I am thankful for so much this last year, and I’m so very excited for 2024.
I am thankful to be working with such a great team at PortlandLabs. In 2023 we had almost perfect uptime for our hosting clients and outstanding responses to the incidents that did come our way. Every time I watch Evan, Thomas, Korvin, Andy, Myq and Lisa respond to an alert I am blown away by the amount of expertise and professionalism brought to bear. Hosting these “white glove” high value Concrete sites is why we’re able to give away Concrete CMS as free open source to everyone here, so I’m incredibly proud of their hard work and our 0% churn rate for those clients.
I am thankful for having such bright minds on our infrastructure and ops challenges too. In 2023 we moved away from LastPass after their security issues, which was a tremendous pain. We changed support platforms. We updated and updated and updated client sites and hosting environments. We reviewed, edited and rewrote every operations document before our compliance review. We passed all our compliance reviews, pen tests, and continually get authority to operate for the DoD with flying colors.
I am thankful for Jess and content marketing efforts that consistently drive hundreds of new people to our site a week. I’m glad she found and starting using Matomo instead of google analytics, and it’s great.
I am thankful for all the new ideas we’re able to have and execute quickly on. We found a new direction for Concrete in focusing more on authenticated apps, intranets and portals, and we’ve already designed and chopped the theme for v10 (we’re calling it “Oxford shirt.”) The site health dashboard was added to Concrete. The editing interface got dramatically clearer to use with a revisit of how areas were displayed. The entire Rest API was rebuilt and launched. We did a lot of work on our demo/centralized install system (you use it here when you spin up a demo) and we actually conceived and launched a vertical focused brand for the HOA space called https://neighborhood.online all in a few months of work. It’s extremely impressive what our tiny team can do, and I am genuinely so thankful they choose to come to Slack every day and work with me.
In 2024 I look forward to some pretty dramatic improvements to the Concrete CMS ecosystem. In January we will be launching our completely rewritten developer and user documentation. We mentioned it in a December town hall and I’m really excited about how clean and easy it is to get through. After that I’m excited about launching our new marketplace. It’s going to be easier to connect to the community and it’s going to allow developers to sell on a subscription basis which should really help make maintaining quality Concrete extensions appealing. I’m also very excited about Concrete v10 which will have some new features for organizing and curating content that I hope to be as exciting to use as in-context editing felt back in 2008 when we first went open source and no one else was doing this WYSIWYG style. I’m also excited to be making extensions for our marketplace ourselves again. After a long hiatus we’re starting to build extensions focused on integrations to other popular SaaS business platforms.
That’s a lot of work, and I can already feel my team looking at that list and gulping. I have every confidence we can pull it off, as we always have quietly banged out more work than anyone would expect of a team our size.
Last, but not least, I’m thankful for all of you. It’s hard to explain what we do here to any of my business friends who aren’t familiar with open source, but at the end of the day, I know the benefits we get from a large community of volunteers are immeasurable and I’m thankful that you choose to use Concrete for your projects.
Here’s to a great 2024! Cheers!
Everyone be safe tonight. Here’s to a prosperous new year!! 