Looking ahead to 2022, we are grateful to the Sulu community.
As I’m sure many of you can relate, much of 2021 had more in common with 2020 than we initially hoped for. But, looking back on the year, we have many reasons to be grateful. This past year gave us some more much-needed time to invest in our product and plan for next year’s release of Sulu 3.0, as well as a ramp-up in projects, making for a busy end of the year. As a company and a community, Sulu is healthy and in a good position for growth in 2022.
A recap of 2021
Mirroring the year before, a slower start to the first half of the year was difficult from a business perspective but gave us the space and time to work on our product and develop more fine-tuned plans for the future. By the time summer rolled around, our business had gotten progressively busier. We had the opportunity to work on more client projects and, as they say, “eat our own dog food.” We’ve come away from these projects refreshed and with many ideas for improvements.
Sulu is still transitioning from a service-based organization to a product company—the ability to dabble in both areas really helps solidify our product and move in the right direction.
As a quick recap of our accomplishments, in 2021 we:
- Launched the Sulu Partner Program to help Sulu agencies deliver better projects, showcase their work and shape Sulu’s future
- Released Sulu 2.3.0, which included a central activity and event log, new page features, and enhanced validation in forms
- Released Sulu 2.4.0, which included a new Trash feature, retrieval abilities, and new preview link types
- Continued to educate and onboard new developers and agencies on how to get the most out of Sulu with our blog posts and guides
Plans for 2022
Now and in the long-term, Sulu is committed to remaining open source. As we look forward to 2022, we’re thinking about how to grow and move further toward becoming a full-scale product company. To support Sulu’s growth and keep the project healthy, we aim to launch several licensed, complementary products that meet unique needs for target groups. We also strive to onboard new agencies to the Sulu Partner Program.
With the product as our focus, we’ll continue client services as a way of learning more about the Sulu project and incorporating those learnings back into the core. Hopefully, we’ll gain some new team members!
In 2022, we’ll launch Sulu 3.0, marking a significant step towards the modernization of our product. This major update will include maintenance, housekeeping, and breaking changes that include an update to Symfony 6.0 and minimum support of PHP 8. In conjunction with the release, we’ll be replacing our current content storage solution, PHPCR, with our own content storage tool. We learned a lot over the past few years from using PHPCR, and with this knowledge, we’ve begun developing a solution more tailored to Sulu’s needs. We look forward to better performance ahead!
Thank you!
It wouldn’t feel right to close out this year without a heartfelt thank you to our community. You’ve given us amazing feedback that ultimately makes Sulu a better product. We also want to give a special thank you to the first participants in our Partner Program — MASSIVE ART, webstores, and connectiv! eSolutions — we’re grateful for your trust and partnership in a challenging year.
Speaking of feedback, we’d love more of it. If you have a spare moment, please fill out our latest Sulu Community Survey. Your input will help Sulu grow as a sustainable, open-source project.
To all: have a very restful and happy holiday season — we look forward to communing again in the new year!
Festive regards,
Thomas Schedler on behalf of the Sulu team.
