Frontity acquired by Automattic Q&A

Since Automattic invested in Frontity last year, we have worked closely with them. This allowed us to connect with different team members, and opened the doors for discussions about Frontity joining Automattic.

Given Frontity’s pre-revenue stage, the possibility of joining forces with an industry leader to keep pushing our mission has always been there. We have had talks with other potential partners, but none of them aligned with our values and vision as well as Automattic.

After a series of conversations, Automattic offered to sponsor our team to work directly on the WordPress open source project. In particular, to help improve the full site editing developer experience and contribute our expertise in frontend tooling, performance, and UX.

We saw this as a huge opportunity to make a more significant impact in the long term. By joining forces, we have the chance to help improve the experience for all developers who want to use WordPress, not just those who want to use it as a decoupled CMS. We believe this move is a big step forward for our team and for the WordPress ecosystem.

No, this acquisition doesn’t mean that Frontity Framework or any substantial part of it will be merged into WordPress. Nor does it mean that we will bring React to the WordPress PHP or full site editing themes.

We will work closely with the WordPress community to improve the developer experience of building both blocks and themes. In addition, we will explore different ways to make WordPress sites more performant. There is a variety of needs for WordPress sites, and we will leverage our experience at Frontity to help create better tools to develop them.

The entire Frontity team is joining Automattic. Co-founders Pablo Postigo and Luis Herranz will continue to lead the team as part of Automattic.

After joining Automattic, we will focus on helping to improve WordPress and the full site editing developer experience. Given that, we won’t have the bandwidth to fully dedicate ourselves to the continued development and ​​maintenance of Frontity.

Frontity Framework will continue as an open source software project, available for free to everyone. Over the past few weeks, we have been working on leaving the framework in a stable, bug-free position, and documenting the features we were working on.

Today, Frontity is stable and safe to use, and many companies and users are actively using it in production environments. In addition to its feature set, Frontity offers distinct advantages over similar frameworks which make it the best way to run a decoupled WordPress site with React.

We’re helping to transition the project to a community-driven endeavor. We believe this is an opportunity to make the project better by inviting more discussions, greater participation, and encouraging the community at large to contribute their particular expertise.

Like all other open source projects, not only can you keep using the framework, but you can also make contributions to improve it. You can help make improvements by among other things, fixing bugs, and/or working on features and packages you want to see implemented. While our team looks at the opportunities around Gutenberg, anyone interested in contributing to the current Frontity codebase can reach out to us. There are many different ways for users and community contributors to keep the project healthy. Here’s how to get involved.

We are still working to transition Frontity to a community-driven effort, so that its maintenance continues. We will keep you posted about any important updates regarding the status of the project.

Frontity has been considered production-ready since our 1.0 release in June 2019. Today, it is safe to use and many companies are actively using it in production environments.

With its current feature set and flexible extensibility pattern (similar to that of WordPress itself), Frontity continues to offer distinct advantages over other similar React frameworks.

The Frontity Community Forum is packed with answers and solutions for all types of Frontity-related questions. It will continue to be available.

Chances are your question has been asked before, so it’s always a good idea to start by searching Frontity’s primary learning resources and the forum for a solution. If you don’t find an answer there, you can start a new post in the community. We encourage you to be engaged and help others as well. More information about how the forum is organized and how to use it can be found in this guide.

Yes, they will all continue running.

Thank you for asking! There are many different ways for you to get involved with Frontity. From contributing on GitHub to writing tutorials to speaking at meetups and everything in between.

Please read the Contribution Guide for specific ways you can help support the project. If you have any questions about how to contribute, please feel free to reach out to us.