The final moments of a year follow a familiar pattern: the intensity of trying to finish project deliverables and tie off loose ends, distractions from preparations for family trips and holiday events, and the ultimately realization of “I guess this can actually wait until January” that each of us eventually arrives at. It is a balancing act to insert an attempt at some sort of retrospective into this mix, but this is something I always find to be vitally important.
For Apostrophe, 2024 marked significant strides toward our vision of ApostropheCMS as both an open-source platform and a commercial software product. We’ve made critical internal investments, deepened partnerships, delivered steady releases, and launched new initiatives. It’s been a year of planting seeds and nurturing their growth, setting the stage for what’s to come.
Apostrophe Workspaces: Building a Self-Service Future
Workspaces represents a pivotal step in our long-term strategy for Apostrophe. While our open-source ecosystem supports a broad range of projects, our commercial offerings empower businesses to scale. This year, we took foundational steps toward a fully self-service model for our suite of products.
Our ultimate vision is to make Workspaces a seamless experience: launching projects with starter kits, deploying to our managed hosting, upgrading features, and managing portfolios effortlessly. While balancing this vision with continued investment on the core CMS, we’ve gathered valuable feedback from developers and agency partners, refining features like self-service hosting. With early 2025 launches in sight, I’m proud of what our small team has accomplished so far and can’t wait to share what we’re working on with our community.
Apostrophe + AI: Enhancing Productivity
2024 saw the debut of Apostrophe’s AI-driven features for developers and content editors. With a focus on practical support tools, we’ve prioritized accelerating SEO, content translation, and developer documentation workflows.
This is just the beginning. In 2025, we aim to expand on these capabilities, guided by feedback and collaboration from our community. AI is evolving rapidly, and we’re committed to building features that empower high-performing teams.
A Developer-First Platform: Astro, Vite, and Beyond
From day one, Apostrophe has prioritized best-in-class tools for developers. This year, we continued that tradition by releasing and enhancing our integration with Astro. This unique headless integration strategy combines Apostrophe’s in-context editing with Astro’s frontend flexibility, offering an exceptional developer experience. Originally piloted and contributed by Michelin, this integration has grown into a cornerstone of our developer toolkit and we have more resources and tutorials on the way to help new developers discover what’s possible here.
We also completed the transition from Webpack to Vite, modernizing our supported JavaScript workflows for speed and simplicity. Looking ahead, we’re excited to introduce more flexibility in native templating support and improve our CLI tools. Feedback from our community remains vital as we refine and expand these features.
Accessibility: Progress and Commitment
Accessibility has been a quiet but steady focus this year. We’ve made strides in color contrast adjustments, keyboard navigation, and screen reader compatibility, all supported by new automated testing tools. These improvements are part of our ongoing commitment to creating an inclusive editing experience, which will remain a priority in 2025.
Apostrophe Assembly: Scaling Seamless Customization
Apostrophe Assembly continues to lead the way as our white-label website builder, seamlessly blending user-friendly content editing with the capacity for deep integrations and extensive customization through the open-source modularity of ApostropheCMS. This year, we significantly improved the dashboard for managing sites, paved the road for more advanced permission models, and refined Palette—our tool for applying design changes through the CMS—all guided by close customer collaboration.
Managed Hosting: A Standalone Offering
In 2024, we began offering a new version of our Managed Hosting platform as a standalone subscription, starting with our agency partners and expanding access from there. This allowed us to refine the tools we use for managing and deploying new infrastructure. Many of these tools we have been also been able to share directly with our customers. Expanding these capabilities is central to our Workspaces strategy for 2025.
Our Customers’ Success Is Our Success
Everything we’ve accomplished this year—open-source enhancements, new features for Pro and Assembly subscriptions, hosting improvements—aims to empower our customers and their clients. We’re grateful for the partnership, trust, and collaboration that has enabled us to work closely this year with passionate and high performing teams serving a range of industries—HR, travel, real estate, education, non-profit, manufacturing, health—directly supporting a number of launches while bringing key insights, feedback, and direct contributions back into our core platform.
We’ll be sharing out a number of new case studies soon that showcase some of these stories more deeply. Lots more to come here!
Lessons from 2024
As we close this chapter, here are a few key insights I’ve been thinking about:
- A sharper focus on the needs of the digital agency. Apostrophe was born from our client work over years of running a digital agency and these are the teams whose needs we continue to align the most with. As the scope of Apostrophe’s capabilities has grown to support a new level of scale in its deployments, we continue to return to this focus with the confidence that even the teams responsible for the largest enterprise deployments and the most advanced SaaS integrations carry this same spirit with them in their work as well.
- A new level of discipline for the scope of new features. It’s in our nature to want to add new features to Apostrophe with every release. Listening to the needs of our customers and our community regularly reveals new ideas and opportunities to solve new challenges. At the same time, the platform has already grown so much in this way over the last two years, and as the katamari ball grows ever larger, the impact of each new addition from the perspective of maintainability takes on more weight. The phrase “cross cutting concerns” has become a common one included in each new feature’s project charter and technical design documentation. The work ahead will be strengthened through this discipline and a new focus on polishing and illuminating the great features that already exist rather than adding more on top of them.
- An appreciation for the mightiness of our small team. One thing I am regularly grateful for is the ambitious vision of our team. We have high expectations for ourselves and an appetite for challenging work, and our regular product planning and team goal setting exercises are packed with big ideas. Fully achieving these goals requires persistence and patience, and allowing ourselves the grace and an understanding of the natural constraints inherent to our small team. Every year I am astonished at what we are able to achieve through this mindset.
Looking ahead to 2025
As we bring these insights with us into the year ahead, there are a few specific things I’m excited to tease a bit more:
- Self-service hosting is coming. We are close to releasing our private beta of fully self service Managed Hosting in Workspaces. We’ll be working with our agency partners to get their feedback and working towards making it more broadly available to anybody with an active Workspace.
- More AI-enabled features are coming. We have been aligning our own big ideas in this space with the feedback coming from our community around our first batch of AI features and look forward to expanding on this strategy further.
- The core creator experience will keep improving. Many of our priorities for the year head are about streamlining existing workflows and resources for both developers and editors. We will continue to balance these efforts with new features that unlock capabilities in strategic and thoughtful ways.
To our team, customers, partners, and community: thank you for making 2024 a milestone year. Here’s to continued growth and collaboration in 2025.