Guess what? It’s been a little over a year since Oxwall entered this world to face life as a competitive open source product. During this time the software has really come a long way (more precisely, all the way to 1.2.6), and luckily this force seems to be unstoppable at this point. Let’s look back twelve or so months and tally the sort-of end-of-year results.

We don’t want to be precarious, and so start with a little graphics courtesy of Google Analytics. Look below – we are clearly witnessing an exponential growth: more Oxwall-powered communities are being set up, more plugins developed, more people join on the fun. The graph shows the daily number of admin area accesses on different Oxwall sites.

As the Oxwall project matured, a key decision was made by the team last year – a more structured and carefully planned development/release schedule was put in place, resulting in a more predictable update pattern. More flexibility in development was also achieved by the switch from SVN to Mercurial Distributed Version Control System.

At the same time, the fine-tuning of the Auto-update system proved to be a success, and made sure all community members are on the same page come update time. It helped admins to consistently be on the edge by always knowing about the releases of the latest builds, or what needs to be additionally configured.

Due to these shifts in the development/release processes, we’ve been able to greatly speed up the reaction to all reported issues, and reached a new level when it comes to critical bug fixing. More importantly, the Auto–update system reduced the number of different software versions installed, as the latest build is usually employed by almost 80% of all active websites within a week of a release.

Oxwall really went global, with several groups across the world setting up Oxwall-dedicated communities, working on local translation, member support, and distribution of the software. To facilitate these efforts we have tweaked our policies and even came up with the Oxwall Club; a membership in which will bring even more benefits to said groups.

In the meantime, more international exposure was achieved after a page about Oxwall project appeared on the Wikipedia; while a greater market penetration through the inclusion of the software to the Softaculous and Simple Scripts collections brought significant traffic increase.

More recently we’ve added the support of Cloud File Storage for networks’ static content, and also saw the appearance of first paid plugins and themes in the Oxwall Store, which will drive even more creative and progressive energy towards the project. We are looking forward to seeing what you’ll come up with next.

And make no mistake, this is all just the beginning of a very exiting journey. The team behind Oxwall is truly committed to producing the best social builder around, and we do have great plans for the future. Thank you for choosing us.