We’re excited to announce that Frontity has been acquired by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr and more.

As part of Automattic, our team will contribute to the WordPress open source project and work closely with its community to help improve the full site editing developer experience.

Here is the story of how we got here and what this means for WordPress and Frontity Framework.

Our story

For many years, we have chosen WordPress as the center of our entrepreneurial projects. Its mission of democratizing publishing along with its collaborative community have always been an inspiration when building our products.

In 2019 we decided to launch our open-sourced Frontity Framework as a way to ease the integration between WordPress and React for building websites. We were confident that this project would not only help make WordPress stronger, but also further our ultimate goal: to make building delightful user experiences universally accessible.

Since we launched, our team has delivered frequent updates, released numerous features and packages, improved documentation, published multiple learning resources, and provided support to make the experience with Frontity the best it can be.

Together with you, we have achieved incredible things. Your Frontity projects have been a source of inspiration for many other developers. And we have no doubt that some of the themes the Frontity community has created are among the most wonderful WordPress themes out there. For us, working hand in hand with you all has been an amazing and enriching experience.

Frontity’s unique approach has helped to solve many challenges. And more importantly, it has allowed thousands of users to choose WordPress for their decoupled projects and to build great user experiences. We are very happy and proud of what we have accomplished alongside Frontity’s amazing community!

The opportunity to join Automattic

Automattic’s 2020 investment in Frontity opened the doors for discussions about Frontity joining Automattic. They have always understood our ambitions with Frontity and the more we talked with them, the more we realized our visions and values aligned.

After a series of conversations, Automattic offered to sponsor our team to work directly on the WordPress open source project. In particular, to contribute our expertise in developer experience, frontend tooling, performance, and UX to the WordPress core itself, instead of doing so only for an external tool.

We believe that this is a huge opportunity. The impact our team could make working directly on WordPress is much more significant than continuing on our own, so we decided to go for it! Now we have the chance to improve the experience of all WordPress developers, not just those who want to use it as a decoupled CMS.

What does this mean for WordPress?

The future of WordPress is exciting! As part of Automattic, our work will be focused on helping improve WordPress and its full site editing developer experience.

Even though Frontity is a React framework, it doesn’t mean that we are going to push React to the WordPress frontend. We will look at the Gutenberg and full site editing space to identify those areas in which our work could have the most significant impact, and work closely with the WordPress community to help improve its developer experience.

WordPress is already the best content platform on the web. We want to help it become the best development platform on the web.

“I’m really impressed with the effort and care the Frontity team has put into their work over the past few years. We are at the cusp of exciting new opportunities with Gutenberg, and I cannot wait to start collaborating together on making the experience of developing with it a joy to behold,” said Matías Ventura, member of the developer experience team at Automattic and lead architect of the WordPress Gutenberg project.

What does this mean for Frontity Framework?

Frontity Framework will continue to live on as an open source software project, available for free to everyone. As we shift our primary focus to working on WordPress and Gutenberg, we unfortunately won’t have the resources to fully dedicate ourselves to the continued development and maintenance of Frontity.

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, agencies, and users are actively using it in production environments. With its current feature set and powerful extensibility pattern (similar to that of WordPress itself), Frontity is the best way to run a decoupled WordPress site with React.

In order to facilitate the continuity of the project, we are helping transition it to a community-driven endeavor. We believe this is an opportunity to make the project better than we, as a single organization could, by inviting more discussions, driving 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 the features or packages you want to see implemented. There are many different ways to help keep the project healthy and move it forward. To learn more about how to get involved, check out the Contributing section of the documentation.

Since we understand you may have other questions and concerns, we have prepared this Q&A page.

Looking to the future

Thank you for your continued support, and for helping us build this exciting new chapter!

Although our team has a new home, we are not going anywhere! We are staying here in the WordPress ecosystem, and we will continue to work on making your experience with WordPress the best it can be.

We are excited about this opportunity, and to keep doing what we do best with a platform as powerful as WordPress!

We feel truly grateful to Frontity’s amazing community and to our team for their part in helping grow this project. Thank you to K Fund and the rest of our investors and advisors for supporting us throughout these years, and to Seabird Capital for their help during the sale process. Thanks to both the Google for Startups and SeedRocket teams for helping us and allowing us to connect with some of the best startup founders in Spain. And to the team at Automattic, thank you for this amazing opportunity! We can’t wait to start working together!

– Pablo Postigo and Luis Herranz, founders of Frontity.

Read more on Matt’s blog: Frontity to Join Automattic.