On October 3rd we filled our suitcases with a boatload of ApostropheCMS Nalgene bottles,
t-shirts, stickers, and screen cleaners, and headed to Node.js Interactive in Vancouver to spread the word to our fellow JavaScript developers about our Content Management System, ApostropheCMS. It was the team’s first time sponsoring this conference and we didn’t know what to expect.
Our trip to Vancouver truly exceeded our expectations.
We talked to a bunch of amazing developers about their current content management systems, about their love for Node.js and JavaScript, and about their content management needs. It was great to hear that many people had good reasons to try ApostropheCMS for an upcoming project.
On the first day, it was clear that few attendees realized there was a great alternative to WordPress — let alone one written 100% in Javascript on top of Node.js and completely open-source. But, that was okay— telling people about all the features in ApostropheCMS was a lot of fun. We had a blast educating folks about all the interesting websites already built on top of Apostrophe and share a little bit of the history of how the project evolved. Moreover, it was gratifying when we heard the genuine excitement from so many of the people we talked to.
It was especially satisfying to share hands-on demos with folks to illustrate Apostrophe’s in-context site editing and drag-and-drop functionality. It gave us an opportunity to share some of the powerful enterprise modules that we’ve been working on. In particular, the apostrophe-workflow module enables users to build sites for a variety of languages within the same templates. We even had a chance to geek out a bit with curious developers and share code examples to show how them how intuitive it is to configure and extend Apostrophe modules. (Spoiler alert: it’s just JavaScript.)
Impact on Apostrophe's roadmap
We got a lot of feedback into what the community’s needs are when it comes to content management. One thing that we kept hearing over and over was the need to interface with the content data via an API. Interestingly, we have also been planning to extend ApostropheCMS with a headless module, so it was great to see our project’s roadmap reflected the interests of the community.