Disclaimer: this article was NOT generated by chatGPT 🤖
My name is Zoltán and I am one of the original founders and current project maintainers of the Flowbite ecosystem alongside with Robert – for without his design skills we couldn't enjoy the beautiful UI/UX components that are now used by over 2 million projects on NPM.
I've been wanting to write a blog post that encapsulates the results of what the Flowbite Ecosystem and Community achieved last year and it's going to be pretty hard to summarize it all as this was the year with the highest growth we experienced in terms of adoption, community growth, but also challenges.
I'll try to break it up in a chronological order and focus on the different tools and libraries that we've developed as the year passed - so let's get started!
One million downloads on NPM
One of the best metrics that you can use to measure the adoption rate of a framework is to look at the total amount of NPM downloads – we reached over one million downloads sometime in the middle of the year and the weekly download rate has only been increasing.
At the time of the writing of this article the main Flowbite library is rocking about 94k downloads per week, while Flowbite React is standing at 26k, Flowbite Svelte 10k and Flowbite Vue slowly catching up with 1.2k.
Big shout-out to all the open-source contributors and project maintainers of the adjacent libraries based on the main Flowbite library!
Growth has been steady and adoption has been increasing at a pace of about 10-15% on a monthly basis – this gives us a decent amount of time to keep improving the library while keeping growth intact.
Flowbite Library
The main growth factor of the Flowbite Ecosystem is the open-source UI component library that is based on the utility classes from Tailwind CSS – there are over 54 standalone components and 16 framework integration guides and we have big plans this year to build even more.
We have provided official TypeScript support to the interactive JS API, added brand new components, provided new functionality and features, improved the documentation styles, and fixed over 194 issues as of date.
We also built countless of integration guides with other frameworks, such as Astro, SolidJS, Gatsby, and Flowbite with Symfony being the latest one and we have plans to build quite a few more.
The next phase for the development of the Flowbite Library will be to start building more complex components such as data grids, autocomplete input elements, custom chart components, and others.
We launched Flowbite Blocks
This is probably the most notable launch that we have made and it is a collection of modular websites sections that you can use to quickly wrap up a website by copy-pasting the source code directly from the Flowbite platform.
Right now there are over 293 block sections that have been planned, prototyped, designed, coded, verified, and launched on the Flowbite Blocks page which include essential building components for a website such as hero sections, CRUD layouts, pricing pages, blog templates, and more.
We will keep adding new content as we design new components, sections, and pages and while we also collaborate with the open-source community to provide support for libraries and frameworks such as React, Vue, Svelte, and more.
Flowbite Figma Design System
I'm not sure if many of you know but the first instance of Flowbite was in fact a Figma file that we built for integration with Tailwind CSS – originally named tailwind-figma.com we had to rename it per request from Steve Schoger from Tailwind Labs to prevent confusion – I have to thank Steve for that because I found the beautiful "Flowbite" name and domain then 😜
Long story short, last year we decided to open-source the core UI components from the Flowbite Library and it has been generally very well received – you can duplicate the file on Figma Community right now.
Of course, this meant that we had to "up our game" with the pro version's design system and we have provided updates all the way up to v2.4.1 and we are super close to launching v2.5.0 with countless new components, landing pages, Figma features, and more.
Flowbite Admin Dashboard
Towards the end of the year we also had a big surprize to the open-source community by releasing an admin dashboard template that leverages not only the Flowbite design system, but also the library's interactive UI components and more.
The repository reached over 200 stars on GitHub and we plan to release new pages based on demand and feature requests from the open-source community. We are currently improving the pro version of this dashboard and we are excited to share it in the coming months with our Flowbite Pro community.
Flowbite Community and libraries
Probably the most amazing thing about Flowbite is the awesome and flourishing open-source community that is growing around it – we have recently reached over 2,000 members on the Flowbite Discord server which is quite breathtaking.
The open-source Flowbite libraries such as Flowbite React, Flowbite Svelte, and Flowbite Vue have been nicely growing in terms of number of components, functionality, documentation, and also usage.
This year, we plan to collaborate even more with these libraries to increase consistency across the frameworks and provide assistance with building new components and documentations.
What about the future?
I've been personally working over 2 years on the Flowbite ecosystem and starting from creating the first instance of the repository, pushing the first commit, building the Flowbite platform, managing the community, it's been quite a lot.
My strength is primarily being driven by the awesome community that we have built around the Flowbite concept and ecosystem and as long as we can we will make sure that our main mission will be to provide open-source UI components to all software developers and teams regardless of frameworks.
A big thank you to all open-source contributors, the core Flowbite team, our partners, and developers and designers of Flowbite – let's rock this year even more! ❤️
PS: here's a video on Twitter where I talk about this:
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