Five Years of Mattrbld

Five years ago today, the very first alpha of Mattrbld was released to the public. It feels surreal to me that this much time has passed already. What started out as my Bachelor’s thesis project, turned into a mature headless CMS that has been used to build websites and more for half a decade. Wild.

Rolling Releases

Since that first alpha, there were 28 releases, with the 29th already in the pipeline. Mattrbld reached beta status in 2022, shortly after its first birthday and had its grand 1.0 release two years after that.

1.0 was also when Mattrbld became the open-source project it was always intended to be—and it only has matured since. New features were added based on user feedback and with more eyes on the project, working with projects became even more enjoyable with multiple quality of life improvements.

Slow Adoption

If I am honest, adoption of Mattrbld isn’t where I would’ve hoped it to be after five years back when I started this project. I really thought Mattrbld could solve a problem a lot of smaller teams and indie devs had: having a Git-based headless CMS for their websites and apps that didn’t require yet another account or subscription with a focus on user experience and advanced features such as internationalisation.

From the feedback I’ve gathered over the years, it seems like it can solve this problem for users once they hear about it, and give it a try. It obviously isn’t the right tool for every job and it definitely still has limitations, but I’ve personally used it for multiple personal projects and client sites over the years.

To me, it seems like developers tend to gravitate to similar projects with bigger teams and flashier marketing—something I’ve never been good at. Clients, on the other hand, seem to prefer big names under the illusion of more independence. That being said, I think this stagnant adoption is mostly a failure on my part.

The barrier of entry to Mattrbld is too high, and I haven’t been able to work on the revamped quickstart guide nearly enough to remedy that. People seem to want to read less and less these days, so the detailed documentation isn’t enough for them to get excited about the project.

Steadily Forward

Thankfully, numbers aren’t everything, and if anything I hope seeing that this project has been updated and maintained for half a decade can give potential users some sense of security that it won’t go away anytime soon. A new release is right around the corner—and some work is always happening in the background.

To anyone who has built with Mattrbld from the very start five years ago or just started using it yesterday: thank you for giving it a shot. I hope you can enjoy working with it for many more years to come.

And special thanks to anyone who has contributed over on GitLab or sent some feedback via Mastodon—you play a big role in making this project feel worthwhile! 😊