Two Years of CourtBouillon
Do you know what day it is today? It’s October 12, which means that it’s CourtBouillon’s two-year anniversary 🎂! So it’s time to rewind and see what happened during this year.
A Brief Introduction
For this 2-year anniversary, we made a short survey about you, WeasyPrint and your expectations. Thanks a lot to all the people who answered it 💜.
In this article, we’re going to briefly introduce ourselves for people who don’t know us yet, remember what happened during this year, detail our sources of income and then see what we’re up to for the next year!
Who Is CourtBouillon?
Two years ago, we announced the creation of CourtBouillon.
We? We are Guillaume, aka liZe,
and Lucie, aka grewn0uille 👋.
About the full story of the creation of CourtBouillon, you can read this nice article 😉.
What Does CourtBouillon Do?
Our goal, as CourtBouillon, is to develop and maintain open source software. The main projects we take care of are:
- WeasyPrint,
- pydyf,
- tinycss2,
- Pyphen,
- cssselect2,
- and more…
Beyond maintaining and developing this nice software, we also love to write articles on this blog about new WeasyPrint versions, specific new features, CSS tricks, technical topics…
Don’t hesitate to walk around the blog section 😊.
You can follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS feed to never miss news!
What Happened This Year?
A lot of things happened during this year. How many issues were closed? How many pull requests were merged? How many releases have been out? Let’s have a look!
Closed Issues
256 issues were closed during this year, of which 92% were on WeasyPrint.
Merged Pull Requests
38 pull requests have been merged, of which 81% were on WeasyPrint.
Releases
23 versions have been released, it’s almost 2 releases per month 🙀!
New Features
Various new features came alive this year. Which ones were the most popular?
It looks like that performance is something important for many of you 😄.
These results are connected with the previous survey.
Sources of Income
All these things wouldn’t have been possible without sponsors, backers and users. Thanks a lot 💜.
As we believe that transparency is important, we’re going to provide details on our different sources of income.
We have four main sources of income:
- templating and styling with HTML/CSS,
- bug fixes and additional features,
- sponsoring and donations on OpenCollective,
- miscellaneous, which will be detailed.
The distribution between the different sources is quite homogeneous.
Templating and styling with HTML/CSS
If you didn’t know yet, we offer professional support, mainly on WeasyPrint and its usage.
Creating HTML and CSS for print is one of the (many) things we can do. If you have a cute mock-up for your documents made by your sweet designer, if you don’t know how to transform it into nice HTML/CSS (or don’t have the time to do it), we’re here for you!
CSS can sometimes be hard to master, even more when it’s CSS for print. Our long experience on this topic gives us the skills to create reliable HTML and CSS quickly. Reading our CSS is also a simple way for our clients to learn how to write their future stylesheets.
Bug Fixes and Additional Features
Another thing that we can do is to fix the bugs that make your life hard and to add the features you need to generate the greatest documents of all time.
A nice thing about this part is that the bug fixes and the new features you sponsor benefit the whole community. Another nice thing is that the bug fixes and the new features funded by other companies will be useful for you 😉!
During this year, some nice features and bug fixes have been funded by sponsors:
- footnotes support,
- PDF/A support,
- bitmap fonts support,
- nested
line-clampsupport, - better footnotes support for multicolumn layouts,
- and more are coming!
Thanks a lot to everyone who sponsored features and bug fixes 💜.
Sponsoring and Donations on OpenCollective
When you become a backer or a sponsor on OpenCollective, you greatly help CourtBouillon to maintain its projects in a sustainable way.
Of course, fixing bugs and adding features requires a lot of time. But there is also a lot of invisible work.
Answering and sorting GitHub issues, improving tests, improving performance, writing articles, communicating … all these things require time. Thanks to OpenCollective backers and sponsors, we’re able to spend time to do that peacefully.
Thanks to all the OpenCollective backers and sponsors 💜.
Miscellaneous
As you can guess, this category contains everything that doesn’t fit in the other categories.
This year, it includes:
What for Next Year?
After this year, what can you expect for the next one?
New Features
In the survey, we asked you which features you’d like to see in WeasyPrint. Here are the results!
The battle has been tough between faster generation and grid support!
This ranking doesn’t contain all the GitHub issues with the feature label.
It doesn’t mean that everything here will be done, but it will
definitely help us prioritize the roadmap 🛣️.
New Articles
We think that communication is important, so that everyone can be up-to-date regarding the software we maintain. It’s also nice to share some knowledge about CSS, printed documents, Python, and all the other cool subjects we’re sure we’ll cover in the future!
So, you can expect new articles about features, WeasyPrint versions, CSS tricks, and more!
And More!
Of course, you can be sure we’ll continue to answer all the GitHub issues you may open, all the mails you may send us, all the messages you may write on our Matrix/Gitter channel.
You can be sure we’ll do our best to offer WeasyPrint and its dependencies a bright future.
Thanks again to all the people who sponsored features and bug fixes, to our lovely backers and sponsors, to our fantastic clients, to everyone who uses our software and opens issues 💜.
Don’t hesitate to follow us on Twitter to never miss news, to contact us if you’d like from some help or some advice on WeasyPrint, and to support us on OpenCollective!