2025 was a defining year for OpenForge. The numbers tell part of the story: we tripled our GitHub stars, doubled our contributor count, and shipped three major releases. But the numbers don't capture the most important part — the community that made it all happen.
We started the year with a small but dedicated core team of 12 maintainers. By December, that number grew to 28. More importantly, first-time contributors went from an average of 15 per month to over 40. Our "good first issue" program, revamped in March, was a big driver of this growth.
The plugin ecosystem exploded. In January, we had 45 community plugins. Today there are 200+. Standout additions include the real-time collaboration plugin by @devpatel, the AI integration toolkit by @miazhang, and the comprehensive testing utilities by @noahpark. Each of these started as community RFC discussions.
Discord grew from 3,000 members to 12,400+. We ran 24 community calls, 8 contributor workshops, and our first-ever OpenForge Conf with 500 virtual attendees. The conference recordings have been viewed over 50,000 times.
Looking ahead to 2026, we're focused on three themes: performance (v3.2's edge rewrite is just the start), developer experience (better error messages, faster builds), and ecosystem growth (official plugin certification program). Thank you to every contributor, sponsor, and user who made 2025 incredible.