Once upon a time there were two boys - Sam and Aleksey. They lived in different countries, thousands miles away from each other. They didn't know about each other, but there was something common between them - they wanted the world to be simpler. One day they met online. That's how OctoberCMS has started.

When we started we only had ideas shining in our minds. We didn't know if the world is going to accept them and if people like what we like. It was a risk, but we were feeling that we both have enough experience to see what's right and what's wrong. Our philosophy has not changed from the beginning - the platform should be be minimalistic, natural and easy to use for everybody - designers, developers, web studios and their clients. We still love simple things - birds, bees and people.

The beginning was scary. Everybody love trends, and it was obvious that we go against the trends. We borrowed many ideas from platforms that are now considered to be ancient. But since the very beginning we have noticed a growing interest in OctoberCMS and it was a big relief - we realized that although the modern world is full of complex technologies and trends, people still want simplicity, and that many of the technologies available today are overkill for the majority of websites. The experience showed that developers watched us and some were looking for simple tools they can use every day for their customers. When we started nobody knew of us. But by the time when we launched the Beta October had several thousands subscribers in Email and Twitter. The website traffic on the first day we opened the Beta and the download counter was something we had not seen before - more than 150 simultaneous visitors for many hours in a row. And this where October is today, after one short year:

• Nearly 15,000 installations.
• About 2,500 projects registered on OctoberCMS website.
• More than 1,800 stars on GitHub.
• OctoberCMS is still among the top trending PHP repos on GitHub.
• Thanks to our community, the OctoberCMS back-end is translated to 11 languages.
• 54 plugins on the Marketplace, many of which are built by the community.
• People are talking about OctoberCMS in blogs and social networks.
• There are real websites built with OctoberCMS, even though it's still in Beta.

We want to say thanks to all the people who trust and support us. We would be nothing without our Community and we are happy that there are many web developers who share our ideas. The next year of OctoberCMS is going to be even more exciting!