It's hard to find the words to express our excitement and pride for this announcement! The Builder was a highly anticipated plugin since it was first mentioned in our blog in 2014.

If you haven't heard of the Builder before - it's a plugin for OctoberCMS that allows you to create other plugins from scratch, or add new features to your existing plugins. Builder implements a Rapid Application Development process that automates the boring activities without sacrificing complete control. With this tool you can spend more time implementing the plugin's business logic in your favorite code editor rather than dealing with the more mundane tasks, like building forms or managing plugin versions.

The plugin development itself took just a few months, but the technology used by the Builder had to be created before we could get started. In fact, many ideas and concepts we implemented in October since its early days were pursuing a goal to create the Builder - a tool for the visual development. Builder is the ultimate implementation of our philosophy, which is explained on the About page. While we were working on the Builder we rewrote the Inspector, which is an important part of October, and carried out many improvements in other parts of October.

You can install the plugin from its page via the Marketplace. The page also contains detailed documentation and it is a good idea to read this before getting started with the Builder!

We also recorded a video tutorial showing how to use the plugin to build a simple library plugin:

What's next?

We're not going to stop now! The Builder was a big step towards the Stable Release. There are several other items in our Release list. They include improvements to the platform, website and tools for authors, Overall there are no more major tasks remaining and nothing can stop us from releasing the Stable version of October soon!

P.S. Please avoid using the comments in this post to get technical support for the Builder. If you have questions or issues, submit a message on the forum, connect to the IRC chatroom or use the Builder issue tracker on GitHub.