Today is October's third anniversary! So many exciting things have happened since our second birthday. The biggest milestone was the Stable Release accompanied with a complete website redesign, followed by the introduction of some new Marketplace features -- Coupon codes and Extended licenses.

We were never planning to stop at a Stable Release and now we find ourselves busier than ever. The October community keeps growing and we hear the calls for more features and support. The Marketplace has hundreds of products viewed by thousands of visitors every month. We are looking for ways to improve the visitor's experience and also simplify the process of finding high-quality October extensions and related service providers.

In addition we're now working on October Pond, which based on your initial responses, we can see is a feature in high demand. We are hoping for it to be a welcomed addition, great for both beginners and experienced developers. It will allow anyone to install October and start a project literally with three mouse clicks. At the same time it will be a key tool for automating the process of updating live websites, with minimal downtime and risks.

October has grown almost twice in all important metrics:

• 127K installations (it was 60K a year ago).
• 16K projects (was 9,300).
• 5,118 stars on GitHub (was 3,400).
• 314 plugins (was 167).
• 69 themes (was 32).

October is now used with confidence in large production websites. Hundreds of customers have multiple October projects, which is a great gesture of trust for such a young platform. There are numerous high quality third-party plugins and themes, both free and paid, which indicates that the community has confidence in the developers and October ecosystem in general.

We're very grateful to the October users and developers who help us to drive the project forward. Let's congratulate October on its anniversary and continue to keep building great things together!