A look back at JoomShaper’s 2018

25 December 2018

7 min read

The year 2018 is about to say goodbye, and that means 2019 is just around the corner. While we are planning for 2019, it’s important that we go down the memory line and flashback at what we have done in 2018. Like all other years we passed, we had worked consistently to bring new things and make our customers happy.

Sometimes, a year is not enough to implement every plan we have for the betterment of the company and the customers. JoomShaper did have some of such long-term goals for which 2018 was just the starting point. But there are also so many things we achieved in this year.

Flashback at JoomShaper's 2018

It has been a year of improving our products, bringing new stuff to them, and releasing new templates, layout bundles, and more. SP Page Builder, Helix Ultimate, and monthly Joomla templates got remarkable enhancements and performance boost throughout the year.

12 Joomla Templates

This year, we released some fantastic Joomla templates. The newly added templates cover the category of finance, corporation, agency, real estate, medical, news, handyman, and more. Over the span of this year, our Joomla templates have worked behind a remarkable number of live websites.

Wayne Corp - Next generation corporate Joomla template
Estate - Most advanced real estate Joomla template
Gazette - News, magazine, and blog Joomla template
Opus - Creative agency Joomla template
Salon - Spa, beauty care, parlor Joomla template
Rental - Ultimate rental service solution Joomla template
Stellar - Joomla template for creative agency and portfolio sites
Fixter - Joomla template for home maintenance and handyman service websites
Medico - Joomla medical template for hospital, clinic & healthcare sites
Helix Ultimate - Free universal Joomla template for any website
Calcio - Joomla template for soccer news & football club websites
Finance - Best Joomla template for finance, corporate, agency sites

Each of the released Joomla templates has been downloaded plenty of times. Just take a look at some of the stats we have curated for you:

Medico got 131 votes and has been downloaded more than 3540 times
Finance got 116 votes and has 6740+ downloads
Opus got 78 votes and has 2310+ downloads in just four months
Most interestingly, Helix Ultimate alone has been downloaded 160100+ times and has 400+ votes.

SP Page Builder: More powerful addons and layout bundles

After releasing SP Page Builder 3, the Joomla world has been experiencing a whole new system of creating websites. But this is not the end. In 2018, we brought tons of improvements to this page building tool with plenty of new addons and layout bundles. Now you have radically new UI, refined UX, and inline editing system in your favorite SP Page Builder.

5-star rating: SP Page Builder has got overall 5 star rating on Joomla extension directory this year.

We have also been flooded with so many positive feedback.

I use this for all Joomla websites to give clients and easy way to update and for my developers to give the website a professional touch without too much hastle or coding.- Pete

Addons: Alongside improving Carousel Pro addon, Feature Box addon, Animated Number addon, Person addon, Testimonial Pro addon with more options and features, we brought the following new addons in 2018.

Animated Heading addon
Price List
Image Overlay
Open Street Map addon
Article Scroller

Layout Bundles: To have a headstart with your website building, we added plenty of layouts to SP Page Builder. Some of the most popular layout bundles that we released in 2018 are:

Landing Page (web app landing, mobile app landing, product landing)
Coffee Shop- an energetic layout bundle for coffee shops
Conference- for a business event, a community meetup, a charity show, or a concert
Corporate- for corporate firms and agencies
Fashion- for any type of fashion shop, boutique house, and garment portfolio website
Digital Agency- build a website for any digital agency

Joomla Extensions

JoomShaper has developed 45 Joomla extensions that are successfully reigning in the Joomla industry. Like all other years before, we also released a couple of new Joomla extensions. They are:

SP Cookie Consent: From May 25, 2018 onwards, all website are supposed to comply with the GDPR terms. To stay ahead of this process, we released SP Cookie Consent. A plugin to display a cookie (or other legal) notice on your Joomla website and inform the visitors that your site uses cookies.
SP Medical: SP Medical is a complete medical site management solution that enables you to build a dynamic website for any type of hospital, health clinic, dentist, surgeon, pediatric and other relevant sites on Joomla.
Extension updates: Alongside releasing two new Joomla extensions, some of our existing ones got huge improvements. Such as SP Property got better asset listing, improved search, reCAPTCHA & more. SP LMS got ACL, review, cart and many more.

Helix Ultimate

We also brought considerable enhancements to Helix Ultimate in 2018. The enhancements include but not limited to typography, SEO, and icons. We added 40+ new FontAwesome icons. Media manager in Helix Ultimate now supports .ico file type. Most interestingly, it also got RTL language support and Open Graph protocol.

Joomla tutorials and tips

Over the period of 2018, we published plenty of tutorials and tips for Joomla users. Having those tutorials in Blog, we came to know that a remarkable number of users have been benefited. They flooded us with their positive feedback in the comments and emails.

Some of the most popular tutorials are:

Sponsors and giveaways

Like all other years before, we have contributed to the Joomla community by sponsoring local and international Joomla events. In 2018, we sponsored Joomla events almost everywhere across the globe. JoomShaper has been a proud sponsor of the following global Joomla events:

JoomlaDay Florida
JoomlaDay Netherlands
JoomlaDay France
JoomlaDay Italy
JoomlaDay Madrid
JoomlaDay Kenya

A lot closer to JoomShaper’s future campus

To offer a great working environment for the employees, there’s no alternative to having a dedicated campus for the company. With that in mind, in 2017, we purchased a large piece of land to build a 75,000 square feet JoomShaper campus. We got lots more steps closer to that in 2018. We have our complex designed and hired a construction firm to get along. We plan to start the construction in early 2019.

A much bigger team

We already had the industry-leading product designers, top-notch professional web application developers, content developers, marketing professionals, and experienced support engineers in our team. Over the year 2018, we were joined by more members to accelerate the workflow and add values to the company as a whole.

"None of us is as smart as all of us." - Ken Blanchard

Our effort to deliver aesthetic Joomla templates and offer perfect web experience has been possible because of our exceptionally talented team members.

The future we are eying at

Every new year brings new hopes, new stamina, and new motivation to work for the betterment of our clients and the company we all are a part of. In 2019, we will focus more on the followings:

Continue updating of our existing templates and extensions
Focus more on quality support and minimize response time
More addons and features to SP Page Builder
New functionalities to all other products
Application based and niche specific Joomla templates
Continue supporting community (sponsors & giveaways)

So, the year 2019 is going to be an exciting year for JoomShaper. Be sure to stay with us all along the year. We will delight you with our work, we promise.

Rayhan Arif

Assistant Vice President, Business Development

Content and web evangelist who loves to discuss life-changing web tools like SP Page Builder & Helix Ultimate, and introduces new templates and helps users have a clear understanding of how they work.