Half a Million Forum Members!

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve reached a fantasic milestone: 500,000 registered forum members! Congratulations to Tim Guthrie for becoming the 500,000th member of the community. In the last five years, the Sencha community has grown by 10x. We can’t thank you enough for all the participation, assistance and feedback that’s helped us to create and improve our projects and products.

The Community Today

Today, we’re one of the leading communities of professional developers creating serious applications for business. We’re a global community: 30% in North America, 30% Europe, 15% in India and 25% distributed across almost every other country in the world. Three fifths of the community are full time professional developers, and another 15% are full-time professional designer/developers. 15% of you manage software development teams. One third of you work for development agencies and systems integrators. Two-thirds of you work for companies.

It always blows my mind to see the richness and inventiveness of the applications you’re creating for all kinds of end users. About one third of you are creating B2B applications for companies, but that’s followed closely by B2B and B2E applications (about a quarter each). The remainder — about 20% — are ISVs creating SaaS or packaged applications using Sencha.

Participating in the Community

The Sencha Forum is the main place we talk about Sencha technologies, give each other help and provide feedback on where you want our projects and products to go. We’re now closing in on a million posts. Over the last few years, based on your requests, we’ve added new features like search, voting and top threads. We’ve also (mostly :)) successfully fought spam and spammers. Our spam filter has blocked almost a million spammers from registering for the Sencha forum. While the anti-spam features occasionally trip folks up, we think we’ve made reasonable tradeoffs balancing access and convenience vs. spam protection.

Of course, the forum is not our only venue for participation. Senchadevs.com, our community developer registry, is the number 1 ranked SEO page for “find a sencha developer,” and it has over 1,600 firms and individuals listed. Sencha Market, for extensions and community contributed code, has almost 200 listed extensions. Until recently, Market was a little difficult to find, but we’ve improved accessibility with the recent site redesign. Keep those contributions coming!

A Final Thank You

Thank you for being a part of the biggest professional JavaScript application development community on the planet. What we do here every day at Sencha is dedicated to making it easier and easier for you to create more and more powerful business applications with web technologies. With your help and contribution, we plan to continue to work toward this mission. We’re grateful that you’ve chosen to take the journey with us.