Forge 2.0
This has been a long time coming, but we're really excited by it. Robert, our lead developer, has put in countless hours to completely rewrite the Forge (our file-release and bug tracker platform) from the ground up. Way back when CMS Made Simple started, the Forge was written as a standalone application in Ruby on Rails. Despite a few shortcomings, it has served us well but as none of the current team particularly specializes in Ruby, development stagnated. This rewrite is being built on our favourite platform: CMS Made Simple. Why didn't we think of that sooner!?

Non Profit
In the Autumn of 2018, CMS Made Simple became a non-profit corporation, registered in Canada. The current Dev Team members, and Ted Kulp, the founder of the project, have all agreed to release ownership of all core code, assets, and branding to the CMS Made Simple Foundation. Among many other benefits, this helps to ensure the future stability of the project, keeping the code open and free in perpetuity. We chose Canada simply because three of the Dev Team, including the Project Manager and Lead Developer are Canadians.

Major Release 2.3
CMS Made Simple version 2.3 will include more features, a sleeker core, admin theme improvements, and much more. We are still a few months away from beta testing, but will post progress updates periodically. In the interim, we are still maintaining and releasing updates for the 2.2 series. Once the new Forge is ready, we'll be diverting more resources to the development of 2.3.

Slack
After fifteen years, we have retired our IRC channel and have migrated to Slack. The fine folks at Slack have generously made this possible through their non-profit program, and we're definitely enjoying all of the new features it brings. Our Dev Team discussion and meetings are now logged automatically and easy for us to search, our marketing team is using the video chat features to flesh out new ideas, and our public chat is already more active than the IRC channel had been in quite some time. Please feel free to join us by requesting an account at https://www.cmsmadesimple.org/support/documentation/chat/

GSuite
Another benefit of being a non-profit is free access to many Google products. In January we transitioned all of our mail services and groups over to GSuite, which has reduced the workload of our server admin and sped up communication within the Dev Team. Email management can now be handled by the administration side of the team instead of the technical, whose skills are best used elsewhere.