Raising Funds to Sustain the Continued Development of Bridgetown
Jared White
on Whoa, can you believe it? The Bridgetown web framework is over six years old, and throughout that time there has been massive change within the Ruby ecosystem and the tech industry more broadly.
In order to keep up with the times, we are pleased to announce all new Bridgetown code will be generated by AI agents. The future of coding is agentic, and our role as humans is simply to observe the automous improvements being made at a breakneck pace every second. After all, the worst agent is now more capable than the most 10X engineer ever, and so it’s become clear as day that only losers write code by hand. Instead, we’ll fix everything by tokenmaxxing as we build our glorious techno-utopian future.
🤔
Just kidding! 😜
Bridgetown is a framework for handcoders, for artisans, for people who care deeply about ethics and community. We may be one of the few handcoded frameworks left standing before long, and we have no problem with that.
But here’s the hard truth: we can’t keep maintaining Bridgetown on a shoestring budget.
As of the time of this writing, our Q4 2026 sponsorship goal of $300/month stands at only 18%, or roughly $54/month. And it hasn’t budged much in some while.
The fact of the matter is that continued maintenance and feature development of the Bridgetown web framework is at risk.
This is an opportunity for the Ruby community to rally, to demonstrate that frameworks based on ethical principles still matter and projects which seek to serve individuals over corporations still have an important role to play in open source computing.
To raise funds, we are now announcing a series of goal tiers. While this isn’t an iron-clad promise that all these features will happen immediately if we reach our fundraising goals, it is a public acknowledgement that we will prioritize these efforts as fundraising heats up. Hold us accountable! And let us know what you’d like to see as we move forward.
Tier 1 @ $75/month: Migration to Codeberg #
The Bridgetown Core Team has been deliberating about fully migrating to Codeberg (and away from GitHub) for quite some time now (some plugins already live there), and we have made the decision to move forward. We still plan to keep bridgetownrb/bridgetown on GitHub as a mirror, so as not to inconvenience anyone who may be installing gems or accessing repo code from GH directly. But we will be moving over our workflow of filing issues and submitting pull requests to Codeberg. There are also some additional workflows that need to be looked at such as automatic website updates and publishing our own Gem Index.
Your support will directly help us kick off this process!
Tier 2 @ $150/month: Address Vital Maintenance #
Over the months and years, a bunch of little things have piled up. We’d love to start investigating these issues and whittle down our backlog. Things like Missing permalink placeholders fail silently, Date localization is out of, um, date 😏, Add Bundled Configuration for cross-document view transitions, and Add Y-M-D permalink placeholders.
Tier 3 @ $225/month: Make Our Markdown Awesome #
We’ve been building out some exciting new functionality for the Markdown processing in Bridgetown, most recently our <u>wikilinks (missing)</u> feature, and now we’re ready to move forward with even more content-focused enhancements! Things like Callouts extension to Markdown (note, tip, warning, etc.), Hashtags, Add Swup back as a bundled configuration, and Ability to limit resources in dev for faster initial builds.
Tier 4 @ $300/month: Beef Up the Resource Engine #
It’s been 5 years since we introduced the Resource Content Engine, a significant rewrite of the underlying static generation mechanism for processing pages. In a solid testament to the validity of that architecture, we’ve done very little since to change how the engine works—even when adding significant new functionality like internationalization.
But there’s always room for improvement, and we’d like to dive into a few of the more painful initiatives sitting on the back burner. Things like Use data from custom collections when using prototypes, Create Meta Collections merging multiple collections to render into timeline-like pages, Pages which paginate are excluded from collections.pages, and Support hreflang tags for i18n.
Stretch Goals #
Can we get to $400/month? $500/month? There’s still a lot we’d love to get working on, especially Bridgetown’s backend server integration with Rack and the Roda toolkit, and other server-oriented functionality like Sidekiq background jobs. There’s also more we can do for great i18n support, as well as the ability to create and deploy a fully dynamic Bridgetown web application (aka not just a static site with a handful of API endpoints).
But we’ll be able to flesh out some of these ideas more as we approach our initial $300/month tier goal.
Will you help us? Does the future of Bridgetown and the Ruby web community matter to you? Then please consider donating today. Your sponsorship will go directly to supporting the time & material costs of keeping Bridgetown vibrant and moving forward as a developer ecosystem. We are the only Ruby-based “hybrid” framework, supporting fully static sites, dynamic web applications, and every permutation in-between; we are also one of the preeminent “distributions” of Roda (meaning we provide an out-of-the-box, pre-configured environment to build sophisticated web applications using Roda).
And we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other Ruby frameworks like Hanami who are fighting for a more equitable and inclusive community where everyone feels safe and welcome.
I feel an overwhelming sense of personal gratitude that I have been able to work on Bridgetown since 2020, meeting hundreds of Rubyists and web developers from all over the world as well as connecting with the amazing people who are on the Bridgetown Core Team. I look forward to continuing this work into 2030 and beyond.
Sponsor Bridgetown Today and help us blow past $300/month!