16 Years of rtCamp: Expansion, Innovation, and New Frontiers
As rtCamp turns 16 today, I want to take a moment to reflect on the past year — on what we’ve built and where we’re heading.
What We’ve Been Up To
WordPress, of course!
While we are expanding into new areas, WordPress remains at the core of everything we do. This year, our teams helped multiple enterprise clients migrate from Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, Drupal, and custom CMS solutions to WordPress — continuing to prove that WordPress is the best, even if an underrated enterprise CMS out there.
In fact, I see our clients leveraging WordPress as the ideal foundation for composing the DXP they actually need, even if it’s often overlooked by the Gartners of the world in favor of trendier, more proprietary platforms.
Beyond migrations, we saw demand for Gutenberg block-based page building experiences picking up. Our work on unique scalability solutions brought development costs down and helped enterprise teams achieve faster time to market, specially for those managing multiple brand websites.
Our WordPress practice remains solid, and the team remains deeply focused on creating business value for our client partners.
Expanding Our Expertise: Frappe & ERPNext
One big shift this year has been our expansion beyond WordPress into the Frappe and ERPNext ecosystem.
Frappe is an open source low code framework. More like Larvael or Django, but a lot more batteries included and fully open source with MIT license.
ERPNext is an enterprise resource planning tool, that is built using Frappe. ERPNext is GPL and started with a goal to be WordPress for ERPs. It’s highly customizable and scalable, with support for external apps (more like plugins).
We have used ERPNext to replace our accounting (Xero), HRMS (Keka), payroll solution (Greytip) ATS (Recruitee), PMS (ActiveCollab), time tracking (Everhour), CRM (Pipedrive) and dozens of spreadsheets. And we are not even done yet.
Saving literally tens of thousands of dollars in SaaS subscription, we also benefit from an integrated, yet modular platform. Since ERPNext doesn’t have per-user pricing, more information can be shared directly with stakeholders across the board.
Over the past few years, we’ve gained deep expertise while enjoying the process of building with Frappe and ERPNext. Much like our journey with WordPress VIP, we’ve now taken the next step by becoming an official Frappe & ERPNext partner. This ensures you can trust our expertise, whether for custom application development or to achieve the best out of a custom ERP implementation.
We’ve always been strong advocates of open-source solutions, and adding Frappe and ERPNext services aligns perfectly with our commitment to helping enterprises win with open source.
Building Smarter Solutions
We worked on two major productized solutions this year:
GoDAM – A scalable Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, recently launched for WordPress, designed for enterprise teams managing large media libraries, with unique video commerce features.
SnapWP – An ambitious, turnkey headless WordPress solution aimed at making headless WordPress development faster and easily manageable.
Both of these products were shaped by real-world challenges we’ve solved for our clients.
Training the Next Generation
Our campus hiring and training program continues to bring fresh talent into the industry. This year, 54 new engineers joined rtCamp, trained from the ground up in open-source development and engineering best practices. Why do we go through the pain of hiring and training, you ask — you have to experience our engineers’ work to truly appreciate the impact they deliver. I can say with complete conviction that a rtCamp engineer with 1 year of experience blows out most engineers with 5 years of experience.
Contributing to the Open-Source Community
With each passing year, our conviction in open source grows, not merely as a business, but as active participants — as builders and maintainers.
On WordPress, we are contributing across Gutenberg, performance, and of course, the core project along with documentation and translations. This year, apart from many part-timers, we now have 10 full-time engineers contributing upwards of 400 hours per week. Making us the largest contributors to WordPress in terms of hours.
With ERPNext, we’ve started contributing code, documentation, and insights to the broader Frappe community. We released Frappe Slack connector, Frappe Private Comment and Frappe Email Send Override to the open-source Frappe ecosystem, with more in the offing.
What Next?
Looking ahead, our focus remains on developing more enterprise-ready solutions that solve real pain points. With WordPress, Frappe and ERPNext for larger enterprises, we can build synergistic solutions that reduce cost, and enable larger, complex systems at startup speed.
Not just in WordPress, but across the open-source software landscape, we will continue to strengthen our contributions.
A big thank you to every rtCamper, client, and partner who has been part of this journey. The best part about being 16? We’re just getting started.
Rahul Bansal
Founder & CEO, rtCamp
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