Shoelace 2.0

January 24, 2023 • 2 min read

It's been three years since I broke ground on Shoelace 2.0. Between then and now, the project has amassed over 300 million monthly hits on jsDelivr and, as of today, it is jsDelivr's 73rd most popular project.

And that was just the beta version.

Today, I'm happy to announce that the first stable release of Shoelace is finally available!

First and foremost, I'd like to say thank you to all my users. I've poured my heart and soul into this library and I'm thrilled to see so many people building with it. You continue to inspire me every day!

For those unfamiliar, Shoelace is a free, open source library of Web Components you can use to build websites and web applications. There are over 50 accessible, handcrafted user interface components to choose from, and you can use them in any framework you want!

Why Choose Web Components #

Web Components are built using Web Standards, meaning they don't require a framework to use. You can think of them as custom HTML elements, because that's exactly what they are!

And because they're just HTML elements, you can use them in any framework you want, such as React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, Solid, and more. This makes Web Components a great candidate for your next design system! In fact, Shoelace acts as a design system starter kit, allowing you to customize it to suit your needs.

Shoelace is built with accessibility in mind and comes with both light and dark themes out of the box. Why spend months building your own UI primitives (i.e. buttons, dialogs, form controls, tabs, etc.) when you can get dozens of battle-tested components and start building with them right now?

I invite you to learn more about Web Components to better understand how you and your organization can benefit from them.

What's Next #

While this release is a major milestone for Shoelace, I feel like we're still just getting started. There's always more to do — more features, more tests, more polish — and with the support of the amazing folks at Font Awesome, we're going to deliver an incredible amount of value in the coming year.

Sorry, no spoilers! But you'll be hearing a lot about Shoelace as we continue our journey to become everyone's favorite open source Web Component library.

Before I go, I'd like to share some interesting stats about this release!

Shoelace 2.0 in Numbers #

Development of Shoelace 2.0 started in January 2020. The first beta was released on July 15, 2020. Since then, Shoelace has grown quite a bit! Here's a look at some stats from the project.*

55 components have been built
Over 2,500 commits have been made to the project
85 people have contributed to the project
669 issues have been filed on GitHub
274 pull requests have been opened
More than 150 discussions have been started on GitHub
Over 500 people have joined the Shoelace community on Discord
Over 300 million CDN hits per month
Over 13,000 npm downloads per week
73rd most popular project on jsDelivr
#2 product of the day on Product Hunt (July 25, 2020)

*Stats recorded on January 24, 2023

Special Thanks #

I'd like to extend a very special thank you to every single contributor who worked to make this possible. Everyone who's filed a bug, submitted a PR, requested a feature, started a discussion, helped with testing, and advocated for the project. You are just as responsible for Shoelace's success as I am. I'd also like to thank the folks at Font Awesome for recognizing Shoelace's potential and believing in me to make it happen.

Thank you! And keep building awesome stuff!

This post was originally published on the Font Awesome blog.