Happy 4th Birthday

(cherry picked from commit f74997d)

bridgetown-website/Gemfile.lock

@@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
 PATH
   remote: ../bridgetown-builder
   specs:
-    bridgetown-builder (1.3.3)
-      bridgetown-core (= 1.3.3)
+    bridgetown-builder (1.3.4)
+      bridgetown-core (= 1.3.4)
 
 PATH
   remote: ../bridgetown-core
   specs:
-    bridgetown-core (1.3.3)
+    bridgetown-core (1.3.4)
       activemodel (>= 6.0, < 8.0)
       activesupport (>= 6.0, < 8.0)
       addressable (~> 2.4)
@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ PATH
       i18n (~> 1.0)
       kramdown (~> 2.1)
       kramdown-parser-gfm (~> 1.0)
-      liquid (~> 5.0)
+      liquid (>= 5.0, < 5.5)
       listen (~> 3.0)
       rake (>= 13.0)
       roda (~> 3.46)
@@ -34,16 +34,16 @@ PATH
 PATH
   remote: ../bridgetown-paginate
   specs:
-    bridgetown-paginate (1.3.3)
-      bridgetown-core (= 1.3.3)
+    bridgetown-paginate (1.3.4)
+      bridgetown-core (= 1.3.4)
 
 PATH
   remote: ../bridgetown
   specs:
-    bridgetown (1.3.3)
-      bridgetown-builder (= 1.3.3)
-      bridgetown-core (= 1.3.3)
-      bridgetown-paginate (= 1.3.3)
+    bridgetown (1.3.4)
+      bridgetown-builder (= 1.3.4)
+      bridgetown-core (= 1.3.4)
+      bridgetown-paginate (= 1.3.4)
 
 GEM
   remote: https://rubygems.org/

bridgetown-website/src/_posts/2024/2024-04-02-happy-birthday-bridgetown.md

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+---
+date: Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:09:29 -0700
+title: Happy 4th Birthday, Bridgetown!
+subtitle: A hearty thank you to all our sponsors and 70+ contributors who have helped this open source project flourish.
+author: jared
+category: news
+---
+
+Four years ago today, I wrote in my Day One journal:
+
+{%@ Note do %}
+“I forked **Jekyll** today and turned it into **Bridgetown**, so I'm now privately the maintainer of a Webpack-aware, Ruby-based static site generator for the modern JAMstack era. How cool (and crazy) is that?!?!”
+{% end %}
+
+The first public website launch and release of Bridgetown 0.10 [happened a few weeks later](/news/time-to-visit-bridgetown/), and the rest as they say is history. As always, a **hearty thank you** to all our [sponsors](https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown#special-thanks-to-our-github-sponsors--) and [70+ contributors](https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown/graphs/contributors) who have helped this open source project flourish in ways I never could have imagined.
+
+## Some "hindsight is 20/20 thoughts"
+
+I know we all sort of cringe thinking about Webpack today (_esbuild forever!_), but back then it was still a Big Deal and represented a major frontend shift towards using ESM, pulling in packages from NPM for both JavaScript and CSS libraries/frameworks, and compiling using JavaScript-based tools. Having a pre-configured frontend pipeline that Just Works™ come ready to roll with your site generator was (and is) nothing to sneeze at.
+
+It's interesting to look at my original notes on what was most urgent to add to whatever might emerge from this fork: Webpack (as mentioned), Components (not just basic includes/partials), Internationalization (i18n), and easier third-party API integration were top of the list. A promising start! But a lot of what I love today about Bridgetown hadn't quite been conceived of yet. **Much has happened in only four years!** (You can find a more in-depth [list of post-Jekyll features and changes here](/docs/migrating/features-since-jekyll) if you're curious.)
+
+One major direction for Bridgetown I imagined in those earlier days that we ended up totally shifting away from is a tight integration with Rails. Aside from my [own perspective on Rails shifting](/future/road-to-bridgetown-2.0-escaping-burnout/), it turns out a significant level of interest in the potential architecture such a marriage might produce never materialized. I could do a deep dive some day into why that might be, but the good news (and a direction I never would have foreseen in 2020!) is that we pivoted into a tight integration with [Roda](/docs/routes). That proved to be a **huge boon** for the framework—with a lot of newer features being heavily inspired by the "Roda way" like the new [Initializers](/docs/configuration/initializers) system—and **I'm ready to push that all to the max this year**. I see no reason why, with just a tad more DX polish, a combined Bridgetown + Roda couldn't be then used to build _substantial_ web applications serving thousands of customers. I look forward to spreading the message that Bridgetown is far more than "just" a static-site generator (as we clearly say right on our homepage!) by promoting solid integrations with [Rodauth](http://rodauth.jeremyevans.net) and [Sequel](http://sequel.jeremyevans.net) to round out our server-side offerings. (We're basically just living in the RECU—the Jeremy Evans Cinematic Universe—at this point! 😅)
+
+## In closing…
+
+We're currently in the midst of the Bridgetown v2 development cycle, and I'll be posting Part 3 of our blog series on the topic shortly. In the meantime, be sure to sign up on our [Community Discussion site](https://community.bridgetown.pub) and [follow us on Mastodon](https://ruby.social/@bridgetown) to stay on top of the latest news. **Thank you once again for all of your support over the past four years**. The Bridgetown community is now larger than any one of us, and I can't wait to see what the next four years have in store for Rubyists everywhere.