I was born in Spain. I created my first website at the age of 16 when I was in high school. In the Computer Science subject, the teacher taught us basic stuff, such as Word, Excel, Access, etc. One of the things we learned was how to create a website using Microsoft Word. He taught us how to upload it to a free hosting platform and the very basics of any website.
I then started my website for fun, and because I started to get visits and people contacting me, I began to enjoy it. I kept working on it from then on, and a year later, I moved from Microsoft Word to Macromedia Dreamweaver. From there to HTML, then CSS, and so on.
fullPage.js was born due to a combination of two things.
One was when I was working as a full-stack web developer, one of my tasks was updating the company’s website. They suggested that they wanted something simple, like a PowerPoint presentation. So I started to dig into the idea and found this excellent scrolling effect on one page. In an attempt to re-create it, I couldn’t find any component to do such an effect, so I had to create it from scratch. Of course, the code wasn’t isolated from the page itself, and it wasn’t a “component” as such, but a big part of the work and research was already done.
The second was when I was actually trying to improve my jQuery/JavaScript skills and started to think about making a plugin for jQuery, just for learning and making something useful for others. Having made this page with this unique scrolling effect, I thought this was the perfect idea for a jQuery plugin – Something that will save time for other developers that are in the same situation as mine.
I’m the only core contributor to the code. There have always been people helping a bit here and there, especially in the early days. But, there has been no one as committed to the project as I have been. There are more than 130 contributors to the main repository. But they were mainly providing small pull requests.
However, fullPage.js is much more than just the core code for the JavaScript component. It is about managing customers, support, improving parts of the website, creating new extensions, improving documentation, creating and maintaining plugins for WordPress, working on SEO, etc.
Although I’m the only developer working directly on the fullPage.js code, I have a small team of people helping me with other things – all of them working part-time, most just a few hours a week.
It makes it much easier for them to create a full-screen scrolling website, saving them quite a lot of time and headaches. Now we also provide plugins that add extra features or change the kind of animation and WordPress plugins and wrappers for the main JS frameworks such as React, Vue, and Angular.
Top secret! Nah, just kidding :)
I’m about to release a new major version (version4) that will introduce a few improvements and drastic changes in how fullPage.js works. But most importantly, those will result in a few bugs getting fixed, better performance, new features, and probably a smaller file size.
I’m pretty excited about how fullPage.js will now deal with dynamic content by auto-detecting changes on the DOM and updating itself accordingly, without having to do anything on the developer side. Also, I’ll finally drop compatibility with IE 9! :)
Difficult to say. More than a feature, I would say it’s more a matter of fixing some bugs or improving certain behaviors that are far from desirable. From issues related to incorrect section dimensions on In-App browsers (Instagram, WeChat, Twitter, etc.), avoiding accidental scrolling when using scrollable sections, allowing users to hide specific sections using media queries, or to use custom navigation arrows.
This is for anyone who wants to create a reliable full-screen scrolling website – From the web developer who wants to build their portfolio website to the big corporation that wants to announce the next Disney movie, passing through the no-code people who want a plug and play plugin for their WordPress client’s website.
Regarding the use cases, most people use public websites. Some examples can be BBC, Dreamworks, or Zara. In one case, I talked with a customer who was using it for a Museum in Mexico, where they would have it running on iPad all around the museum. So people could interact with the page.
Others use it on the intranet for internal tools. In one case, a customer needed a custom license to use it in a production factory software so employees could have access to certain information.
I haven’t gotten in contact too much with them to ask for these kinds of things, but that’d be something I for sure have to do at some point! :)
They can get a license from the Pricing page. Or better yet, if they are React, Vue, or Angular developers, they can help me fix bugs or close issues on these repositories: react-fullpage, vue-fullpage.js, and angular-fullpage.