| 21! At this point WP is “boring technology” which makes it a great choice for many sites. It still does much that's hard to get anywhere else: - The core update process. It's long been one-click. Almost no other CMS or self-hosted framework offers as smooth an update process. (With Laravel, for example, I end up paying for Laravel Shift and even then it requires manual intervention that would be hard for a non-dev to handle.) For WP, services now exist to do automated updates with health checks and rollbacks to counter potential plugin incompatibility[1]. - The plugin ecosystem. WP went from "democratizing publishing" to "democratizing user-owned sites and businesses". From learning management systems to stores to paid newsletters, it's pretty cool what people with no programming experience can spin up. Things I'd love to see for WP in the next 21 years (that we'll probably get sooner if enough people contribute): - Built-in multilingual support. The web is global but WP isn't really, yet, except via third-party plugins. It's on the roadmap[2] but it's been a long time coming. - Improved education around Full Site Editing (FSE) and the new editor. The tools are getting good now, but there's still an education gap. Lots of people are helping to close this, though. Jamie Marsland's YouTube videos do a great job of showing what's possible with FSE, for example. [3] - Background batch processing/queues. These are only available via third-party solutions (and bundled with things like WooCommerce), but should probably be built into core. - SQLite support. Already pretty good but not officially supported in core yet. - Built-in site migrations. Also on the roadmap.[4] - Enhanced Playground tech. Distributing WP as a single binary for dependency-free local development (i.e. without Node.js) feels achievable and worthwhile. - Version control. It's too hard to store a WP site's state in a git repo and keep that synced with production and staging environments, especially when those with admin access can install and upgrade plugins independently of the repo. [1] Like Automattic's own scheduled updater on WP.com (https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/05/20/scheduled-plugin-updat...) and WP Engine's Smart Plugin Manager (https://wpengine.com/smart-plugin-manager/). [2] Current state of multilingual sites in WP: https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/word... [3] I like Jamie's videos showing how to recreate famous layouts with FSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrdXCSIP578 [4] Site Transfer Protocol: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60375 |
https://wordpress.org/playground/