{"id":2396,"date":"2017-06-18T12:55:41","date_gmt":"2017-06-18T10:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nieuwsmarkt.nl\/?p=2396"},"modified":"2017-10-01T09:09:53","modified_gmt":"2017-10-01T07:09:53","slug":"opinions-the-possible-future-of-wordpress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nieuwsmarkt.nl\/nl\/blog\/2017\/06\/18\/opinions-the-possible-future-of-wordpress\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion(s): ‘The possible future of WordPress’"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week we experienced the WordCamp Europe 2017 event and the official announcement of the new WordPress Gutenberg editor. All of that ‘stuff together’ brought me to some ‘thinking of the future’. And the words not said at WCEU.<\/strong><\/p>\n

First of all, I was not in Paris at the WCEU<\/a>, I followed a lot of livestreams<\/a> of the event. I am just very curious how real visitors experienced the event. I had a feeling that the level of many talks go much-much further than the average market of WordPress ‘users-builders’. If these kind of events are ‘just’ at the level of high-end developers (nothing wrong with that), please call it ‘The WordPress Developers Conference’.<\/p>\n

However, if any WordCamp event should serve a broad(er) audience, I would suggest to make a formula with tracks like ‘develop, create\/build and use’. Anyhow the event of this weekend did not make it less interesting, on the contrary, this event could make us all thinking a lot about the future of WordPress for the coming two years.<\/p>\n

Gutenberg<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The interview with Matt Mullenweg<\/a> brought some interesting insights in just a couple of sentences. He mentioned Wix and some others in an ‘upcoming’ context. That seems to bring the WordPress development team in some other directions, especially around the long existing ‘old school’ TinyMCE editor<\/a> in WordPress. And also the vision around the use of widgets, which he now mentioned in relation to themes and ‘more or less’ admitted that widgets are not the ideal solutions (anymore) to place ‘blocks of content’ anywhere you like. Although they just introduced the TinyMCE editor in their textwidget within 4.8.<\/p>\n

The end of widgets the way we use them now?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That said, he was actually refering to pagebuilders in general, without mentioning the word (for as far as I have listened well to his speech). It has always been the philosophy of WordPress to ‘just develop’ the right foundation and let theme and plug-in developers do ‘the rest’. But the changes in ‘the rest’ are becoming more influencial than ever before.<\/p>\n

For sure Wix is not real competition (yet?), the whole concept around it has more limitations than possibilities. It might even be the motor to get more people to the WordPress platform, but only if it offers a much more friendly front-end approach to get things done. I don’t expect Gutenberg<\/a> to develop into a full pagebuilder framework, but I think and hope that Gutenberg will become the ‘hook-in’ framework for connecting pagebuilders into it, either in front- and\/or back-end.<\/p>\n