This week: automation, payroll transparency, translations, SQLite in Core, efficiency, and much more…
I built my first website at 14 years old on GeoCities, which later led to building client websites as a freelancer while touring the world as the leader of a rock band. I eventually grew a WordPress agency that delivered more than 800 websites to our clients – before creating Atarim.io to redefine the way agencies collaborate with their clients.
I’ve been part of the WordPress community for more than a decade. I feel that over the past couple of years we’ve been trying to figure out our place in the ever-evolving world of websites while understanding what’s the future of our ecosystem and amazing community.
So with this really cool invite to be the editor-for-a-week at WP Owls, I wanted to take the opportunity and dive into and contemplate the future of WordPress, as I and others in the community see it.
This was an interesting experience and I learned a lot, so without further ado, here are my top 4 articles:
The first article explores the future of WordPress as described by the Co-Founder, Matt Mullenweg, during the latest WCEU. This touches mostly on tactics rather than strategies, but one thing that I found interesting is the want to make Gutenberg the standard interface across the web. Very much like classic WYSIWYG rich text editor was (and still is) widely adopted for text areas.
Most global tech brands have already realized that collaboration is an integral part of every workflow. From Google to Microsoft, as well as Adobe who purchased frame.io (video collaboration) last year and have just announced the acquisition of Figma.
I may be biased as I run Atarim as the leading collab tool for WordPress, but I believe that in order for WP to keep leading, we need to accept and integrate collaboration into every aspect of the system.
In its broadest definition, WordPress is a Content Management System. Over the past few years, researchers and developers are breaking the glass ceiling of what we all thought was possible with AI. Especially around content creation and creative work. I believe that we’re only just scratching the surface of what AI will enable us to do for website and content creation in the near future.
Security has been a massive Achilles heel for WordPress over the years and as it seems that WordPress is starting to go upmarket into the Enterprise world, bad security practice simply can’t continue. This article breaks down an 8-year study into the use of malicious plugins in WordPress, and the results are not awesome (to say the least) This one is not so much a prediction but rather a plea for the community to start taking these issues seriously.
Abandoned plugins, unreviewed code, and scammy GPL sites are doing us all a disservice.
Erik Torsner describes how to manage WordPress environments with WP-CLI and Robo. I just found out about the latter, but it seems like an incredibly useful tool for creating all sorts of command-line commands.
Piccia Neri wrote a really great article about why the company is listing (or not) potential earnings in their advertisements. I myself really don’t like it when the company hides such information.
Ryan McCue described a very interesting thing about how WordPress processes plural forms in different languages.
LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. Trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
Ari Stathopoulos proposed that WordPress should have native SQLite support. I think it’s a really great idea, and despite some disadvantages of SQLite, using this database will work perfectly well in certain situations.
Another article dedicated to performance has appeared at XWP – this time they focused on the four pillars of performance.
GoDaddy has launched a beta version of its manged WooCommerce\ service. It looks really interesting and combined with the skills of the Pagely team I’m sure it will work great.
Jeff Everhart compared several of the most popular headless eCommerce platforms and checked how they compare with WooCommerce.
Matt Medeiros wrote an interesting article about stolen plugins. Fortunately, instead of just complaining that this is happening, he analyzes where the demand for such sites comes from.
Felipe Elia described what his path looked like when choosing a new theme for his website and why the choice fell on OceanWP.
Jeff Chandler summed up Matt Mullenweg’s recent visit to the What’s your problem podcast. A lot of topics were covered there, such as Open Source and Tumblr.
Anders Norén does not rest, but regularly releases new block themes into the world. Now it’s time for Beaumont – writers will surely like it.
Have you heard about the PHP Swoole server? Neither did I, but it’s really fast and also has a script to run WordPress on it.
Chris Wiegman has released Kana – an easy-to-use, wp-env inspired server.