WordPress is a deep, deep ocean. Storms may be raging on the surface, but stick your head down and you see that the bulk of the ecosystem lives deep below the surface, still moving forward, business as usual. Now- how long that metaphor holds is anyone’s guess.
Matt Mullenweg is the self-proclaimed BDFL and regardless of how you feel about his leadership of WordPress, the only way to force a major change to the leadership structure or roadmap is to fork the software and make your own thing, as he keeps reminding everyone who disagrees.
Matt’s position is pretty secure, at least from my vantage point. Twenty years of reliable infrastructure and a trademark that’s almost a household name. Replacing those would be no easy feat. There’s plenty of armchair developers on Twitter who rant about how they know what WordPress needs, but even if they do, they don’t know how to deliver. If you think you can do it better, go do it, I say.
That’s what John O’Nolan did when he left the WordPress community and founded a competing CMS called Ghost. You can read his original manifesto here or check out this recent interview recorded since the chaos began.
Ghost isn’t as big as WordPress, of course, but it’s profitable and self-sufficient. Whenever there’s an exodus of authors leaving Substack (either for political reasons or more likely because they’ve realized that the hyper “growth” they see on the platform doesn’t always translate to increased profits), Ghost is one of the top destinations. It hosts writers and journalists like Casey Newton and Molly White as well as publications like 404 Media and Quillette.
It pays off to do one thing and to do it well. If you’re a writer launching a newsletter, Ghost is infinitely easier than WordPress. No page builders or site editors. No overwhelming choice of plugins when you want basic functionality like email subscriptions. Just a clean and snappy interface for writers. WordPress still can’t decide if it wants to be a blogging platform or an enterprise-grade page builder.
So this is my main criticism of WordPress right now. It’s acting like a typical twenty-something: it doesn’t know what it wants to be, struggling to define an identity, blaming all of its problems on someone else. As I’ve said before, just make better software. (Reading and responding to all the toxicity on Twitter and Reddit is not going to help WordPress democratize publishing.)
AI is Coming For You
Meanwhile, I’ve been digging into adjacent tech areas like automation, generative AI, and LLMs. I’m starting to fall in love with writing python for some reason.
Working in WordPress can also be fun, but often I feel like I’m playing in someone else’s toolbox. And this person left out half of the tools I need and doesn’t want to give me any APIs to build them myself. Writing my own little python scripts (ok, letting Copilot/ChatGPT write them) is reminding me of why I liked coding to begin with. The ultimate freedom of code – the fact that the only limits are your own imagination, not someone else’s user interface.
On the flip side – AI itself is nothing like code. Instead of being predictable and deterministic, it’s random and hallucinogenic. But I do believe it’ll change the internet (and society) at the same scale as the introduction of the mobile internet.
I still love writing content in WordPress, and believe in the mission statement behind it (democratizing publishing), but I can’t help wonder what the future of the web will look like. So, three pieces for you, talking about WordPress, AI, and the future:
- First, on the Webmasters podcast, I interview Keanan Koppenhaver of FloorboardAI. Keanan is a friend with a lot of WordPress agency experience, so the conversation is really geared towards WordPress developers and builders can start leaning into AI.
🎙️ An AI Crash Course for WordPress Users and Developers ft. Keanan Koppenhaver - That conversation got my wheels spinning, so earlier this week I put down my thoughts on whether AI is going to help or hurt open source. AI is writing a lot of code, but overall, big projects like WordPress aren’t seeing tremendous gains in the core software. Even worse, collaborating with AI often means we’re not collaborating with other humans.
📝 Is LLM-generated code good for open source? - I joined a live panel over at The WP Minute where we shared our 2025 WordPress predictions. It seems that every time I join a WP Minute livestream, another huge WordPress bomb is dropped in the next 24 hours. We recorded this right before Automattic pulled all of it’s resources from WordPress.org and Matt Mullenweg wrote about JKPress.
🎥 2025 WordPress Predictions w/ The WP Minute
Links From Around the Web
I tend to collect my interesting links on Bluesky first, and then I use a python script to pull URLs from my profile feed and pick which ones will show up here. Last week I updated my python scripts to get a simple UI via Streamlit (see more about it here).
Here’s what you should be reading:
- When it comes to doing live “speed build challenges” in WordPress, I think Dan Maby perfectly captured my own experience: “I like the block concept in many ways, but I’m struggling with how I used it in the Speed Build. I did many things I would never usually do…” Writing with the WordPress Block Editor – Dan Maby
- Felix Arntz’s AI Services plugin version 0.4.0 now has an “AI Playground” that allows you to explore the available AI services and their capabilities through a dedicated UI inside WordPress. AI Services: Playground Walkthrough (See also my recent interview with Felix.)
- Creating agency workflows for full site editing? Last week I interviewed Amor Kumar, Principal Engineer at WebDevStudios and we talked all about the current experience building with Gutenberg. Agency Workflows for Building with Full Site Editing ft Amor Kumar – Webmasters.FM
- Automattic is temporarily pulling a large amount of sponsored contributors off of the WordPress project. How this will effect the project remains to be seen. Aligning Automattic’s Sponsored Contributions to WordPress – Automattic
- The Studio local development app from WordPress.com continues its slow march to becoming a full-featured offering (and LocalWP competitor). It now offers full sync with sites hosted on WordPress.com. Meet Studio Sync for WordPress.com
- AI is changing how the web is made. “The biggest risk factor I can foresee is that if your sole responsibility is to write code, your job is almost certainly at risk.” The Importance Of Investing In Soft Skills In The Age Of AI | CSS-Tricks
- Want to know more? This is such a great summary of AI/LLM advancements over the last year. For me, interacting with AI this past year has been a constant back and forth between feelings of awe and underwhelm. Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
That’s all folks! What do you think? Is WordPress in existential trouble right now, whether from outside (AI?) or within (unfocused leadership)? Will an alternative emerge from within the community? Will the block editor finally add responsive design controls? Sound off and let me know.
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