Three Things for WordPress in 2017

I recently did a talk at the Marietta WordPress Meetup that I co-lead concerning the state of WordPress in 2017. This is heavily based on news topics from sites I regularly visit and things gleaned from the “State of the Word” by Matt Mullenweg (leader of WordPress).

There are 3 things that are priority for WordPress:

• The Rest API – This a major development focus to get WP up-to-par with other frameworks
• The Editor – Changes are coming. Automattic is working with the makers of TinyMCE.
• Customizer – This will be a major GUI focus

The Rest API

The Rest API is not really going to be used by many people, but by having a Rest API, we are no longer limited to WordPress as the front end. For example, you can have all of you content in WordPress, but pull in the content into a mobile app that Sideways8 writes. It opens it up for corporations to do whatever they want with WordPress.

The Editor

“Editor and Customizer will break backwards compatibility” – Matt

This is a big deal. I was told, by Andrew Nacin in 2012 (a core developer) that you can upgrade from .79 all the way up to the current version of WordPress. It’s true. For WordPress to do this is interesting. I’m not sure what this means, but maybe good will come out of this. WordPress seems to be trapped in supporting legacy features and code.

The Customizer

To quote Matt in an interview I watched:

“I think widgets can go away, I think menus can go away, a lot of things that are separate can essentially be different elements that you can put into a post, you can put it into a page, or you can even put it in a layout builder that is kicked off by a theme that really allows you to customize different parts of a page much easier than you can today”. – Matt

And the last quote from Matt: “If you’re not working on these three things, they aren’t that important”.

Let’s see how things change, and see what the new features are!