The Future of WordPress?

Posted on 21. Dec, 2009 by Alex Denning in Interview

The final of our community series, slightly later than planned asks twenty one of the WordPress community what they think the future of WordPress should be. Again, in no particular order, here are the responses.

Yikes, after the doom and gloom of the previous question, I had better turn it around a bit here and try to look at the bright side of things…

If WordPress stays on its current trajectory, expect to see hundreds if not thousands of additional upgrades. I think the WP devs are fixated on updating the core at least four times a year, last I read. That is an *insane* amount of work for users, who will be constantly updating WordPress until the day they die.

The good news is that all of these updates theoretically will be improving WordPress with more features, stronger security, and better code. I think eventually WordPress will hit critical mass and be bought out by some corpo-giant like Yahoo or Google. I will leave it up to you to contemplate the future if something like that should happen.

In the meantime, WordPress will continue to grow and evolve into an increasingly awesome piece of blogging/CMS software. Something we can all look forward to!
-Jeff Starr

I think blogging will decline in the future and will be replaced by micro-blogging. Blogging will be just another extension of micro blogging like a read more link.
-Lester Chan

I see WordPress powering nearly every new website that needs ‘a few pages and a news section’. That and easy-to-create installation profiles helping nearly anyone distribute ‘It’s the next Facebook!’-type solutions. In a box, so to speak. WordPress will be something more than a blogging platform then.
-Ian Stewart

By nature of the businesses that are being created around it, WordPress as a flatform will continue to grow. In a matter of a few short years, WordPress is already beginning to shed its notoriety of being “only” a blog platform and is being seeing as more of a content management system.
-Brian Gardner

I’m pretty sure that in the future it will be possible to do even more than now using WordPress. And man, I can’t wait!
-Jean-Baptiste Jung

I think you just answered it. During the next few years I think you are going to see WordPress evolve into more of a CMS friendly platform. You can pretty much do anything with it already, but it’s going to get easier to do so in the future.

-Jason Schuller

Heh, that may be one of the challenges for WP: it’s just capable of anything now (or, after WPMU & WP merge, it really will), so maybe it will come to a point where there’s just nothing more to add? I guess I’m not visionary enough for this question

-Ozh

With free platforms like these basically anyone can set up a blog or even a website in a very short time. So this means that the need for smaller companies selling their services with poor CMS systems would fade.
-Indrek Saarnak

Like you said, anything is possible at the moment. It’s just a matter of what emerges. A trend that seems to be gaining some steam lately is the custom single post templates which could be interesting for certain types of sites.
-Leland Fiegel

I think some huge steps are being made at the moment to make people realise that WordPress isn’t so narrowly defined. Part of this process is integrating certain things into core that give huge diversity possibilities. I’m talking essentially about things like post_class and post types, custom taxonomies and the like.
-Alex Cragg

It was only a week or two ago that WordPress won at the Open Source CMS Awards [at time of writing], and was only topped by Drupal in the PHP CMS category.

Even a year or two ago, WordPress was definitely very blog oriented, but that’s changing. A lot of people will certainly still see it as a blogging system for a while to come, but all WP can do is keep growing and keep making its users talk about it. Sooner or later, it’s going to lose that blog-only stigma altogether.
-Michael Martin

Tough question… I’m really bad at predicting the future, as I saw myself working a 8-4 job, but here I am, making a living of WP. I think WP will continue to dominate blogging market, but also gain on other CMS’s like EE, Drupal etc once everybody sees the potential.
-Magnus Jepson

It will evolve into a CMS framework powering majority of the sites on internet.

-Ashfame

I think WordPress is being seen more and more as a CMS, I believe it will be always seen as the best blogging open source platform, but the usage as a CMS will grow more and more.
-Mike

More flexibility. In Piwik for example everything is a plugin: individual data visualizations, the installation routine and even the plugin API. I like the ability to replace nearly every code fragment with my own.
This would push WordPress to the next level.
-Thomas Scholz

I haven’t looked at WordPress as a blogging platform in years, but perhaps that is because my team and I at Crowd Favorite spend almost all of our time building large scale sites on it – many of which have no blog.

I expect the core product to continue to be enhanced with improvements to basic features, and that the surrounding projects (bbPress, BuddyPress, etc.) will continue to mature as well. Eventually, there will be some more formal support for CMS style sites either in core or through a different *Press offshoot. I’ve taken a step on doing this for our needs with the Carrington CMS theme framework.

The 3.0 release (merging with WPMU) will be an interesting pivot point for the project – I think there will be some hard decisions that will be going into that release.
-Alex King

WordPress will continue to be used as a platform to do things that go far beyond blogging. As these projects end up in the showcase and acquire press, more people will begin to realize that WordPress is an excellent blogging tool but it’s by far the not only thing it is capable of doing. WordPress will continue to evolve as a framework or a platform that will enable these creative uses of the software. Hopefully one day, when Matt is asked what is WordPress capable of doing, his response will be, anything you can imagine.
-Jeff Chandler

With the addition of custom post types WordPress is clearly heading more towards cms territory – and there will be no limit for premium theme authors, who will no doubt lead the way in the innovations with them (hopefully Darren and I will be at the top of the list

). I think that will also spark more plugins and themes that turn WordPress into a cms, much like the POD’s plugin does now – only in a way that is more specific/ relevant to the theme.
-Ben Gillbanks

People will start taking WordPress seriously as a powerful CMS in the next year. Maybe I’ll even be able to quit reading those articles titled “How to use WordPress as a CMS” (yes, I hate that phrase). When custom post type functionality becomes as easy as adding a few lines of code coupled with custom taxonomies, WordPress will be all-powerful.
-Justin Tadlock

WordPress is a strong blogging tool. It also won a CMS award (http://wordpress.org/development/2009/11/wordpress-wins-cms-award/). With third party plugins (http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/), it is easy to convert WordPress into a store but what I am expecting from future of WordPress is to see itself as a shop/e-commerce solution built in core files.
-Mehmet Ozekinci

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Alex Denning is the founder of WPShout. A WordPress developer from London, Alex co-founded WPShift at the start of 2010 where he sells awesome WordPress themes.

You can find Alex on Twitter and at AlexDenning.com.

10 Responses to “The Future of WordPress?”

Marcell Purham
21. Dec, 2009
I love wordpress! I think WP will take over the blogging community and will be the top CMS ever
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Nick Reese
21. Dec, 2009
WordPress is great on because of it’s community. That is it.
WordPress will at some point fail because of its a license which has no legal balls.
Lets be honest, ultimately a business plan of getting “bought out by some corpo-giant like Yahoo or Google” is a totally unorganic process which hinges on “someday.” Personally someday doesn’t cut it for me.
I really think a paid product will replace WordPress in the next 3-5 years.
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Anthony Keenan
21. Dec, 2009
I think WordPress has already reached the point of being a great CMS for business websites and have just switch over to doing ALL my client sites in WordPress. I hope this trust and “all eggs” approach proves to be the right decision in the long run – it’s certainly proving popular with clients and is speeding up development times.
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Ahmed
21. Dec, 2009
Its Like when you asking What is The Future Of the Internet? I love wordpress and i don’t want it to be sold to those big cooperate Org
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Tom Hermans
23. Dec, 2009
The more I use WordPress, the more I get to know the power of it. If only there would be some better way to adhere users and their ‘own’ posts & pages, it would be awesome.
Don’t let the big guys get hold of this brilliant piece of software
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Ian Macalinao
23. Dec, 2009
WordPress is by far the best blogging software out there. It should evolve into a CMS; it has so many great functions etc. out there for developers and makes plugins a breeze to make. It pretty much is a CMS with tools like Pods. Open source is the future. Look at Netscape… now it’s Firefox. DOWN WITH BLOGGER AND WEEBLY!!! :p
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- Nick
  23. Dec, 2009
  Power to the people is great, but ideas spread much faster and are often stickier if they are for profit.
  After all the idea of “Venture Capital” is the most non organic idea ever.
  Reply to this comment
Comment Name Violation
25. Dec, 2009
I love WordPress so much, I want nothing more but to see it prosper in the future!
It is the best CMS out there, so I am sure it will.
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Hikari
02. Jan, 2010
In the past, web communication was based on NNTP, then it merged to mailing lists, and them to forums.
When we thought personal websites would emerge, yorkut came out and took communication to chose, private area (you can’t Google search what’s talked there).
Now we see microblogging on twitter.
In the past, when blog structure was created, many ppl saw it as a “digital personal diary”, where ppl would talk only about personal stuff that is boring for everybody else. When that stigma was gone, twitter came and again ppl misused it talking about futilities, but soon they realized its power.
Well we never know what will emerge in the future, there always can emerge a new and inovative (not always good) that will go to the public.
Taking that apart, I belive big companies will try to enforce community portals to keep public on their hands, always enforcing easy of use so that the masses can use and it becomes popular.
Among public CMSs, I believe WordPress will take the front since it is easier (no non-geek will try to build a site over Drupal) and be even more notorious.
If bbPress and buddyPress advance and become easier to merge with WordPress, it will be a good community-CMS platform, that for sure big companies will fight against or try to buyout.
I also believe its possibilities as magazine, simple CMS and microblogging (all of them implementes by plugins and special themes) will be highlighted. It will receive better CMS features (menu building PLEASE!!) and become the first and general option for self-host websites.
And its plugin community will get organized, or it will break apart
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The future of Wordpress: help wanted « Scott Berkun says:
April 13, 2010 at 4:34 pm
[...] If you’re a WordPress developer, or user, either through wordpress.com or your own blog, what ideas, directions, challenges or even features do you think I need to consider for a talk like this? Jane Wells, who leads UX for WordPress, believes as Matt does, the future of WordPress is people. But what should those people be doing? Vladamir thinks WP is slowing down, and as I’ve noted, plugin culture creates problems for users and for corporations. And for some, there’s a separation between what WordPress the platform should do, vs. what it should do for users. [...]
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