WP21

It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’s work on b2/cafélog.

There’s been many milestones and highlights along the way, and many more to come. I’ve been thinking a lot about elements that made WordPress successful in its early years that we should keep in mind as we build this year and beyond. Here’s 11 opinions:

Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.

Blogging, commenting, and pingbacks need to be fun. Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better. Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog.

Wikis are amazing, and our documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.

Forums should be front and center in the community. bbPress and BuddyPress need some love.

Every plugin and theme should have all the infrastructure that we use to build WordPress itself—version control, bug trackers, forums, documentation, internationalization, chat rooms, P2, and easy pathways for contribution and community. We shouldn’t be uploading ZIPs in 2024!

Theme previews should be great, and a wide collection of non-commercial themes with diverse aesthetics and functionality are crucial.

We can’t over-index for guidelines and requirements. Better to have good marketplace dynamics and engineer automated feedback loops and transparency to users. Boundaries in functionality and design should be pushed. (But spam and spammy behavior deserves zero tolerance.)

Feedback loops are so important, and should scale with usage and the entire community rather than being reliant on gatekeepers.

Core should be opinionated and quirky: Easter eggs, language with personality even if it’s difficult to translate, jazzy.

Everyone developing and making decisions for software needs to use it.

It’s important that we all do support, go to meetups and events, anything we can to stay close to regular end-users of what we make.

What would you add?

Fun fact: On May 27, 2003 I blogged “Working backwards, earlier tonight was great. Put WordPress out, which felt great.” as one sentence in a 953-word entry written from the porch of my parent’s house where I was accidentally locked out all night until my Dad left in the morning to go to work. Had no idea WordPress would be as big as it is. Earlier that night had set up WP for my friend Ramie Speight, and done some phone tech support for another friend Mike Tremoulet I had met through the local blogger meetup. My friends from high school all had their own domains with WP and that feedback loop was magical for shaping the software.

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