WordPress was criticized early on for not being a “real Content Management System”
It is true that it is first and foremost a blogging platform. It is flexible, and easily used and modified. You might go so far as to call it “simplistic”. WordPress and its competitors Joomla and Drupal, are all products of open source development. I have long thought that founder Matt Mullenweg, was a visionary. This due in large part to what WordPress was and how it was introduced.
Before WordPress, I used HTML exclusively and was unfamiliar with Content Management Systems. The CMS was a logical move, since it allowed for easy storage, updating and manipulating of data. The mere process of updating was much easier. And updating became a requirement rather than a luxury for websites as the web grew,
Early in the life of the web
Early in the life of the web, you could put a site up and it could be found fairly easily. The choices were far fewer in those days. People actually remembered and manually typed in URLs. As the web grew, Google strategically positioned itself as the caretaker by indexing the web. It became necessary to rely on search engines to be found in the ever increasing population of websites in cyberspace. Static sites got lost in the shuffle. Regular updating of sites became standard practice.
Blogger, LiveJournal, and others came on the scene as blogging became popular. WordPress appeared originally as a blogging platform, but it was clear it had much larger potential. Users of other CMS software claimed it wasn’t a “real” CMS. Some argued against its open source nature. But that is a fundamental reason for its success. WordPress “Nation” has develoed into a vibrant community of users, supporters, journalists, vendors and fans.
WordPress Will Continue To Grow And Evolve
As a community, we feel that WordPress is ours. Unlike proprietary software it is “by the people and for the people”. Is it any wonder that WordPress powers about 30% of all sites (not just blogs)?
Tom Ewer wrote an insightful article for Elegant Themes blog in which he predicts that the move toward free flow of data between applications will fuel the next wave of growth and evolution of WordPress. He predicts:
- Premium plugins will become ever more popular.
- The WP REST API will change our conception of plugins forever.
- Leading plugins will look to establish themselves as mini-platforms.
- The door is open for an App Store-style plugin marketplace to emerge.
- Plugins will be truly international in the near future.
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