WordPress as Platform for the Open Web

Mr. Matt Mullenweg is leading a revolution. A quiet revolution that has already taken 10 years without many noticing. We recently setup our first production website in WordPress called Insightaas.com. The flexibility and design agility of WordPress is simply extraordinary.

We originally installed WordPress 2.9 in January 2009 as a way to evaluate several popular content management systems that were evolving at the time. And at the time didn't think it was much more than a great looking backend. Functionally it really didn't do much outside of what most blogging platforms did. The theme and plugin community was nascent at the time, but no longer.

If you look at the version "codex" something should hit you smack between the eyes. WordPress has accomplished, in my opinion, what no other open source, GPL product has to date — it has built an incredibly diverse and far reaching community and ecosystem. For example, people like Yuri from the Washington Post. Since 2007, there have been about 7-12 releases per year on average. There are over 26,000 plugins in the WordPress plugin repository. 18%+ of websites on the Internet run on WordPress. I'd go as far as to say that the WordPress ecosystem is second only to the Apple iOS App Store. And it's free!

There's a book coming out about the WordPress community. I think this is the actual story, rather than the software platform itself. The governance for the WordPress project is probably the first scaled-up, app level open source success outside of the Linux kernel. It's a different way of working, supposedly without pants. Enjoy this talk below, and notice the ease, humour, ambition and confidence with which Matt lays out the future of WordPress. His nature and delivery is almost Jobs-ian, and yet very much not like Jobs – humble and super technically astute. I am positive the community will make WordPress into the best next-generation application development platform.

 

 

About the author

Alex is a pioneer in using the cloud to meet the needs of small and medium sized business (SMBs) and membership-based organizations. He has a BSc in computer science from the University of Michigan and has worked as a product manager at two Internet startups. Alex is a father of 2 and plays the trumpet for fun. He is the founder and the president of the University of Michigan Alumni Club of Toronto.