The world of WordPress doesn’t stand still.
Just a fact: in May of this year, WordPress has celebrated its 12th birthday. When you sit back and think about it, the CMS has undergone a gamut of big advancements in the retrograde of the time. More architecture for plugins, more WYSIWYG editing, more themes and widgets have been created, and more. From the nature of the case, innovation and new trends of how to organize and manage a worthy CMS appear almost every day. It’s senseless to ignore them, but to follow once is hard. If you aim to succeed and be able to meet all the up-to-date needs with your website, you have to put all the novelties in action. For doing so, you’ve gotta know them first. Now, when 2015 is about to come to a close, there are couple great questions to consider: with 12 years gone, where will the future of WordPress will be in the next 12 from now? What new features and possibilities will the CMS have? Will WordPress be still relevant to the website development space? Let us take a look at some of the dominant changes that WordPress CMS is about to face and be ready to meet them in the upcoming years.
REST API
“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
Similarly:
“If you think you understand what the REST API means for WordPress, you don’t understand the REST API.”
If you follow WordPress-related news regularly, then you probably already know about the inclusion of REST API to the CMS core. Being one of the hottest topics to discuss, many folks within WordPress community predict that this novelty will turn the tables for WP. To learn more on WordPress REST API, we suggest to check the official WP outlook and explanation. Here, you can find an expertised and comprehensible enough insight on everything related to the matter.
Custom Dashboards
Having predicted the importance of REST API, and since it’s been already included to the core, then we’ll definitely witness custom dashboards in the WordPress market shortly. Thinking what is this and why do you need one? Well, let’s sort it out. For as long as most of us remember, there was a single, unified, one and the same interface for the administrative system of WordPress (i.e. dashboard). Imagine how cool it might turn to install a custom dashboard with a focus on what you need and want. Let’s say add dishes, not posts. Seems surrealistic? Believe us, nope.
Mobile Apps
We would suspect and be anticipating the moment when creating a mobile app with WordPress will be that easy as setting up a WordPress site. Considering the current pace of WordPress development, we can predict that using the REST API, ReactJS, AngularJS, Cordova, Ionic Framework, just to name a few, WordPress will be surely implemented to build apps for Android and iOS.
Expert’s Predictions:
Matt Mullenweg once said, “In five years I think that WP will be infinitely easier to use for both power-users, developers, and newbies. You will be able to have a full experience of core, plugins, themes, docs, and support in several dozen languages that will be as large or larger than English. There will be over a million people making their living on top of the platform. Most people will be creating from touch devices, and their content will mostly not come from keyboards (virtual or physical) as an input device.”
Michael Bastos, Founder of Advanced WordPress Facebook group, Pricels.com
“More people will create their own private CMS as a service companies because the code to build one is so easy and so commoditized that it’ll be less about the CMS and more about the process for setting up a website. WordPress will probably remove almost all of its PHP code and become almost entirely JavaScript based as time moves on. Any commodity market either grows or dies based on the strengths of its specializations, like we’ve seen with Ghost, more companies will write software or services to focus on doing one thing really well like e-commerce or blogging etc.”
Rhys Wynne, Director at Winwar, Lead developer at FireCask
“I think that going forward the architecture, rather than the system, will become important. We’re already seeing things like WordPress (and I think Drupal too) adopt a REST API, which will open the world to more CMS systems built off the big ones. Think of all the builds of Linux you can get, optimised to various systems. I can see CMS’s going the same way.”
Jean Galea, Founder of WP Mayor and WP RSS Aggregator
“The next big thing for WordPress is the REST API which I think will change the way we think about building projects with WordPress. The concept of themes will change for sure but the REST API will also make WordPress a much more flexible platform that can power an even wider range of applications.”
Peter Nilsson, Founder of WP Daily Themes
“My strong belief is that more and more users will use some form of CMS for their websites when choosing between alternative available in the future. CMS is so much better and more manageable than the “regular” websites. We could recently read on W3Techs that WordPress increased and now powers 25 percent of the web. Which is fantastic news for all of us who really like, use and work with WordPress. Even more interesting is that 57.2% of users don’t use any kind of CMS. So many market shares are available to be converted for example to WordPress via easy-to-use tools such as companies like aisite provide.”
David Bisset, WordPress and BuddyPress Expert, WordCamps Speaker
“WordPress is transitioning towards a stronger CMS solution, but more importantly an actual platform. With the REST API and products like Apppresser, the most impressive things that I see WordPress doing in the next few years are for projects in the mobile or web app space… and you won’t even know from looking at these that WordPress powers them.”
To find more in-depth considerations in an easy way, download the whitepaper, we’ve prepared with the aim.
