By far the most popular CMS (Content Management System) on the market, WordPress has been installed on over 75 million websites. It’s flexible, robust, free and open-source meaning developers like myself can take advantage of what it has to offer, extending its capabilities.
Since 2003, WordPress has come along in leaps and bounds, maturing from a simple blogging platform into an exceptional framework. As WordPress has evolved and new technologies have presented themselves, websites and applications can be made more flexible to accommodate a wider audience.
So what does the future hold for WordPress?
A major part of the WordPress platform is the ability to extend its functionality, meaning user generator content can be integrated with ease. On November 15th 2017, WordPress opened its doors to developers and began the long process of building WordPress 5.0, its current iteration being WordPress 4.9. It plans to use plugins such as ‘Gutenburg’ and integrate them into the core functionality of the framework.
What is Gutenburg?
Replacing the current ‘TinyMCE’ editor in WordPress, Gutenburg does away with the old and integrates a brand new interface, bringing new features to a drag and drop environment. However, much of the development community are split as to whether this would actually be a good thing. For example, if you want to copy and paste text or even add bullet points to your list, Gutenburg will copy your content into separated blocks instead. Furthermore, to retrieve the interface for the existing editor, an external plugin will need to be installed.
Since tools such as Divi and Elementor have arrived, drag and drop functionality has reigned supreme, giving both clients and developers new tools to exercise their inner designer. WordPress aims to improve on these features and break the barriers with what is possible.
Putting the subject of Gutenburg aside, there have been many predictions as to what features will be included in WordPress 5.0. In the web development industry, there is an increasing focus on video content for websites leading to WordPress integrating support for video headers. Though this has been a feature for a while now, more updates will soon come to this particular tool.
What are the plans for website security?
Finally, we broach the subject of website security! Cybersecurity is incredibly important, yet there are many who ignore the threats we face, instead choosing to opt out of plugin and WordPress core updates. As of 2018, ignoring security will no longer be an option as better and faster plugins are being made to help users stay protected.
Now, we could go on and on about how WordPress will host even more eCommerce services than before, or even how mobile first design will impact WordPress theme development. For now however, lets leave that for part two!
