WordPress could become an operating system for the open web. That’s WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s vision for the future at WordCamp Europe in Vienna this weekend.
Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic, which runs Wordpress.com, Jetpack and WooCommerce, believes that WordPress has an important role to play as large platforms like Facebook try to enclose and delimit the internet.
– The open web is more important than ever before. WordPress can become like an operating system for the open web. We want to see a shift towards a more open web. With WordPress, we have every opportunity to create our own vision of how we want the web to be,” said Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Europe in Vienna this weekend.
Although WordPress is changing rapidly and it can be difficult to know exactly how WordPress will work in the future, Matt Mullenweg was sure that the open source model will never go away.
-“The openness and working together in a community is the coolest thing about the web. It’s what’s allowed WordPress to out-compete dozens of publishing tools. It forces our competitors to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing.
Matt Mullenweg was not impressed with the new blogging platform Medium.com, which he says lacks a business model and locks users into the platform.
– You need to be able to control your digital destiny. You need to be able to export your users to a new platform. There have always been simpler blogging platforms than WordPress such as Blogger. WordPress’ strength is the flexibility and the community of themes and plugins,” he says.
The future is always vague, but WordPress will move towards an application model rather than a document model.
– When I think of WordPress, I think in decades. In ten years, users will interact with WordPress with applications.
That’s why Matt is working on learning JavaScript in depth and encouraging all developers to do the same.
– The future is JavaScript interfaces that talk to APIs. Everything is in WordPress core to shift plugins to be api-driven. We do that ourselves with Jetpack and WooCommerce within Automattic. It’s something all plugin developers should do to position themselves for the future.
An audience member from Google claimed that 28 percent of all new WordPress sites choose themes that are not mobile-friendly.
– “It should be a requirement that all themes are mobile-friendly,” Matt replied.
Alongside mobile-friendliness, Matt Mullenweg wanted to highlight speed as an important ambition for WordPress.
– Speed is a feature. There are always positive things that come when we make WordPress faster.
Read more about WordCamp Europe 2016 here. The next WordCamp Europe is in Paris on June 16-18.
You can find WordCamp Europe’s twitter feed under #WCEU