Looking Beyond WordPress

I haven’t attended a WordCamp since the “WP Drama” hit. Honestly, The Drama made me feel like the 9 camps I helped lead, the 3 I sponsored, the 20 or so I spoke at, and all the effort of contributing were worth nothing just because I wasn’t directly contributing to core.

The ACF to SCF hijacking situation made me realize that it is not exactly safe to release a plugin on the repo anymore. And really, no plugin is completely safe. If Matt does not like the product or the company, he can just shut it down. Yes, it is open source, but the reality that your main distribution channel can be cut off without warning is scary. This has been a massive wakeup call for me. After using WordPress as my primary CMS for 16 years, I already had an inkling that I needed to check out what the rest of the world was using. This just accelerated it.

On a related (or maybe unrelated) note:

If my calculations are right, WordPress is losing market share to the tune of about 150,000 sites a month (based on W3Techs CMS Market Share Yearly Trends). Every single day, 5,000 people choose to build with something else. That metric absolutely has to play into everything Auto[matt]ic does right now and probably painted the target on the back of WP Engine.

All the while, A.I. is making the platform you choose less relevant. We are now just telling A.I. what we want to build, and it chooses the architecture based on what is currently the best tool for getting the job done.

We used to default to WordPress because it made building sites so much faster. But now, it can actually be a hindrance in some cases. I never thought I would see the day.

I love WordPress and the community. In Atlanta, we used to have 14 Meetups in the metro area, and it was amazing. I could go to two or three Meetups a week if I wanted (and sometimes I did!). We used to have to coordinate our schedules just to make sure we didn’t step on other Meetups’ toes. That is a lot of WordPress! I miss the Meetups, and some of the greatest people I have met came from this community.

Don’t get me wrong, WordPress obviously still has its place. Maintaining well over 55% of the CMS market share is an amazing accomplishment. It is still a highly capable platform, and it handles some things better than anything else currently on the market. But for a simple 5-page marketing site that is rarely going to change, A.I. can generate a static site that completely eliminates the security risks and the headache of constant updates.