Starting in Sept 2024 The BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) seems to have become less benevolent and is throwing some hissy fits. People are panicking and seem to think WordPress is dying and are abandoning ship. Well, I do not believe that at all.
Here is the future of WordPress as I see it. Well, what's happening in WordPress right now, especially with all of the stuff that Mullenweg has pulled in the last several months, has made everyone wake up to the benevolent dictatorship problem. While it seemed great, and it went along fairly well with only the occasional flare up here and there, we've now come to a new crossroad in WordPress and that is in dealing with plugins. Now, I've been doing this show for 16 years. Back in the very beginning, you can go back and find Episode 1 which talks about there being less than 9000 plugins in the WordPress repository at that time. Now there's hundreds of thousands of plugins available for WordPress however the repository only has 59,000 now. At one point the repository had 90,000+ plugins. They have removed a lot from there.
I've been unable to verify the numbers in it easily, I just know I've seen it up there in the 90,000 mark years ago, and I'm sure a lot of my favourite plugins that I used to get are no longer there. So a lot of plugins have been removed. I remember back in the beginning of WordPress, it was coders at the beginning of their career just going crazy because WordPress was open source or still open source. WordPress was the new place to be and do all kinds of fun cool stuff with. We had some fantastic plugins for years, some of them are still hanging around. I've got copies of old ones that no longer exist myself, that were just fun, but the code's no longer working with the latest versions of PHP, etc.
What I see happening in WordPress in the coming months and years is a bit of a fragmentation. More and more people are beginning to not be able to trust the WordPress repository as a place to put plugins and themes. This lack of trust is fragmenting the ecosystem. There are new repositories already popping up and it'll be some of them, those with business models that will change the system.
We mentioned one in a show not too long ago about a new Repo called WPHive.com It's a new repository and it's doing things differently now. The big thing that needs to change in the WordPress core is the WordPress core being tied to one repository. What they have to do is open it up to allow people to choose the repository they want their plugins to come from. There is a plugin in development for this sort of thing started by https://github.com/littlebizzy/repoman and this will create a massive amount of demand for plugin repositories. Especially if someone can curate from all the open source plugins that are out there, the free versions and the freemium versions, they can curate those into their own repository and then they can curate some premium plugins into their repository that people can buy at affordable prices. The big thing is to have those repos federate information across all of them. That will be an amazing thing.
What I do see happening is WordPress itself is going to continue, it's not going anywhere. It's going to change, yes, it's going change but I believe in good ways. Are we stuck with Gutenberg? Yeah, I believe we're stuck with it. Even though, as you may know, even Matt couldn't figure out how to use his Gutenberg effectively, (https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hc2abf/matt_losing_a_wp_speed_build_challenge_and_his/) which I just found him using his ability, even he got frustrated with what he was trying to build. Then he was having troubles with the margins and padding, which are some basic things that should be nice and easy. I find that same problem when I've had to use the block editors, I just want to move this just a little bit. How do I adjust just this this little header? It's like I understand why he had problems with it, but hopefully now he understands why everyone was pitching a fit about it.
As far as the plugin community goes, it's not going anywhere. The plugins are going stay there. They're going to stay working. The core of WordPress is fantastic, it's solid. I can't fault Matt and his original coding of the core of WordPress, the expansions to it over the years has been some great stuff that has allowed thousands, maybe even millions of people, to create their own small businesses based upon and around WordPress. Actually it's been 1,000,000 because it's not only the people who build WordPress websites but even the home person, the home entrepreneur with a small business to quickly build a website and add a store to it. Nowadays it's so easy to add in the plugins so that you can take payment processing and more. So that's not going away; it's going to expand.
What is going to expand further? This one is going to catch many people off guard, and I see it coming. That is the problem we have in the world today for everything, which is a subscription service.
More and more plugins are going to move to subscription service versus the system that they are now. This is going to happen. It's going to begin sometime in 2025. I think we saw something about it last year, when I brought it to the show, one plug-in that has moved to subscription service. We're going to see more of this from the bigger and better plugins. I can see it happening first with something like Woo Commerce or even Gravity Forms they might even try and do it with Elementor.
Hopefully they'll grandfather those of us already in that pay the lesser fee currently, which is basically a subscription service and once a year you pay a fee to continue getting your updates and keep your stuff licensed.
These are what I see happening in the WordPress world. Feel free to add comments below.
