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If you’ve been around WordPress as long as I have, you end up witnessing some of the long standing debates come full circle again. Like which page builder is best and why isn’t WordPress innovating fast enough to keep up with them?

While that debate tumbles down the proverbial mountain, gathering debris and growing larger, it is bringing another debate back into focus: Who is WordPress for?

For years WordPress professionals would contest: is WordPress for blogging or is it a complete CMS?

Once the app matured with Custom Post Types + Custom Fields + a robust User Management system, we shifted to: is WordPress a CMS or an application framework?

Lest we forget, WordPress the Digital Experience Platform.

When Gutenberg launched, a vocal audience railed against a drag-and-drop building experience inside WordPress core. How could you do that to my lean, mean CMS/App/DXP — Let Wix be Wix.

But I’m not hearing those debates anymore.

The pushback to having a builder experience is largely gone, and now we’re back debating on the fringes. Should we have more CSS styling options built into the site editor; should we be able to code templates inside WordPress?

It seems like we’ve all agreed that WordPress has gone beyond “page builder” in it’s most basic understanding, and has set its sights squarely on become a “website builder.”

WordPress finds itself jockeying in the hierarchy of all these tools like Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Bricks, etc:

  • Beginner – made for millions
  • Intermediate – made for 100’s of thousands
  • Advanced – made for thousands

The only thing I’m concerned about is my little corner of the WordPress debate: Can WordPress still be the operating system of the web?

This concludes today’s thought exercise, let me know who you think WordPress is for by hitting reply or tweeting at me.

Important Links

There’s a few important links this week, let’s dive in!

  • Namecheap acquires Stencil, a graphic design tool, enhancing their Visual suite with innovative products.
  • Some (very) miscellaneous Editor changes coming to WordPress 6.5
  • Dion Hulse introduced a Trac ticket for the concept of limiting readme text to 2,500 words. “The final 0.2% of plugins are those who I would call out for being in blatant violation of the guideline, in one case, the readme is over 260KB amounting to over 26,000 individual words.”
  • Katie Keith wrote up a post WordCamp Asia thread highlighting her take on sponsoring and traveling to the event.
  • Matt Mullenweg will deliver the 2024 State of the Word from Tokyo.
  • In a near 3,000 word epic, WP Tavern hopeful Brian Coords shares how Automattic is reinvesting back into developers. Studio was an Easter Egg.
  • There’s a thing called Scale Consortium. “Each agency is represented by their CEO, along with a time and resource commitment made up of specialist staff depending on the needs of the Consortium.”
  • Jeff Chandler is employed again.
  • In the event the cabin experiences a drop in pressure, there’s always Open Source, says Lesley Sim.
  • Ionut Neagu, founder of ThemeIsle and FinMasters, shares how small publishers are feeling the pressure from Google.
  • Eric Karkovack writes Why Keeping up with Gutenberg is Difficult for Developers
  • Matt interviews founder of Kadence to talk about their implementation of AI in the theme.
  • Video: Here’s how tobuild a blank landing page template in Twenty Twenty-Four

That’s it for today’s episode, don’t forget to share share share this episode with others and jump on the mailing list 👇

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