WordPress 4.0: The app becomes a platform, but even with the major version number, it’s an incremental promote. Changes to the missing of the decimal point aren’t as major in WordPress as they are elsewhere, but the updates in the pipeline for 4.0 and beyond reflect how WordPress has happen to a platform, somewhat than an application.
Originally just a blogging system, WordPress has grown into an whole site-publishing solution courtesy of its third-party developers. Aside from the thousands of easily interchanged themes existing for WordPress, its library of plug-ins can turn it into everything from a argument board engine to an e-commerce solution. Consequently it’s now considered a viable replacement for other content-management and site-architecting solutions, from Zen Cart to Drupal.
WordPress’ path to this point, however, wasn’t planned. For one, new skin tone for WordPress don’t typically start as direct contributions to the core code. in its place, added extras are prototyped as plug-ins, then merged into the core of the project if they pass muster with the core development team.
For an idea of how incremental those changes can be, appear no further than some of the features promised for the core of the 4.0 release: previews of rooted URLs , a revamp plug-in installation user experience, and a new view design for the media library.
As conservative as those changes are, other plug-ins under development as core proposal hint at WordPress’ status as as a full-blown software ecosystem, as viewed by its users — and its creators. Among them is a plug-in that provides a JSON REST API for WordPress, currently listed at the “development” stage. Another, a front-end editor, allows changes to be made to posts while browsing the site itself, rather than logging into WordPress’s back-end panel.
WordPress may also be facing future competition as an ecosystem from Ghost. Also devised in its base incarnation as “just a blog,” the Node.js-powered publishing structure may be able to ride the rising tide of interest in Node.js and the JavaScript ecosystem and become a major contender. But despite a great deal of activity on the core project, it’s still in its infancy, and its plug-in API hasn’t even been nailed down yet. WordPress has inertia and a massive installed based on its side.
One constant topic with WordPress that’s gone hand in hand with its unstable growth as an ecosystem has been security. Themes are implemented in WordPress as live PHP code fairly than static files, and themes thrashing malicious code have been spotted in the wild. Plug-ins, too, have been a source of obfuscated malicious code, as well as exploitable vulnerabilities.
WordPress has defended itself against this by only if a curetted source for both themes and plug-ins, in much the same style as the Google Play store for Android. But the majority of the work involved in securing a WordPress installation, even as WordPress evolves as its own platform, clearly still falls to the end-user.
