WordPress.com update makes it more modern
Blogging, at least blogging platforms, have become a hot topic recently. Medium has sparked a new wave of updates and platforms trying to make blogging easier and more accessible to anyone on the web. Tumblr’s made tweaks to how it works and introduced a new chat service to focus more on the community. WordPress, which powers a large part of the web and blogs, has taken a larger and more ambishes step towards trying to keep their dominance.
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress developer Automattic, has taken to his blog to outline the project, codenamed Calypso, which is the product of 20 months’ work by 127 engineers and designers. Matt detailed what went into the all new fully Javascript web interface. The code is Node and React, which makes the site fully responsive.
The update takes Medium head on with ‘discover’ and ‘recommended’ sections directly borrowed from Medium. The company has also made it completely free to map a domain or get a new domain for your newly minted WordPress.com blog. The company also introduced a new standalone Mac app, which makes starting and writing on a WordPress blog a hundred times easier.
Mullenweg then explains the decision to go open source:
A lot of people thought we should keep this proprietary, but throughout my life I’ve learned that the more you give away, the more you get back. We still have a ton to figure out around plugins, extensibility, contributions, Windows and Linux releases, API speed, localization, and harmonizing the WordPress.com API and WP-API so it can work with core WordPress. Thousands more PHP developers will need to become fluent with JavaScript to recreate their admin interfaces in this fashion. I’m also really excited to revisit and redesign many more screens now that we have this first version out the door.
Calypso is a huge step forward after years of WordPress starting to look dated compared to others like Medium. The new interface won’t show up on self hosted WordPress blogs, but if you’re using the Jetpack plugin you’re able to mange the site on WordPress.com or on the Mac app.
Tell us in the comments down below what you think about WordPress.com new tools, and if they’ll make you think about using a WordPress blog for personal or even business use!