We all miss his writing.

The best luck with OmFest!

Many of the changes over the last nine years have seemed very heavily weighted toward builders, as you say. And, sure, I guess that’s where the money is. But I’d argue that might be where the *fast* money is.

But the benefits of accommodating professional builders seems to come at the cost of reduced access for those day-to-day users. The other day on the r/wordpress subreddit someone posted questioning their company’s developer’s decision to hard-code all content into template files and only allowing user input through a form that bypasses the Post CPT and displays them directly from the database.

That’s only an extreme case — I’m often surprised how many WordPress developers (not just content or marketing agencies) refuse to give clients login access to *their own websites!” (See also Time Magazine’s presentation from one of the Wordcamps in Portland where they said they don’t allow reporters to post directly to their site — instead reporters email submissions which are then edited and handed off to trained production staff for posting.

That sounds crazy to me since it’s rarely taken me more than half an hour to train a client to log in, make simple page edits, and post to their blog.

Another redditor recently asked why so many posts asking for help using WordPress get downvoted. The short answer appears to be that “serious developers” don’t want grubby users and DIYs breaking into their important conversations.

And finally, just today on r/Wordpress, a 75 year old who’s “proficient in several computer languages” said he was giving up on Wordpess site because the learning materials he was able to find didn’t match what he was seeing. The people who made WordPress the most popular CMS on the planet were largely able to launch successful sites with little more than WordPress for Dummies and a shared hosting account. That no longer seems to be the case.

At the last four U.S. Wordcamps I’ve gotten in rather fierce discussions with people who say WordPress isn’t for ordinary people anymore and that they should use %#!# Wix or SquareSpace until they’re willing or able to hire a programmer to migrate them to WordPress. I think that’s… a terrible

TL:DR: I think a lot of people might have misinterpreted you when you said “learn React deeply” and took it to mean for bloggers, “you can’t build your own WordPress site,” and to mean for builders, “if you want to use WordPress you have to pay us.”

I know it’s not quite as bad for your small-fry customers at WordPress.com. But it’s kind of a wild west out here for the people I’m pretty sure you and I both would agree made WordPress as much a household name as Excel or Netflix.

To the extent you have any influence over the process anymore I hope you can steer things back toward the folks who care what happens to THEIR websites after they’re launched.

One thing that I always felt that was missing was an official, Twetny-twetny-something Automattic WordPress theme specifically designed with online publications in mind. Yes, there’s NewsPack, but I am talking about an actual modern block theme that individuals can build a basic-level digital publication on quickly and tune/expand as needed.

We’ve never had that – many official Automattic general-purpose themes are great, but it takes *a lot* of work to convert one into a full, coherent website focused on articles and how they are presented, not just pages.

I don’t know what the guys and gals working on the official 2027 theme are going for this year, but it would be a nice change of pace if we had such a theme (or at least one with a lot of pre-built but flexible blocks that publishers use for content management) come January. A lot of Kadence users, including me, would welcome such a theme with open arms. So Matt, what do you say?

And when it comes to the Bloggers / Builders tribes, I think one…perhaps the largest tribe, seems to be missing. The SMB tribe. Those that have heard “WordPress is what you should be using”, then try it and are overwhelmed when they hit the wp-admin and need to make decisions on things they have little in-depth knowledge of. With the advent of more simple point and click options like Wix, Squarespace, and others, they get lost in the infinite customization and extensibility options of WordPress.

It’s the The Paradox of Choice at play. “…having an abundance of options rather than a few simple choices leads to decision fatigue, anxiety, and lower overall satisfaction with the final outcome.”

I’ve often advocated for WordPress to have a core “toggle” in wp-admin. First load “are you a blogger, small business owner, or developer?” and based on those choices the user gets a pared down wp-admin or full wp-admin experience. I know many hosts have approached this in various ways, but IMHO, it should be a core decision from the start.

Easier said than done of course, so I’ll slowly suggest the Homer Simpson backing into the bushes gif. 😉

Later, when I ran a network of sites for a university that would include both “bloggy” sites (academic researchers often have to keep something like a blog to demonstrate what they’re discovering, to keep funders happy!) and “built” sites (for exhibitions at the university’s museums), I naturally reached for WordPress.

Despite WordPressing for over 20 years now, I’m still not sure if it’s wise to mix “blogging” and “building”. But I still do it anyway. It works.

To some extent, it is also a generational issue. Old hands who were on the internet twenty years ago read and write very differently from younger generations. In my experience, they are also much more patient when it comes to websites; content matters more to them. An excess of buzzwords and stock imagery tends to drive them away from a site—whereas other people might actually appreciate those very things.

I think we will have to keep living with this ongoing balancing act in the future. But then again, it’s also kind of fun—a challenge that keeps things exciting, right?
The future remains exciting and full of possibilities. What will WordPress look like in ten years, and which target audiences will choose it as their system of choice? Will AI agents love WordPress just as much as we do?

Yeah, it’s still on Squarespace. He hasn’t figured out yet how to do something as good on WordPress.