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I feel reasonably sure you're just trolling - or attempting a joke. However. The reason WP did - and does - so well is that for most hosts, it's very easy to

I feel reasonably sure you're just trolling - or attempting a joke. However. The reason WP did - and does - so well is that for most hosts, it's very easy to deploy, does what most sites need, and is reasonably easy to teach. It's also trivially extensible, within it's somewhat limited framework. So any other PHP application (various shopping carts, etc) can be easily put on top of a normal WP site, and with a little glue, made to be a plugin that "just works" (most of the time. And occasionally makes the whole site return a completely empty page and no errors...). However, there is going to be a general decline in PHP being easier to deploy than other server site languages, an interesting proposition might be to make a language agnostic WP 'database core'. Currently, it's all a bit of a mess underneath - lots of the system still thinks it's a pure blogging engine, lots of the internal functions are aimed at that, etc. But the core idea of the data model is [post] >- [categories] and [metadata] which can be attached to those somewhat ad hoc. Posts can be different 'types', dependant on the current theme (yeah - WP is kind of messed up). But the idea of all your content pieces are roughly equivalent, so a blog post is basically the same thing as a static page, is basically the same thing as a custom-post-type-video, cat picture, etc, is reasonably powerful. If the core of the database concepts were codified and 'locked down', and the PHP back end simplified down to being a RESTful interface on top of it (JSON for the back end, pretty HTML for the front end) + a few oddments, then that could be ported to any number of different languages quite easily. This way mysql could be factored out, if desired, or PHP, and a lot of the concepts would still keep on working. The trouble is you lose the WP 'it's PHP, so a custom theme can do ANYTHING!!!!! magic'. Which might be good for security, but bad for popularity. If the core were codified enough, then many plugins and theme control stuff could simply become front-end javascript plus templating files, which would be good though. (And back-end agnostic).

pknight 12y ago
I think about the future of WordPress a lot. Like what would WP look like if it was mostly JS? When I look at all the front-end developments (React etc), it's really hard to gauge. On one level I'd love to see things become more framework agnostic and flexible. The json api in theory frees up a lot of restrictions in what devs can do with WP running as a backend. Even cooler if we can switch out Mysql with other kinds of databases. But it's kind of interesting, for all PHP's warts, it has made it so easy to build things, allowing a huge amount of plugins and themes to develop. For all these years, devs didn't need to worry about the latest library, from backbone to angular, from react to mithril etc. It's the stability and ease of access that has been so important to growth. Now that the web is so javascript oriented it's really compelling to just think about how WP can adapt to it. But a big push toward adopting new methodologies just strips away the number one reason to develop with WordPress: the huge ecosystem that has solutions coded with PHP. And if you are going to create that rift, you might as well start with some other platform. But it's really hard to pick a winner now, React for example, could easily be overtaken by another lib in a years time. We're unsure how Nodejs is going to develop. The json API's current state is not superfast or fully developed yet. I sometimes wonder that we're underestimating the advantages of having something stable like PHP continuing to run at least part of the show. For example, I have yet to see any kind of theme (A WP theme or otherwise) coded with some kind of front-end oriented mvc setup that results in a qualitatively superior site experience.

pknight 12y ago

I think about the future of WordPress a lot. Like what would WP look like if it was mostly JS? When I look at all the front-end developments (React etc), it's really hard to gauge. On one level I'd love to see things become more framework agnostic and flexible. The json api in theory frees up a lot of restrictions in what devs can do with WP running as a backend. Even cooler if we can switch out Mysql with other kinds of databases. But it's kind of interesting, for all PHP's warts, it has made it so easy to build things, allowing a huge amount of plugins and themes to develop. For all these years, devs didn't need to worry about the latest library, from backbone to angular, from react to mithril etc. It's the stability and ease of access that has been so important to growth. Now that the web is so javascript oriented it's really compelling to just think about how WP can adapt to it. But a big push toward adopting new methodologies just strips away the number one reason to develop with WordPress: the huge ecosystem that has solutions coded with PHP. And if you are going to create that rift, you might as well start with some other platform. But it's really hard to pick a winner now, React for example, could easily be overtaken by another lib in a years time. We're unsure how Nodejs is going to develop. The json API's current state is not superfast or fully developed yet. I sometimes wonder that we're underestimating the advantages of having something stable like PHP continuing to run at least part of the show. For example, I have yet to see any kind of theme (A WP theme or otherwise) coded with some kind of front-end oriented mvc setup that results in a qualitatively superior site experience.