Following some thoughts from the WordPress community, and the reasons that the platform that we have grown to love and use on our small- and large-scale websites and blogs might fail or decline in popularity, I wan tot give some input into what I see happening.
Now get this straight: blogging platforms are each able to get the job done – it is all about how they do it and in what manner the content is displayed. The average users isn’t concerned about the licenses involved, but we’ll get into that at a later point.
Here are the critical things that might take place to essentially destroy the brand and image that WordPress has created:
1. Another platform comes along and users see potential. Remember that it takes quite a few years (quite a few months at a minimum) for any trends to catch on. Just look at Twitter: you barely heard about the service in the media prior to the end of last year with the political elections, and now it is rare not to use it – it has nearly replaced email for instant chatting. The new system has years of research built into the backend and there are significant improvements over WordPress in its current (or future) form, being more powerful, yet still as simple as WP is.
2. WordPress users just stop blogging. It probably won’t happen with how rooted-in people have become, transforming their lives to creating websites, blogs, and the like for profit. Now, profit can be an evil thing. Get in between your wants and needs, and you have a struggle. Should WordPress fail to get the job done – users want to be able to control more to make $$, and they could leave (even though you already have a great deal of control in this regard with self-hosted WP).
3. A change of ownership occurs – either the lead development team “resigns” or another company purchases the system (although not likely with Automattic in charge). We’ve seen countless examples of services that were once great and died as a result of change of ownership failures. Funding wouldn’t be available as readily to support the ever-growing demands and needs of its users.
4. Plugin and theme developers become motivated by money, going where the profit is. Right now, the balance is “okay” in regard to the number of people creating premium and paid plugins and themes, compared to those that are free. We aren’t seeing “trial” plugins being created, nor do we have a 10:1 ratio of premium themes to free themes. It is a good balance and many users are pleased by this.
5. Features continue to accumulate, reducing simplicity. Referring back to Number 1, if another platform comes along and offers the same features, but with a more streamlined, sleek, and productivity-based interface, we could have a problem. Now, competition is good, but it would be a stark change to what is available now. WordPress rose as a result of good funding and development, input from its main users, and the support of developers (with the large plugin database).
The main feature of WordPress is the fact that you don’t have to code or develop plugins – all plugins that are necessary for large-scale blogging have been created and there are only a few things you can’t do with WP that you can with other systems.
6. The current users of WordPress want something simpler. There is no denying that Habari functions much like the initial releases of WordPress, but is elegant and simple to use. There is no what you might want to call ‘bloat’ in the system as WordPress appears to have when you take a step back and look at what you are trying to do – get text and the occasional image or video published onto a websites displayed in a functional order.
Even though this post appears to attack WordPress, it is doing little more than stating some truths – no pieces of software can dominate the market forever – there will be something that comes along and does what you need it do better and more efficiently. Perhaps people realize that there is a serious market for free blog systems, and despite the fact that it takes thousands of hours of coding and countless hours of support, it is possible to innovate and produce your own version of a blog system to challenge the leaders.
I’d like to hear some of your input into this. At this time, I am somewhat divided as to how or what will cause the demise of the blogging system. It is difficult to say when it will happen – other systems slowly died when less people were blogging. I certainly hope that the system has another six years left, but only the future will tell.
March 1st, 2009 at 12:09 am
I look forward to seeing some themes you showcase being released for Habari