Inspired by Automatticians James Kemp and Dave Smith, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our discord in the design of WordPress stems from the differences of our two big tribes: Bloggers and Builders.
Many of the OG developers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world. We link out a lot, love comments, social features and think a lot about the editor as a writing environment.
Builders are the site shapers, webmasters, the agencies, the companies, the content managers that think in a more page-first rather than post-first way. Tagging? Blogroll? Date-based permalinks? Who needs them. Give me custom fields, rich templates, a site editor, to craft beautiful sturdy pages that will stand the test of time. A store with a catalog of items where what changes is the inventory and ratings, not the content.
The Builders right now dominate our core development discourse, which makes sense. They hold a lot of the economic share with merchants and rich websites. They’re also more loyal. The Bloggers love their WordPress as the place they truly own and call home, but Bloggers have an account on every channel where there’s an audience, they syndicate out with an ephemerality mindset, because that reader/listener/follower connection is the spark that keeps their flame alive. A Builder would never be a digital sharecropper on someone else’s domain.
Dave Smith has been doing some very interesting explorations of a simpler site editor, and you hear his Builder bias around 3:20 in how obvious a static homepage as default seems to him.
The good news is we can coexist as we have at least since WordPress 1.5. We just need to give a little more love to the Blogger side, there’s so much cool stuff we could do in the Fediverse with RSS, ActivityPub, ATProto, blogrolls (link manager is still in wp-admin!), pingbacks…
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