WordPress.com Developer Blog

Just my $0.02, as someone who's been building things on WordPress more or less full-time for something like a decade now, and working with various other CMSes for another decade before that.

> Cosmic JS is a drop-in replacement for WordPress

I don't know what "drop-in replacement" means in this context. To me, a drop-in replacement for WordPress would offer one or more of the following features:

1. Connect to my existing WordPress content database and use it as its content store

2. Use my existing WordPress theme to define its presentation

3. Provide APIs that are 100% identical to the existing WordPress APIs (the Plugin API, the REST API, etc.)

4. Allow loading and running existing WordPress plugins without modification

I don't see how Cosmic JS does any of these things. Some of them it addresses partially, an example being that there is a content importer available to pull content in from a WP site. But that still doesn't feel like a "drop-in" solution to me. A drop-in solution means I can pull out WordPress and replace it with the new thing without having to think much or rebuild anything, which does not seem to be the case here.

> We noticed that lots of development time was spent building and maintaining the CMS itself, sucking time away from core application development.

I don't understand this. WordPress famously installs in five minutes, and once that's done you only have to deal with it by installing updates, which is increasingly something it can do on its…

To be fair, don't just down vote the parent comment because your don't like someone bashing php; it's a pretty reasonable question to ask.

Most people don't actually know that php powers such a large portion of the internet, because globally there's waning interest in php (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.html) and it's generally dreaded by developers (http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#techSuper-dreaded).

In all seriousness, why would you get into php at this point?

Do you want to go and work for Wordpress.com? (I mean, heck, they're building node sites now (https://developer.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-the-new-wordpress-com/)).

Are there really that many php jobs floating around?

I'm certainly not seeing it.

There are a tonne of 1-click-wordpress-for-$10 companies out there, making $10 websites using it... sure, and certainly, plenty of people use it as a blog; but is there really a professional path for a php developer?

There's no where near the interest in it that there is in engineers using say, java or C#, or heck, even javascript.

I mean, I'm totally down with looking up composer and php classes if you're curious to see what 'modern' php is like, but I certainly couldn't come up with a good reason to do it other than curiosity.

According to https://developer.wordpress.com/calypso/ the jetpack plugin is required for wordpress.org users (mentioned that above) and it sounds like you need to use their node.js hosting. (the point of .org is self-hosting)

So this all goes to my original point that there is very little clarity on where this leaves wordpress.org. It's clearly a big endorsement of node.js, which is great, but there needs to be some clear strategic intent here for where we're headed with wordpress.org - beyond what seems to be a band-aid.