I believe we all have an inherent capacity both for static and familiar (status quo) and dynamic and creative (unknown). It seems that life circumstances tend to shift us dominantly towards one or the other.
I believe that WordPress (the project, not you) is naturally dominated by developers and that that has created a limited mindset for it. A technical status quo.
I believe that the phrase “WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog.” is a clear expression of a status quo that has trapped WordPress.
The thing is that it is a sweet trap, one that I and many others benefit from. Yet it is also a status quo that I believe is inhibiting the project!
There I said it. I am a great admirer and proponent of WordPress (both the project and you) … but I also see it as almost dead in the water. Though the stats may tell a different story – the stats mostly good for describing the status quo!
@iamronen – With respect to WordPress I also see:
* Don’t fix what ain’t broke, and
* Nothing succeeds like success.
What if there are 200 million users who can benefit from WordPress but do not because it is broken?
even if everyone who used it loved it … that still doesn’t mean it ain’t broke!
there are many expressions of success!
and one of the keys to escaping the WordPress status quo is in a mistake I myself just made in my comment (I also come from a software background) … it isn’t about “users” its about “people”!
users “create websites”, people do something very different 🙂
I think WordPress per se is okay, but the net has moved on from content management to user management. CMSes like WordPress ruled the scenario and in this domain there was no closed-wall, big companies like Google or Facebook. Open source projects pioneered, triumphed, and still rule. BUT user management system (also known as social nets) php scripts lagged far behind, and while WordPress’s Buddypress could be a challenge or even the dominator it remained stagnated and uncared. It lacks serious and effective integration with wordpress – ability to comment to blog post directly from the activity stream as well as show comments posted in blog posts in the activity stream is lacking. Not to speak of innovative features like intercommunication between BP sites. For example, if you are on yahoo mail you can add your hotmail contacts in your yahoo contact list as well as send mail to them without being hotmail member. Now imagine two different sites running BP – say, abc dot com and xyz dot com could similarly communicate to each other. I could then add my xyz contacts (=friends) to my abc contact list without being xyz member as well as post profile comments to them. If BP could pioneer this, only if! Probably magic like WordPress happens only once.
Can you see any of these signs in the WordPress project?
Of course, I’ve been guilty of everything on that list. You have to catch yourself because the natural tendency for most of us is for the status quo.
I believe we all have an inherent capacity both for static and familiar (status quo) and dynamic and creative (unknown). It seems that life circumstances tend to shift us dominantly towards one or the other.
I believe that WordPress (the project, not you) is naturally dominated by developers and that that has created a limited mindset for it. A technical status quo.
I believe that the phrase “WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog.” is a clear expression of a status quo that has trapped WordPress.
The thing is that it is a sweet trap, one that I and many others benefit from. Yet it is also a status quo that I believe is inhibiting the project!
There I said it. I am a great admirer and proponent of WordPress (both the project and you) … but I also see it as almost dead in the water. Though the stats may tell a different story – the stats mostly good for describing the status quo!
@iamronen – With respect to WordPress I also see:
* Don’t fix what ain’t broke, and
* Nothing succeeds like success.
how do you know it ain’t broke?
What if there are 200 million users who can benefit from WordPress but do not because it is broken?
even if everyone who used it loved it … that still doesn’t mean it ain’t broke!
there are many expressions of success!
and one of the keys to escaping the WordPress status quo is in a mistake I myself just made in my comment (I also come from a software background) … it isn’t about “users” its about “people”!
users “create websites”, people do something very different 🙂
I think WordPress per se is okay, but the net has moved on from content management to user management. CMSes like WordPress ruled the scenario and in this domain there was no closed-wall, big companies like Google or Facebook. Open source projects pioneered, triumphed, and still rule. BUT user management system (also known as social nets) php scripts lagged far behind, and while WordPress’s Buddypress could be a challenge or even the dominator it remained stagnated and uncared. It lacks serious and effective integration with wordpress – ability to comment to blog post directly from the activity stream as well as show comments posted in blog posts in the activity stream is lacking. Not to speak of innovative features like intercommunication between BP sites. For example, if you are on yahoo mail you can add your hotmail contacts in your yahoo contact list as well as send mail to them without being hotmail member. Now imagine two different sites running BP – say, abc dot com and xyz dot com could similarly communicate to each other. I could then add my xyz contacts (=friends) to my abc contact list without being xyz member as well as post profile comments to them. If BP could pioneer this, only if! Probably magic like WordPress happens only once.
If ain’t broken, don’t fix (change) it.