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…
Also, there’s an overlap. I started blogging on WordPress in around 2004, and once the “builder” features became richer, I was in a strong place to make sites for clients using the same technologies I was by-now familiar with.
Later, when I ran a network of sites for a university that would include both “bloggy” sites (academic researchers often have to keep something like a blog to demonstrate what they’re discovering, to keep funders happy!) and “built” sites (for exhibitions at the university’s museums), I naturally reached for WordPress.
Despite WordPressing for over 20 years now, I’m still not sure if it’s wise to mix “blogging” and “building”. But I still do it anyway. It works.
It’ll be 20 years in February that I’ve blogged on WordPress.com. It was the obvious choice in 2007; it felt like it was _meant_ for blogging. Clearly building is another important audience and I can see how over the years you all have tried to accommodate both. There’s much I like about WordPress today — I don’t miss TinyMCE one bit. But I do miss themes I could just install and go and it looked put together; modern themes are more like toolkits to build what you want. I hope you’ll lean harder into a path for people who just want to write and not have to build a decent-looking site first.