When will WordPress die?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

It seems to keep going, but I find it difficult to accept any explanation of why it keeps going:

It won’t happen overnight, but WP-API will dramatically reduce the amount of active PHP code in WordPress, starting with the admin back-end. It will become a JavaScript app that talks to the WP-API sooner than anyone suspects.

Front-end (read: theme) development will change at a slower pace, because rendering HTML on the server side is still the right thing to do for performance and search. But themers will have the option to ditch the traditional loop for an internal, non-remoting version of the WP-API.

There’ll be some mostly-dead code maintained for backwards compatibility (because that’s how the dev team rolls), but on the whole, the PHP side of WordPress will be a lean, mean, API-hosting machine.

Which means there’s going to be even more JavaScript involved. Reckon that’s going to be built the same way as today? Nuh-uh. One taste of React in front of WP-API, and I reckon the jQuery and Backbone era will be finished.

In WordPress itself, most of this will affect how the admin back-end is built, but we’ll also see some great WordPress-as-application examples in the near future. Think Parse-style app development, but with WordPress as the Open Source, self-hosted, user-controlled API services layer behind the scenes.

What about HHVM? You’re going to want your lean, mean, API-hosting machine to run fast and, in some cases, scale big. Unless the PHP team surprises everyone by embracing the JVM, I reckon the future looks more like HHVM than FPM (even with touted PHP 7 performance improvements).

Once HHVM is popular enough, having side-by-side PHP and Hack implementations of core WordPress data grinding functions will begin to look attractive. If you’ve got MySQL on one side, a JSON consumer on the other, and asynchronous I/O available in between, you may as well do it efficiently. (Maybe PHP will adopt async/await. See you in 2020?)

Post external references

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    http://bethesignal.org/blog/2015/02/27/new-era-wordpress-hhvm-rest-react/
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