As we announced and TechCrunch covered, my.wordpress.net has soft-launched.
What this means is you need to fundamentally shift how you think about WordPress.
From the beginning, WordPress has always been open source, giving you freedom, liberty, autonomy, and digital sovereignty. Open source is the most powerful idea of our generation.
For the past few decades, WordPress was software you got from a cloud provider or web host, such as WordPress.com, Bluehost, Hostinger, or Pressable (the currently recommended WordPress hosts). You could self-host it on a Raspberry Pi or home server, but few people did.
The experience of downloading WordPress, as my Mom did, is that it unzips a bunch of PHP and various code files onto your desktop. Very confusing!
But now, thanks to incredible advances in WebAssembly (WASM), we can spin up a web server, a database (SQLite or MariaDB), and a full WordPress installation inside your browser in about 30 seconds. Instantly. No server needed. I introduced Playground at State of the Word in 2022.
You can even use it to cross-publish apps to the web, desktop, and iOS, like Blocknotes did in 2023. You can get the latest Blocknotes at Blocknotes.org. One codebase, multiple platforms.
These WordPress Playground containers are fully composable and atomic. You can track and roll back any change. Undo for everything. Stop thinking of WordPress as just on a web host and worrying about maintenance and management, and more as a self-contained unit of open source goodness, a fun little package where you own and control the code and data and can run it however you like.
How perfect is that for AI to work with? Playground makes WordPress local, fast, and trivial to spin up multiple instances, test code changes, and save them.
Next up, we’re going to add peer-to-peer sync, version control integration, and cloud publishing so other people can access it.
I believe this will take us from millions of WordPresses in the world to billions. Hosting isn’t going away; in fact, I think demand for cloud syncing will increase drastically as we radically open up what people can build on top of WordPress.
In an AI age where it’s trivial to spin up software from scratch, consumers will have to give much more thought to brands they trust to be in it for the long term. We’ve been relentlessly iterating on WordPress since 2003. I plan to work on it the rest of my life, and there’s a broad community of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who make their living on top of WordPress.
On WordPress.com we offer 100-year plans and 100-year domains, and I believe we’re one of the few companies where that’s credible. It’s led by Zander Rose, who ran the Long Now Foundation (one of my favorite non-profits) from 1997 to 2023, a quarter century.
In core WordPress, we are obsessed with backwards compatibility. You can run plugins and themes written 20 years ago on today’s WordPress. I’ve stumbled on decade-old installs, and the built-in auto-upgrade took everything to the newest version.
At Automattic, for better and worse, unlike Google, we almost never shut things down. We obsess about maintaining or redirecting permalinks. We make it easy not just to get your data in, but take it out too. We build businesses that lower churn not by locking you in (Wix famously has no export) but by making it easy for you to leave. If you love somebody, set them free.
In the next few years, there will be a Cambrian explosion of software and services. You’re going to have a lot of choices about where to put your most precious data and software. You should demand open source and bet on those who are clearly in it for the long-term.
Today, everyone gets a phone number and email when they grow up. That will expand in the future, everyone will have a domain and a WordPress. A part of the internet that you own.
Technology is best when it brings people together. Technology is best when it puts you in control, gives you ownership, digital autonomy, freedom, and liberty. That’s open source. It’s so exciting to see how AI is supercharging open source.
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Thats awesome!
I would really love to see WordPress-Light version, I think a lot of people need a feather weighted CMS, very basic, to share their thoughts and bunch of images. This light version don’t even support themes or plugins, predefined layouts with simple color options, yes user can change background but thats it. All core features are built in. Maybe this should be a project under WordPress umbrella but with different name.
Great progress as alway 🙂 I fully support your vision that everyone will have a domain in the future. That’s why I registered firstname-domains for my kids luisa[.]cc and lukas[.]cc both running (or in work) with WordPress.
This post got me excited. Since I left Automattic, I’ve been building something in the distributed systems space that connects directly to what you’re describing: peer-to-peer sync, atomic state, version control semantics. We’re about to launch.
It’s been a wild ride. I’d love to reconnect and show you what we’ve been working on.
As someone who installed 1.2 back in the day and quickly drowned under the weight of the tech backend, this is just magic. The flip side is I’ve had at least one other person wonder if there’s a ToS hiding somewhere. 🙂
You can inspect the network traffic, it’s just using Local Storage which is built into browsers now.
WordPress really nails that sweet spot between simplicity and power super approachable for beginners yet endlessly customizable for those who love to tinker.
As someone who’s been down that rabbit hole myself, I know exactly what you mean. There’s something special about watching your ideas come to life through themes, plugins, and a bit of code.
I actually built my own little corner of the internet “晨风笔记” using WordPress, and it’s been such a rewarding journey. Here’s to all of us building and growing in this amazing ecosystem!