WordPress's Matt debates Netlify's Matt ↦
If you missed this exchange between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann at the recent Jamstack Conf, read this to get the tldr. Here’s a section of the conversation to focus on…
Public debate kicked off at the end of August, with Mullenweg telling reporter Richard MacManus: “Jamstack is a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it…”
“I don’t think the era of WordPress is over,” Mullenweg added. “I think we’re going to reach over 50 per cent market share in the next few years.”
This is not so much to do with architecture, but rather because users love software-as-a-service, whereas Jamstack is about custom development. There is not yet a Jamstack equivalent to the likes of Shopify, Squarespace or Wix, all mentioned as growing businesses.
WordPress and Jamstack are not completely in opposition. “I still think WordPress can play a really important role in the future ecosystem,” said Biilmann. The pattern he said he sees is WordPress used as a headless service, with developers “completely being in control of the front end layer.”
Discussion
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Lars Wikman
2020-10-18T14:26:58Z ago
Oh dear. I have opinions.
So WordPress was great when I was getting started but I find it an alarmingly poor foundation to build software on when actually considering sustainability and maintainability. The primary culprit in my eyes is that it is absolutely not built to handle a non-CMS workflow. It is incredibly poorly suited for automation and devops. I go deeper on this in this post: https://underjord.io/the-wordpress-merging-problem.html
He would want WordPress to be the future and they will certainly not go away anytime soon. But I think it is an evolutionary dead end that hides the cost of using it to the site owner until a few years down the road.