Most of the technically-minded folks in WordPress are familiar with Pagely: They provide managed hosting for WordPress-based sites.
In addition to that service, they also publish a blog that highlights a number of different topics – anything from running case studies on WordPress SaaS products to covering the new features they are releasing to their customers.
Over the past few weeks, they’ve been running a series in which they highlight people who are involved in WordPress in some capacity and, as of yesterday, I had the honor to be featured on the blog.
An Interview with Pagely
When others ask to do some type of write-up or interview for their website, it’s always a humbling experience; however, if I have the opportunity to share some of the lessons that I’ve learned during my experience in working with WordPress, then I’m always happy to participate.
I don’t know how interesting or how much weight the following interview will carry for many of you, but I had a blast participating and definitely thank Pagely for the opportunity.
During the course of the interview, I was asked eight questions for which I provided answers based on my experience in working with WordPress over the past several years. The questions were:
- For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background?
- You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress?
- During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with?
- What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you?
- How has the WordPress community changed since you started?
- What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again?
- What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making?
- What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see?
And then Shaun, the author who was responsible for conducting the interview and drafting the blog post, wrapped up with a few final thoughts.
You can read my answers to the questions on this page. While you’re visiting the site, I also recommend that you check out some of the other recent posts to see what others have to offer as they’ve interviewed people involved in all areas of WordPress and they are definitely a great group of people from which to learn.
If you’ve anything else to ask or add, then please feel free to do so in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them.
Tom: “In short, the future of WordPress is really going to be paved with what’s possible with the REST API. I think seeing what we’re going to be able to do with “headless WordPress” or just being able to connect to WordPress and talk to it without having to actually work with the dashboard or the back-end (whatever term you prefer) is going to be really, really cool.”
This is something that fascinates me but for a tangential reason: if you dispense with the nice WP templating system and the equally-robust Admin, doing it all with the REST API, you really have to start comparing WP to other headless/backless CMS implementations.
That is, what does WP have to offer that’s so special without the theme system and Admin? After all, what you’re left with is a lot of enhanced CRUD functionality. Why not just make the jump to Processwire (or similar), an arguably better CRUD?
> That is, what does WP have to offer that’s so special without the theme system and Admin? After all, what you’re left with is a lot of enhanced CRUD functionality. Why not just make the jump to Processwire (or similar), an arguably better CRUD?
I think that’s an awesome question – and I think it also raises questions not just about other headless CMS systems but other frameworks that provide basic CRUD functionality out of the box.
Personally, I don’t know what would be _unique_ other than people being able to build new types of web applications (or, well, same type of web applications but new to them) using a platform they already know.
This can make it pretty easy to spin up a backend for an application that may have parts running in the browser, on a phone, etc. The potential that WordPress has will be greater than it’s ever had before.
That said, the comparison to other platforms is inevitable. I think this is a good thing, too because _this_ is when real innovation starts to happen.
So while we’re currently discussing whether or not post formats should stay in core, imagine the things we could be talking about when this becomes a common piece of the software and we’re building even more with it.
—