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The WP Minute brings you WordPress news in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Imagine if Wix invested in opensource.
Imagine if Wix gained on WordPress.
Imagine if Wix conquered our beloved CMS.
Imagine if Wix focused
on one area in WordPress.
Data liberation.
I don't think the closed source
CMS will supplant tens of thousands
of WordPress professionals.
One-click installing WordPress for their
clients anytime soon, even with their
aggressive marketing tactics, with a
whole section devoted to their open source
initiatives, documented@wix.engineering,
including a behind the scenes, look
at how they scale their platform
for hundreds of thousands of users.
It's obvious they know the importance
of connecting with developers.
So why not call the bluff?
Matt Mullenweg just mentioned in his
summer update at WordCamp Europe,
that the data liberation initiative
isn't moving as fast as he'd hoped.
He wants to unlock customer website,
content and other data proprietary.
CMS is like Wix hold
hostage from their users.
If they decide to migrate away
what an amazing opportunity for
Wix and others to take part in for
the greater good of WordPress open
source and all users of the web.
I agree with one of the
Kevin Geary's points.
I don't believe there's a master plan
coming from the sidelines at Wix, they
are a product and profit first company.
Their core product is an open source.
Automatic on the other hand,
started with air quotes.
With an open source product and
is now trying to build the profit
first part of their business.
Or have that in my last post, what would
we do with the keys to the kingdom?
Open source winning doesn't mean that
WordPress wins at every single front.
It shouldn't, it can't
really we've lost the plot.
If we think that our goal is to
build a defense against these other
CMS platforms, instead of devising a
timeline where WordPress must win at
all costs, we should be advocating
and demonstrating the WordPress way.
To these commercial entities.
Look, I don't think it's an easy task,
but if anyone from Wix is listening,
spending a few hundred thousand in
engineering time could create a plugin
that syncs data to and from a WordPress
installed, it's probably money well spent
much more than sponsoring a YouTuber.
And the end of the day users
win, which is the ultimate goal.
And the optimist in me hopes that the
more proprietary brands see the value in
this type of portability data liberation.
The more, they might be enticed
to go deeper investing in
other parts of open source.
Heck.
Imagine if you could install the gravity
forms, plugin on your WordPress site and
a WIC site, what a world that would be.
But I'm not foolish.
I know these are epic challenges
and largely not part of the
mainstream software's agenda
or automatics for that matter.
I also know the idea of wanting
other platforms to look more
attractive for developers means that
WordPress could certainly look less
appealing through the same lens.
There's a model here that
we've halfway on earth.
It's worked for 21 years
instead of the goal to have
WordPress installed everywhere.
Maybe it's the impression of our
community that should be spread first.
Don't laugh.
I can hear you.
Do we need to be more than 50% of the web.
Can Wix and others have their
share so long as they become
good stewards of open source.
My fear isn't that the other
platforms will conquer WordPress,
but that open source WordPress in
collaboration with automatic can't
move fast enough to find its footing.
Loose terrain, not just built on the
rough edges of UI and UX decisions,
but the lack of deep bonds threaded
throughout the community, the stuff
that gets challenged every day.
More transparency from leadership,
automatic, truly investing in partnerships
with us and community members, treating
everyone with respect and integrity.
Across the board.
Finally a problem.
AI can't solve.
WordPress thriving because of humans.
In the battle for a dominant
CMS, it's hard to pick a winner
or loser because the real fight.
Should be for more choice.
Everywhere.
So, as I spoke about at State of the
Word, I'll reintroduce Data Deliberation.
This is the idea that one of the
best things we could do as an open
source community is unlock all
the proprietary platforms, all the
places where people have their data
locked in to systems which might not
allow export or easy composability
or transferability of their data.
Um, so we, we termed this data
liberation and uh, if you scan
that QR code or go to wordpress.
org slash data dash liberation,
you will see we have.
The start of what, uh, hopefully
will be something that creates a ton
more freedom on the web and a ton
more portability between platforms,
including in and out of WordPress.
WordPress could be maybe a middle
ground between something else.
Um, however, this has had
very, very little progress.
So if you go to that page, click
on some of the links, you'll
see mostly empty GitHub repos.
So I just wanted to point this out.
As an amazing place, if you're interested
in contributing to WordPress, uh, to adopt
something and have total ownership of it.
So if you wanted to, sort of, each of
these projects is fairly self contained.
So if, uh, you wanted a chance to
actually lead something within the
WordPress project, you could be in
charge of the, say, Wix to WordPress
converter, or something like that.
Um, this, I think, is also going to
be really important for us, as the
more and more marketing dollars, uh,
hundreds of millions of dollars are
spent in marketing for proprietary
platforms, the proprietary platforms.
have gotten tons of investment in
the past few years, things like
Shopify, Squarespace, et cetera,
and they are coming as sort of the
macroeconomic conditions have changed.
They've started to really target
WordPress agencies, WordPress
users, WordPress sites, quite a bit.
And so they're coming and trying
to snipe away our community.
So we have to keep an eye out for
that and the problem as well is
when people go that way it's almost
impossible to go back the other way.
It's like, uh, I don't know if
you had this advertisement here,
but the Roche Motel, the Roches
check in, they don't check out.
That's a lot of these proprietary CMSs.
They'll let you check in your data,
but you can never check it out.
So, as part of our mission to democratize
the web and increase freedom, I think
it's really, really important that
we create portability, even when the
platforms themselves try not to allow it.