WordPress takes first step away from PHP, after 12 years and powering 25 percent of the web!

WordPress, undoubtedly, is the most popular framework that powers websites today. In fact, it is said WordPress powers a quarter of the web! WordPress was started by Matt Mullenweg, approximately 12 years ago and begun as a project after a personal trip and the need for a platform to power a blog of his trip updates. Since one of the platform back then was b2, he used it as the base for his new platform. Soon, WordPress became the most popular PHP framework to power websites. Over the years, Mullenweg founded Automattic, a company that offered commercial WordPress services. In a blog post by Matt Mullenweg, he mentioned how the most difficult thing to do in technology is to disrupt yourself. That certainly holds true with the achievements by Mullenweg and his community of millions of developers across the globe. While Mullenweg acknowledges the accomplishments, he also goes on to acknowledge to create a new product ground up. According to him, the strengths of WordPress are the same reasons to hold them back. A code base that has largely stayed the same, with tons and tons of patches and code reworks added on to it over the past 12 years. The result has been a framework that can be run on self  hosted websites catering to a bunch of users, as well as large scale websites serving billions of pages to users across continents. To address the concerns, Mullenweg and his team at Automattic began work on a new admin interface, and chose to go with JavaScript, a web scripting language instead of PHP and the rather popular database MySQL. To create the admin panel, the new project called ‘Calypso’ uses a thin layer of Node.js on the WordPress server to serve the initial page. For the logic, Automattic used React, a JavaScript framework by Facebook. The developer page for WordPress says, “Calypso adopted Facebook’s React view library early on, and has been heavily influenced by other open source work in the React community.” In addition to this new approach, there’s also a new Mac desktop app that would allow publishers add content to their WordPress site from the Mac OS. Mullenweg hopes Calypso becomes a part of WordPress some day, but he believes that is a decision that needs to be taken by the developer community. For now, in line with its open source philosophy, Calypso has been released as an open source project on GitHub.