Why I will always love WordPress (◠‿◠)

This all goes way back… I found WordPress when it was first made public while I was still learning to code and I have been using it ever since.

At the time, I just started my freelance work as a web designer, transitioning from using Flash to proper standards based, accessible web design. I used WordPress as my first ever blog and soon realised the potential for making use of it as a CMS for my clients. My very first WordPress site was for a wonderful artist, poet and activist. She had not long arrived in the UK and was putting down roots. She was looking for a way to publish her work and support the causes she cared about. She was kind enough to let me, a complete newbie, build her a website with WordPress. She probably didn’t realise this at the time, but it was a brave move as I was very new to working with a CMS.

This very first theme that I built was quite clumsy and I think back in dread to the many mistakes I made. However, that site stayed live and online for over eight years. I kept collaborating with her, edited and updated the theme along the way, but the site itself kept her work online and she loved it; and importantly, so did her audience. She was not technical at all and just wanted to write and be read and this is what is so wonderful: WordPress let her do exactly that without having to battle or wrestle with anything complicated. It was a joy to watch her take ownership of her corner of the web and this was what taught me more about the power of this open source software than anything else.

WordPress gives people a voice.

This is essentially the essence of why I fell in love with WordPress. It lowers the barrier for everyone. The open licence and the fact that it can be used for free by anyone with something to say is just wonderful. No matter their background or skill level, anyone could just put themselves online.

Automattic built WordPress for publishers first. It was an easy interface that was familiar to anyone having written an email before, for example. And importantly, the published websites looked well presented through clean and clear typesetting. This focus on people was exactly why I adopted WordPress early on. I could be confident that my clients across the board would be able to easily learn how to use the interface and not struggle with any updates to their content.

I built all sorts of sites with it. I worked with charities, small social enterprises, created artist portfolios, showcases for bands, and my own teaching sites. And the process was always the same. We install WordPress, which is free. Only the domain and hosting has to be paid for. I then design and build the theme bespoke to their mission. After handover, they will happily carry on updating their websites without any major headaches. All this is what allows them to be online easily and affordably. And I’ve never found anything else that does all of this so very well.

WordPress keeps moving with the tide.

It is wonderful that WordPress keeps evolving and growing. The software gets frequent updates and despite a lot of the criticism online around certain issues, in my view, it still delivers very well. You just need to be considerate in your approach. I have to be honest, I don’t like every change and every update that arrives. But I will always be a WordPress fan and defend it as throughout the years the core values have been maintained: It stays open source, it remains free and it keeps putting publishers first.

While as people who work for theme building, we might have some gripes ~ it is clear that all of the updates and changes are evidently introduced and made because it will benefit publishers primarily. And this is something that, to me, justifies the moves they make.

The founding story of how WordPress came to be is just wonderful. It is great to see how Matt Mullenweg is still defending the open licensing model and will gladly answer any questions and elaborate on why this is and remains a constant. The initial vision and philosophies behind it are inspiring. And I’m amazed that this is still the case now over twenty years later.

For teaching, we started using WordPress as our CMS as it is open source and is free to use so that it would not cost our students anything financially. The fact that it is now so large and used so widely is an added bonus ~ knowing how to design and develop a WordPress theme is something that is still in demand (◠‿◠)

This brings me what prompted this post. WordPress.com has now launched a free hosting for education, and it is simply wonderful. Students get a year of professional managed hosting at no cost with a free .blog or .art domain. They can build real sites that they actually own. And here is the part I love most: When the study year is over, the site will not vanish, it rolls onto a free plan, with all the content intact, so that the site they created remains theirs and importantly remains online. There is also a wider offering of initiatives around this as well campus workshops, students’ clubs, curriculum credit for open source contribution so it is a very rich and generous scheme.

As soon as I saw this I wanted to find out more and followed up with a few specific questions. And they replied straight away, answering every one in detail. As our students learn how to build their own themes, I wanted to see if this was included in this plan. I know that on WordPress.com you need to upgrade and be on the paid tier in order to upload your own theme. And I was happily surprised to find out that the plan does allow custom themes to be uploaded. This is exactly the kind of thing my students need and which makes this scheme such a generous offering.

This means we can still just work with any WordPress theme as a starting point to learn about publishing and learn about theme options, and then we can build our own theme and upload it. This makes it all so much better. Our students can put themselves online with something they designed from scratch, build themselves and show off their skills. ツ ツ ツ

The speedy response and the brilliant answers now give me real confidence in this scheme. This also confirms the trust that I have in Automattic as an organisation. I’ve now applied as a teacher on behalf of our future students and I can see so many possibilities opening up. Our students can leave with a real portfolio on a platform that is trusted, they can keep it and grow ~ it just amazing!
And underneath all this is the same principle and quality that made me fall in love with WordPress over two decades ago. Give people the tools, get out of their way and let them have a voice, make it easy for them to publish online.

Just proves that some things are worth staying loyal to (◠‿◠)