First, thanks to the organizers of WordCamp Canada for inviting me to speak at this year’s conference and for allowing me to post to this blog.
I like to start these things really early and encourage a conversation that starts way before the conference and extends beyond. That way we can get more done when we meet face to face. And that’s really why I do this — to meet other people who want to do the same kind of stuff I do.
I did a podcast a few days ago entitled WordPress and Me. I’ve been involved in blogging since inception in one way or another, and over the life of WordPress I have used it, but never dived into it as a developer. I assumed that meant working in PHP, which has never been one of the environments I’ve mastered. These days I do all my server coding in Node.js.
But then one day I discovered that there was a comprehensive API for WordPress that ran in Node. So I tried doing some stuff with it, and it worked! I read through the docs and it made complete sense, in fact it reminded me of the API we built for Manila, in the late 90s, a precursor to WordPress. I discovered that WordPress had met me where I worked. So I continued experimenting and saw quickly that you could make a very nice editor with this API, so I went for it, and the result is WordLand, which is the primary thing I want to talk about and demo in October in Ottawa.
A few more notes from the conversation on Slack a yesterday.
- I found it interesting that the questions assume I know more about WordPress than I do. I’m not a newbie to what WordPress does as a user, but I am very new to working with it as a developer.
- I made the choice of APIs without realizing I was making a choice! From what I learned yesterday, I doubt the other API would have made WordLand possible. But if people really want to get the ball rolling, we should either clone the API so it works anywhere (that’s usually possible) or extend the wpIdentity package to support the other API. Since it’s liberally licensed, anyone can do it, it doesn’t have to wait for me to get to it.
- I think people will find over time that I am more receptive to the perspective of an independent developer trying to co-exist with a dominant vendor, having spent much of my career in that role. The problems of that were why in 1994, I completely turned my career in the direction of the web, it was exactly what I needed to be creative — a platform with no platform vendor.
- I have, however, also been the CEO of a corporate platform vendor at UserLand, with the product Frontier — which is the environment that all this stuff happened in (blogging, feeds, podcasting) but it never got any credit for it. It’s a shame because Frontier is an amazing platform, but people really resent the platform vendor, and aren’t very kind to them. This happens everywhere, not just here. So I also identify with the position that Matt and Automattic are in.
- I want to make a contribution, not only by providing a really nice editor for writers using WordPress, something I can relate to because I am also a writer — but also to leave behind the code I used to connect to WordPress so that other editor-makers can build on that, and most important — our products can be 100 percent compatible, so users can use different editors to work on the same documents.
But even so there’s even more to the story. Luckily there will be a few months to work on that stuff before October! 🙂
PS: I tend to edit these posts after publishing.
PPS: Of course I wrote this post using WordLand.
