My WordPress Wishlist for 2025

2024 was a difficult year for WordPress. But soon 2025 starts with new hopes. That's why I decided to create my wishlist for WordPress.

Inspired by Adam Argyle's CSS wishlist, I decided to create my own, but for WordPress. I only have 5 wishes, so here we go.

2025 to be a year of peace

2024 was difficult, to say the least. It had led to a huge conflict in the community. People, instead of collaborating were busy arguing with each other. I won't be pointing fingers at who started it (because it's not as simple as just pointing out Matt's WCUS talk - the root cause lies deeper).

What I would like is for people to shut up, hide their egos for a moment, and start discussing what went wrong and how to fix it. I know there's a long list of those things, but let's skip the blaming part. It's time to start treating each other with respect again and to find a way out of this mess.

Each side should show a bit of goodwill - so, no more pineapple checkboxes and more contributions from companies benefiting from using WP would be a great start. Those are things that can be done quickly.

Better Governance

WordPress needs better governance. But I don't want a revolution overthrowing Matt. I still think Matt should lead the project, but he needs help. Matt has a clear vision that mostly focuses on users, on the other hand, other types of users use WordPress and they should be represented and have a voice too. Thanks to different voices we can find better solutions. That's how WordPress did for years - we had many different voices, but we were able to find a consensus.

We definitely need to figure out a model that will work for all of us. Creating it won't be easy and it will be the biggest challenge for WP in the upcoming year.

More Flexibility

I see WordPress's market share as one of the biggest blockers in pushing forward. And it's not that I would like WordPress to lose market just for the sake of losing it. If we look at Craft or Statamic, they can evolve quicker because they don't have to worry about the fact that one change will break half of the internet.

Having a lesser market share would allow us to introduce some breaking changes (for example in the DB structure) easier.

Of course, we can't just order people to go away and use something else. So maybe it's time to think about how to push a bit quicker, without focusing on the backward compatibility that much.

Making the WordPress ecosystem more secure

WordPress itself is secure. It's not perfect, but overall it's OK.

Most issues are related to plugins and themes. When we did a cleaning event in October, we were able to close around 1000 plugins from the official repository. Based on this, you can see that the official repository (and other marketplaces) have some problems and it would be great to collaborate on this more.

On the other hand, it would be great to see more plugin developers taking security more seriously.

I know that security isn't as fun as adding new features but making the WP ecosystem more secure should be a priority and should be handled quicker than it's happening right now(adding notices about abandoned plugins is taking around 10 years already and counting).

Adopting standards instead of constantly creating them

WordPress has this tendency to create its solutions instead of adopting things that are already widely used by developers. Why it's a bad thing? Because we are closing ourselves for talents that could help us in growing things.

This way we are fencing us from the rest of the developer world. For example - Interactivity API. Is it good? Yes. Does anyone outside of WP use it? Nope. This leads to less learning materials, fewer contributions, and more developer frustration.

If we look at technologies like TailwindCSS or Alpine.js - they are cross-platform, and almost any web language has an implementation of them. This means - more learning materials, more contributions, and better developer experience. Are those solutions perfect? Hell no, but developers use them in a lot of projects.

I'm not saying that now we should change everything - I'm saying to change our approach for the future. Instead of building new things that only the WP ecosystem will use, let's think in a more open-source way, so others can benefit from it and contribute back.

And what are your wishes for 2025?

PS. Happy New Year