WordPress, with its extensive theme and plugin ecosystem, has empowered users to build diverse websites with ease. However, the lack of a standardised templating and plugin engine has its own set of challenges and opportunities for enhancement.
Problems With Current WordPress Development
Mobile Responsiveness
Having a website that is not designed to be responsive on mobile devices can significantly impact the user experience. As more and more people use their mobile devices for browsing, it is essential to ensure that websites are optimised for these devices.
Google’s algorithm considers mobile-friendliness when ranking websites in its search results, so having a website that is not mobile-friendly can negatively impact a website’s SEO.
Artificial Intelligence could be introduced to run a series of mobile checks against your theme to ensure that your theme include accessibility options and that it works as intended in multiple web browser’s. In the past I have used Python and Selenium to run some automated testing but incorporating AI would really streamline the process.
Lacking Search Engine Best Practices
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a set of techniques and strategies used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine result pages. While there are plugins available to help optimise a website SEO, some users (myself included) believe that WordPress should offer built-in SEO features.
This could allow developers to make their themes SEO friendly, while ensuring a baseline standard that themes should implement. If done incorrectly, custom WordPress themes can hinder your performance in search engines.
Global Variables
Global variables are variables that are declared outside of a function and can be accessed by any other functions in the program. They are often used to store data that needs to be accessible to multiple functions. However, their use can lead to code conflicts, such as when two functions change a global variable at the same time without one function knowing that the other has changed it.
Using global variables is a potential security risk, as malicious code can access and modify the variables, leading to unexpected or malicious behavior. While global variables have sculpted the ease of use and extensibility that WordPress is celebrated for, they also being challenges and vulnerabilities. Modern development practices often sidestep global variables to dodge these issues.
WordPress REST API Limitations
The WordPress REST API is limited in terms of performance, as certain data can take longer to retrieve due to the nature of the API. The WordPress REST API is limited in its flexibility, as it requires developers to follow a specific set of rules and guidelines to ensure data is retrieved accurately.
The API is limited in terms of extendibility, as it does not provide the same level of flexibility as more robust APIs, making it difficult to customise and extend the API for certain projects and use cases.
Dependency Management
Dependency Management is an important concept when it comes to WordPress plugins. It is a system which allows developers to ensure that their plugin has all of the necessary components and is compatible with other plugins, themes, and core WordPress. Without a built-in dependency manager, plugins can be installed and activated without properly checking for compatibility, leading to potential conflicts and issues.
To help prevent these issues, developers must manually check and manage the dependencies of their plugins before releasing them to the public. By doing this, they can ensure that their plugin is safe to use and will not conflict with other plugins or themes.
WordPress Multisite Complexity
Having a single WordPress website is relatively straightforward to manage; however, managing a multisite network can be more complicated.
This is because each site in the network has its own separate settings, databases, themes, and plugins, and each site must be managed independently.
Managing a multisite network requires more technical knowledge than managing a single WordPress site, as it involves configuring the network and its subsites, and ensuring that all sites are running smoothly.
It can also be difficult to keep track of the different settings and configurations for each site, as well as any updates or changes that need to be made.
In my experience, managing and securing a multisite network can be complex and is often not as easy compared to managing a single website. There are plugins like Multisite Enhancements that add a lot of useful features to make WordPress Multisite easier to maintain.
Data Management
Data Management involves the collection, organisation, storage, and interpretation of data. It involves the use of various techniques to ensure that data is properly stored, processed and accessed when needed.
Handling custom data types and meta fields can be a difficult and time-consuming process as there is no universal standard for storing and accessing them.
Without proper data management, businesses may struggle to properly utilise their data, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Good data management can help ensure data accuracy, integrity, and security, which are all essential for effective decision-making.
Security Concerns
WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) used by millions of websites around the world, but its open-source nature can make it vulnerable to attacks from malicious actors who are looking to gain access to websites.
These attacks can range from brute force attacks to exploit vulnerabilities in the platform, as well as malicious code insertion and other malicious activities. WordPress websites should be secured through the use of secure passwords, regular updates, and active monitoring of the website to detect and respond to potential threats.
Framework Bloat
WordPress is often criticised for including too many features that can significantly slow down a website, leading to an unsatisfactory user experience. Often these features can be challenging to turn off without the use of an external plugin, which can add a considerable amount of extra weight and put a strain on server resources.
Mixed Development Coding Standards
Mixed coding standards refer to the use of different coding conventions or styles across different components of a software system. These inconsistencies can make it difficult for developers to understand and maintain code, as they must be familiar with multiple standards.
It can be difficult to keep track of which standard is used for which component, as well as to ensure that all code follows the same standard. As a result, mixed coding standards can lead to increased development time and confusion, as well as decreased code quality
The Potential of a Templating Engine in WordPress
A templating engine in WordPress allows developers to quickly and easily create custom themes and page layouts without having to write code from scratch. Templating engines provide a powerful way to define the structure and content of a WordPress site, allowing developers to create dynamic and visually appealing websites.
Templating engines provide a range of features, including the ability to create custom page templates, style sheets, and widgets. They also allow developers to quickly and easily change the look and feel of an entire WordPress site by making changes to a single template.
It can also provide developers with the ability to create custom post types, which allow them to easily create content-rich websites with a variety of content types. Extending a theme base class can help developers save time and money by eliminating the need for coding from scratch.
Enhanced Code Organisation
A templating engine like Twig or Blade could segregate HTML and PHP, ensuring cleaner, more readable code by separating logic from presentation.
Improved Security
Templating engines inherently sanitize data, reducing the risk of XSS attacks and enhancing security.
Improve The Developer Experience
A structured templating engine can offer syntactic sugar, making code more intuitive and reducing the learning curve for new developers.
Improving WordPress Plugin Development with a Plugin Engine
Plugin Engines are a type of software that can be used to quickly and easily develop WordPress plugins. Plugin Engines offer a range of features that can help speed up plugin development and improve the quality of the plugins created.
These features include an intuitive interface, a library of ready-made components, automated testing, and analytics. Plugin Engines can help developers save time and money.
By reducing the amount of code they need to write, and also help them develop higher quality plugins by allowing them to quickly and easily experiment with different features and components.
- Use a plugin engine to quickly build and deploy plugins
- Leverage existing WordPress APIs for plugin development
- Create a unified development platform for plugins
- Automate plugin deployment and updates
- Enable developers to easily create and customise plugins
- Streamline debugging and troubleshooting
- Design plugins with a modular architecture for maximum flexibility
- Support multiple development environments and platforms
They can also help developers keep their plugins up to date with the latest WordPress standards, ensuring that their plugins remain compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
Enforcing Development Standards
A plugin engine could enforce adherence to specific OOP principles, ensuring consistency across plugins and making it easier for developers to understand and modify code.
Automated Plugin Code Reviews
With a standardised code structure, AI could efficiently review, and validate code, ensuring adherence to coding standards and potentially identifying vulnerabilities. This would dramatically reduce the number of issues that make their way onto production websites.
- Standardised code structure
- AI reviews and validates code
- Ensures adherence to coding standards
- Identifies potential vulnerabilities
- Dramatically reduces number of issues on production websites
Enhanced Security and Maintenance
OOP principles, like encapsulation, could safeguard data and functionality, while also making plugins easier to update and maintain without affecting other components.
Redesigning the WordPress Plugin and Theme Ecosystem
A shift to a new system would require developers to learn and adapt to the new standards, potentially disrupting the existing developer ecosystem.
Reduce Compatibility Issues
Ensuring that existing themes and plugins remain compatible with new or updated versions of software would be a monumental task, as it would involve a great deal of time, effort, and resources. It would also carry a great risk, as any changes could potentially disrupt the functionality of numerous websites which rely on these themes and plugins.
Security At It’s Core
While the transition is ongoing, ensuring security would be crucial to safeguard websites from vulnerabilities that might arise during the shift. Once implemented, a structured approach could facilitate more robust, secure, and maintainable development practices in the long run.
Why WordPress May Have Chosen Its Current Path
WordPress has always prioritised backward compatibility, ensuring that websites continue to function even as the content management system evolves.
The procedural and global function-based approach lowers the entry barrier for new developers, enabling a wider range of people to create plugins and themes.
When WordPress was developed, PHP’s object orientated programming (OOP) capabilities were limited, and procedural programming was common, influencing the initial architectural decisions.