As I’m sure you know, WordPress is the most dominant self-hosted blogging platform available on the internet to date and is so for a variety of reasons. The sheer amount of community spirit backing the platform, providing users with thousands of free themes, tutorials and plugins is one major factor for this aswell as it being opensource and completely free. There are many other platforms such as Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal etc but WordPress continues to lead strongly ahead.
WordPress is currently on version 2.9.2 with 3.0 around the corner; it has come a very long way since it was first released on version 0.7.1 back in 2003. Being such an advanced script presently leaves one main question in many minds, what’s the future of WordPress? Will it ever reach the point to where there is nothing else to add to WordPress? Will plugin authors run out of ideas? What sort of direction will WordPress take in the future?
In the very near future, I can see WordPress moving away even further than it is already from being looked at as just a traditional blogging system and moving more towards the CMS side of things. Movements for WordPress to be looked at as a fully functional content management system instead of just a blogging platform have already started. When WordPress came out, it wasn’t even thought of to create a complete site other than a blog using WordPress to power the site and now, many developers use WordPress as their main CMS.
The bar for creating quality WordPress themes is and will continue to increase for both free and paid themes with many sites set-up purely to offer WordPress themes for download. Such sites include WooThemes.com and ElegantThemes.com More functionality and great, unique designs will be released and frameworks such as ThemeShaper will continue to grow. The default theme provided with every installation will also change, it’s due to change in the next realease, version 3.0.
As WordPress continues to grow, new tutorials will be created, written by it’s large community and more options for the admin panel will become available such as WordPress’s Menu Management that is due to be released in WordPress version 3.0, using the custom Woo navigation.
I think it’s an exciting time right now for WordPress and I really do look forward to seeing how and what WordPress develops into in the future. I sure have found watching it grow into what it is today, exciting.
