Due to benefits of  PHP Web Development  so many businesses preferred their website in PHP. Soon their preferred choice was to make their website in WordPress which was PHP based. After so many years of its launch, WordPress finally went through a revamp in 2015. The decade old PHP framework of this hosting platform for blogs and websites made itself to grow and evolve a lot. But in the world of technology what prompts you to grow can also hurdle your advancement and WordPress was also experiencing this. In order to keep up with the fast pace web world, WordPress developers overhauled it rather than fixing the countless bugs and issues. They created Calypso, a new admin interface of WordPress ditching PHP and formed an alliance with JavaScript using libraries like Node and React for the technical growth.

What is the History?

WordPress was launched in 2003 and it dominated the market for more than a decade. It was preferred by millions of online users because of its free tools, thousands of plugins and themes. WordPress captured the web CMS market easily. Soon this hosting platform became the most popular PHP framework for websites having more than 25% of the web market share.
In 2015, Automattic (the company which created WordPress) announced Calypso, a new admin interface for anyone who is using a WordPress website. The JavaScript developers were more excited to hear that it was built entirely in JavaScript. Actually it was built in React, so people who were fan of WordPress and have interest in React, become even more interested in this. As there was some misinformation in the community hence let’s clear this up and understand what it means for the web developers.

WordPress is not being rewritten in Node.js

With new advancement, now PHP Development Company also need to learn about Calypso, React and Node.js if they are working in WordPress. WordPress has been written in PHP but the Calypso admin interface for WordPress is written with popular front end tools like React. This is actually part of a popular trend i.e. Use your server to just give us raw JSON data and then build your application entirely in JavaScript to consume and use that JSON data. WordPress then actually becomes an API which you can pull and push data from. This decoupling of the view and the backend login has given freedom to the WordPress developers and they move much faster because they don’t have now more than a decade of PHP view logic dragging them.

What about WordPress and Node.js?

Why most developers talk about Node.js? Actually most of the front-end tools are built in Node.js, Calypso is built with popular node tools like Jade, Marked, WebPack, Uglify, Babel, Hot Loader and over 100 more modules. This is how the front end space have evolved and it is good actually that WordPress has started using them because there were not many people using these tools in this space.

What about WordPress.com accounts, self hosted, Plugins, Custom post types?

If you do  PHP Application Development  and create WordPress sites then you need to learn many new things now. Calypso is actually an editor and an RSS reader for WordPress.com sites. You can also use it to manage your self-hosted WordPress site. After you enable Automattic’s JetPack plugin, you can manage your content with Calypso. Developers have built these. You could manage, Pages, Posts, Themes, Menus, Plugins and some settings, all the things which you need to manage a blog. Initially missing was an interface for custom fields, custom post types and any custom interface that a plugin use but soon it should be there. So many people use WordPress not only as a blog but many other things.

What’s Store in the Future?

The new version came with an all new desktop application, refined the experience of a blogger and gave the developers an edge for their skills. Let’s discuss what advantages the developers got with this.

New WordPress.com, an admin interface, is now just like a third party interface by WordPress core.

Using JS and API calls in place of PHP and MySQL, the server will be able to distribute a functional WordPress client that runs smoothly within the browser.

The REST API is going to perform functions like fetching the blog posts and publishing new blog posts along with media uploads.

The loading screen time which was developed as a single page application, reduced as well as a fully responsive experience across devices was achieved.

The platform becomes open source on GitHub and offered the flexibility to the users to develop customized interfaces, plugins and themes on the Jetpack websites.

A new Mac desktop application was developed which allowed publishers to insert content to the WordPress site from MAC OS and later on Windows and Linux versions are.

Social media was full of with this news of revamping of WordPress after so many years. The team at Automattic, the parent company of WordPress said that there were working since long for these changes in WordPress and this Gen-next version of WordPress will change the World of technology for sure.

What does this mean for a WordPress Developer?

Much of a theme writing is already in JavaScript. Developers often use WordPress as just an API to get data out of and then use frameworks like Angular, React, or jQuery to display that data. Developers are not building a whole website in JavaScript framework but much of the interactive view layer of these sites is moving into JavaScript frameworks. It looks like you will be writing a lot of JavaScript in your WordPress sites in future.

As Calypso is open source hence people are curious to see what will come next. For many this is going to be big thing for JavaScript. Front end development landscape is changing and it is now hard to ignore what has happened to JavaScript in last few years. Hence now it is great time to start learning JavaScript if you are already not comfortable with it.