Lecture slides from this week
This week we'll be covering WordPress, the worlds most widely used open source CMS. WordPress is great for simple websites of which the web is made up of many. It's why it powers (estimates, numbers differ by source) 33% to as much as 50% of sites on the internet.
These sites could be everything from the Whitehouse down to every individual blog / new acount on wordpress.com (SaaS solution version) which is why people take some of that number with a grain of salt.
It's a great platform to start your own website on but it's run into some recent controversies which are worth exploring - namely the battle for the heart of the community around a text editor. It's weird to think about, but when a CMS lives and dies by the ease of content entry, you can understand why the new core mandatory text editor called Gutenberg would attract positive and negative attention.
With plans to phase out the "Classic Editor" in 2020 many people in the community are at a cross-roads: Continue to trust the same core community that "took away" their beloved simple HTML editor, or forge a new path. We'll look briefly at the concept of community forks through the context of ClassicPress, a popular WordPress alternative that's gaining traction as the more community centric CMS.
With parallels to Drupal and it's popular fork Backdrop (topic for next lab) we'll see that it's not always code that leads to inflection points in groups but the process by which that code is formed, agreed upon, and ultimately pushed into the main project everyone's aligned with.
WordPress is a great resume builder both in terms of the platform as well as putting on your resume that you have experience with it, so let's dig in and check it out in ReclaimHosting once more!