Building Web Apps with WordPress, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18. The Future

The first edition of Building Web Apps with WordPress was published in 2014. A lot has changed in the five years between the first and second editions. A lot is going to change in the five years after this second edition is published.

In this final chapter, we will briefly point out some of the big changes in WordPress over the past few years. If you’ve read the book up to this point, you should have a good handle on these topics.

We will also make some predictions about the future of WordPress. Some of these predictions might miss the mark, but in general these are topics worth keeping tabs on for the next few years.

Where We’ve Been

WordPress version 3.0, released in June 2010, was the first to provide support for CPTs (these are covered in detail in Chapter 5). The addition of CPTs was the final step in the transition of WordPress from blogging software to a content management system. The addition of CPTs empowered developers like us to start using WordPress as an application framework.

WordPress version 4.7, released in December 2016, included REST API endpoints for posts, comments, terms, users, meta, and settings (the REST API is covered in detail in Chapter 10). While a feature plugin that enabled REST API support had been available for a couple years before this release, the existence of the REST API in the core WordPress plugin “blessed” the use of the REST API and encouraged developers to start building with it.

WordPress version 5.0, ...