While restoring my old blog post, I started thinking about WordPress as a platform. WYSIWYG web site creation services like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and others are gaining attention and growing fast but they are more services than platforms. WordPress on the other hand has an immense collection of plugins and healthy community of developers and designers behind it.

Main problem I see with WordPress as a platform is that its plugins run on the server-side, creating a compelling long-term incentive to host your own WordPress server to take advantage of features offered by those plugins instead of using WordPress.com. Allowing user-chosen plugins to be installed on WordPress.com creates a gaping security risk and management headaches.

I think the answer lay with WordPress.com desktop app which currently doesn’t do much beyond what browser version offers and seemingly neglected. Key idea is to add client-side plugins support to the app, plugins that leverage WP REST-API to add features to WordPress-based websites.

There could be several types of client-side WordPress plugins:

• Interfaces – WYSIWYG editors, media libraries, assistants, etc
• Generators – generates and updates static assets to be added to the website or injected into webpages.
• Augmenters – marks, corrects, suggests, and injects.
• Monitors – tracks changes and stats.
• Mediators – monitors, controls, and routes posts, comments, transactions, etc.
• Services – client-side workers
• Bridges – integrates with third-party services and platforms

And adding Docker support will allow servers to run in client-side sandboxes for use by the desktop.

Result would be a host-neutral platform, one that can address needs of both WordPress.com sites as well as self-hosted sites although it will significantly reduce the need to host your own.