When WordPress.org launched its plugin and theme directories about two decades ago, it was a brilliant idea. Centralizing distribution made it easy for site owners to find and install new features. But the web it was built for doesn’t exist anymore.

Today’s web runs on distributed systems, verifiable code, and modern APIs. Not on a single, centralized repository that still relies on Subversion. The open web has evolved, and if WordPress wants to remain part of it, it needs to evolve too.

The outdated foundation

For two decades, WordPress.org has served billions of plugin downloads and connected developers with millions of websites. But centralization, while efficient at first, has introduced structural risks and technical limits that the web has now outgrown.

It created a single point of failure, both technically and operationally. It limited scalability and introduced governance bottlenecks. And it left us with an architecture that feels frozen in time; built for 2005, running in 2025.

That realization is what drove the creation of FAIR — Federated and Independent Repositories — a project that rethinks how WordPress software is distributed. Instead of relying on one hub, FAIR introduces a decentralized, verifiable, and community-governed network for plugins and themes.

FAIR and the modern supply chain

FAIR replaces dependence with resilience. Each repository in the network can host and distribute packages independently, while still following shared standards. Every package includes cryptographic signatures, provenance metadata, and will, in the future, include a Software Bill of Materials, so users can verify where software comes from, what it contains, and who maintains it.

This approach eliminates the single-vendor risk of WordPress.org, strengthens supply chain security, and makes accountability transparent. It also enables compliance with modern regulations like the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act, where verifiable software integrity and traceability are no longer optional; they’re now legal requirements.

FAIR’s architecture is built for the world we live in now: one that values interoperability, privacy, and digital sovereignty. Anyone can host their own repository, yet still be part of a connected ecosystem. That’s how the open web should work.

Building something new: the glossary plugin

While working on the FAIR website, I ran into another kind of problem, not structural, but practical. The project uses a lot of technical terms: supply chain security, provenance, federation, attestations. It quickly became clear that readers needed a way to look up definitions without leaving the page.

So I started exploring existing glossary plugins for WordPress. My first stop was the one used on make.wordpress.org, which powers the official contributor handbook glossary. That plugin — WordPress.org Glossary — is available in the WordPress.org repository and does its job well enough for what it was built for. But it’s a good example of how WordPress infrastructure tends to get stuck in the past.

It relies on legacy patterns and hasn’t caught up with modern browser standards. The same is true for most other glossary plugins. They still depend on jQuery tooltips and shortcodes instead of embracing what browsers can already do natively.

So, I built a new one: Glossary by Progress Planner. It uses modern web APIs like the HTML Popover API and CSS Anchor positioning to display definitions cleanly, accessibly, and without heavy JavaScript. No extra frameworks, no workarounds, just a simple, standards-based approach.

This small project reminded me of a larger truth: many parts of the WordPress ecosystem haven’t kept up with what the web itself can already do.

Signs of progress

Not everything is stuck, though. The WordPress Playground is one of the most exciting things happening in the ecosystem right now. It runs WordPress entirely in the browser using WebAssembly, and it’s a brilliant example of how modern web technology can make PHP-based software feel new again.

Another promising development is the Abilities API, which is coming in WordPress 6.9. It’s the foundation for future AI integrations; something I argued for back in April, when I wrote that WordPress needs AI-ready infrastructure (note that by no means do I want to claim that I was alone in making that statement). The fact that this is now being built into WordPress core shows that modernization isn’t just possible, it’s happening.

The path forward

The open web isn’t (and was never) powered by one hub. It’s powered by many nodes, working together. That’s the model WordPress needs to embrace.

Modern WordPress should be truly democratic, modern, and standards-driven. It should integrate with the web as it exists today, not the one we built for yesterday. FAIR is one example of that shift. The glossary plugin is another small one.

Each represents a move toward a future where WordPress isn’t just catching up to the web, but leading again: by adopting the best of what the web has to offer.