Nick Hamze wrote a nice post about what WordPress needs to do to get the “cool kids” back. He mentions quite a few things that I agree with, such as the perception of PHP, interface chaos & security perception. He also mentions quite a few I’ve written about before or invested in companies that fix them.

His most pressing quote: “The frustrating part? Most of these are totally fixable with focused effort.” I could not agree more, but this is also where WordPress has historically been quite lacking. In brutal honesty, we think developers can solve problems that they’re not uniquely suited for. I see this as a positioning and a product direction problem, and I’ll discuss both.

Positioning

If you go to WordPress.org now, the first text you’re greeted with is “Meet WordPress – The open source publishing platform of choice for millions of websites worldwide.” Let’s imagine you’re a possible prospective user who’s asked their agency to build a website for them. You think “WordPress is a ‘publishing platform’? I asked for a CMS or a website builder. I’ll go somewhere else.” If you think those aren’t the words people use, don’t just take my word for it. Let’s look at what Google Trends says.

Is WordPress’ positioning broken? Yes, it is. WordPress marketing isn’t good, and honestly, all the unrest from the last year hasn’t helped. But positioning is a very fixable thing. A good positioning and marketing strategy is not something that just falls out of a GitHub or Trac issue, though. Developers shouldn’t necessarily be making these decisions, but we often allow them to do so in the WordPress ecosystem.

When Nick writes we should “create new success stories,” I agree completely. But who is going to do that work? The marketing team keeps getting shut down… There would definitely be people in the ecosystem who’d like to do that kind of work. If we had a functioning and empowered marketing team with a clear scope and roadmap of what they should be doing, I’m 100% sure that we could do that work.

To be clear, this needs more than just adding more cases to the WordPress showcase, we’ll need to actually market those success stories.

I think we also need to do more branding work. That normally requires budgets we don’t currently seem to have available, but there’s plenty of room to be creative. I would say that branding campaigns would be a good use of funds though, better than donating them to the Internet Archive as the foundation did last year.

Product direction

Most of the work done on WordPress up until the current release was based on a roadmap created years ago. Finally, with the upcoming release, we’re adding features that keep WordPress relevant in the AI age. We don’t have a solid, or at least not public, process of reviewing what’s on our roadmap and how we should change that. And we don’t actually have appointed “product managers”.

Developers are not always good product people, just like they’re not always good marketers. We have a fantastic community with lots of people who would be qualified to do these roles, but we require them way too much to be… developers. We require this simply because we don’t really recognize “product management” as a role within the project. I think it’s time for that to change. We need an empowered product team.