Big news from the WordPress community today: WordPress.com has relaunched with a brand new interface to manage WordPress.com blogs and Jetpack-enabled websites, a new codebase (called Calypso) and API based on JavaScript, and an open source foundation:
A little over a year and a half ago, we challenged ourselves to find a fresh way to interact with WordPress, and now we’re ready to unveil what we’ve been working on. The new WordPress.com interface is built from the ground up as a single JavaScript application that relies on the WordPress.com REST API to communicate to the WordPress core.
I took the new management interface for a spin with MacStories, and it looks great. Clean, responsive, faster than ever. The people who worked on Calypso clearly put a lot of thought and willingness to start fresh into this.
As for existing WordPress users (both .com and self-hosted versions):
If you’re an existing WordPress.com user, you already are! Elements of the new WordPress.com have been progressively launched over the past eighteen months. If you run your own self-hosted WordPress site, you can install the Jetpack plugin to use the Calypso-based editing and management tools. Your site will be ready to go once you log in to WordPress.com.
A new Mac app has been released to manage all WordPress sites on the desktop, and Automattic told me the mobile apps have already been built on this backend as well.
Last, make sure to check out Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic) on today’s launch and decision to go open source:
A lot of people thought we should keep this proprietary, but throughout my life I’ve learned that the more you give away, the more you get back. We still have a ton to figure out around plugins, extensibility, contributions, Windows and Linux releases, API speed, localization, and harmonizing the WordPress.com API and WP-API so it can work with core WordPress. Thousands more PHP developers will need to become fluent with JavaScript to recreate their admin interfaces in this fashion. I’m also really excited to revisit and redesign many more screens now that we have this first version out the door.
This is a beginning, not an ending. (1.0 is the loneliest.) Better things are yet to come, as all of you dig in.
WordPress is such a great success story. I’m very happy I chose to use it over six years ago.