I’m in the process of moving from a custom version of my website, and blog manager, a newer version. Back in 2011 I wrote my own custom CMS, as I migrated Audrey and I off WordPress, to deliver more security (obscurity) into our world. As I look to continue the evolution of my CMS, I’m leaving everything behind, and just launching APIs, and working from there to build exactly the user interface I will need to manage my world.
Even though I had moved my blog(s) from WordPress three years ago, there was still some serious WordPress residue on everything. Many earlier blog posts have very WordPress-esque HTML, and the graphical template I used was originally a WordPress theme, so there was HTML, comments, and many other fingerprints of the early WP template in there.
As I work through this process, I think of WordPress, and how they were considering putting in a full API with version 4.1 release. I don’t see any evidence of it on there, so I can only assume they pushed back its release. I don’t blame them, after talking with them about the challenges they face, I can imagine it is taking more work that you can imagine.
I can’t help but think about a WordPress reboot. In my world, I hate legacy code, and technical debt. I very willing to just throw everything away, and start over—except there is one small difference, I’m not a platform with 65 million users.
However let’s imagine you could! Just reboot WordPress by launching six simple APIs:
- Pages
- Posts
- Links
- Images
- Comments
Then let the ecosystem build everything else. Create the first public, and admin UI. Then go from there. Use the brand, the momentum, and the community to reboot, and redefine the popular CMS platform. I think in just a couple of years, you’d see WordPress looking something like SalesForce or Heroku.
For me personally, I like the freedom that comes with using APIs. It makes it easy to decouple legacy code, and evolve small, or even large parts of what I do. Another aspect in which I am very fortunate to do what I do for a living. I think back over my career and all the legacy code bases I’ve had to herd around like cattle, and I am much happier in my current world of APIs.
