How Will WordPress Be Built in the Future?

One of the largest benefits of WordPress is that the content management system (CMS) remains an open-source project that relies on community contributions to ensure not just modernized code but the best contemporary user experience. However, how it’s built may soon be changing.

On September 14, 2017, however, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg announced a move away from React, largely prompted by a post by Facebook (the creators of React) announcing that React would be a licensed (and no longer an open-source) project going forward. React was a fundamental part of the latest rewrite of WordPress.com (a ground-up rewrite called Calypso), upcoming WordPress core updates, and the basis of the much-anticipated Project Gutenberg, which was entirely being written in React. Pivoting away from React now not only would fundamentally change the way WordPress core updates will be written in the future but also dramatically impact current projects, meaning that Project Gutenberg will now have to be completely rewritten using a different javascript library.

As the community began to speculate as to which library will be used going forward (Would it be Vue? Angular 2? Preact?), no less than two weeks later, Facebook took an about-face as they announced that React (along with Jest, Flow, and Immutable) would be re-licensed and available for use, after all. But is this a case of too little, too late, as WordPress developers around the world have already started to pivot away from React and embraces alternatives such as Preact, Polymer, or Vue?

Learn more about the story of React and WordPress on WP Tavern.