Again, a very insightful article :-) Bringing a better level of contibution (notably from enterprises) and elevate WordPress as a valuable technology for the more global technical community are great challenges we’re facing.

While I agree on many things with Simon, I must say that for the clients I'm faced to, they don’t care or even know what to be a core contributor is. When choosing a solution, they search for references that prove that WordPress will fullfill their needs and environment. Signs are: do other enterprises use WordPress, does my tech team trust it, will it support it, is there enough entrerprise oriented dev… This new class of clients bring more projects and more well funded projects.

That’s where Drupal is very efficient for example.

WordPress is obviously mainstream (and that's a great victory). When someone chooses WordPress, he or she often refers to its simplicity, and often thinks that it's an out of the box product or at least that it can be bent to our needs for a cheap price.

It's a strength and a weakness at the same time.

The reality is that even it is very user-friendly, WordPress is a complex technical platform. This is also why you can achieve brilliant things with it.

This is why I chose it few years ago to develop enterprise oriented projects.

However, this choice has its difficulties. If WordPress is mainstream from a user point of view, it’s not on the technical side (technical PM, developpers…).

From my experience, this is one of the main difference with technologies such as Drupal or CodeIgniter. They’re more considered in the technical community and are more promoted and rewarded.

It leads among other things to have a lot less WordPress technical resources which are enterprise oriented. This is a daily problem for me.

I think that WordPress is facing the same issues that PHP has faced few years ago. PHP has also emerged as a maintream technology and its Drupal has been Java for years. It’s now ancient history and PHP is obviously maintsream for both the users and the technical world.

I believe WordPress is still an emerging technology that has to prove itself in the more classic IT world while retaining its uniqueness as a revolutionary tool, a vibrant and humanist community.

On the contribution field, there’s very few classic enterprises that consider it. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to do that in one of those (a big B2B media company). And I confirm It has been a hard fight to achieve that. It would be wonderful to have WordPress bringing enterprises to contribute to the open source solutions they're using.