At WordCamp US 2015 or 2016, I stood up and asked Matt during the QA if he thought people would eventually build theme / plugin templates in JavaScript. He quickly responded that it wasn’t going to happen. Now, Gutenberg builds part of the frontend of the site with JavaScript, while WordPress’ archaic template hierarchy continues to render the header, the footer, the sidebars (are those still a thing?).

Fast forward to 2020, I build websites using React and whatever CMS is relevant. Sometimes that’s WordPress. Or bring your own CMS. I haven’t thought about going to a WordCamp in 3 years, even though my job would probably pay for it because when I went it was pretty exclusive of the rest of the stack. That’s OK, but WordPress isn’t the full stack.

Many people are drawing a false equivalency between the future of the web and “JAMstack”. Microservices are the future. Headless CMSes are the future. The backend doesn’t matter to the front-end, only the API surface does. These are the reasons I’m not as excited about WordPress anymore, not because of marketing by headless CMS companies. The tooling of the modern front-end is amazing.

WordPress can fit perfectly well into the modern front-end, but the people at the top shouldn’t hold it back by starting silly fights and instead learn from modern tech. WordPress can add a lot to the modern front-end, and Gutenberg is a great start. I still can’t fathom handing over another CMS for a client to manage. But I’d like to see WordPress strive to provide an interface to interact with the rest of the front-end and not argue how front-end should be done in the first place because that’s absolutely not where it excels.