BackPress Revival Receives Rocky Reception from WordPress Development Community

photo credit: Ryan McGuire

BackPress supporters hosted a preliminary discussion yesterday to flesh out plans for bringing the long-abandoned project back to life. Organizers Roy Sivan and John James Jacoby were surprised by how many developers were interested in the prospect of reviving BackPress. Unfortunately, the live Google Hangout wasn’t broadcasted publicly and was limited 10 people, which gave the group a rocky, disorganized start on a closed channel.

WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin joined the discussion briefly before it started to say that BackPress, which he characterized as “five year old vaporware,” is “terrible and should be thrown away.” His view reflects many others – those who may see the value in making WordPress more modular but don’t believe that investing in BackPress is the way to get there.

@royboy789 @JJJ BackPress made sense as an experiement in the era it was born, but now it should just be left to die a peaceful death.

— Ryan McCue (@rmccue) June 16, 2015

@royboy789 @JJJ It splits the ecosystem with no real appreciable gain. If you don't want the core admin, don't use it.

— Ryan McCue (@rmccue) June 16, 2015

Let me save you guys a few thousand hours and headaches. http://t.co/ILp8nMDFL5

— Brian Krogsgard (@Krogsgard) June 16, 2015

“I think that all the objectives here can be accomplished without doing it in a separate project,” Nacin said.

“If you want to make a big difference in WordPress, then go contribute to the REST API. This isn’t it.”

Ryan McCue, one of the lead developers on the WP REST API project, joined the discussion to encourage BackPress supporters to consider making it into a feature plugin, which he believes would be a more productive avenue for radical experimentation.

Sivan pointed out that the problem with this path is that it still requires the use of a plugin, whereas BackPress is meant for developers who don’t want to have to install WordPress and plugins in order to experiment with it.

Responding to commenters on yesterday’s post, Sivan summarized his thoughts about pursuing BackPress as a feature plugin:

I think the takeaway from today is to decide what it is the development community wants out of WordPress, and see if feature plugins are the way to go, or if there is some validity in building out this system (whatever it may be called) as what we hope can be re-integrated into core at some point. Whether that means taking backwards compatibility into account or not has yet to be seen.

“It would probably be better to start from scratch; it’s not even close to up to date with current WP code it was meant to emulate,” Matt Mullenweg said in response to the idea. “It’s a fun experiment regardless, especially if people don’t think of it as Official WordPress Policy or Future (which it isn’t).”

After nearly three hours of discussion about possible ways forward, those present concluded that it would be best to reconvene next week to identify the problems that BackPress would solve. Most of those in attendance were developers passionate about creating a more flexible, modular WordPress and willing to see if a BackPress revival could be a possibility for addressing that.

Our conversation touched on the high level and next steps are coming, and we are planning on meeting next week same day, at 2PM (PST)

— Roy (@royboy789) June 16, 2015

Organizers created a GitHub repository for exploring a new BackPress and will meet every Tuesday at 2PM PST. Anyone interested to join the discussion can participate on the new #backpress Slack channel, hosted at https://advancedwp.slack.com.