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Sarah Gooding

Vue Project Launches Community Campaign on OpenCollective

With the recent news that WordPress is abandoning React due to its BSD + Patents license, core contributors are now revisiting the discussion of the merits of other frameworks. Gutenberg development is currently on hold until a new library is chosen to replace React, and selection is likely to be imminent to prevent further delay.

Vue is once again a strong contender with a recent surge in enthusiastic support in discussions on GitHub, Mullenweg’s announcement, and social media posts. One of the chief concerns WordPress core contributors had regarding Vue in previous discussions was the longevity of the project and its dependence on creator Evan You, who has historically done most of the development.

The Vue project has recently been taking steps to mitigate this drawback. Earlier this week You announced that Vue is now accepting financial support on OpenCollective, a platform for funding open source projects in a transparent way. You already has a successful Patreon campaign where contributors are paying $8,815 per month to support his work on Vue, but the new OpenCollective account will support the work of core contributors and community events.

“When I started the Patreon campaign, the primary goal was providing myself with enough income so that I can work on Vue full-time,” You said. “Today, as the Vue community grows, there are more and more contributions from the community, and OpenCollective’s transparent expense model could help us scale the financial contributions beyond a single developer.”

Just four days after launching, Vue already has an estimated annual budget of $9,895 on its OpenCollective account. You is still independently accepting contributions on Patreon to fund his full-time work on the project.

Preact, the other leading contender WordPress core contributors are considering, has had an account on OpenCollective since late 2016. Backers and sponsors have contributed to a $16,091 estimated annual budget for the project.

Both Vue and Preact have growing networks of financial supporters and are not heavily influenced by a single corporation’s interests. WordPress core contributors continue to discuss the merits and drawbacks of the two frameworks on various places around the web, but the discussion is somewhat scattered and it’s difficult for participants to know where their feedback will receive consideration.

“The main options are actually all pretty good, and we’d probably be fine going with any of them, which is makes it a tough decision — objectively and technically there isn’t one clear without-a-doubt winner,” Matt Mullenweg said today in WordPress’ #core-js Slack channel.

An updated post detailing the frameworks and technical considerations that contributors are now examining has yet to be published to the make/wordpress.org development blog. Having communication throughout the process of selecting the framework, instead of announcing it after the decision, would go a long way towards keeping the community informed and involved. We’ll be following the public discussion as it develops.

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9 responses to “Vue Project Launches Community Campaign on OpenCollective”

  1. Of the two (Vue vs Preact), my vote goes for Vue. I mentioned it earlier on Twitter, but I think there’s a good opportunity for WordPress as a brand to throw their weight behind something and make it a powerhouse. Vue’s got a solid (but small) userbase. If they could take Vue and do for the JavaScript world what they did for Blogging with b2/cafelog… the possibilities are endless.

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    • It’s important to remember that ultimately, the library that Gutenberg uses doesn’t change what you can use in your development – Gutenberg wraps the library inside the WordPress element, so none of the underlying library is exposed.

      It’s already possible to write Gutenblocks with mostly vanilla JavaScript, and they’ll soon be entirely framework agnostic. The plugins you write could be based on any library, or none at all.

      For me, at least, the much more interesting part is the library of (again, soon to be framework agnostic) components that Gutenberg is building. This is where the power of modern JavaScript development will make creating new things so much easier and more enjoyable.

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    • Automattic has Just to do what FB did with React; hire You full time and create a Vue dept. with him and some people helping , what’s the problem with that ? Google did it with Guido , MS, apple and FB did it all the time, without give a damm to open source. Problem solved, VUE will grow like a monster and the hole world will be eternal grateful for another great open source tool.

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      • I think this has a lot of potential for a bit further down the road, and I wouldn’t just restrict it to Automattic.

        Three or four years ago, there was very little modern JavaScript development happening in the WordPress world. Over that time, modern JavaScript has been embraced by a bunch of different companies. Product companies like Automattic and Yoast are building all their new things with modern JavaScript, agencies like Human Made and 10up are building all their client sites with modern JavaScript. Over a very short time, the WordPress world has amassed a huge amount of world class JavaScript knowledge and experience.

        The next phase of that is to distill that knowledge back into Core. Take all of the component libraries, workflows, and patterns; and bring them together in a way that gives the entire WordPress world – regardless of whether they’ve managed to find the time to Learn JavaScript Deeply – the opportunity to join in the fun.

        Back to your original question, maybe that will involve creating an “official” WordPress framework, maybe not. Having projects working independently of the major players is an important part of how the wider JavaScript ecosystem evolves, I think WordPress can fit into that ecosystem without needing to build our own thing, or take an existing thing and make it our own.

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    • Should WordPress consider how much influence we’ll have in a project?

      The concept of “influence” seems to have different definitions for different people – some folks are referring to the ability to get the project maintainer to do work for them, some are referring to how well the project accepts contributions. Some are referring to the ability to strongly push the direction of the project, some are referring to how project leadership integrates feedback into the grander visions.

      All of the major JS libraries take on feedback quite well, but I would hesitate to demand that WordPress’ interests are given priority. In some respects, we’re still gaining our feet in the JavaScript world, and framework architecture is a complex topic that we may not necessarily have the full picture on.

      So, to answer your question: yes, it is important that a library be interested in our feedback, but it’s not at all a factor that we be able to push the library in a particular direction.

      Is it a plus that Vue’s creator wants to embrace the community?

      Certainly, these kinds of close ties make it much easier for us to work together, contextually useful feedback is always better than general feedback. That said, I would expect any of the major libraries to be open to creating these ties, I’d love to see involvement from a bunch of different libraries in the framework agnosticism work.

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  4. I think this has a lot of potential for a bit further down the road, and I wouldn’t just restrict it to Automattic.

    That’s what I meant , By what I found You is making crowdfunding to get 10K/month so he can work fukk time in Vue, he’s almost alone there. Now Imagine pay this guy ( more than that obviously) and add some people to just work on Vue. That’s an investment. That’s what FB did with React but we know by far that Automattic wouldn’t act back to the community the same way FB did, so probably Automattic would be investing in another great open project and creating another big monster , so big that React and it’s derivatives could stay with their “intellectual property” that nobody will gonna miss them and they probably will fade away and be swallowed by their ignorance, because this IP clause is just that a big ignorance.

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