2022 probably marks my 8 or 9 year anniversary of playing with WordPress.
The beauty of this technology is its wide spectrum of users and usability: WordPress was made to make building websites easy, but time has only reinforced its abilities. Today this is a foundational block of the web, with about 40% of the web being powered by it.
You may think it’s only useful to build blogs or simple websites, but the truth is different. WordPress is a technology that’s capable of much more. While many developers snub it, many others build exciting projects that are more like complex web apps than simple and static websites.
The simple possibility to develop themes and plugins lets you have control over the structure, style, functions and features of what you develop. In short: the ability of making a website in a simple yet inefficient way doesn’t mean you necessarily have to go down this route.
That said, WordPress benefits from a huge community of highly competent people that make super efficient and performant solutions you can implement in your project. I simply view this as using a library in a classic web development project.
There are also tons of different ideas on how to suit WordPress to custom and demanding needs, like decoupling the frontend and backend and using it as a headless CMS (like Strapi, Contentful or Sanity).
For highly interactive, complex and financed solutions, I would still use different tools, but the truth is WordPress has an insanely huge market, mainly made up of small-to-medium (quite big) sized companies and professionals. Coming up with cool and innovative ideas to mold this technology to create advanced platforms and solutions is both a fun and profitable choice.
I also hope that with time more modular and flexible features will come out, like WP-based libraries, frameworks and APIs. That would really enhance the development experience and make it possible and finally convenient to build complex apps with WordPress.