WordPress is changing, fast, and I’m happy about it. But I have needs that aren’t necessarily those of the community! (spoiler alert multilangue)

After that first experience with the community at WCasia, my view of WordPress changed.

My questions run deep, and Noel Tock’s opening words still ring true. Will WP be able to transform itself sufficiently to become the platform of tomorrow?

As Matt explained at WordCamp Asia, the block editor is a long-term project. It will improve and enable the platform to grow.

For my use, and from my point of view. Major improvements are needed in these 3 areas in the short to medium term:

Multilingual

Probably the trickiest for me. Being Swiss, 80% of my projects are multilingual.

Being French-speaking, if I want to be read/understood by a wider part of the community, my content must also be available in English.

A few days ago, I tried to translate a site using twentytwentyfour with WPML. The editor templates don’t follow; and like everything else with multilingualism, it’s ultra-chronophonous to test, open, return to the editor again and again and again. The WPML solution, which I believe is the most widespread, has always been a source of infinite frustration. Polylang improves the situation somewhat, but not very happily.

There’s always weglot and Google Translate, but one is expensive and the other lacks flexibility when it comes to writing content.

The first thing that strikes you about WCasia is its diversity. So one wonders why the platform itself does not yet reflect this richness.

However, it would appear that the goal is not for tomorrow… but rather in a few years’ time…

It’s an ambitious challenge, both technically and ergonomically. With the arrival of AI, language barriers are falling. It’s time for WordPress to help make our content available to everyone.

Global vs Local

Site-wide changes, “character paragraph styles” for graphic designers, spacing and basic block styles should be clearly separated in a section that would also be useful for onboarding.

Knowing that you’re changing a “site style” or “content style” without question. It’s a question of nomenclature and UX. For the moment, even for an experienced user, the interface is meandering and doesn’t bring a gain in productivity and enjoyment over hybrid themes.

The developer experience

I’m one of those graphic designers who have developed programming skills. I’m not an engineer, but I can produce relatively clean custom plugins/themes.

I need the future of WordPress to listen to me too. I need to be able to simply and with pleasure (developper exprience!) intervene on my sites with the tools I’ve chosen (in this case, I’m thinking very strongly of tailwind). This includes creating blocks, managing complex templates in my editor and synchronizing them with the site editor.

For the moment, block themes are not yet accessible to me. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but I’m continuing on my “hybrid theme” path. But I’m looking forward to taking the plunge soon!