WordPress 3.0

suggestion for helping democratize wordpress.

Building a site has become so much easier with the help of things like wordpress. I feel there is a need to allow people to build their site with wordpress as easily as creating a Facebook or MySpace profile.

Short of a mass-market ready version of wordpress, the very nature of using wordpress will keep the vast majority of people out and hence limit the growth of wordpress.

My suggestion is two-fold:

1. Assume that if people choose wordpress, they want to use wordpress to build their site (express themselves).

2. Create a link (an interface) between the front end that the user sees who is building their site and the back end

Explaining my suggestions:

1.
A. Sort of like signing up for Gmail, define your users to be people with the computer literacy of our parent’s generation.
B. Can you customise the layout of the page with a visual editor? Like using Word, where text and pictures can be visually composed together for print media, it is essential that the elements (text, pictures, music/sound, video) of a wordpress page be wholly visually manipulated.
C. Content should be pre-filled. Similar to how there is one post and one comment and one category on a fresh installation of wordpress, it would be disappointing for a first-time user to go through the installation process to find a screen that’s almost blank.

2.
A. There is huge value in how easy it is to update the look of a wordpress site through the style.css file. The main job of the interface between the visual editor people use to create their site (1.B) and the various files that compose a wordpress site (index.php, style.css, etc… ) is to keep up with the development of the back end of wordpress.
B. The back end of wordpress is those files (index.php, style.css, etc… ).

We will need some very smart code to take the genius of the current setup and make it widely accessible.

If people can’t create what they want in wordpress, they won’t use it. Because we first create, then we use.

WordPress has democratized self expression by allowing people to publish. Now wordpress can democratize the creation of sites that facilitate self-expression, so that both what is seen (site creation) and what is said (content publication) is a reflection of the user.

WordPress – self expression