WordPress.com has Studio, a native app for running WordPress locally, and GitHub Deployments Chr

(For clarity, this isnt sponsored, even though Automattic did sponsor me in the past for quite a long time. I just find it fascinating following the products they put out.) For a long time, the message and branding for WordPress.com was this is the one you use if you want to use WordPress but dont

(For clarity, this isn’t sponsored, even though Automattic did sponsor me in the past for quite a long time. I just find it fascinating following the products they put out.)

For a long time, the message and branding for WordPress.com was “this is the one you use if you want to use WordPress but don’t need or want to do any custom development”. It’s got all the guard rails. You aren’t touching the code or doing anything bespoke, but the tradeoff is that you aren’t going to get hacked, lose data, worry about speed problems or accessibility problems, etc, because it’s all handled for you. And because you’re so with-the-grain, you can even change themes regularly because they are all built to handle your white-bread setup.

That’s the old story though.

Things are very different these days. If you pay for the Creator plan or higher ($300/year), you have SFTP/SSH access and you have direct database access. That’s been a couple years now it feels like. This means you can install your own themes, plugins, etc. Totally changes the story on what you can do with a WordPress site on WordPress.com. It’s essentially a premium WordPress host now, as it’s rather expensive for a single site.

I got a demo yesterday from some nice Automattic employees showcasing some of the new development features on WordPress.com. There were two things I had no idea they were doing:

  • You can now deploy from GitHub
  • They now offer an app, Studio, for running your sites locally.

    • If I was leading developer features at WordPress.com this is 100% exactly what I would have done. It’s bananas to me how WordPress has become as dominant as it has without any real solid answer or help on how to run it locally. This is the answer to that and a real shot across the bow of Local (e.g. WP Engine, now).

    And the GitHub Deployment is just crucial. With few exceptions, I feel like websites should be deployed from a code repository, and Git/GitHub being the currently dominant players there this just makes sense. You may remember I’ve been incredulous about this in the past.

    So now you can still use WordPress.com entirely with all the guardrails, or you can take them off and do whatever you want. Smart — although it’s weird to watch Automattic fight itself over hosting. The Pressable slogan essentially becomes “it’s not as nice but it’s three times cheaper.”

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