In my last video I stated that the Low-Code/No-Code revolution (for website development) has exploded in the WordPress world. That’s because one of the essential ingredients for a robust Low-Code/No-Code environment—is a large ecosystem of third party developers who extend Low-Code/No-Code capabilities. And understandably, a massive potential customer base motivates plugin developers.
WordPress powers over 30 million websites (according to BuiltWith data) accounting for over 43% of all websites in the world, and over 63% of all websites that use a content management system. With such an overwhelming reach, and because they are an open-source platform, if you’re a plugin developer, what other platform would you want to develop for? Nothing is close to the WordPress marketplace.
So let’s dive into the history of WordPress and how it became such a behemoth and why the Low-Code/No-Code revolution has thrived in the WordPress environment.
WordPress was first released as a simple blogging platform way back in 2003. Back then all it did was publish blog posts, and a WordPress home page consisted of a list of those serialized posts. That’s it. A couple of years later in 2005 WordPress added the ability to create stand alone “Pages,” in addition to blog posts, which was the beginning of its transformation into a true Content Management System.
But it wasn’t until 2010 that they introduced the ability to create your own custom post types. So you could have Posts and Pages, and any other kind of custom content you might need. And in 2011 they released WooCommerce, a robust eCommerce platform specifically built for WordPress. Also in 2011 a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields made it really easy to add any custom fields you need to any custom post types.
So by 2011 WordPress had transformed from a simple blogging platform into a full featured CMS. WordPress was so robust at this point that the New York Times, CNN, and Forbes all adopted it as their primary website CMS.
While WordPress’s core capabilities were in place as early as 2010, in order to build custom post types and custom fields and then display them on the front end of a website you had to rely on website developers who could code in PHP, and build front ends with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
And things pretty much stayed that way until 2018 when some of the Page Builder platforms that have been popular addons to WordPress started to add custom theme development to their already robust page content tools.
But let’s back up a bit and define what we mean by theme building.
Every WordPress site requires a theme. There are thousands of pre-structured and pre-designed themes available for WordPress. Every theme provides a few core elements that define the structure, design, and functionality for the main parts of every WordPress site. For example, every WordPress site has a header section, a footer section, and structured layouts for Pages and Posts. As well as other theme parts that provide custom layouts for displaying search results, viewing category archives, and displaying 404 messages when visitors land on URLs that don’t exist.
And again, until 2018 the only way to modify these theme parts was to write PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
But when page building platforms extended their Low-Code/No-Code tools to also design and customize theme parts, that was the game changer! What’s more they also added tools to dynamically connect their robust library of page building content elements to Advanced Custom Fields made possible by ACF.
Among the PageBuilders that were releasing these game changing tools was a company called Elementor. And while Elementor has competitors like Divi, Beaver Builder, and Bricks, Elementor made the brilliant move of following the WordPress play book by making the free version of their plugin open source. This invited all manner of additional third party developers to start offering addons not just to WordPress but to Elementor itself. As a result Elementor has become to Page and Theme Building platforms what WordPress is to the CMS market.
If WordPress is the biggest planet in the CMS solar system, Elementor is its largest moon. And to stretch the analogy, this moon is so large it has a host of third party satellites developing add-ons that orbit Elementor.
With this combined set of dominant open source tools, the already vast market of additional plugin developers have been rapidly adopting and extending both WordPress and Elementor which has only further accelerated their growth and capabilities. And all these tools can be deployed without reliance on expensive and hard to access programmers.
Next time I’m going to do a flyover of all sorts of WordPress plugins and frameworks that extend the functionality of WordPress and that have also jumped on the Low-Code/No-Code bandwagon by adding Elementor integrations into their specialized products.
So, until then.
Viva la Revolución!
