The post below was an April Fool’s prank. WordPress 4.0 will be no more a catastrophic rewrite of the platform than previous versions. Keep reading, though, if you’d like some laughs.
WordPress 3.9 won’t even be released for another two weeks, but development has already begun on version 4.0.
And the proposed changes to the platform are incredible!
Reimagining
Following in the footsteps of Drupal, the entire framework of WordPress is going to be rewritten from the ground up. The WordPress you’re used to will still remain – in spirit – but the actual code will be taken back to its roots.
A project is now underway to document the core feature set of WordPress in plain English so it can be rebuilt, from scratch, in the coming months. Originally, the plan was to merely revert to the original 0.71 codebase and work forwards, but that was deemed too-daunting a task.
Instead, we’ll start from a blank canvas and rebuild hooks, APIs, themes, and rewrites anew. Every gripe made on the forums and in Trac about the horrendous spaghetti code WordPress has inherited over a long history (and through its coupling with PHP) has already been tabulated so we can avoid the mistakes of the past.
Polyglots
If you’ve been waiting for WordPress to up its PHP requirement beyond 5.2 so we can use a modern programming language, rejoice! The new version of WordPress, since it’s being entirely rewritten, will be built in a unique subset of the Go programming language.
The subset is merely a custom dialect, pulled together by analyzing the speech patterns and coding habits of hundreds of WordCamp presenters over the past year. The team now knows exactly how WordPress developers write their code, so we’ll be using the new “GoPress” dialect to ease the transition from PHP to the new system.
A few developers have already begun work on a PHP-GoPress transpiler, written entirely in Objective-C so we can further involve the Apple development community.
Database
If you’ve been following my blog, you know I’m keen on the data abstraction layer in WordPress. There’s good news on that front, too!
The new WordPress 4.0 will feature its own fork of the open source MySQL project. The database will be compiled into the project itself, so installing WordPress will finally be even easier than the famous 5-minute install. Early estimates claim we’ll get that down to 3 minutes!
With these exciting new changes on the roadmap, I’m thrilled for the future of WordPress development. What else are you looking forward to with 4.0?