Earlier today, @davew published a blog post titled WordPress and me. He talked about WordLand, his focused and fast editor for writers and bloggers. Through developing the editor, he’s discovered WordPress again.
WordPress as the OS of the open social web
I think WordPress has all that’s needed to be the OS of the open social web. We needed it and it’s always been there, and I saw something that I want to show everyone else, that the web can grow from here, we should build on everything that the WordPress community has created. It’s a lot stronger foundation that the other candidates for the basic needs of the open social web, imho.
I’ve been following Dave’s work with WordLand for the past few months, and it’s been really nice and encouraging to see him work on a product that aligns with my values. And now, Dave will get to present his tool and his ideas to others in the WordPress community! He will be talking at WordCamp Canada in October.
It should come as no surprise that someone so involved with some of the key concepts of the Open Web, like RSS, values ideals of openness and giving writers control over their content. WordLand’s approach to « what you see is what you get » is something that aligns so well with WordPress’ own ideals. It clashes with walled gardens like Twitter or Bluesky where you’re limited in length, format, content, and where you ultimately do not own your writing. It’s super motivating and empowering when someone newer to the WordPress ecosystem recognizes those shared values and the power of the platform.
Rediscovering WordPress
In his post, Dave talked about his journey of rediscovering WordPress through a new lens. The WordPress.com REST API, its endpoints and its authentication layer, gave him the tools to build the editor he needed, while still benefiting from everything the WordPress community has created in the past 22 years.
This is also what we had in mind when Automattic released Calypso 10 years ago:
Calypso is…
- Incredibly fast. It’ll charm you.
- Written purely in JavaScript, leveraging libraries like Node and React.
- 100% API-powered. Those APIs are open, and now available to every developer in the world.
Calypso and its underlying API paved the way for the first REST API endpoints that made it to WordPress itself a year later. That API then became a cornerstone of the Gutenberg project:
WordPress has always been about the user experience, and that needs to continue to evolve under newer demands. Gutenberg is an attempt at fundamentally addressing those needs, based on the idea of content blocks. It’s an attempt to improve how users interact with their content in a fundamentally visual way, while at the same time giving developers the tools to create more fulfilling experiences for the people they are helping.
WordPress.com REST API vs. WordPress REST API
On a more technical note, the folks more familiar with WordPress will wonder why WordLand uses the WordPress.com REST API, and not the core WordPress REST API.
Dave chose to use the WordPress.com API for WordLand — and that makes perfect sense for the goals of the project. It provides built-in authentication and opinionated endpoints that would otherwise need to be built on top of the core REST API, and would need to be shipped to every site that wants to use the WordLand editor. That’s simply not what WordLand was designed to do.
Perhaps more importantly, the WordPress.com REST API is just one of the many ways to interact with WordPress. That’s the beauty of WordPress: it’s open and flexible, allowing different tools and solutions to thrive. In this case, it’s nice to see how WordLand, WordPress, and WordPress.com came together to empower writers, each bringing their own strengths to the table. It’s a great example of how open tools and platforms can work hand-in-hand to create something truly special.
It’s always exciting to see new tools emerge from old foundations — and even more so when they help bring us closer to the open web we want to build. Funny enough, the WordPress.com REST API still relies on XML-RPC — a technology built by Dave 27 years ago 🙂
Go write something!
If you haven’t tried WordLand yet, go give it a try! All you need is a WordPress site, either hosted on WordPress.com or running the Jetpack plugin.
