WordPress and Node.js
Any views on the rumored porting of WordPress to Node.js?
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Tony Scott
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Any views on the rumored porting of WordPress to Node.js?
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Jack Lenox, 
javorszky 1102 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
“rumour”, “trusted source”, “no joke” => trolling.
Also, I would be very surprised if that happened. WordPress is very big on backwards compatibility, so stuff like “this won’t work in the new version any more” is a big thing, and WP is deprecating stuff through a couple of major versions any way. Telling people “oh, your host isn’t going to be able to host your site any more because we got rid of the fundamental thing and replaced with something else” is… insane. There might be a fork/version of WordPress that might be implemented in nodejs, but moving it and ditching PHP will just not happen. Fact. (because common sense, people)
milesg 1131 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree with javorszky, are they going to port all the plugins and themes as well? If not, a huge part of the WordPress USP is gone.
treb0r 1255 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I would be surprised if they ditched PHP entirely. I think it’s more likely that they will gradually transistion key parts of WP to node.js, but only the parts that make sense.
Late last year I took the collections theme for a whirl – that is built with a lot of backbone.js and I have to admit that it gave WordPress a much more ‘App’ like feel when using it on a smartphone.
javorszky 1257 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
php and nodejs do not, and can not work together without having to entirely different web servers on different ports. Sharding an application into two is just a really really bad idea from an architectural point of view.
treb0r 1322 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Well, I read an interview with Matt Mullenweg disucssing the future of WP and he predicted that “90% of WordPress will be JavaScript-based within the next few years”. He doesn’t mention node specifically, but that’s what I took from what he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/future-only-five-computers-says-matt-mullenweg-144502972.html
javorszky 1324 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Yes. Backbone is javascript (and is included in the scripts). Think of WordPress as a data store and an API for the data. The presentation could be done ENTIRELY in javascript using backbone + views and whatnot, templating could be done via handlebars, or your choice of templating language. The server logic would still be php, the datastore would still be mysql.
treb0r 1337 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Indeed. So there we have it. I would expect something similar to what you describe. Maybe somebody else is getting their backbone confused with their node ;-)
Ian Anderson Gray 1825 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I kind of panic when I hear these kinds of rumours. I’ve been developing in PHP for the past 10 years and having to relearn everything in a different language gives me the shivers. I would agree with @treb0r that certain bits might be done in node js but not a full transition.
I don’t like the sound of “90% of WordPress will be JavaScript-based within the next few years” either. I assume this isn’t client side Javascript?! Client side javascript kills accessibility and what happens when you have NoScript installed?
Tony Scott 2037 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Ian – you’ll be relieved to hear that Node.js is deployed on the server.
Ian Anderson Gray 2054 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Good! I’ve played with Node.js before with the likes of Grunt. I think it’s important to distimguish between server and client side JavaScript. Saying that WordPress is going to be 90% JavaScript makes me want to scream otherwise!
Terminal Pixel 2045 on Monday 17 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree that it’s not exactly likely with the huge PHP ecosystem surrounding WordPress but I think at some point it will get to the stage where the benefits of rewriting the whole thing from scratch outweigh continuing to modify WordPress to get it to do something it was not originally designed to do.
Tony Scott 2226 on Thursday 20 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
For those who want a brief introduction to Node.js: Migrating from PHP to Node.js.
nathansmonk 1533 on Wednesday 26 March 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
My gut feeling is that the web is moving this way in general. I welcome it. PHP based on apache reaches a ceiling pretty quickly.
nathansmonk 1604 on Friday 19 September 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I actually asked Mike Little about this very topic at a WordCamp in Sheffield, UK – he said there are no plans to do this whatsoever – sorry guys.
Jack Lenox 1649 on Friday 19 September 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think there’s a slight misunderstanding here. As I understand it, Matt is referring to the user-facing side of WordPress. It’s already possible to build themes and plugins that are mostly JS and the introduction of features like the REST API will make this even easier. More and more of wp-admin is using JS extensively (the media manager, themes experience, plugins experience etc.)
So in that sense, it’s very plausible that WordPress could be 90% JavaScript-based in five years’ time.