Web Development is trending good and bad. Bad is Facebook, Twitter and Google – the top three secret personal-data harvesters who are also shucking their duty to patrol what they allow to be “advertised”/published on their systems. The good is that Web Development continues to change and mature at an exponential pace – no more so than in WordPress. Over the past 2 years, WordPress has seen a number of major trends that will come to peak in the second half of 2018. Here are 3 of the biggest ones:
- The launch of Gutenberg Visual Editor with its reusable JavaScript blocks will see WordPress become JavaScript primarily by the end of the year.
- Expect to see the WP RestAPI used to establish major direct connections and interactions with popular Enterprise Applications.
- Watch WordPress to continue to lead the way towards handling the EU’s GDPR and Cookie Policy privacy regulations.WordPress will continue to add more core commands, plugins and 3rd party tools and plugins to address these pressing data privacy and protection issues worldwide.
With WordPress being used on 31.1% of the Worlds top 10million websites, it also shapes Web trends and usage profoundly especially given the emergence of DIY WordPress PageBuilders that have become overall SiteBuilders and Theme Designers. So this review will try to put some background material on the major WordPress trends to look for to the year end 2018.
10 Major Web & WordPress Trends
1)Rate of change of technology is accelerating and effecting business processes , web practices, and social interactions. Welcome to the World of Exponential Change Everywhere.
….Technology Review sees 8 key trends spurring exponential growth across business technologies
….Forbes – Workplace Changes Are Accelerating Feb 2018 as organizations are forced to adapt more quickly to protect their customers & markets
….DataFloq – The Top 7 IT Technology Trends for 2018 sees AI, Edge Computing, and Breakthrough Encryption being enablers of exponential change
….Active Wizards – The Top 10 Technology Trends of 2018
….Clockwise – 2018 Web Trends include Push Notification, Animotion, Progressive Web Apps, Customer Help & Chat Support
2)The Web has become an increasingly dangerous place in the past 5 years due to a potent combo of state supported and criminal hackers
….Forbes sees a total cost of Cybercrime amounting to $6 trillion/year. This huge amount is broken into 3 components: direct loss and payments, which in amounting to $450B in 2017; the second cost is lost business as 40% of breached companies see a decline or go out of business and the third cost is lost wealth to customers/clients who are subject to subsequent cyber attacks.
….IRTC saw data breaches in North America occurring mostly for business [50%] plus incurring the largest numbers of lost data.
….Barkly Blog describes the growth and changing attack vectors used in cyberattacks for 2017-2018
….Wired underlines the continuing onslaught of hack attacks in 2017 with the even more malicious ransomware attacks on governments, corporates and even small businesses.
….Cisco’s 2018 Annual Cyber Security Report cites 65% of emails are spam, 8% 0f spam emails are malicious, 40% of malicious files are in zip format…
3)New Emphasis on Security, Data Privacy and Operational Integrity due to above trends has Europe leading the way to better controls. The result is 1/2 year or more of added administrative concerns for large organizations. Even small businesses will find security and privacy tasks more pressing.
….Silicon.uk European Watchdogs To Tackle Social Media Data Harvesting
….EU GDPR and Cookie Policy emphasize data protection as much as data privacy improvements. But the reforms have wide reach as any website in the world serving EU citizens has to conform to new, tougher EU data protection and data privacy regulations.
….Cryptography Tool Chest and race to keep the crypto-chest full of effective tools.
….WordPress plays positive role in GDPR rollout for small to medium business websites worldwide.
4)With the arrival of Gutenberg WordPress switches from PHP to JavaScript primarily code base. This means WordPress developers will have to become much more proficient in JavaScript tools beyond traditional WP jQuery, Backbone, etc.
….Gutenberg Handbook strangely does not acknowledge its JavaScript and React.js primarily coding roots for WP visual editing.
….Calypso Handbook in contrast to Gutenberg describe the complete JavaScript codebase for WordPress.com’s backend admin operations.
….JetPack and WooCommerce are still PHP codebase though they use chunks of JavaScript.
….Javascript has achieved ascendancy in Web development as well as WordPress development.
….How Gutenberg is Shaking WordPress UI Foundations but Gutenberg still lags well behind the topend WordPress PageBuilders.
….Two PageBuilder Vendors, Visual Composer and SiteOrigin provide the ability to incorporate Gutenberg blocks in their editors.
5)Meanwhile MultiLayout Themes combined with topend PageBuilders have become WordPress SiteBuilders.
….Here is the story of how MultiPurpose, Multilayout Themes combined with topend PageBuilders became WP Theme Designers
6)WordPress backend is undergoing major changes as hosting providers go to the Cloud to provide better security, speed, & integrity
….Two Cloud hosting Pioneers, Kinsta and WPEngine are the pioneers, but a wide range of shared hosting providers are becoming Cloud hosts. The claimed Cloud advantages are better security against DDOS and other hack attacks, better automated backup and update to themes and plugins, improved uptime plus response time improvements.
….Lurking in the shadows is Calypso which is the backend for WordPress.com but has been extended to “know” about users WordPress.org websites as well. How will Calypso impact WP core backend operations?
7)Will SEO and Conversion tools contribute to the uglification of WordPress websites. Let us count the potential ways but also be careful because everyone of these “free” plugins may incur GDPR and Cookie policy costs.
….7 Best Lightbox plugins for displaying banner ads or Calls to Action
….11Best Opt-in Plugins for creating popup or slide in mailing form or special sales offers
….9 Best Chatbots for converting casual scanners to customers
….5 Best Push Notification plugins and app services
….11 Best Social Media icon plugins.
….9 Best Related Posts and Sponsored Readings plugins
…. 3Tooltip and Popout plugins for a variety of getting notice ads
8)Just as the Rest API emerges as a major WP player with Calypso and Gutenberg, GraphQL is gaining adherents including React.js users
….Moesif describes the progression and trade-offs from SOAP/COrba thrus Rest API to GraphQL.
….How to GraphQL explains the comparison to the Rest API and all the various workings of GraphQL
….Pusher provides a Rest vs GraphQL overview plus demos of good GraphQL tools
9)Emergence of Hero Slider creation tools as superior landing page creation tools
….Slider Revolution brings hero images with addon images, type, and objects that appear and disappear
….Smart Slider 3 builds a great variety of sliders including Hero Image/Video sliders with menus and overlapping elements
10)Just as PageBuilders are becoming SiteBuilders so are themes transforming into SiteBuilders too. Here are three.
….Astra is free with full multilayout features but its pro versions ads templates and Elementor and Beaver Builder features
….The7 Theme has good multilayout capaibilities plus Visual Composer + Ultimate Addons plugins
….XTheme has basic multi-layout features plus a choice of 2 PageBuilders, 4 Sliders, and 2 gallery plugins all free
11)As we have seen above AI is beginning to permeate the Web development scene; now there are WP plugins for AI
….11 AI based WordPress plugins devoted to a wide range of tasks
Finally, in case you had any doubts about the ascendancy of mobile development and JavaScript, check out this educated view on 2018 Web Development trend:
In sum, the next 6 months will be most interesting as WordPress goes through a major upgrade cycle with Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0. It will be interesting to see how well the feature rich MultiLayout Themes and top end PageBuilders adapt to Gutenberg and its React.js blocks. More relevant details should be forthcoming in about 3 months time.
Summary
There is no doubt that exponential change is roaring through society. And it is inevitable science and technology progress not at a snails pace but with exponential improvements in just about every field of business and endeavour. Indeed, the task for society as well as the smaller field of web development is coping with an exponentially changing landscape.
Resources
Wedevs – WordPress Change trends 2018