Dancing to a Calypso Beat

Sidenote: I wrote this article two months back, at WordCamp US, and am only now getting around to posting it. Sorry for the delay.

A few months ago, the culmination of nearly two years of internal work was open-sourced to the world. A new WordPress admin interface built by Automattic on top of Javascript technologies like Node.js and React, codenamed Calypso.

A lot of folks got excited and a few got scared. Some folks got a bit confused. But I haven’t heard many folks drawing the parallel and writing the explanation that I’ve cobbled together, so here’s my take on it:

For a while now, there’s been a variety of WordPress apps — iOS, Android, and some defunct ones for Blackberry, Windows Phone, WebOS, and the like. They all interact with WordPress via the existing XML-RPC API. They’re not really extensible for plugins — if someone installs “The Events Calendar,” events don’t start showing up in the app as they would in your traditionally PHP-generated WordPress Admin UI.

Calypso currently mirrors those mobile apps more than anything else, just shifted to a wholly different space. Instead of using the legacy XML-RPC API, which is meant primarily as a way to publish content and has a host of issues (sending user passwords in plaintext with every request, for one), it uses a REST API with far better authentication. Instead of running on mobile devices, it runs either in your web browser at WordPress.com or encapsulated in a Desktop app. But at its core, it’s a self-contained administrative application for WordPress sites.

I feel that the biggest win in releasing the Calypso interface, though, is that it can remedy a situation that’s festered for some time now. The current WordPress mobile apps are maintained by a crew of mobile developers that work for Automattic.

Development happens in the open, and community contributions are welcomed, but they are comparatively few and far between — largely due to the fact that the majority of folks who are really passionate about WordPress are primarily familiar with the languages that WordPress is written in — PHP, CSS, Javascript, MySQL, etc. Very few have much interest in leaping into App development. Likewise, most mobile developers have their own set of problems that they are passionate about solving, and volunteering their free time to build and maintain an administrative app for WordPress would ordinarily be low on their list of priorities.

So, it falls to someone to find and hire Mobile developers to maintain the assorted WordPress mobile apps.

With the release of Calypso, though, there is a bit of a paradigm shift. Calypso, being written in Javascript, is already in the skill set of many of the folks who are already passionate about building the core software, as well as those that leverage WordPress to build sites.

This, I think, will mean a significant renaissance of community interest in API-driven apps for maintaining a WordPress site. I also predict that we’ll see a lot of folks passionate about WordPress forking Calypso and tweaking it to make customized apps and distributions for specific clients and use cases — which will only expand further once REST API endpoints ship in WordPress Core, and Calypso migrates to use those, instead of the WordPress.com REST API.