We keep it running
There is a lot of noise around WordPress right now, and AI can write a site from a sentence. I am still more hopeful about the project than I have been in years, and this is why.
I am a steward of the open web. The web is for everyone, and access to it is a human right. WordPress exists to democratize publishing.
I think of the project like the space station. The countries that built it agree on little, and it stays in orbit because the crew keeps it running. The people who share the mission of WordPress have their differences, and the mission is still there.
There are many of us. We fix bugs, review patches, test, and ship a release a few times a year, most of us having never met. It is imperfect. Old code is still in there, and the admin shows every generation of design it has been through. Anyone who works on it has a list of things they would change, and mine is long.
Working on it is a privilege. What we owe in return is to keep the code and the openness that lets anyone publish without asking permission, so that both are there when the next shift comes.
If you make your living in WordPress, the next few years are yours to shape. The people who built on WordPress have already lived through the move to mobile, to the block editor, and to headless, and they are still here. Building on WordPress is getting faster. WordPress itself does not need to. The speed on top only works because the ground underneath holds still: a post has an author, a date, a status, revisions, and a rule for who may see it. The decisions about how content and people relate are already made, and any data can be worked into them. I put a court case into WordPress, every filing a post. I put a record into a post. Neither needed a new platform.
Open source is what makes that ground safe to build on. Code is easy to produce now, and trust is not. A community that has maintained the same thing for twenty years has it, and the license means WordPress belongs to that community.
I am going to keep working on it. If you build on WordPress, review one patch this release cycle.
WordPress is not going anywhere. You are allowed to. It will be there when you come back.