I have been wondering about this for a few days now. What would happen if all WordPress development ceased, and WordPress.org was frozen? No one is in control of the website, and no one is working on the software. Now what?

My general thought was that WordPress development wouldn’t stop. It might actually speed up. People would take actions into their own hands and try to make a difference in the community.

It’s not like the people don’t already hold a large part in the development of WordPress. Over 4,000 plugins have been submitted to the WordPress plugin directory, most of which are user submitted. Only a handful were created by the WordPress team. There are thousands of WordPress themes out there, either free or premium. WordPress, in one way or another, is run by it’s users.

Updates to the core WordPress engine are awesome (I’m actually really looking forward to WordPress 2.8, I’m going to do a series of articles on it when more information is released), but not completely necessary. Or, at least, updates to the core WordPress engine aren’t necessary for a short amount of time. If WordPress were to stop developing for a large amount of time, it might have it’s repercussions. You can’t do everything with plugins, although you can do a lot.

I wonder if people would take up the actual development of WordPress. WordPress is open source, and I’m pretty sure that there are developers that know the code pretty well that aren’t part of the actual WordPress team (remember, the WordPress team is gone!)

This post is pretty out there. It’s one of those random thought posts that I’d like to do more of. If only other people would join in and leave their random thoughts… that would make my life so much easier. :) I know that this wouldn’t happen. The WordPress team is pretty dedicated. It’s just cool to think about these things sometimes (at least I think so).

Tags: WordPress development, WordPress team