How will these changes at Wordpress.com affect your design business?

[delstu]

WordPress.com has been completely stripped down and rebuilt in JavaScript and API calls – and now it’s all open-source.

From an article at WordPress.com just got relaunched, now it's open source and there's a desktop app - TechSpot

Are these big changes or negligible?

[brandMatt]

The most important thing to note is the article refers to 'wordpress.com', i don't think it applies to the stand alone wp cms, though I could be wrong.

[TheGAME1264]

The more I read it, the less I understand of what I'm reading; and the less I understand the happier I am that I avoided the whole W*rdPr*ss platform in the first place as much as humanly possible.

If I'm reading this correctly, and I really hope I'm not reading it correctly, it appears that the entire WP admin backend will be hosted on wordpress.com regardless of whether or not people self host their blogs. If that's the case, that has the potential to be a very bad idea for a few reasons:

1) Lack of control of access to data. WP potentially has access to millions of blogs by doing this.

2) Custom admin mods. People presumably won't be able to FTP mods to the WP admin, and I can't see how Git would allow them to do that.

3) "Built purely with Javascript and REST API calls." The API calls require PHP (or any other server-side language) for obvious security reasons (i.e. authentication tokens can't be passed through Javascript), so this makes no sense at all.

4) "Fully multi-site for advanced users, so you can manage hundreds of WordPresses from one place." I read this, and all I read is "SPLOGS! SO MANY MORE SPLOGS!"

I may be off base on this as well, and it's entirely possible; Automattic has done a horrible job of explaining whatever it is they're doing. But man, if there's ever a standalone reason for people to learn to code their own stuff, this may very well be it.

[brandMatt]

I don't think the changes apply to the stand alone version of wp, I think it only applies to the wordpress.com blogs. Regardless the 3rd and 4th comments on that linked article are complete BS.
Game, you are right, there is no way to have a completely secure login system using only client code. Even more disappointing is the lack of windows or linux stand alone desktop admin apps. I may be on a mac, but far from every developer uses one. This is right up there with apple deciding to not provide swift dev support to windows.

[TheGAME1264]

That's just it...according to Matt Mullenweg, it is.

Dance to Calypso | Matt Mullenweg

Mind you, this is part of the reason I say that they've done a horrible job of explaining what it is that they're actually doing. You and I are two intelligent people and are interpreting this in two completely different ways.