In WordPress, there is an ongoing debate about whether AI should be integrated into the core ecosystem or remain as a plugin. This ongoing discussion will be featured as the first chapter on WPTavern, initiating a dialogue on the potential of AI within WordPress.
Plugin or Core Integration
While the AI within WordPress is not a part of its core, the consensus seems to be that an ecosystem can always provide value that any individual proprietary API could lack. This method sees the inclusion of AI as overloading the core development team, which could interfere with their ongoing projects.
Matt Cromwell shared his concerns about overloading the WordPress roadmap with additional AI features. He emphasized that integrating AI could potentially divert attention from existing crucial projects. However, he acknowledged that initiating a discussion about AI was a positive step to ensure WordPress remains pertinent in the rapidly evolving technology landscape.
Diagnostic AI Co-pilot
The idea of a diagnostic AI co-pilot, as suggested by Sujee, is a very promising application for an ML approach. AI could become instrumental in maintaining WordPress sites, as Ollie Jones mentioned. A good example for AI would be its ability to analyze conflicts with plugins and provide possible solutions. It could even temporarily pause and block problematic parts of the code to keep the site running while alerting an administrator to the issue.
Sujee has also expressed that this type of AI assistance for daily publishing and development tasks would be extremely useful to her. The roles would be enhanced and made more efficient without risking human jobs, aligning with AI serving as an assistant.
The Current Phase and Future Plans of WordPress
WordPress is now at the phase two stage of a four-phase project. Stage three, Collaboration: Live and asynchronous collaboration, along with publishing flows, aims to improve processing timelines. All the new functionalities are designed to enhance team-based customization, draft sharing, annotation, and boost editorial workflows.
- Real-time Collaboration
WordPress Phase 3 Real-time Collaboration Tools: The first improvement on the way is real-time collaboration inside WordPress. This requires the building of a user interface and infrastructure that allows, for example, different team members to customize different parts of the website simultaneously. If implemented as Sujee advocates, this should boost productivity significantly for teams maintaining WordPress sites.
- Asynchronous Collaboration
Ask any team about success in phase three, and they will cite asynchronous collaboration as a key focus for improvement. In addition to enabling team members to work on content at different times, this feature allows team members to share drafts, comments, and annotations. The outcome is that distributed, collaboratively working teams, like Sujee's team, naturally find that content writing becomes faster as it aligns with their workflow.
- Publishing Flows
Phase three also includes work on improving publishing flows. This involves incorporating guidelines such as instructions, objectives, and other steps into the content creation process. According to Sujee, this structured approach helps in maintaining the quality and consistency across different types of content that are published.
WordPress Keeping Up With AI
This is an amazing part where WordPress proactively discusses AI integration. As Sujee notes, innovation is crucial to keep WordPress competitive with new technologies and platforms. These discussions are just the tip of the iceberg, with many more projects that were once mere like WordPress.
In the end, it is a precondition for future-proofing and therefore welcome that WordPress deals with AI integration. For now, at least, thinking about AI as a plugin will enable WordPress to keep growing without putting an unbearable load on its development team. By continuing the conversation and accepting discussions about how we might apply AI into future versions of WordPress (as Sujee suggests), they can still continue to lead as a content manager.
