Calypso: Write Once…

One thing that hasn’t been discussed much in today’s coverage of the new WordPress.com and the WordPress.com Mac app is how incredibly easy it is to port something from one interface to another—something new for the WordPress world.

Calypso, the codename for the new WordPress.com interface, had 140+ developers working on it. Constant changes, commits, reviews, and more. Before preparing a public repo for all development this moment forward, the pre-OSS repo has over 26,000 commits. 26,000!

They built a pretty darn cool app. Sure, I’m old-school and still wear my wp-admin t-shirt with pride, but the new WordPress.com is pretty darn cool. It took an incredible amount of work to develop the API endpoints needed, the infrastructure, and the devil-in-the-details bits to create the new experience. Not to mention all of the testing, design work, and everything else that went into making the new WordPress.com.

The Desktop repo has about 500 commits. 350 of them are from two developers working on it since mid-summer. This is total for all three platforms (Mac, Windows, and Linux).

The web interface has been the focus. This isn’t like the mobile apps, which are great and are native, but also require dedicated development efforts separate from core WordPress and browser-(and desktop-)based WordPress.com.

If I’m developing some cool new interactive experience on top of WordPress and (either) REST API, I can learn from Calypso to see how they do it, launch it on the web and, without duplicating any development efforts, as a desktop app at the same time.

This is a very practical example of the new world awaiting WordPress.