WordPress is changing.

I love WordPress. The excitement of the famous 5-minute install. The thrill of contributing to core. The freedoms and philosophy. The huge, generous, welcoming, diverse community.

Maybe, like me, you've built a business on WordPress? It's a great CMS. It takes care of so much for you. And I'm so grateful for it.

But the direction of WordPress isn't what it used to be.

Earlier talk of "the operating system of the web" has been replaced by a focus on using blocks to build pages, themes and even entire sites. Which is awesome for people who want to build those things.

And it makes total sense. WordPress has a clear product direction and a great future as a tool for website building. There's brilliant stuff happening with WordPress. I still love it for for creating websites and blogs. And you should too.

But back-end developers who want to build apps and process more complex data are left out of this plan. Where is the fields API? Post relationships? Dependency management? Modern PHP development practices?

Yes, you can shoe-horn these things in to WordPress, but does it feel right? Doesn't it feel like there should be a better way sometimes?

If, like me, WordPress development sometimes feels like a chore rather than a joy, you're not alone.

But there's good news - just over the horizon is a world of modern PHP development: advanced frameworks; new tools; useful open source projects and packages; huge communities of amazing people; and many awesome learning resources. There's lots of inspiring and creative work happening and being shared.

I've been exploring the Laravel framework and the ecosystem around it for several years. Looking beyond the WordPress community has made me a better developer, upgraded my tooling and process, and opened up new opportunities.

And Beyond WP is my attempt to build a bridge to help you do the same.

Even if you want to keep working with WordPress, seeing what's going on elsewhere will make you a better WordPress developer.

I'll share learning resources and development tools, introduce people, and help you get started in the community.

I'll start with sharing stuff from the Laravel world, because that's what I know. But if Beyond WP takes off, maybe I'll start building bridges to other tech communities too.

Don't just peer at the horizon wondering what else is out there. Take a step forward. Find out what lies Beyond WP .