There is a line of thinking that goes:
- WordPress is fairly complicated.
- I only need to do something fairly simple.
- Thus, there should be a simpler version of WordPress to do that simple thing.
A WordPress Lite, if you will.
The trouble is, which simple thing do you focus around? In the article linked above, it’s newsletter publishing. I’d wager that wouldn’t be a top contender for a WordPress Lite focus if such a focus was ever considered. Instead, I imagine existing features being cleaved away into plugins. Maybe there is no blog functionality. Just “pages”, no “posts”. Comments are a plugin. RSS is a plugin.
I could also imagine a WordPress Heavy. Custom Post Types are encouraged to be set up immediately. Custom Fields can be easily created and applied to the Custom Post Types. SEO tools built in. Essentially swallow up the 5 most popular plugins and enable them all by default. A full leaning into robust CMS-ness.
Doesn’t feel right though, does it?
A strong/useful base that is extensible by plugins, with development focused on a single product, not fragmented into demographic forks, is the way.
There is so much in the current WordPress core that really should be available as an option add on. The codebase could be drastically simpler, I’ve been toiling with the idea of contributing to a fork with a similar focus to what you describe here.
Funny part is, I would consider basic SEO management and a field manager like ACF to be far more essential than things like Emoji’s, the theme customizer, XFN, XML-RPC, SMTP post creation, application password, and so much more.