WordPress powers about 25 percent of all websites on the Internet, including this blog. It’s just made a major change to its code.
The popular content management software was originally written in PHP, a popular web programming language that’s been around since the mid-90s. Much of the WordPress application is still in PHP, but the newest version of the admin interface – that is, where you log in to write posts and manage your sites – is now written in JavaScript.
JavaScript has also been around since the 90s, but it allows for a greater degree of interactivity since it offloads much of the processing to the user’s web browser on their own computer, rather than sending so many requests back to the server.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, dubbed their new admin interface Calypso. It’s available as an open-source project on GitHub, so if you’re technically minded, you can go check it out.
The new admin panel also has options to manage your WordPress sites through an OS X desktop application.
Enjoy the updated WordPress admin panel!
By Sharon Campbell