I agree… and then I disagree.
I hear it not the first time, that “all CP does is back porting WP code”. And, you say it yourself:
Customers of mines are very reluctant to use CP for now, just because they need custom plugins and themes developed not to rely on WP’s ones, and they think that if they have to use those and know they are going to cause issues, it’s better something different entirely, like Wix.
The thing is users who choose CP they do not expect huge movements in CP now.
That is the whole reason they change.
But they can’t without a solid ecosystem, which is based on Plugins and Themes, and a stable CMS.
The CMS is stable. It is time-vetted like nothing else is.
I prefer using old, discontinued Plugins over actively developed ones because nothing changes.
Of course, security patches are another thing. We can’t halt those. That would be not responsible.
However, I am of course also understanding that CP needs to continue to grow. I am not saying “Stop all work”
What I mean is that perhaps of the very skilled developers who right now might be busy developing a V2 (I am not sure, it is just a guess) - if they get some hands on a plugin each, and perhaps a theme or two, in about a month or two we can deliver those, and then we can go full steam ahead on actual core development.
It is difficult to not make me appear as saying “halt all stuff, go the other direction”. I am one of them in favour of CP finally “growing” into its own path, nothing I’d love more.
But if we don’t get plugs and themes, all development we put into CP will be lost time, I am sure about that, because unfortunately CP alone is not really versatile. You can create a simple blog, and with lots of code, more than that. But users aren’t all coders. Specially “Clients” - even if they never use it - want to believe that they “can” if they want. If you as developer deliver them a hardcoded PHP magic, they aren’t happy. They want things to edit and do in the backend. Thus, plugins, or themes.
Well. In the end it is like a Ouroboros. More Core development means more people trusting it survives and thus more plugin and theme devs coming in.
More plugins and themes available means more users and thus more resources (and reasons) for Core Development.
Thus I “submit”
Lets not halt CP development. But lets try to not forget themes and plugins on the path (like many in this thread already stated there are actually ideas and WIPs, thus… I should be happy now )
Let’s also start encouraging to develop new (CP targeted) things instead of "just use WP things and ask their devs to make it compatible)
I think if we lead the way, just as a recommendation, it can change the status quo, which as it is currently, will lead in a big problem down the road (or did already, as we can see from above posts, some got hacked just because trusting this “works with” philosophy/culture).
Hope it didn’t come along the wrong way