Once upon a time, I created web pages with some WYSIWYG editor created by Corel. It was horrible, but it allowed me to make my site look however I wanted it to. And, at the time, that meant really ugly. But I was happy as a clam, running home from school (yeah, this was a *long* time ago) I couldn’t wait to play art director.
So, along comes the CMS revolution. It automated content, but made it harder for people to customize their sites. The art director in all of us died a little. That may have been a good thing… *cough* MySpace *cough* But in all honesty, control is what people crave and need, automation was what they thought they needed ;)
Empowering users with the ability to play art director and control as much as they can, from within a theme, is the future. And without doubt, Jason Santa Maria was one of the first people to really pull this off and make us all think a little bit harder. Oh yeah, I made a plugin to help out with this too!
Inline with that thinking, we need to empower users with the ability to not only control *how* the site looks, but *what* it does. We need to think about themes as more than the paint on the walls, but as the structure of the building. WordPress is about more than words. Photoblogs, videoblogs, tumblelogs, stores, applications – we need more diversity in not just the look, but the type of themes in the WordPress world. I’m not sure “theme” or “template” even covers what it is a “theme” does.
The future is looking at the past and understanding what made the web so interesting in the beginning, and then figuring out how we can help WordPress users do just that.
