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Advantages of open source website and publishing software on display with WordPress 5.0

Law firm website open source

WordPress launched its version 5.0, including a total overhaul of its editorial interface via Gutenberg, just ten days. 

Since then, WordPress released version 5.0.1 as a security release, as reported by WordPress Tavern’s Sarah Gooding, “with fixes for seven vulnerabilities that were privately disclosed. It includes a few breaks in backwards compatibility that plugin developers will want to review.”

First updates in a week, and the second to come six days afterwards. 

WordPress 5.0.2 will be the first planned followup release to 5.0 and is now scheduled to be released December 19, 2018. Gary Pendergast posted a summary of this week’s dev chat that includes the schedule and scope for the upcoming release. It will include Gutenberg 4.7, Twenty Nineteen bug fixes, and a few PHP 7.3 compatibility fixes.

No matter how large a company, the talent of their developers or the quality off their testing, when you put software out to a huge number of users using various operating systems and machines, you’re going to find bugs.

With open source you pick up a a huge number of developers working on the software, finding bugs and working to repair them and making improvements for performance, speed and security. Those developers are getting feedback instantaneously from users around the world. 

An example is improving the speed of Gutenberg, as shared by Gooding.

Slow performance as compared to the classic editor has been a commonly-reported issue with Gutenberg. The project has a label for it on GitHub with 26 open issues. 140 performance-related issues have already been closed so the team is making progress on speeding it up. 5.0.2 will bring major performance improvements to the editor, particularly for content that includes hundreds of blocks

For posts with a large number of blocks, a component of publishing in Gutenberg, the speed can be up to 300% faster.

Major upgrades and feature enghancements will come in WordPress 5.1, to be led by WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, in February – just 60 days after 5.0 and Gutenberg’s launch. 

Law firms using proprietary software for websites and content management (think blogs, microsites et al) do not see anywhere near this rate of improvement in their software. 

Couple that with upgrading software only happening when “doing” a new website, usually three for fears after their last website and you’re running on software three or four years old (not including when their developer/web agency last updated their software).

Software that old poses performance, security, speed and usability problems. It’ll also lack features your peers are already using. 

In time, law firms, law schools and other organizations in legal will come to see the advantages of running open source software and using a managed host for it.

That way publishing and websites will run on a near SaaS (software as a service) solution by them or for them by a web agency or a managed WordProcess host such as LexBlog’s publishing solution. Sorry to tout us. ; ) 

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