WordPress.com Gets Custom Plugins and Themes

Default avatar.
August 08, 2017
WordPress.com Gets Custom Plugins and Themes.
Praise any deity you’re into, because WordPress just got custom plugins and themes! Again. We are talking, of course, about the WordPress.com hosted service that allows anyone and everyone to make their own WordPress site for free. They just opened up their service to third-party plugins and themes, so go wild! The service has historically, and quite understandably had a "Hell NO" policy on third-party plugins and themes. The wrong one can leave your site vulnerable in a big way, because it has malicious code, or is simply egregiously out of date. Either way, you’re leaving the security of your site in the hands of other developers, whatever their intentions and skill level may be. Here’s some of what they said:
For many years, WordPress.com has been a simple way for people to create their own beautiful WordPress website in minutes.
But that simplicity came with a tradeoff—WordPress.com did not offer built-in support for the thousands of third-party plugins and themes that helped make WordPress the world’s largest and most open web publishing platform.
Now, we’ve made a significant change to the WordPress.com Business plan: you can access and add third-party plugins and themes built by the WordPress community. It’s the simplicity, speed, and expert support that you’ve always loved about WordPress.com, plugged in.
On WordPress.com, everything is connected. Or it was. The most likely solution that they’ve come up with is some form of sandboxing. For the uninitiated, sandboxing is when you take a program, and sort of lock it away in its own environment (the "sandbox") where it can run without doing any harm to the rest of your system. If they did this with every site on their network, it would allow users to upload whatever they like. The only site they could potentially compromise is their own. WordPress’ own blog post on this update has not specified if sandboxing is the technique they went with, or any other details about how they made this change. That’s probably because they don’t want to give the guys in the black hats a head start. So WordPress.com just got more flexible. I suspect this change will also result in increasing numbers of people paying for the commercial support options, such as the ones Business users get. After all, increased functionality means increased complexity. And yes, it seems that WordPress.com’s “Happiness Engineers” are going to be tasked with helping paying users to integrate new themes and plugins. That could be rough. On the whole, I’m impressed by the company’s decision, happy for the users, and I feel a bit bad for the support staff. Now I just have to make up a side project that will give me an excuse to test all of this out.

Ezequiel Bruni

Ezequiel Bruni is a web/UX designer, blogger, and aspiring photographer living in Mexico. When he’s not up to his finely-chiselled ears in wire-frames and front-end code, or ranting about the same, he indulges in beer, pizza, fantasy novels, and stand-up comedy.

Read Next

10+ Best Resources & Tools for Web Designers (2024 update)

Is searching for the best web design tools to suit your needs akin to having a recurring bad dream? Does each…

3 Essential Design Trends, April 2024

Ready to jump into some amazing new design ideas for Spring? Our roundup has everything from UX to color trends…

How to Plan Your First Successful Website

Planning a new website can be exciting and — if you’re anything like me — a little daunting. Whether you’re an…

15 Best New Fonts, March 2024

Welcome to March’s edition of our roundup of the best new fonts for designers. This month’s compilation includes…

LimeWire Developer APIs Herald a New Era of AI Integration

Generative AI is a fascinating technology. Far from the design killer some people feared, it is an empowering and…

20 Best New Websites, March 2024

Welcome to our pick of sites for March. This month’s collection tends towards the simple and clean, which goes to show…

Exciting New Tools for Designers, March 2024

The fast-paced world of design never stops turning, and staying ahead of the curve is essential for creatives. As…

Web Tech Trends to Watch in 2024 and Beyond

It hardly seems possible given the radical transformations we’ve seen over the last few decades, but the web design…

6 Best AI Productivity Apps in 2024

There’s no escaping it: if you want to be successful, you need to be productive. The more you work, the more you…

3 Essential Design Trends, February 2024

From atypical typefaces to neutral colors to unusual user patterns, there are plenty of new website design trends to…

Surviving the Leap from College to Real-World Design

So, you’ve finished college and are ready to showcase your design skills to the world. This is a pivotal moment that…

20 Mind-Bending Illusions That Will Make You Question Reality

Mind-bending videos. Divisive Images. Eye-straining visuals. This list of optical illusions has it all. Join us as we…