Topic on WPweekly last friday (the thuuurteeeeeenzz) and on the WPTavern-Forums was the Demise of WordPress. My Thoughts on that: If it happens, I think that Security will play a big part in it. Things will develop like they developed for MySpace. Ad-plastered Theme directories with poor designed and coded Themes will be all over the place. They will steal themes or produce weak themes with stolen pictures from deviantArt and some will even include harmful code into those themes. MySpace could handle that problem after a while, but just because they host the stuff themselves. Selfhosted WP-People will have to deal with those Problems on their own.

WordPress.com hosted blogs will of course not be affected by those security issues, but i think if WordPress.org-Stuff gets less popular and people start talking bad about it, WordPress.com will go down as well, even if there are no issues with it. I know that there´s definitely a development into this direction of theme directories run by people who try to exploit respectable but blueeyed WP-Users. Some do by putting ads with their own affiliate code to other sites in there. Some do by adding harmful code (that the average user won´t notice until it´s too late) and some do by not even providing themefiles but just link to something that fucks up your system pretty badly doesn´t do good things to your computer.

2 Weeks ago when i was doing research for a post draft on Software-Piracy (that i haven´t finished yet lol) I discovered that many Premium-Themes are out there for illegal download (one could argue if they had to be gpl then providing the code wouldn´t be illegal, but you get my point). Yep, i downloaded and looked through the files. They had changed copyrights and malific code in it. Of course i informed the respective Theme-Authors about it, but they already knew.

I also think that many Theme-Authors and Plugin Developers will get upset and depressed and some may walk away from WordPress. Not just because WP gets a bad reputation, also because it will be a lot harder to get your stuff out there. With a network of theme directories and other sites run by the same persons, they have enough backlink power to overtake the first page in google search. it won´t be easy to get your stuff there so that people can see it. I hope that it won´t happen, but it could and that´s sad. Like i said jokingly on the WP-Tavern Shoutbox some days ago… if you look on Google for “Premium Themes”, you won´t probably find something what we understand as Premium Theme now but a Kubrick Theme Clone with a pink header and some bling bling dollarsign gif animations and a glass of champagne in it or so… if that´s not premium, i don’t know what is :D (That´s my idea, my intellectual property, don´t steal it lol)

Let´s just hope i´m wrong.