Automattic, Inc., the company behind the ever-popular WordPress content management system, have announced a major refresh of its hosted blogging platform WordPress.com along with a number of extras that are sure to please bloggers and developers alike.

Top of the list is what the company is calling Calypso, a major overhaul of the WordPress back end adds a layer of the stack on top of the 12-year-old PHP portions of the codebase. This new version of WordPress pushes developers to work directly in JavaScript, Node and React, and interface with WordPress via the newly-minted WP-API.

The need for speed is perhaps the primary focus of the redesigned interface with the use of JS delivering an interface that Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg describes as “incredibly fast…it’ll charm you.”

Although the code for WordPress itself (the CMS, not the hosted service) has always been open source, the code that specifically ran WordPress.com has not been, until now, with the new backend being completely open sourced and as a bonus is also said to be 100 percent API powered.

Services that were previously add-ons or extras are now included in the backend, including Social, with stats, likes, and notifications, and the drag and drop functions previously available have been vastly improved, complete with new image display options.

If you host your own WordPress site though and this all sounds interesting, the good news is that the interface is also being made available for self-hosted WordPress installs and is available for installation via Automattic’s Jetpack plugin.

Last, but not least, the company has also released a WordPress desktop application for OS X that brings the functionality of the new interface to a computer while at the same time leveraging the processing power of the said machine to make the experience even quicker; of note the software, along with the WordPress.com new interface offers vastly improved support for multiple blogs meaning a user can manage and write to multiple sites from the one place.

Great, but…

While the move away from a interfacing directly with PHP will be of a concern to some developers, from a pure user perspective the changes should not only be strongly welcomed but were arguably overdue as well.

But…and there is a but, that while there are benefits for WordPress users across the board it should be noted going this route destroys a lot of value for the WordPress ecosystem. As Mullenweg noted, 25% of the Web runs on WordPress; that’s a lot developers with knowledge of PHP and the ‘old way’ of doing things that are useless in the new future, and a lot of built-in support for WordPress that evaporated over night.

The company pitches it as a better way to do things, and Mullenweg makes a strong argument for that. On the other hand, this better way of doing things may have come at the cost of the biggest benefit WordPress boasts being able to throw a rock and hit someone who can solve whatever your problem is with your installation of WordPress.

Image credit: siliconprairienews/Flickr/CC by 2.0

[Editor’s Note: Post was updated at 8:54 AM CST to clarify and correct the changes occurring in Automattic’s technology stack. -mrh]