Tung Do, the owner of DevPress, has written a post that he knows may be more ambitious than he can handle. He notes a longstanding desire to “revolutionize the WordPress-experience” and he wants to do so by transforming DevPress into a hosted web platform.
While Tung says he is not aiming for the WordPress.com audience, his goal is to essentially create a more broad-based WordPress.com. He wants allow people to sell things, have forums, testimonial submissions, contact forms, and more. He envisions starting with a single theme, and creating child themes down the road that people can choose from.
You may be thinking Tung clearly just hasn’t heard of WordPress.com, Tumblr, Squarespace, or the new Ghost project. But he mentions each, and gives his reasons for how he intends to make his platform different.
His post is certainly bold, and interesting. You have to respect someone for being passionate about a goal. But he’s got an uphill battle ahead of him. However, I don’t want to belittle his efforts. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is space in the hosted market for a number of smaller solutions; I’m just surprised it’s intended to be so generic, when I personally see more opportunity in niche options. Time will tell.
I used to follow DevPress, but after the shuffle and dead time I just have a hard time trusting it. I’m not sure that I see a great need in yet another WordPress focused hosting platform. His post seems like a pipe dream, but maybe I’m just a naysayer who will be proven wrong.
Hi Curtis. I don’t intend on competing with the big boys. It’s an idea for a personal experiment that I publicized to put pressure on myself to see it through.
Since the original team split, I’ve brought DevPress back to life so the members at least have someone to answer their support questions and I’ve added new themes. Recently, I’ve even added one major plugin =)