Will Flutter Retire WordPress?

📅 2020.06.05 - 👤 Borbély Viktor

WordPress sites have been with us for a long time. Its success is unbroken, as it is very simple to get started with it. The community has written thousands of extensions for it, keeping its reputation alive. For any task, there are surely dozens of plugins. It can be connected to almost any system, but certainly to the most popular ones. Can Flutter break this?

What is the advantage? Without programming knowledge, in a few hours, even as a beginner, we can create our own basic homepage. If we choose a template for it, we won’t have problems with the appearance either. Some hate it, some love it. Yes, a divisive platform.

How did it occur to me after these arguments to compare it with Flutter? Flutter is a UI kit from Google that attacks multiple platforms at once: mobile, web, and slowly desktop applications. Google’s undisguised goal is that whatever screen we’re talking about, Flutter will be available there. That is, code written in the common Dart language will work on any device. This is good news because we don’t have to mess with translation.

Early experiences

Of course, it cannot be predicted when this technology will be widely popular. What is visible is that even if a new language must be learned (applications must be written in the Dart language), its success is indisputable. We have to write our application once, and in return we’ve created it optimized for Android, iOS, and any browser. This will certainly be a very strong consideration in the future for a Project Manager who is (also) responsible for the project’s finances. Or for a CEO who is now starting their startup.

After more than half a year of experience, I can state that Google has fulfilled its promises. It has truly created a framework for applications that can be developed sufficiently quickly. Supplemented with the associated development tools. These have been kneaded into Android Studio, and VS Code also received strong support. They realized that they cannot do the same thing again as at the beginning, giving weak tools into the hands of enthusiastic developers. To all this, they created the free pub.dev developer page hosting packages, where we can use thousands of ready-made and qualified packages in our own application with one move. And the community jumped on it and creates fantastic things under the aegis of open-source.

Well, whether there will ever be a swap between the two platforms still waits. Flutter web is not the out-of-the-box solution yet. I’m curiously waiting for template systems, configurators with which anyone can create their own mobile application in a few minutes. More and more known brands are joining this: Adobe XD, Supernova Studio (for Mac for now). These editors already support creating Flutter applications from the designed design.

Conclusion

This is of course still a bit further away. Google/Flutter and other teams’ cooperation favored designers. In any case, a good process has started: by Google defining Material Design, the Cupertino guys HIG (Human Interface Guideline), and Flutter implementing these, any developer can carve a basic level UI for their application. A sufficiently good appearance can come out from under our hands even if pixel pushing doesn’t enchant us. And this brings closer the distance between a developer and a designer.