We’ve been talking about our upcoming migration to WordPress, and every time it comes up, there are understandable concerns raised in the comments.
Some folks worry about security, others about performance, and many still think of WordPress as the old blogging tool of 15 years ago. That’s why I’m writing this—to explain why we’re making the move, to clear up some myths, and to reassure you about what this means for our community.
Daily Kos has always been powered by community. For more than two decades, we’ve built and maintained our own custom publishing platform—a system designed for a very different internet, long before social media, mobile-first browsing, and modern web standards. That system has carried us well, but it’s now over 15 years old. Every upgrade is expensive, time-consuming, and requires resources that could be better spent building the features our community wants.
Much of the site still runs on Perl, a programming language that was last updated in a meaningful way in 2012. In the tech world, that’s a lifetime. Running a modern platform on such a dated foundation means constant maintenance headaches, dwindling developer support, and security risks that get harder to manage as time goes on. Our current system is simply not sustainable.
That’s why we’re moving to WordPress. It’s not some barebones blogging tool from the 2000s. Instead, it’s the modern platform that powers some of the biggest media organizations in the world, including The New Yorker, Time, TechCrunch, Variety, Rolling Stone, News Corporation properties like the New York Post and Daily Telegraph, and Al Jazeera. These are complex, high-traffic sites that demand speed, reliability, and security—proof that WordPress can handle whatever we throw at it. In fact, an astonishing 43% of websites run on the platform.
Like all major tech platforms, WordPress faces many questions. However, most concerns are overblown, irrelevant in our situation, or obsolete. The reputation for security problems, for example, mostly comes from two things: stories that predate 2020, and badly coded plug-ins.
In reality, WordPress now has a dedicated security team of more than 50 experts who work to find, disclose, and fix vulnerabilities. Their process is fast and coordinated, and automatic background updates push fixes out to millions of sites in hours. That’s a level of protection our old, homegrown Perl system could never hope to match. We won’t be running random unvetted plug-ins, and we’ll have professional support and monitoring on top of that. With WordPress, Daily Kos can be safer and more stable than our aging custom system ever could be.
Another common worry is that WordPress sites “all look the same.” That happens only when people grab a generic theme off the shelf. Daily Kos will keep its current design look. It won’t suddenly look unfamiliar the day we switch over.
Down the road, a redesign is likely—once the migration is complete and stable—but that will be a separate process, with plenty of community input, and not something happening at launch.
There are often complaints about WordPress’ performance, but it drags primarily when sites overload themselves with unnecessary features or run on bargain hosting. We are working with developers who specialize in large-scale media migrations, and we’ll have the infrastructure to ensure the site runs smoothly.
We expect to launch the new Daily Kos site on WordPress in February 2026. That date gives us time to migrate the full site, preserve all content and links, and rebuild the community features—diaries, comments, groups—that make Daily Kos unique.
After we launch, the good stuff will truly begin. We’ll have access to an enormous plug-in library and developer ecosystem. That means new features can be implemented quickly, instead of waiting months or years for custom coding. Want better comment filtering? A mute button? A customizable front page featuring your favorite authors? Even a Daily Kos mobile app? These are things we’ll finally be able to deliver at the speed you expect.
Change can feel unsettling, especially when it touches the tools we use every day to connect, write, and organize. But this is a straight migration, not an overhaul. Old links will continue to work. Content will be preserved. Community will remain at the heart of the site. What matters most is the feeling of belonging that this place creates—the warmth of logging in and seeing familiar names, the energy of a great conversation in the comments, the sense that we are in this fight together. That connection is what makes Daily Kos special, and it’s what we are laser-focused on protecting and improving.
This migration is a major investment in the future of Daily Kos. It’s about making sure the infrastructure that carries this community is strong, safe, and built to last for decades more.
If you want to help us make this future possible, one of the most important ways is by supporting Daily Kos financially. This is a half-a-million-dollar project. Every contribution helps us pay for the work that will power this community we love well into the future.
Daily Kos has always been about us coming together to build something bigger than ourselves. Moving to WordPress is part of making sure that continues—today, tomorrow, and 20 years from now.
kos September 12, 2025 at 11:30PM From Daily Kos
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