Why I’m Moving Away from Power Platform and Back to Modern WordPress

title: "" published: true tags: wordpress, webdev, powerplatform, career canonical_url: https://matthummel.com/blog/ description: "After nearly five years of enterprise Power Platform work, I'm pivoting my content and personal projects back to modern custom WordPress development."

After nearly five years of enterprise Power Platform work, I'm pivoting my content and personal projects back to modern custom WordPress development.

For the last nearly five years, a big part of my day-to-day work revolved around the Microsoft Power Platform. Over the past few months, I began writing about it here—sharing practical fixes for canvas app delegation, complex formulas, SharePoint integrations, and automated flows.

However, the more I documented those enterprise processes, the more I realized my core passion wasn't in low-code platforms. While internal business tools solve real corporate problems, my true technical curiosity has always belonged to full-stack web development.

Because of that, I'm making a deliberate shift: moving away from Power Platform content and returning to my roots in modern WordPress engineering, open-web architectures, and custom personal builds.

Here is why I'm making the change—and what I'll be sharing next.

1. Five Years in Managed Ecosystems vs. Open-Web Control

Spending nearly five years inside the Microsoft ecosystem taught me a lot about rapid enterprise app delivery. But working exclusively within a vendor's walled garden introduces hard limits on custom execution, data flow, and long-term platform control.

Returning my focus to custom web development (especially modern setups using Roots/Sage, Blade templates, Vite, and automated CI/CD pipelines) brings back the exact aspects of engineering I enjoy most:

• Total architectural control over data flow, markup, and application logic.
• Direct performance tuning at the code level without vendor-imposed rules.
• True open-source independence without licensing shifts or platform lock-in.

2. Modern WordPress Is a Superior Developer Experience

There is a common myth that WordPress development is stuck in the past. In reality, modern custom theme and plugin development uses a toolchain that matches top-tier web application engineering:

• Clean templating using Blade and modern PHP features.
• Instant asset compilation powered by Vite.
• Streamlined developer workflows (using tools like Cursor and scoped MCP

integrations) that handle repetitive boilerplate, freeing up time for architecture, accessibility, and speed optimizations.

Stepping back into custom WordPress builds reminded me how powerful, clean, and rewarding web engineering can be when done with modern tools.

3. Building for the Web (Not Just Enterprise Specs)

Internal enterprise tools naturally focus on admin forms, internal workflows, and corporate data entry. They serve a functional purpose, but they rarely allow for creative experimentation with modern web APIs, public-facing user experiences, or open-source software.

I want to spend my energy building and shipping personal web projects, such as:

• Lightweight, speed-first custom WordPress plugins.
• Modern theme starter stacks.
• Full-stack experiments combining external APIs, modern UI, and AI workflows.

What Changes Here

• No new Power Platform posts. The tutorials I published over the last

few months will remain online for anyone who needs them, but my focus is moving on.

• Deep-dive WordPress content. Expect practical guides on custom PHP

architectures, Sage/Blade workflows, performance strategies, and modern developer tooling.

• Build logs. I’ll be sharing the raw, honest engineering process behind

the personal projects and tools I ship.

It took five years in the low-code world to realize how much I missed custom web development, and I’m excited to be back in my element.

Are you building for the open web or refining your own dev stack right now? Let's connect in the comments below.

Originally posted on DEV.to.