For those of you traveling back from WordCamp US or missed the live stream, here Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2019 talk in audio format + transcript.
For cost and time, I did it through Temi, which isn’t super accurate, but good enough for scanning the talking points.
- Gutenberg 72 times
- Block/Blocks 84 times
- Community 20
- Governance 1
Throughout the rest of the year, purchase a Matt Report hat from the store, and I will contribute 100% of the profits to WP&UP supporting mental health in the WordPress community.
The transcript picks up after the movie intro.
Matt Mullenweg: (00:00)
Let’s see some familiar names there. I was a produced by Mark Maunder and Kathy Zan. You might know from some of the word fence work, but I thought this was a beautiful contribution to the WordPress world and they actually going to be some, mitigates a festivals coming up. So hopefully this can make into the South by or one of the other great festivals. If you have any pull with any of those, please get in touch with Mark or someone, see if we can get it in. But a good illustration as well of the different types of contributions. Uh, so when I saw a preview of it, that’s my first time seeing the final, final, final cut. Um, that wow. Could we read from that? I had stated the word. That’d be kind of cool. So thank you all for joining that.
Speaker 2: (00:42)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (00:48)
so the officially jump in Audi st Louis, I’m told that this place is also called the loo. Is that something you all say? The people from the UK look at you funny as is actually not my first time in st Louis. I was back here for a happiness meetup in 2011, which was my first exposure to city museum. And of course I’m familiar with the Saint Luna techs and other culture ambassadors you have out there in the world that I was not aware that, uh, st Louis hosted the world’s fair in 1904 and in fact, uh, many amazing technological innovations have come out of here cleaning the wireless telephone x-ray machines. I lectured streetcars and the first prototypes of personal automobiles, which back then were both gas and electric. So it took like a hundred years to come back to the election. Um, so it seemed fitting to have the event here and also to look at where WordPress has been and where we’re going to go. Uh, this event was brought to you by 47 organizers, 122 volunteers and 90 speakers yesterday.
Speaker 2: (02:00)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (02:07)
this event was also brought to you by the sponsors that make it so that the ticket is so inexpensive. Uh, thank you. The blue host who commerce Jetpack and Google
Speaker 2: (02:16)
[inaudible]
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Matt Mullenweg: (02:23)
So as we head into the final months of 2019, we’ve actually, our earliest WordCamp us in awhile. Um, it’s good to take a time to reflect on everything that we’ve worked together on, collaborated our accomplishments and just everything going on with this year. Uh, we’ve had two core releases so far this year. Uh, first word press 5.1, uh, named for Betty Carter included the first iteration of this site health screen, which some of you might be familiar with. Ah, Oh, that’s a few fans.
Speaker 2: (02:53)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (02:54)
the idea behind this is that again, WordPress is all about empowering users and we wanted to put the information in the tools in the hands of users as well to keep the site running in tip top shape as we power an ever increasing percentage of the web. It as our responsibility behooves us to try to make sure that portion of the web is safe, secure, UpToDate, and running the latest and greatest stuff. Um, so this allows because people, information, they can either use themselves or get in touch with, uh, their support hosting or things like that. We had a lot of uh, developer experience improvements in 5.1 holding the Chron API. This is kind of the thing that runs in the background of WordPress that makes actions happen at certain times. So let’s say you schedule a post, you ever wondered how that actually gets posted at the time when you schedule it?
Matt Mullenweg: (03:41)
Uh, we have kind of a weird Cron thing built into WordPress. We’ve enhanced it now so that uh, advanced hosts are hosts that have a lot of chrom, uh, scheduled tasks can um, hook into that and make it more efficient. We also, for the multisite fans and room added a site meta feature which gives developers more performant way to store arbitrary data as opposed to just dumping everything and options. Like we used to 5.2 named for his Jaco Pastorius came out in may. Uh, this one was pretty exciting because what you see on the left there is the old widget screen on the right is the new widgets all available within Gutenberg, which also means that you can edit them in line and see exactly what they’re going to look like in the real time Gutenberg interface. We also, I did a cricket iteration based on feedback from y’all saying that there were a lot of blocks, good problem to have.
Matt Mullenweg: (04:34)
So we’ve made it for yourself or for your clients. You could hide or show certain blocks. Uh, we have our block manager and then finally you shouldn’t see this and you want w S O D stands for the white screen of death. Um, I guess originally it was called this, uh, because you know, it was a play on the blue screen of death that windows used to painless. They have. But basically what this means, if you visit your site and you see this, there was probably some sort of PHP air or something that is preventing your site from loading. And unfortunately that makes it also hard to fix your site if it’s airing out a. So now when something like this happens, particularly from a auto upgrade or a plugin upgrade, you’ll get a special email with a link that lets you, uh, basically navigate to your L, which the activates the plugin, uh, before, uh, loads and allows you to then, uh, turn it off and get back into your site.
Matt Mullenweg: (05:30)
Uh, so again, this is just an example of something coming up from users coming up from the support forums that we’ve identified as common barriers and our user experience and did a lot of work, uh, to try to rectify. We’re press 5.3 is coming out on November 12th. So just around the corner, uh, this is not a pre-announcement of the Jasmine. We always do that on the day. So, uh, you will see what a jazz person is for, but it’s a very, very exciting release. Um, for a number of things, we have over 150 block editor improvements. So some of you might not know, but the version of Gutenberg that’s been shipping with WordPress 5.2, uh, is a few months out of date now. And it’s been lots of updates since then as I will talk about more later. Uh, but it is, I’m very, very excited to get all the Gutenberg and permits in the hands of our wider audience.
Matt Mullenweg: (06:22)
It’s also coming with a new default theme. This is 2020. Uh, it is a Gutenberg first beautiful, uh, CMS power theme with an original design contributed by Andrew’s Nora. And then of course expanded by the 20 2018. Uh, it is really slick. I have switched my own site, M a. Dot. T T over to it. And, uh, it really highlights some of the power of Gutenberg. So I highly encourage jacking it up. Uh, if you would like to get involved in some of the final, I guess basically done, but if you want to see the code behind it and, and some of what went into it, uh, you can check it out on GitHub as well in the vein of improving things for administrators and making WordPress easier to run for everyone. Uh, we’ve put in a little screen that just kind of verifies, uh, your Avenue email, which is separate from a user email.
Matt Mullenweg: (07:14)
So we would send out emails like when things were auto updating and when things broke, but we found out that a lot of people had set up that email when they first started and never looked at it again. So now about every six months you’ll get like a little, Hey, is this still your best email type screen? Um, again, these things seem simple, but it’s a foundation on which we can build a lot else on. Cause now we can start to make more things dependent on that. Add an email. Then also five, three is gonna have some more developer stuff. This could have so much Gutenberg or I’ll talk about that later. Um, we did time and date component fixes, uh, that probably at least three people here in the audience know Val. It’s raise your hand if you know what those mean. Ah, pretty savvy audience. That’s at least 40 and we of course updated to be compatible with the latest PHP 7.4 which is of course faster and better than ever. It was all store a year where we raised the minimum PHP versions.
Speaker 2: (08:10)
WordPress [inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (08:16)
we ended support for PHP 5.2 to 5.3 and I have an interesting stat that for people running WordPress 5.2 which is our latest stable release, um, 83% on PHP five point or PHB seven or later. So we are seeing people who are updating WordPress are also updating PHP, which is very exciting. Um, however, as we were digging to these stats, we found something else, which is about 10% of all of WordPress’s we’re tracking are on older versions of PHP. So we think this might be contributing to some people being sort of stuck on some older versions of WordPress that it seems that they are running a higher percentage that a general population of older versions of PHP, which we track going all the way back to 5.0 I know so we still have a lot of work that 10% of the is on the world still on two old upgrade PHP ends up being a lot of them.
Matt Mullenweg: (09:12)
You could call that about 3% of the web, so it sort of woke me up to the VAT that we’re going to need to really dive into these and work with the web host and the people, excuse me, hosting them, try to get in there and to to get these on the latest and greatest. While this has all been going on, there’s been a ton of fun stuff happening on the mobile side of WordPress, which is a crucial, important for user adoption part that sometimes we forget about in the day to day development. So of the 38 core blocks that are in Gutenberg, we have now ported 10 of them to mobile and we got Gutenberg on mobile in the first place. So congrats of that team.
Speaker 2: (09:53)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (09:56)
so the block editor is now available on both iOS and Android devices, um, including one additional block coming out and the release coming out on Monday. We are almost done with the offline support, which means you will be able to blog and use the WordPress app on a plane train or automobile when you are not connected or maybe even at a conference like this. And we have our dark mode Donna on iOS and that will be coming to Android in a matter of weeks. Of course, the people side of WordPress as we just heard from that, uh, the open film is one of the most exciting and the events and people side of WordPress has had an exciting year as well. In 2019 there will be 141 WordCamps as the big ones all over the world. 34 of those in brand new cities. We also have this new thing, 17 of which, and one of which tomorrow called kids camps, which is,
Speaker 2: (10:54)
yeah. [inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (10:58)
events adjacent to work camps design specifically, uh, for our younger contributors. Um, in fact, I believe at this camp we had one of our youngest here working with us, one of our youngest speakers ever. We come from that. Yeah, four. At what age? Let’s call it 14 or 15. Uh, so very, very excited for a new generation. Uh, it’s a little scary to also think that they weren’t born when WordPress started. I know if that made any of y’all feel old. It definitely made me feel a little advanced. We’ve had over 5,000 meetups. The WordPress meetups are the more like monthly events happening all over the world in almost every city and 16 do action, a charity hackathons. And this is where WordPress volunteers and community members come together and create websites for nonprofits and set them up to just have a beautiful web. This was also a year when we started bringing in, uh, more of the people stories to the wordpress.org, a blog or news site.
Matt Mullenweg: (12:02)
So the icon on the left is he regrets? Do you haven’t come across here at press before? Highly recommend checking it out and maybe you might even have a story you want to share there. Your press has a community site which highlights the journeys of how people came to WordPress and the effect it’s had on their life and if they’ve had on WordPress as well. We started highlighting one of these per month on the wordpress.org blog and it’s been really, really exciting to get to know more of the people behind WordPress. And in fact, many of them are stories that are new to me as well. So it is a must read for me every month. There was a bittersweet part or a sad part of 2019 as well that we, uh, we did lose some community members, um, notably Viper double O seven bonds, also known as Alex Mills, who’s a long time contributing friend and colleague. Um, I also recognize that many people might have lost other folks and the beauty. So I just want to take just a brief moment of silence to remember and thank those who are no longer with us.
Matt Mullenweg: (13:11)
Alex was an amazing contributor, uh, to WordPress, a great friend, a great colleague. Um, we, our automatic is putting together a, a scholarship to parallel the Kim Parcell scholarship that’s been going on for a few years now that brings someone to WordCamp us. And this will be targeted at a plug in developer, um, who hasn’t had the chance to visit, uh, work camp USA yet. And so there’ll be a full scholarship full ride for them. And the beautiful part of this is actually Alex’s story mirrors that quite a bit. Uh, his mom was telling me where he was a little bit more uh, introverted. Um, but he found out that I was going to be a work camp nearby to him even though he’d been a big contributor. He didn’t, had never been to the events and went, and that was part of what a lot on the blossom and to finding a new set of friends and new community, a job that automatic kinda everything at the change for him.
Matt Mullenweg: (14:01)
And that kind of last decade. Um, it has been a very, very eventful 11 months. Uh, we’ve had lots of ups and downs. Um, that’s what this graphic is illustrating and um, but we’ve had thousands of people come together as well. I do want to rewind a little bit and talk about where we were just about a year ago. So close your eyes and imagine, ah, that WordPress 5.0 probably the biggest change we’d ever made to WordPress. And it’s 16 year history came out the day before we’re camp us, started in Nashville. We had people coordinating work from airplanes. They were impart impromptu groups of core developers, testing and packaging the release in the hallways. The polyglots and marketers were support teams were just scrambling to get ready. And of course we had that snazzy release video that was a pretty controversial year. Uh, that year. Um, you, we came together and decided to make this big change cause we wanted to first disrupt ourselves. Uh, we want to empower more WordPress users to realize our mission of democratizing publishing and want to make the web a more open and welcoming place. But, um, you know, Gutenberg got some, uh, feedback. These are all real tweets or quotes from articles. I don’t want to pile on to the Gutenberg hate, but come on, this is nowhere near ready. I think it’s safe to say absolutely capitols hate the Gutenberg editor on word press now and a lower case P says pour salt in the runes.
Matt Mullenweg: (15:35)
Gutenberg is just plain terrible and barely functional design should make my life easier, not harder. And finally don’t update the WordPress 5.0 you know, there was lots and lots of feedback on that and I think we learned a lot both in the process, uh, but also in how we can communicate change better in the future, although there are no changes on the horizon as big as Gutenberg was. Um, and I think of that as like, you know, when batteries swing with a couple of baths before they go to the man, we’re going to have really good practice for any future future changes we want to make. Um, I think that we also, uh, have a great opportunity. We made big changes in the future, sort of build that trust in the conversations around testing, using get hub for development, things like accessibility. So I understand why we had a lot of this feedback but we did get through it together.
Matt Mullenweg: (16:27)
So thank you. We have had since that 5.0 release 20 releases of the Gutenberg plugin. So the pace of iteration of Gutenberg has kept up and I’m also very, very proud to say, cause there was some discussion around kind of contributions, um, that the number of Gutenberg contributors since 5.0 has grown from 200, uh, over 480 over develop a over a doubling a year to year. Um, I’m also very, very excited to say that even as WordPress becomes more advanced, we incorporate new technologies. You’re all learning Java script deeply is that we’re going to have the most contributors we ever had to WordPress ever this year. So in 2018 we had about 594 contributors this year so far, right? 1,122 unique contributors. Thank you.
Speaker 2: (17:20)
[inaudible]
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Matt Mullenweg: (17:27)
So thank you for clapping. Allows me to take a drink. Do you want to throw some more in there? The current release version, 5.3 coming out in November 12th is that to have the most contributors of any release in our history by over a hundred people. I’m also happy to say that the adoption of Gutenberg is going fantastic. I have 2.7 over 2.7 more sites using Gutenberg than not, and this is actually probably under counting because we’re subtracting everyone using the classic editor from this, but of course those of you who might be using the classic editor, no, by the classic editor editors, a plugin we promoted very heavily with the upgraded 5.0 that a lot of people that still use the old editor as well as use the new editor, but it actually classic editor doesn’t turn off. Gutenberg allows you to toggle between them so you can decide on a per post basis what you want to use. So we believe some interesting number. I don’t have any exact thing but interesting number of the classic editor users are actually also using Gutenberg as well. We just passed a two days ago, 50 million post made with Gutenberg
Speaker 2: (18:32)
[inaudible]
and
Matt Mullenweg: (18:37)
that number is going up fast. We’re seeing over 270,000 per day. And again this is a subset of the posts that we’re tracking. This is only uh, folks running the debt pack plugin that we get this stat from. So, um, there is even a larger, that is the, the floor of whether that number actually is. So the look at where Gutenberg is today and to talk about some of the development and work we’ve been putting into it. First and foremost, I want to talk about performance. I am so proud of the team for this graph. So what you see on the left there is the average seconds to load for version 5.0 then all the way on the right is a release candidate to have version 5.3. So we’ve halved the time it takes to load, um, Gutenberg and the post and edit screen. We also, one of the things that we noticed when we first launched is that the actual typing lag, um, for all the complex things we were doing in Gutenberg is fairly high.
Matt Mullenweg: (19:34)
So that has gone from 170 milliseconds and 5.0 now down to 53 milliseconds again, uh, down by two thirds. In terms of the speed that’s going in there, we put in some fun user, uh, enhancements. So for example, uh, when we first launched, when you move blocks around, which is what you’re seeing on the left, they should just pop around. We’ve added a motion. Um, so now you kind of can see what’s going on. It just feels a lot better. And of course this also respects the motions, sensitivity settings, uh, chicken sat in your browser for accessibility, we added a typewriter mode. So this is pretty fun because like a classic typewriter, it keeps your vertical place as you type. So it’s a voyage jar and jumps are cases of typing near the bottom of the screen. Just a much more pleasant editor experience and something that now I want from every single editor I use.
Matt Mullenweg: (20:24)
Uh, we had a block previous. So what you’re saying here is now when you, uh, cause the blocks, um, you know, just uh, when it was just the icon on the name, you’d never know. We recreated a little bit of the mystery problem we were trying to solve. So at the block previews do is show you right next to it. Um, exactly are preview of what the block is going to look like and it allows for more explanation. So if you were clicking on something and you’re like what is masonry, which is a fair question to ask, it’ll show you that that’s actually what we call these cool tile galleries, kind of Pinterest style galleries. We created a quick navigation mode which uh, helps with both usability and accessibility for you to be able to navigate through blocks with a keyboard and you can press escape to go into that navigation mode.
Matt Mullenweg: (21:11)
What is coming for Gutenberg? Cause I’m even more excited about the catch up that we’re doing in version 5.3. This is the simplest thing. But wow, we actually found a, we’ve been gathering some stats on when people are searching for uh, for Gutenberg blocks. And one of the very, very top things was social icons. These are like the NASCAR stickers of the wifi everywhere, but you can now add, um, uh, icons any place you can put a Gutenberg block. And we created a really nice interface for doing so. A huge project that we’ve been working on at is taking the navigation menu. So this is what previously was an entire screen inside of WordPress with its own everything. That’s what you see on the left and making it an inline Gutenberg block that’s still supports all the same functionality and even add some new. So what you’re seeing there is a color picker, uh, which previously it wasn’t even something you could do with the old navigation editor.
Matt Mullenweg: (22:12)
Um, by the way, you might notice we renamed it to from menus to navigation. This is going to make all the restaurant users of WordPress understand a lot faster, real issue. We run into and testing. Uh, we’ve created the ability to do gradients. And Gutenberg and, uh, a gradient tool. This is actually pretty fun because it’s a fairly complex interaction. We’re able to put it together in a, uh, exciting way so you can create blocks like it’s 1999 again, uh, that of course pairs well with our multi button block. Another thing, they seem basic, but these are things that we were running into quite a bit that people were asking for. Um, we are very now far, we’re now a year into the idea and the reality that there are, there’s going to be a thousand blog blooming. So people are creating blocks left and right and it’s uh, it’s really designed to see what’s going on.
Matt Mullenweg: (23:05)
So one of the things that um, uh, most proud of the team have for doing as well. So they have a blocked directory. So what this is, is that you’re going to be able to install a blocks in the block directory completely in line. So what you just saw happen, right there was what was happening in the background rather is someone typed in a block they were looking for, they didn’t find anything. They went and called out to the centralized WordPress out or block directory, they clicked at it. And what happened was essentially like a plugin got installed, activate in the background and the block was available to answered completely instantly, completely in line with no page loads or anything
Speaker 2: (23:47)
[inaudible]
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Matt Mullenweg: (23:53)
This is also really fun because as the block directory grows to incorporate hundreds and thousands of blocks, you can use those building blocks just in line as as what you’re doing. Uh, we’re also going to expand this to include patterns, patterns, block patterns or what we’re calling collections of blocks. So if you could imagine like a testimonial pattern or you know, slider type things. Yeah. Basically collections a of the basic building blocks that, uh, take the most common patterns that you see on websites all over the world and make them accessible to install with just a single click. The idea here and what we’re really trying to enable, uh, with these fundamental building blocks is that you could look at any website in the world and build that inside of WordPress with just a few clicks. It is common on the community side of things. We’ve also seen some, uh, pretty cool examples.
Matt Mullenweg: (24:48)
Um, this is the Morgan banker mortgage bankers association, uh, site built by RT camp and they created a blog template for the newsletter functionality. So what’s actually happening right here? They are building an email newsletter in line with Gutenberg to give her a quick call out to WordCamp Phoenix. Uh, any folks from Phoenix here ice, which I also got a little call out on the film also made me realize how weird the word Phoenix is. When you look at it, it’s like the word weird. You’re like, ah, is that Oh, are either, uh, this is 100%, uh, blocks. And in fact, many of the work camps, including we were working with us and now building their entire sites just using Gutenberg and blocks. Nine publishing is using the interface and to route to newsrooms, uh, for different mail-outs they’re doing for Gutenberg. They estimates, uh, that they are saving 15 hours a week for editors across posts, newsrooms, when they implemented this Gutenberg interface. Finally pragmatic created a plugin, which takes a client created word documents, not WordPress word and associated images imports the content directly into Gutenberg editor. And using a combination of core and custom blocks basically makes it ready to go, um, into their publishing system, which again, super, super cool. We do a quick round of applause for these folks. Go there.
Speaker 2: (26:20)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (26:28)
so for deciphering the word document format, that’s impressive in and of itself. Last year I remember it actually came up in the Q and a. I was, someone asked what percentage Gutenberg was and as they were about 10% done, I’m very excited to say that, uh, we’re now at 20% done. So the important changes and part of why we made the investment in Gutenberg was this is the fundamental foundation that we’re going to build the next decade of WordPress founder and I, so we’ll do about 10% per year, but already as we get the 20%, it is incredible humbling and on inspiring everything that people are able to create with what’s in there already. To give a quick reminder, there are going to be four phases of Gutenberg. We are uh, I would say on the tail end of the easier editing phase. This is where we’re tackling all the usability problems we had and tiny MC and our former editors, uh, where people are having trouble manipulating and beds, short codes, images, basically getting the layouts and formatting that they wanted with the old editor.
Matt Mullenweg: (27:41)
We have increased that usability tremendously and the Gutenberg team still does at least one usability test per week and post them at least once a month to make blogs, uh, showing uh, kind of the progress of those kind of real world. You know, not people who are in this room, people new to WordPress. How are they able to use this interface? We’re currently in the thick of the second phase, phase two, which is all around customization. Give you a little update there. We have completed converting all the widgets, the blocks block customization navigation menu, which isn’t a plugin but it’s going to come in core. Uh, the widget block screen and customizer widgets panel with blocks support. We are finishing up a block pattern directory and implementing full site editing you like, hi slipped. The biggest thing there, just as a final bullet point, uh, but it is coming along and there is a light at the end of the tunnel as a quick reminder, the final two phases and the third one is going to be collaboration, which is where we take everything that you’ve seen in Gutenberg and make it so that you can real time co-edit with anyone else who is editing the same things that you are.
Matt Mullenweg: (28:54)
And I also think a lot and invest some development into the workflow around changes and sharing changes, previews, et cetera. And then finally a last, we’re going to tackle the Babel fish problem. And I have multi-lingual support core to WordPress and core to Gutenberg and you of all, he gets super excited about that.
Speaker 2: (29:18)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (29:24)
we’re still at the very, very beginning of this journey. Um, we’ve been doing good Berg for about two years now. There are 47 releases prior to 5.0 coming out. We’ve got 20 cents then. Um, but it’s the community, all of you that really WordPress great. It was so interesting how quickly the individual interviews in that film all went back to that same word, community, community. Uh, there’s so many parts of how you can get involved with WordPress. And I want to talk about some of the ways or some of my suggestions for if you’re watching this other than a thousand something people here in this room are the many on the live stream or the folks who are gonna watch this later. Um, ways that you can get involved and being a cocreator of WordPress first is helping be the change. And you might have heard before every single talk we’ve given that tomorrow is going to be a contributor day.
Matt Mullenweg: (30:22)
So if you are able to get to a, one of the big WordCamps, there’s typically a contributor day afterwards. And what this is, is kind of like the real life version of what we have online. So instead of going to a make.wordpress.org [inaudible] and seeing what’s going on, there will be a physical table for all the people who are passionate about localization, all the people working on the editor, all the people working on whatever that is. And you can walk over that table and be part, uh, alongside the people who make WordPress. I love this concept and it’s one of the most powerful things in the world that with every bit of technology that you interact with every day someone made that. And with WordPress, which media do you interact with every day? It’s probably someone sitting here in this room and you could very easily become one of them.
Matt Mullenweg: (31:08)
So go buy the contributor day. I take it involved. Another fun thing is, uh, the Gutenberg plugin is still there. So when people upgrade to 5.0 we, um, turned off the Gutenberg plugin for them automatically, cause we had I think over a million testers before. Um, but about 270,000, 275,000 people have turned it back on. This means that they are getting those, uh, weekly or fortnightly updates to the Gutenberg plugin, um, before those things get shipped into core. So if you would like to see the latest and greatest of what Gutenberg could be, and there’s a very active feedback channel there for reporting bugs. Basically if you’d like to help define what’s coming next to incor Gutenberg, uh, install this plugin. It’s also neat because it kinda gets you, uh, the latest and greatest before the core release comes out. We’ve also been doing a lot of experiments with beta plugins to allow us to test features before they go into core.
Matt Mullenweg: (32:05)
And one that’s pretty small, still only a little over 100 sites running it. Uh, but I’d like people to checkout and participate with his design experiments. So this is where we’re actually able to make user interface changes to WordPress in a plugin before we put it into core and can get feedback and also do user testing on this. Basically, one of the best things we learned in Gutenberg is that we don’t need to be beholden to the core release schedule, which at our best is three times per year to be able to rapidly iterate, get changes in the hands of users. Um, users are the oxygen for any software and without it, you don’t really know despite whatever planning what you might do, you don’t really know how people were going to use and interact with the software. So it’s really, really important. I want to highlight this fun tweet from someone who I actually reinstall the Gutenberg plugin. This is Hannah Smith said, I installed the Gutenberg plugin today, which upgrades the features that chip with core. I wanted the cover block and I was curious to check it at OMG estimation point integration point. It’s like a million times better if this stuff goes in the core. We’re all in for a treat, well done to all the contributors. So you can be like Hannah, add have, there are three exclamation points in this tweet, which is pretty impressive for 280 characters. That’s a high percentage of escalation points to the rest of the characters in the treats.
Matt Mullenweg: (33:30)
We need more blocks. So, uh, one of the most exciting ways to expand the kind of window of what people are able to do with WordPress today is creating more of those blocks. So if you’re building sites for clients or friends or yourself and you find yourself needing something that Gutenberg doesn’t yet support and you have the technical wherewithal, you’ve learned Java script deeply and are able to build it, uh, share that please. Particularly if it’s Java script only, it can go in our PLA and our block directory, um, as the blocks increase, it’s almost like the people using the canvas of WordPress are getting new colors and textures and paint brushes they can use. And the things that get created are so inspiring.
Matt Mullenweg: (34:14)
Also, if you have that technical wherewithal or know a lot about WordPress, um, think about helping teach to change. So every single person who contributes to WordPress pretty much at some point had someone else help them get involved. That’s part of why we have the contributor days. It’s part of why we make all of our meetings open on Slack and put out all the notes on P two. I just try to help the whole, the whole whole development of WordPress be as open as possible is, um, is that teaching aspect. It’s really one of the only places in the world as well. You can sort of work alongside developers who create the software that runs a third of the web. And so if you wanted to learn better PHP or better Java script, I can think of no better kinda masterclass or real world, uh, studio with which to do that. Uh, if you’re interested in learning more, hopefully you made it to the get involved booth, which was here at, uh, at the events. But if not, come to contributor day tomorrow. So I’ll be happy to walk you through things or check out make.wordpress.org cause we all make WordPress together.
Matt Mullenweg: (35:20)
Sharing your knowledge can also come through events and meetups. Uh, this is a map of all the meetups happening all over the world.
Speaker 2: (35:31)
Looks like even Greenland’s [inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (35:38)
nah, Iceland though. Where come on Reykjavik. What’s going on. As you can see all over the world, um, there is probably a word press meet up near you and if there’s not, like, let’s say you’re in Iceland, you could start one. And these are really, really fun ways to bring community together and also allow you to experience the best part of WordPress, which is the people. The software is pretty good, but that people are amazing. Uh, in 2020 we’re also going to, uh, redo our regional events where camp us and we’re camp Europe and we’re going to add a new one, which is working at Asia for the first time.
Speaker 2: (36:16)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (36:23)
these regional events are fantastic for bringing together contributors in particular. So you get a lot of the local work camp organizers or the meetup folks come to these regional work camps and can really share and learn at a very, very high level. I believe we’re camp Asia will be in February and this first year we’ll be in Bangkok, Thailand. Uh, so I, if you’ve ever wanted to visit there, good excuse to and were camp Europe is going to be Porto. Oh my God. That’s right. Um, I love Porto’s Porto in Portugal. Uh, also where it port is from. If you ever enjoyed a good port. Um, so, uh, check that out at work. Camp us. We’ll be right back here in st Louis.
Speaker 2: (37:11)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (37:18)
I might need to come a week early just to go to like city museum everyday. I did not realize there was a roof, which makes me wonder, I was kind of wondering if my sister actually basically wonder how many floors are in between where I got to, where the roof was that I missed. Oh my goodness. I was a, we’ve apparently had more social media posts and tweets and tumbler post and WordPress blog post, everything, this word camp that we’ve ever had. Uh, and I’ve been following up as well the WCU S TAC and um, it’s been really, really fun to kind of live vicariously parts of this event I was at but did not see why are we doing all this? Um, we’re trying to help open the web. There is a very natural append to them that sweet swings both in societies and technology and in the web between open and closed.
Matt Mullenweg: (38:13)
And as it swings back towards the open, it doesn’t happen for free. It doesn’t happen automatically. It happens through a lot of hard work. Um, uh, from people like here in this room, um, creating the type of web that we want to live in and we want that people go into kids camps and their children to live in. Uh, we are putting together for WordPress. A few, two final things that I’m going to plug first is now on work press.org/news we are doing our annual survey, which is a very exciting way to show for our corner of the web what is going on and the technologies and things that are happening. But you’re also translating this into I believe six or more languages. So we’ll be able to for the first time or for a better than we have in the past, get feedback from the non-English parts of WordPress as well.
Matt Mullenweg: (39:06)
And then finally, a little surprise announcement ball is you saw a lot of talk for five for the future. Just to briefly reiterate five for the future is this idea that WordPress is a big part of your life. I’m trying to think how you can take 5% of your time, however that might be defined. It could be money, resources, colleagues, whatever it could be. Um, to put back into the comments so that, uh, you know, the kind of core WordPress, which is again built largely by like people here in this room, um, can grow and get better and be something that sort of we can benefit from and future generations can benefit from too. So wordpress.org/five you can take the number or spell it out. We now have a directory. It’s actually, I believe, came up in a question maybe last year. It might’ve been work camp you’re ever here, which is, is there a way we can highlight the people who are contributing that fire for the future? So what this allows is either for individuals or organizations to pledge and show everything. They are sort of pledging and WordPress and you can browse them. And then of course if you are ever trying to hire an agency or web host or thinking like something like that, definitely take a look at the five page to see which organizations are giving back to WordPress and try to vote with your wallet to support the folks who are and really making sure that WordPress can continue for many years and decades to come. All right. That’s all I got.
Speaker 2: (40:35)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (40:40)
wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There’s one more thing already ready for that. So, um, this entire presentation was actually in Gutenberg. This was all on a webpage. And in fact the speaker view, which I’ll bring over here is another webpage and this is all edited. Let’s see if I click this, what will happen? I’ll edit it inside of WP admin to the good work.
Speaker 2: (41:17)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (41:26)
also kind of amazing. You didn’t break great. Let me make this full screen again. Like I’m bringing this window back. I lost it. Presenter speaker view. I’ll bring that back full screen. And this code is all on get hub. We’ll be releasing it. And, um, ah, can we give a quick round of applause for stand up if you are working on this
Speaker 3: (41:57)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (42:05)
there was so much code happening till about like 25 minutes ago. I am impressed and amazed that that came together so well. So congratulations on that. All right, now really we can go to question and answers. So, uh, just a quick sort of guidelines for here. We’ll have two mikes up here in the front so you can kind of walk up a lineup and we’ll get to them. A light will briefly shine on you when you’re going to ask your question and say your name, where you’re from and try to make it a question.
Speaker 4: (42:40)
Hello Matt. I’m Ryan Kenny from Miami. Uh, as a volunteer speaker, organizer and contributor that passionately supports WordPress and our shared mission to create a more open and accessible web. I’m concerned because I don’t believe that we currently have, um, a stated accessibility policy, a community code of conduct, conflict of interest policy, a code of ethics, diversity and inclusion policy or privacy policy, um, between the foundation. And so my question is two part. The first is between foundation and the project who would be responsible for assisting us in creating an enacting those policies. And the second part is how is we as a community, how can we help, uh, make this happen and try to enact some of these policies over the next 12 months?
Matt Mullenweg: (43:31)
That is
Speaker 3: (43:31)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (43:36)
I think, I do think we do have some of those policies in place. Like definitely we have a privacy policy, so we do have some of those already if we need to make them more discoverable.
Speaker 4: (43:45)
Yeah, I don’t believe that they’re published. I’m on the, I’m a a core contributor for privacy and we’ve been working as a team on it, but I don’t believe that it’s been finalized and published yet.
Matt Mullenweg: (43:56)
Well, let’s make sure it should be in the footer of wordpress.org um, but I believe we’ve had one of those for a little while. Um, for the others, I would say that the first priority is always making sure that what the purpose of each of those policies is that WordPress has and body. And I’m very proud with the improvements we made to all those areas, um, in the past year and beyond, you know, especially particularly accessibility. And that is in spite of there being a policy or not, we’ve tried to enact bigger changes in WordPress in a policy first way in the past. And to be honest, uh, it felt nice but didn’t always make things actually change. So when we’ve said every commit must be X, Y, Z or something like that, or just maybe had it as a broad policy, like I think we did one for accessibility on the theme directory once, um, didn’t have the same impact as when we actually built the tools or worked alongside folks to make the changes.
Matt Mullenweg: (44:58)
Um, so I do think about that. Uh, I also think about how can we make all these policies that be about things that we want people to do. Not all negative framing. I was a little, it was pretty noticeable when you came in here. Some of you might have noticed like the first three things you saw when walking into WordCamp us were like, uh, costumes, weapons and Dakota of I was like, Whoa, I’m like the little placards for those following along at home, they were like big black and white placard saying what wasn’t allowed. Mostly. I also want to, I think we’ve always done really well and WordPress, whatever. We don’t try to enumerate every possible thing we don’t want people to do, but really talk about the principles of what we want to create together. And I would love for us to also evolve how we present ourselves at work camps to incorporate more of that. Um, well thank you. Uh, in terms of those other policies, let’s talk about tomorrow and contributor day so we can sort of dial in which ones are there versus not and talk about what might be a good process for getting the rest out there. Perfect. I look forward to that. Thank you man. Thanks so much. See you then. All right, we’re going to bounce the lefts.
Speaker 5: (46:07)
Hi, I’m Alicia from Canada and I was really happy to see a number of security talks this year. And there was one this morning on auto updates where I learned that there’s like 80,000 plugins now or regrets, which is awesome. But, uh, I work for security. We know that a lot of sites get hacked through plugin vulnerabilities, not through core vulnerabilities. So I am curious about, you know, the future of auto updates for plugins, but my main question is, you know, most users don’t know this, so how can WordPress in the community better inform administrators or maybe even email somehow notify them about security risks of doubling plugin vulnerabilities, the potential risks of breaking sites with auto updates and some alternatives like virtual patching.
Matt Mullenweg: (46:46)
That is a super good question. And one of the things that, uh, is one of the nine focuses for the year. I think it is super, super, super important. Um, we’re laying some groundwork. So like that admin email I just showed will allow us to more, we want to use that to message people not just about core like we traditionally have, but also about the plugins they’re using. Is that as part of the reason for getting that in and sometimes we have to build the foundation before we build the house on top of it. So that was one of the things that we learned is we didn’t really have a good UpToDate version of, um, over time in a very much the Hill that we’re, or the mountain we’re trying to climb in the distance is that you just log into WordPress and it’s safe, secure and you get the latest and greatest.
Matt Mullenweg: (47:26)
And you shouldn’t have to think about whether something’s a plugin, whether it’s in core or as part of your theme, whether you customize your theme, but then there’s a security update to a different part of it. Like we need ways to handle all of these possible cases and update, at least for the sites that allow us to right. Set the file permissions as such. Um, as me, sites on the web as possible. Uh, I would like to call out and thank the web host here. So almost every major web host, certainly all the ones that we promote do automatic updates of core, uh, for both major and minor releases. And yeah, that’s been fantastic both for us because that means people are getting the latest grades, WordPress, but also for them. Cause that means that sites are less likely to get hacked or compare four year old version of WordPress to like today’s proprietary or alternative.
Matt Mullenweg: (48:13)
Um, the other thing that I’m starting to see more adopt, uh, we do this on wordpress.com. Lots of other hosts are starting to do it too. It’s auto updating those plugins. So I, if you’re a web host and you’re not auto updating plugins yet, figuring out how to make that opt out and get as many of your sites on the latest versions as possible. It is true that most, uh, vulnerabilities we’ve seen and certainly the ones that have affected most sites have been in plugins and themes and themes are particularly hairy, right? Because people might’ve customized the code there, but these are, it’s all just code. And so for sites that give us the permission to modify these things by the file permissions, I think that we’ll be able to tackle it. Um, it’s really, really impressive what we already have. I don’t know. For those of you who are at the auto update panel, we had Mason, a few others there.
Matt Mullenweg: (49:02)
You know, we forget that it wasn’t that long ago, five or six years ago that everyone had to update their WordPress manually and we now get over a 99 usually 99.99 9.5 auto update rate allows us to get, usually like 60% plus of the WordPress is in the world on the latest version within a few weeks, which is not as good as iOS, but way better than an Android. So as a true platform, which WordPress really is, it is the operating system for the web that’s going to power it. So many things that we know now and so many things we can’t even imagine yet. It’s so it’s really, really important that we invest in that auto update mechanism. Thank you. So thank you. So a great place to contribute, especially if you work on security stuff. All right. Okay. Hi man. I’m from Yossi and from the Netherlands.
Matt Mullenweg: (49:53)
And so at Joe’s we’re really integrated with and we’re making good blocks. We have a lot of schema updates in Gutenberg, but our research shows that only half of our customers use the block editor. And that’s hard because that means that we have to basically maintain to Plex. And I’m wondering if you know how we can convince more people to start using the vlog ed because there is a lot of negativity surrounding it and we’re trying to be supportive, but it is, it’s hard to get. And I saw you as post somebody status post with the most comments we ever had. I believe you’re assuming that every user of classic plugin is not using Gutenberg. Correct. We did research within our audience and asked them, what are you using? Classic or the block editor? And half of them answered. We use the classic editor. Uh, so more of a survey.
Matt Mullenweg: (50:50)
Yes, yes. I know surveys weren’t, Oh, but still it’s, it shows that a lot of people aren’t using it. And so we, we have about just by the numbers, we think, like I said, almost three times as many are using Gutenberg than not. So we think only about 25% are kind of using the classic editor of people who have updated and not all of those are using the classic editor all the time. Some of them are switching between Gutenberg. So it’s 25% or below that are still on there. I think the way that we get people on as first improving Gutenberg. Yeah, right. There’s been so many changes. Um, if you’re one of those people who’s not on Gutenberg yet, that’s okay. We’re still making it better. But please, I would encourage you to take every couple of months, like every two or three months, every major word press release, try it out again and see if the things that frustrated you have been addressed, um, to, I think it’s blocks.
Matt Mullenweg: (51:41)
So he knows how on that, uh, that tweet, uh, Hannah talked about how I really want this cover block. Um, I do believe that block first adoption will really help things. And so as for example, if I’m just making things up, like let’s say you had a really cool new feature that was Gutenberg only, that would be a great reason for people to upgrade. Uh, though I say that knowing that y’all have done as much to contribute, contributed good Virg as like anyone else in the world. So actually a quick round of applause because half a pound Yost gives more back [inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (52:16)
a CEO. I know a lot of that’s due to you, so thank you. Um, so I think that is what’s gonna drive it along, but also let’s recognize that we’re only a year in, we’ve got 75% that last 25% will probably, it’d be like a parabolic curve. Um, but I do think that, I mean, we still have 10% on versions prior to 5.6 a PHP. So I do think that we’ll kind of a submit a some topically approach, like a 85 90%. And that’s the point when as plugin developers, I would say you can really focus on Gutenberg first for everything. All right. I just hope you’re right. I would be very surprised. I mean we’ll check this next year. We can update all these stats. I’d be very surprised if not 90% or more of all new posts going in word press next year. We’re, um, we’re good bird.
Matt Mullenweg: (53:04)
So see what we’ve got a lot of work to do. Yeah. Right. Because I think of it also some of the stuff around the corner, like realtime co-editing, right? I could see that being a really compelling feature for people that’ll help them make the leap, uh, to Gutenberg. And of course in Gutenberg you can still use the classic block so you can actually still have almost exactly the same interface inside of Gutenberg. So there’s lots of reasons people upgrade. Thank you. Cool. Thank you very much. Let’s see over here. I want to check time. Alright.
Speaker 4: (53:33)
Hello, I’m Milan. It’s up from Serbia. So I’m raised, born and raised in communism and now we try to survive democracy and yeah, the second part. So, uh, looking at open source project, the idea to me is closer to communism, but I wouldn’t advise applying that, but also democracy doesn’t work. So, um, yeah. So my question is I’m looking at WordPress. I don’t see any system there. And I wonder when will we see some something that we can, uh, identify as a system for making plans, making decisions? Some what are the names? Something like that.
Matt Mullenweg: (54:28)
Yeah, that’s a good question. Um, I, I will, I’ll take at face value all your values, statements of different political systems, um, and say that WordPress is going look different and maybe none of the political analogies directly applied because it is software. And so
Speaker 4: (54:47)
there are other open source projects that have some kind of system. Yeah. It works.
Matt Mullenweg: (54:53)
I think we should call it, we do the WordPress system. Be honest.
Speaker 4: (54:57)
W why w we see it.
Matt Mullenweg: (54:59)
Uh, it was actually one of the, I know that WP governance project kind of fizzled out, but one of the great outcomes I think was they kind of documented how decisions get made, the team structures for doing. So. Um, the good news is that, you know, basically everything except, you know, like choosing the jazz name for a release happens in a Slack or P two or get hub or track channel somewhere. Um, it was even, yeah, there’s a, a contributor to WordPress who I was talking with and they were like, ah, you know, what happened? The about page got made and like the secret process, I wanted to be a part of it and didn’t realize that that all just happened on track. So almost everything you see happens as part of our open process. So there’s a lot of transparency. And so through the actual organizational structure, I think that it’s changed in the past and will change in the future for depending on who’s contributing their strengths and weaknesses and what, uh, all organizational structures are a series of tradeoffs.
Matt Mullenweg: (55:54)
So what we’re trying to optimize for the time. So prior to when I took back over, we have the lead lead role. Um, we would say that for each release there was a release lead that had ultimate authority, including over myself for what was going to be in that release. And you know, the buck stop there for everything. And what we were trying to do there was increase. Uh, the sort of flexibility that released leads had because we had gotten to a space where releases were a little more incremental and want people to feel autonomy to do bigger things. So I would say that kind of like an outfit you try on for different outcomes that you’re looking for and these different organizational structures will try different things for different parts of WordPress. The key for everything we do, I think will be that transparency. Yeah. And of course that we’re open source at the end of it so that the product is something just like that film was creative comment. That’s so cool that whatever we create as a community is available to the community as well. So thank you so much. Thank you.
Speaker 2: (56:51)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (56:55)
we needed, if you have any good words for that too, like what is kind of a transparent do autocracy or something like that. All of these words have trade offs. So,
Speaker 6: (57:05)
hi, my name is Paul Wilson. I’m from Hawaii. I actually came here on another conference but I think most of your Southern California automatic employees were on my same plane. Cool. And I learned about this word camp so I jumped over to here.
Speaker 2: (57:19)
So [inaudible] but I teach
Speaker 6: (57:25)
digital entrepreneurship at a university in Hawaii and WordPress historically has been the main thing that we go to. And so I have two questions that deal with that in particularly. First is the bullet point and I want to make sure I got it right from your presentation. Implementing full site editing that kind of slipped in there at the end and a, and I feel that’s what’s really been eating at WordPress’s market shares. You have Wix, Weebly, all the other ones that I see my students gravitating more cause they like the customization of being able to edit full site without being restricted to themes. And so my question on that one is we’ve seen Acuras acquisitions in the past. Uh, Chez will commerce, uh, where you brought him in and we’ve see the tools like Debbie elementary page layer that already have all of that in place. Is that something that you guys would consider to help make it more competitive and make it more realistic for people that are just getting started where they can customize without having to be locked in theme wise?
Matt Mullenweg: (58:37)
Totally. So a good way to look at it there, there’s probably at least 25 that I looked at of these page builders that would each have its own data model, its way of doing things, uh, for solving this problem that you’re, you said, so part of why we started in Gutenberg was to provide them kind of like a common rails that they could all build on top of. So page builders, I don’t think they’re going anywhere, but they won’t need to reinvent the wheel of the basics. Like the core CMS stuff that’ll now be handled inside of Gutenberg. They can build on top of that and create lots of cool things outside of their, uh, the full site editing is basically the realization of the original promise of, of Gutenberg, which is what we wanted to do was essentially flatten WordPress, take all these different concepts that you would learn in different places around WordPress and make them all blocks so you can learn a block once and you have knew that anywhere.
Matt Mullenweg: (59:34)
And what we’re doing in with the customization phase is breaking out of the postbox. So right now, all those blocks we showed by default, you can just have inside poster pages. We want you to have that in headers, footers, sidebars, where ever you want. So we’re Duke there, the port things over, there’s some more that needs to be done. Like navigation block is still not finished. It’s a very complex interaction. Uh, but certainly this time next year, and hopefully in the early part of next year we’ll have it. So your students and yourself will be able to take, like I said, look at any site on the web and just using some blocks, maybe the 2020 theme, be able to recreate that. So that is 100% where we’re going. Uh, we’re not as far as I know, not going to acquire any of these plugins, but you also need to write because the plugins are going to continue and they’re now going to be able to move even further faster and work together more, which is also something we hear users say because in the past, like choosing one of these is almost like locking yourself in to a particular way of doing things and if you want to use a different theme or you’re still locked in.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:00:38)
So this is a very user centric model of trying to create, solve this problem for the entire WordPress ecosystem.
Speaker 7: (01:00:44)
So on the second we got avoidance really quick on the, well, it’s not a really quick question. I’ll let you tell him. Hello. Hello. And you’ve got the mic. Hi Matt. Michelle Amos from give WP and WP coffee talk. And I would like to lighten this up for just a quick second and ask you a fun question. I ask every guest on my podcast. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made with WordPress and what did you learn from it and what’s your proudest WordPress moment?
Matt Mullenweg: (01:01:16)
Ah, um, the biggest mistake is a longest, a longer story, but there was a hot notches as what it was referred to. Hopefully most people in the room haven’t heard of it, a few have, but super early on with WordPress. Um, it was basically unfunded and I had like run out of money and we were getting hotter designer to redesign the logo. Actually Jason who did do the logo we currently use, but they ran out before he was going to do phases two and three, which were redesigned the website and the WP admin. And way long story short, like someone paid us to put, paid me to put these links on the website. We’re totally spammy, but it’s kind of before web spam was a thing. And also might have inadvertently like then an event, but certainly pop realized a way to hide content using CSS that Google was not yet aware of.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:02:10)
And so that was definitely the worst thing I’ve done to WordPress and the web. Uh, my initial penance for that was that good kismet was, which was to create something to fight web spam especially, which I understood the people were, were doing there. Uh, but then hoping years of WordPress following that. And one of the proudest, you know, I get incredibly proud every time we come together for these big work camps, U S Europe and last year having 5.0 ship and being able to talk about it and see how the community came together. And I mean, that really was the biggest change we’ve made in our 16 year history. And this idea of going from kind of a document model to a block model of editing is it’s impossible to overstate how important that is to the future of WordPress. So seeing how that came together and how we iterate it in public health, it was all that happened. Definitely one of my proudest Wordfence moments. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 3: (01:03:06)
[inaudible]
Speaker 8: (01:03:12)
hi Matt. My name is Wolfe Bishop with WP top hat and uh, I live right here in Southeast Missouri. So kind of home for me. Um, I’m going to kind of screw up the trend that she just tried to set up with a bit of a more controversial subject. So, um, there’s, we, one of the greatest things about WordPress is the fact that it’s released under the GPL, which means we can use redistribute change plugins, themes, anything that’s released under that license as much as we want, either for free or proper. And we love that about it. This has brought about a trend of, of growing a growing trend of companies known as GPL clubs, which redistribute plugins either free or for profit. Um, and there’s a lot of controversy in the community about the, some people are absolutely for it and others are definitely against it. And this kind of attitude is mixed between both plugin or developers as well as any reasonable developers who are against it. Same with end users. So I think the community might like to know what is your official or unofficial opinion about these types of companies?
Matt Mullenweg: (01:04:23)
Sure. Uh, first and foremost, I’ll say it’s allowed by the license. So it’s something that is, there’s no like cases I’m aware of. Like that’s the license when we create GPL software, Leslie with that freedom and we couldn’t prevent folks like that from doing it without taking a lot of freedoms away from everyone here and there was this room. So it’s one of those uncomfortable, almost like first amendment in the bill of rights. Like sometimes it’s uncomfortable, but it’s really, really, really important. Uh, my personal view on it is that, you know, the customers there will get what they pay for. Yes, they can get a hundred plugins. Well, one, it’s weird to pay for that in the first place if they’re the prices, but they’re not supporting you. Those developers seemed fire for the future in their own case. I voting with our wallet for the software that they use.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:05:10)
Um, sport that, I mean, I, I’ve started now where stuff I don’t even need to pay for, you know, or Patriots or stuff like that, just because I want to see more of it in the world. Uh, how you spend your money is just as important as how you spend your time and any other resource. Third worldview, uh, you’re going to encourage more of whatever you’re paying for it to happen. So if you’re seeing companies like some of the ones we’ve mentioned today that are given a lot back to WordPress, doing a GPL, creating great user experiences, supporting Gutenberg, all that sort of stuff, even if you don’t need to maybe just pick up their yearly license or something. And think of that as a way of supporting more of what you want to see in the world. And um, you know, for these companies is that our are kind of taking lots of people’s work but not really giving much back either. It’s those core things or I’d say maybe
Speaker 7: (01:06:08)
I think it’s safe to say that I’m from a different generation, from most of the people in the room. So my question to you is how do you think or PEs aura either how, how do you think we’re best is going to be adopted by the next generation of kids in K through 12 schools or a, how do you think you are gonna change the WordPress so that way kids in K through 12 schools will want to learn or press and wants to join the local or breast meetups, like how they join robotics and different things. Thank you.
Speaker 3: (01:06:53)
[inaudible]
wow.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:06:59)
First thank you. I believe Olivia, you were one of the speakers that’s working on it, right? Yeah.
Speaker 3: (01:07:04)
Yeah. Very modest [inaudible] example
Matt Mullenweg: (01:07:10)
that you’re setting is something that inspires. So this is going to be on YouTube later and boys and girls maybe of your generation. We’ll see you here asking a question and being a speaker at work camp in front of a thousand adults and you know, it’s kind of beautiful. When I got started word for us, I was 19 and you know the old comic in the new Yorker, like on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. I would think like it’s great on the internet. No one knows that I’m a 19 year old kid in Houston who doesn’t have a comp side degree. And like as learning to code, uh, people just were looking at the code I was creating and we started working together and we’re able to create something that became a community, can’t make product that powers a lot of the web and that I’m still excited to work on every single day when I wake up.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:07:58)
Uh, so those examples being out there I think really helped. He repressed stories. It probably need some more younger folks on hero press. Um, cause he told for somewhere here. Uh, you know, just kinda getting more of that out there. Kids camps I think will help. And finally, you know, we need to, Oh this isn’t finally, we need to make WordPress easier and more accessible. That will help with younger generations as well as the older generations. And the last plug I’ll put in there is, you know, something that happens this year was automatic, which is my company bought Tumblr and we announced that we’re going to switch all that to WordPress. So there’s going to be half a billion more WordPress’s in the world and tumbler definitely has a younger audience on it as its primary user base. And so I’m very, very excited as you know, it’s not going to be the first year but probably second or third year as those become WordPress on the back ends. tumbler.com can be like a react front end talking to the WordPress API and you can have a different user interface on top of that. Um, and those folks much like before WordPress as a generation that learned to code, you know, CSS from my space and things like by going where there’s a lot of youth activity happening already and it’s pretty fun site as well. Um, the customization in that path we have there could allow them to graduate, to be WordPress and maybe graduate being someone as cool as you were talking to a work camp someday.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:09:18)
Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: (01:09:19)
[inaudible]
Matt Mullenweg: (01:09:24)
I’m at, um, Becky Davis from Chicago. Um, and I’ve been doing this a long time. I have sites that are out there that are six and seven and eight years old and I’m still maintaining them and they have thousands and thousands and thousands of posts in multiple languages. And you want me to switch over to Gutenberg? Are you? So do, but you don’t have to. So my real question is, I’ve heard rumors that the classic editor is going to die in the future. Please tell me that’s not true. What did we officially announce for our classic editor? 2022 yeah, that’s not cool. Well, there’s a lot gonna change between now and 2022 in the world in general, like we’ll all be like doing WordCamp camp on holograms or something. But so we, I think it went from Gutenberg released, we said four or five years that we announced at that point that we were going to continue to maintain the classic editor plugin in reality and open source.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:10:31)
When things have usage, it gets maintained. And so the classic editor still has a couple of million users by 2022 guess what? It’s going to keep going. I guess what we’re going to still work on it if it makes you feel any better again, but we don’t want to promise that it’s just because that doesn’t encourage what we want to happen, which is people start to adopt and so hopefully some of the sites that are six to seven years old, maybe as you start to update them for a new design or something else, that could be an opportunity to also bring them over to Gutenberg or maybe that’s something their users or you as a developer want to bring in. Like I’ve definitely, I, by the way, I have, I’ve WordPress’s they’re 16 and 17 years old and it’s been kind of fun to go back and see like things I used to have to custom code or have a lot of HTML and it’s going to cost them a CSS.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:11:16)
I can now recreate it in Gutenberg. That’s a little bit of work, but it’s also really, it’s kind of interesting and I learned as I do it and I know it’s going to be for compatible cause Gutenberg 100% is the future of WordPress. So if you were to ask me 20 years from now, is there still a classic editor? I mean, I hope not, but only because no one wants to use it. So sometime in between there a, its usage will dwindle to the point where it’ll maybe either be an [inaudible] plugin or not. Something officially supported. It’s still open source. So that still means that people will be able to customize however they like. There’s people who only post to WordPress using a command line. So use that as an example of some pretty niche things can still be actively supported and maintained. Uh, but I do appreciate if at some point in the future you take a look at Gutenberg again and try it out, uh,
Speaker 7: (01:12:06)
play with it on new projects, but on projects with thousands of pages.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:12:12)
How do I transfer that? There’s no script of that. We should make a script for that.
Speaker 7: (01:12:16)
Okay. Thank you.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:12:23)
Well, the last couple, maybe two or three. Um,
Speaker 7: (01:12:27)
what’s up Matt? Hey. Hey, my name is Christie and I have a question for you. You are a CEO so you know, or you have consultants that know that a key component of any successful project or organization is good stakeholder management, so this idea that in any group we have a ton of people and a lot of the time, most of the time they have competing interests. If we have buyers and sellers, the buyer wants to get the most money to sell, wants to get the least money and we have to find a place in between. I think we could argue that the WordPress open source project has even more stakeholders than the traditional corporate structure that maybe hasn’t please by each others shareholders. I’m curious what we’re doing in 2020 and beyond to bring all of the different people with different motivations together in the WordPress project to work towards a common goal. The questions that we see here demonstrate, I can probably list about seven different kinds of stakeholders. [inaudible] yeah. With different motivations, different incentives, different things they want to see. How do we get everybody working towards that same goal of what we saw on the video, which is making the project in the world a better place.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:13:52)
That is a good question. And I am so relieved. You defined what a stakeholder manager
Speaker 7: (01:14:00)
cause from over there I’m like, man, I’m a terrible CEO. I have no idea what she means by that. So you gotta think Andrew Mason for that one? Cause he texted me and said, what’s your question? And I said it and goes, you’ve got to define
Matt Mullenweg: (01:14:12)
stakeholder management. Ah, thanks Andy. Um, yeah, so I’m maybe not the most corporate CEO ever, uh, in terms of, but I do think about that problem quite a bit, which is there are so many people with different types of interests, different incentives, different motivations, different things that are important to them, a special interest, uh, within WordPress. And, uh, you know, it can be cacophonous sometimes, right? Like all the voices in the room. I also think it’s part of what makes WordPress beautiful and exciting is that those voices, uh, occasionally come together and create like a chorus or we can all go in the same direction whenever we’re going to make everyone happy and not everyone’s ever gonna agree with all of our decisions. I’m sure there’s many things I presented today that a lot of people would strongly agree with or say it would be bad for the web, which is opposite of our goals.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:15:05)
But what we do try to do is put our philosophy out there of what we’re trying to do, uh, the web that we want to see and the things that are really core to us. I came up in an earlier question, things like transparency and open source and then say if those are also important to you, you know, get on the bus and we’ll take this journey together. If not, guess what is open source so you can still, you great evil press or something and sure it’s open source. You can fork it, you can change it, you can take the code, you can not fork it, you can use it for whatever purpose you like. And um, and so you’re not forced. But if you do want to be part of this, what I would term more the community of people contributing to WordPress, um, we do have to think about how we present things.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:15:51)
So it stated the word, but it’s also what happens at meetups. What goes on the blog, what gets translated. And so the 50 plus languages that WordPress is translated into, it very much has a global and multifactorial problem. Um, that, uh, is part of the fun of it. It’s, um, I was listening to a, I was, I think it was a podcast with, um, who’s the guy that does the documentary is like Vietnam jazz. Ken burns, right? The one that has an awesome pan effect. How cool that has effects built into I movie. Like to be a director to have that your name and the effect some day. Um, and he was talking about they have this neon sign in their editing room and, uh, I’m going to butcher it, but I think it said it, it’s complex because every, he covers these really interesting rich stories and for everything that is kind of a surface story by the kind of tweet version that you can say about what happened and gosh, something like the civil war or music called jazz. Um, but the reality is it’s really, really complex. And I did try to, I thought about getting like a neon thing that said from my office after I heard that Bacchus, I think it was a podcast he recorded Tim Ferriss, if you wanna check it out. Um, so thank you for your question. Thank you.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:17:10)
Alright, next to last.
Speaker 6: (01:17:12)
Hey Matt. My name is Jeremy Ward and my senior backend engineer with WebDev studios. And uh, I was excited to see in your presentation today and was aware of the decision last year to upgrade the minimum version of PHP. And it’s great to hear 83% adoption, I believe you said it was all important. Press 5.2
Matt Mullenweg: (01:17:31)
so 83% of people on WordPress, 5.2 are running PHP seven or higher.
Speaker 6: (01:17:35)
Right, exactly. Okay, cool. That’s awesome. Um, the goal for this year, as I understand it, was to get the minimum version of WordPress onto seven plus and of course I think it’s next month that a security updates for 7.1 end. I’m just wondering, um, if you can elaborate on like the 10% the laggards, the ones that are still on the old versions and um, and the conversations that you are planning on having with web host to get them up to date so that we can push everything forward.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:18:04)
Sure. So one common bit of info that a lot of people don’t know is that uh, web hosts that were running older versions of PHP, that the PHP project itself was no longer officially supporting. We’re still getting back ported security fixes, usually from third party companies that they would subscribe to or things like that. So although 7.0 will no longer be officially supported by the pH D project, it’s a little bit like when we say we don’t want to split it open, they just don’t want to have to deal with it. They want to focus on making the, the new thing, but their web host, often subscriber service and there’ll be those people will still have PHP security updates. So it’s not actually as into life as a PHP project would like you to the field. Um, in terms of what we need to do to pick up those old people, not old people, people on old versions of I made a generational mistake there.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:18:55)
Um, people on old versions of PHP is um, we got to work with a host and now it’s really something where, you know, apart from a small handful that might be running like servers in their closet and on their home connect like pretty much everyone runs WordPress on a web host, on a server image, on any of the great web posts that sponsor work camps. And, um, so one thing we’re looking to start doing is start identifying which hosts are half those older versions and just use that to talk to them. They might not even know themselves that they has to have half a million WordPress is still on PHP 5.6 or something. So if we’re going to expose that to them and kind of offer the best practices of what we’ve seen folks do to upgrade. By the way, this is also an area where I’ve seen direct competitors hosts that competed with each other for the same customers actually help each other out and open source of scripts and things that they used to do upgrades.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:19:48)
Bluehost did some amazing stuff there so we can bring these folks along, but it’s not the end user that probably needs to hear it at this point cause they’ve been seeing the notices and everything for a while now is that we need to start working, uh, with wherever they are paying to host our website. Great. Thank you. Thank you. All right, and we’re going to on this one, I apologize. I know there’s a few more questions, but I’m very cognizant of time and for the folks that didn’t get to it, come on up afterwards. I’m happy to talk to you. All right, so you’ve got the last question. Please introduce yourself. You’re the celebrity that was on that.
Speaker 4: (01:20:21)
No, I just want to go and don’t wear because it’s a bit embarrassing. I, Matt, my name is Sanjay scow. I’m the Webers community manager at SiteGround. And right now I serve as the release coordinator for WordPress 5.3,
Speaker 7: (01:20:40)
November 12th. Right, number 12.
Speaker 4: (01:20:42)
Uh, I’m just the shouty boss lady. Everyone else is doing the work. But one thing that I did,
Speaker 7: (01:20:50)
not bossy, you have executive management skills. Yes.
Speaker 4: (01:20:53)
Thank you. Thank you. Um, I’m also a good listener. So one thing that came up, um, over this past few months in conversations with many different, uh, people involved in the release is that they feel it will be great to have a calendar of releases, a year long calendar of releases. So how do you feel about having a calendar for 2020 for the next, because you said yourself three releases at best every year. So how do you feel about having a calendar for 2020
Matt Mullenweg: (01:21:31)
this is a good one to end on.
Speaker 7: (01:21:33)
Oh, let’s do it. Yes, thank you. There’s no reason not to.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:21:42)
We do kind of a version of that early in the year. Yeah. So we might as well map it out as long as people realize that those dates might move. You know, you know, in the new Yorker when they say they going ons about town, they’re like, musicians leave complicated lives. Developers leave complicated lives
Speaker 7: (01:21:56)
and some things might move bossing them around, you know. But uh Oh, Oh maybe the releases you lead will be super on time. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll get that. And the place that
Matt Mullenweg: (01:22:11)
we should have that. And we have had it a little bit more in the past, I guess we just fell out of updating. It would be slash about SAS roadmap. Probably the best place for that. And a that shows the dates of previous releases, the Jazzers they chose. And then we’ve previously showed some of the updating ones, but I guess we fell behind there. So let’s fix that up a contributor day. That will be done as we wrap up. Um, just very quickly, I would love to invite all the organizers for work camp us this, uh, this year to the stage really quick.
Speaker 3: (01:22:43)
You were involved and organizing, doing something coming up, coming up quickly, quickly, maybe not too quickly. We did was at work camp. We did have a [inaudible]
Speaker 7: (01:23:00)
usually when the organizers are coming out it previous one. So come up carefully.
Matt Mullenweg: (01:23:06)
Okay. Come on, come on, come on, come on, keep coming, keep coming. All right. Wait for everyone to get here. Oh, come on from this side too. Okay. Oh my goodness. Look at this. Look at this. Is this the 47 that we talked about earlier? I’m glad we had it, man. That’s awesome. All right, we’re missing one, but so can we do a quick round of applause for [inaudible].
Speaker 3: (01:23:32)
Fantastic. Thank you so much. [inaudible].
Matt Mullenweg: (01:23:50)
All right, let’s go. Thank you all so much for an amazing state of the word. I’ll see you next year.
Speaker 3: (01:23:55)
[inaudible]
.
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