In this first-of-its-kind, distributed State of the Word, co-founder Matt Mullenweg, shares his thoughts on how WordPress has weathered 2020, and what the future holds for WordPress. This presentation traditionally takes place at WordCamp US, but this year for the first time took place online only.
This is an audio-only podcast the transcript of which is also part of this episode’s show notes. You’ll also find a link to the original video recordings of both the State of the Word 2020 and the traditional Q&A part on WordPress.TV.
Transcript
Matt Mullenweg: Howdy everyone, my name is Matt Mullenweg and this is the State of the Word. About 17 years ago I co-founded a project known as WordPress alongside a gentleman named Mike Little from the United Kingdom. WordPress is open source software for creating the Web. We like to say it’s both free and priceless at the same time. About once a year, this State of the Word address, which is, of course, an homage to the State of the Union that the United States president gives the Congress is something we usually do at our annual WordCamp United States event. This is a once a year event where we bring folks from all over the U.S. together to talk about and create their future versions of WordPress. Today, as many things are happening this year, we are doing it virtually. So thank you so much for tuning in. Whether you are a WordPress pro or just kind of curious about our community, we hope that you’ll find lots to learn and hopefully inspire you to future action and involvement. Twenty twenty was a very surprising year for us, as I’m sure it was for many. 2020 was a year of many firsts, we had COVID-19, my first global pandemic resulting lockdown and isolation that many of us have been dealing with and continue to. It’s really worn out, a lot of us, as the year has continued. It was a year of a lot of social tensions, finally the year where we had to learn how to work together while being apart.
Matt Mullenweg: WordPress has always been distributed. Being open source, we’ve always had people all over the world, but working together in a distributed fashion during a global pandemic is very, very different from how we would normally work together. And a lot of contributors and volunteers› ability to contribute was impacted negatively by the pandemic. Despite all of that, though, we shipped three really exciting and amazing releases. Now, before we get to the releases, I do want to set the stage and talk about Gutenberg, because you’re going to hear that word a lot. And if you don’t know what it means, you’ll be very confused. Gutenberg is the most ambitious project we’ve undertaken in the 17 year history of WordPress. Essentially, we’re attempting to redefine how people write on the Web, taking it from a document based model like printing pages kind of inherited from things like Microsoft Word and turning it into atomic blocks. Basically the idea that instead of a page, which you’re laying out is these rich blocks, which can have rich functionality, they can be embedded from other sites like a YouTube embed or something. They can have the layout and different types of arrangements. They can be nested inside each other. And using these blocks, you can create really anything you imagine. In 2015 from a stage actually, not at all like this one, because it was actually a stage, I asked people in the WordPress community to learn JavaScript deeply, because at the leading edge of the WordPress community, it was becoming quite clear that that was going to be the future of how WordPress was going to develop.
Matt Mullenweg: In 2017, we publicly launched the Gutenberg project, this ambitious thing I just described to you. And then at the end of 2018, with WordPress 5.0, the Gutenberg editor became the default editor inside of WordPress, which is why sometimes now we just call it the WordPress editor. Since Gutenberg started, until now, there’ve been over 15000 commits to the code base and it’s had over 95 public releases. That’s one on average every two weeks since it started. So we’ve been able to iterate and ship Gutenberg faster and even the 3 times a year that WordPress does. And those public releases also allow us to do lots of user testing so we’re able to actually put the working code in the hands of users and the tens of thousands of people who run the Gutenberg beta plugin and get their feedback, which has been really fantastic. Now, Gutenberg as a roadmap of being 4 different phases. And let me remind you what those phases are. The first phase, which we are still in, is creating the fundamental building blocks of what you can do with Gutenberg. So that’s all the block launches you’ve seen. It’s also bringing all those blocks to our mobile editor, which is very exciting, because a lot of people don’t appreciate that Gutenberg also has been quite fluent to use on the Web, also has native implementations for both Android and iOS that we use in our open source WordPress apps. So phase one is all about editing things inside the post of the page.
Matt Mullenweg: Phase 2, which we’re in right now, is editing everything outside of the post and page. So this is the idea, sometimes we call it FSE or Full Site Editing that you can use blocks that comprise the entirety of your site, which really allows us to reimagine what themes and everything else are going to be able to do.
Matt Mullenweg: Phase 3, which we haven’t started yet, is all about collaboration, workflow and real time co-editing. So the best way to think about this is that awesome feature in Google Docs when you can see who’s editing what and a lot of modern Web apps have that, we’re going to build that into just core WordPress and it’ll work in a peer to peer way, probably using like Web RTC and allow when you edit something to see the other people are editing and phase 4, which is just in the imagination stage right now, but likely to be taken underway pretty vigorously into the 2022 two is multilingual. So this is a native way to do inside of WordPress, which today you need a plugin to do, which is create a multilingual website.
Matt Mullenweg: So that’s quick summary of Gutenberg. And now let’s dive into the WordPress releases. The first of these releases is WordPress 5.4 named in honor of Nat Adderley, the amazing jazz trumpeter. 5.4 had over 550 contributors, a beautiful new welcome guide to make it easier for new users to WordPress to get accustomed and learn their way around. Cool design tools, around colors, a way to do blocks for social icons natively and Gutenberg, which means they load really quickly and don’t have any cross-side tracking JavaScript. We made it easy for sites to create a privacy policy and then last but not least, one of my favorite features is we invested a lot in performance and code in this release. We got a 14% increase in speed. This sort of thing is always important. We endeavor to rewrite somewhere between like 5 to 15 percent of WordPress in every major release so that over the long term, much like this Ship of Theseus, we’re constantly replacing all the boards. And, you know, basically we get a new WordPress every couple of years, even though we’re doing several major releases per year. Next step was WordPress 5.5 named for the legendary vocalist Billy Eckstine. In the midst of a pandemic, we had our most contributors ever with over 800 folks who were part of that release, 5.5 introduced one of my favorite features of the year, which is block patterns.
Matt Mullenweg: You know, as we talked about with Gutenberg Blocks, when you start thinking and blocks, you can look at pretty much any website on the Web and see almost like when Neo sees the code behind the matrix, you can imagine how the buttons and images and everything can become a block. What block patterns do is essentially give you like a shortcut to creating those common best practices of like, you know, a testimonial with 3 faces and quotes or, you know, a hero image that then scrolls or whatever it is. People can create patterns to make it easy for you to do this. This is kind of like a shortcut for making sites faster and hopefully can supercharge how fast you can create WordPress sites. We did a lot of work on cleaning up the UI, including refining that iconography of WordPress quite a bit. And then another one of my favorite features, and this has been a crowd hit, as well is the distraction free editor, a mode which can hide most of the chrome of WordPress and Gutenberg and give you a very clean and focused writing environment, which as I find really fantastic for that generative part of writing when you just, you know, close everything, turn off all distractions and just try to get as many words on the page as possible before you go into the more critical editing phase of writing.
Matt Mullenweg: When you are adding things to your posts or pages using Gutenberg, you might look for a block that doesn’t exist yet on your site, meaning that no plugins or core supports it. Now, WordPress can transparently go out to WordPress.org, see if there is a block plugin which matches the block that you’re looking for. And then in the background, if you click insert, it’ll install the plugin, activate it and then on the fly sort of insert that block, which the code was just added support for into your post or page. This kind of seamless on demand installation of essentially a plugin I think is really, really exciting and a good modality that we want to follow with WordPress in the future, just making things as easy and seamless as possible.
Matt Mullenweg: And then finally, another one on the threat of making things easy and seamless is we added support for inline image editing, which means that without bouncing to another editor, without moving to another application or anything else, you can make some basic but really powerful edits. The images in your post just right there in line and Gutenberg. So 5.5 is really again in one of the most challenging times we faced in this year or in the history of humanity, we’re able to create some really, really great progress. And both Gutenberg and the core WordPress experience. All of these improvements that Sarah Gooding, journalist with wptavern.com to say «the 5.5 update is a testament to the stability of WordPress during uncertain times, as well as its unstoppable, distributed contributor base, who continue to get things done despite the pandemic’s unique challenges».
Matt Mullenweg: I was really proud of what the team did with 5.5, but there was more right around the door. We topped the year with WordPress 5.6 named in honor of the legendary Nina Simone. Over 600 contributors came together to put some really exciting behind the scenes features for WordPress, including allowing you to opt in the automatic updates for Core. This is the first step towards our goal of allowing your WordPress to simply maintain itself where you can set it and forget it, and it’ll get automatic in the background and hassle free updates to all your plugins, themes and core. We’re doing this for core first and it’s on by default for news sites, but opt in for older sites. But over time we hope that we can make this robust enough to just be on for everyone all the time. So you never have to worry about updating your WordPress ever again, which of course is the best way to stay safe and secure, in addition to, you know, the latest and greatest features. We added support to the Rest API for application passwords, which is a more secure way of getting other applications› access to your site without reusing or sharing your normal username and password.
Matt Mullenweg: We added support for PHP 8, which also came out just earlier this month. PHP 8, different than some more recent releases, changes a ton of things, so both us and the rest of the PHP community are going to need to do lots and lots of updates to get things to be compatible. But WordPress core has compatibility and for sites that are able to adopt PHP 8, they’ll get some pretty cool new features from the language and also some performance improvements on many, many sites. On the user facing side of things, we took the opportunity to update cover blocks, allowed you to convert several different blocks into columns, which is a fun feature change how the button block worked, really start to utilize the block patterns we added in 5.5, culminating in a very exciting new default theme, Twenty Twenty-One, which I’ll talk a little bit more about in a bit.
Matt Mullenweg: So Twenty Twenty had a lot of firsts, but there was some really good firsts too, and including a lot for the WordPress community. One is our first ever virtual State of the Word, which in a very meta sense you are experiencing right now. It was our first time to crack 39% of the top ten million websites powered by WordPress. We are first in this stat more than ten times the number two in the market. And we added just about four percent to that stat this year. So we’ve gone from 35 to 39, which is the most we’ve ever added since the stats started being tracked in 2011. So we grew faster this year than we’ve grown any previous year. And I think that’s an incredible testament to the really hard work about the WordPress core community on WordPress.org and all the amazing developers, agencies, plugins, themes, the entire WordPress ecosystem that really makes WordPress work.
Matt Mullenweg: We had a lot of firsts with online events and mentorship in a year when we all had to stay apart. You transformed in-person events into online gatherings and shared your knowledge and passion, to enable more connections to cool events like WPBlockTalk, WP Accessibility Day, hallway hangouts, code streams and tons and tons of online meet-ups and WordCamps. It’s been very, very exciting to me to see how the WordPress community had adapted to stay connected in this time by exploring these new ways to educate, innovate and inspire, or lowering the barriers to entry and removing the need to travel in order to participate in WordPress events. I’ve always loved the WordPress events and really wish I was in person with all of you right now. But also it’s weighed on my mind that these events are exclusionary to those who, for whatever reason, can’t make it out on a weekday or weekend to travel to where they happen to be. In a first certainly for WordPress and possibly for any major open source project WordPress, 5.6’s release squad was entirely women and non-binary folks. There were over 40 contributors who led the release and it ended up being, as you saw, an amazing one. That’s part of why we named it in honor of Nina Simone. If you’d like to see your face on that list of WordPress release leads someday or just want to learn more about some of the things we just talked about, including WordPress fundamentals, I would love to take this opportunity to introduce the new learn.wp.org site or learn.wordpress.org, which is a new effort by the community to create tutorials, workshops and host discussion groups entirely online. So, again, leaning into this new world that we’re at, that seems like we’re going to connect a lot more on the Internet that we did in person and trying to take the best of what we used to do with our workshops, events, everything like that, and bring it to you online any day of the week, any time of the day. So much cool stuff going on here, but what’s really happening, like as Paul (?) would say, those with a cool facade of Neil (?) or too cool for school are always proclaiming WordPress to be dead, for there to be something new replacing it. So how in 2020 they would grow faster than we ever have? From my vantage point, I have two or three megatrends I think contributed to this.
Matt Mullenweg: First is the lockdown. It gave people space and time to connect online, but they were looking for healthier spaces than just doing scrolling on social. We didn’t need any more tools of our mental health. And blogging about the things that you’re passionate about are finding blogs to read, of people who are into the same things you are into, is really one of the most rewarding parts of the Internet. And it’s never been easier for a do it yourself aspiring blogger to create and connect with people online using WordPress.
Matt Mullenweg: Second was a mega boom in e-commerce. We’ve all heard how e-commerce was pulled forward many, many years. There’s an incredibly flexible e-commerce plug in for WordPress called WooCommerce. WooCommerce facilitated over twenty billion dollars in sales so far this year, more than double of the year before. The intersection of commerce and content is huge and a growing space. And as people who might be introduced to selling things online through maybe eBay or an Amazon or a proprietary SaaS service like Shopify, as they reach a limit of those services, they look for the most flexible thing out there and the most flexible thing out there on the Internet is almost always going to be WordPress. And third, and finally, there was incredible economic uncertainty this year. Lots of people lost their jobs. Lots of people were looking to supplement their income is drive an incredible amount of entrepreneurship, so people who are looking for people who knew WordPress. And on the other side of that, more and more folks who knew or learned WordPress found that they had a lot of demand for their work. So they were able to supplement or replace their income essentially for folks who have a do it for me mentality. So someone who is looking for someone else to build the website, it’s never been a better time to learn and invest in improving your WordPress skills.
Matt Mullenweg: Here are some cool examples to illustrate each of these three trends. For blogging I love the example Marginal Revolution, a blog founded the same year as WordPress in 2003 by two professors at George Mason University. I actually had the good fortune to meet one of the co-founders, Tyler Cohen at an obscure economics conference in Dallas, honoring Milton Friedman, hosted by the Federal Reserve. And he told me actually at that point that the very best thing you could do to improve your writing was to write every single day. Tyler and Alex have followed that and grow their blog to be a really rich community of folks finding connectivity through the language of economics. The community is actually so rich that Marginal Revolution University was born in 2012. It’s a learning site that houses the largest online library and free economics education videos over 900 available to everyone.
Matt Mullenweg: On the e-commerce side of things, you might have come across cool product named, Tonal, tonal.com, which is like a Peloton of strength training. You know, a side effect of this pandemic has been personal health shifting to our homes. Tonal anticipated the need for virtual fitness coaches and uses AI combined with a really innovative mirror interface where there’s a screen embedded in the mirror and then it has kind of like pulleys (?) that provide resistance training, I think up to 200 pounds. And they can offer a superior workout when you’re at home. They don’t disclose their sales, but just a few months ago in September, there was a 110 million dollar funding round, which would give you a hint of their growth and scale. And one of the investors is actually the Warriors› basketball player, Steph Curry, which you might think is a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what your favorite basketball team. But he has apparently been using it under a pseudonym for a few years. He just kind of bought it off the website. They also disclosed when they did that round that in the past year their revenue has grown by 12x, 12 times. And this is all built on WordPress and WooCommerce, which is very exciting both for the scale and showing that you can build a really cool new product and service on top of Woo.
Matt Mullenweg: Finally, here’s someone who was able to learn and improve their WordPress skills, connect with lots of demand for those skills and transform their life.
Woman: WordPress powers ventures like Codeable and Nexus that helps you find a WordPress freelance developer wherever you might be in the world. Deborah Butler is a Codeable certified freelance developer in Cape Town, South Africa. Deborah’s WordPress skills supported NGOs and small business responses to the covid crisis. Check out her work on Children’s Radio Foundation’s COVID-19 informational page. These are just three examples of how all of what we do, how we express ourselves, how we live and how we work has been moved online. And when online is your only option, WordPress is your best option.
Matt Mullenweg: As I alluded to when we were talking about 5.6, there’s a fantastic new default theme, that we call Twenty Twenty-One, which comes out of the box in a number of fashionable pastels. Of course, you can customize it to any color you like. You’ll see lots of cool block patterns in use and a neat new feature which kind of crosses core WordPress.org that Helen Hou-Sandi helped drive was improving the starter content in the theme. So now theme demos, instead of showing that kind of cool but not always useful boat can show all of their starter content on the theme that’s activated already for all of the default themes they’ve ever shipped WordPress and will soon be activated for the remainder of themes on WordPress.org. So you’ll be able to see some great demo content and decide which theme could be the very best for you. Twenty, Twenty-One makes it easier than ever to get your vision on your site and your site onto the Web and now we’d like to show you a sneak peek at some of what’s coming around the corner with Gutenberg. We have Yoan showing the site editor beta.
Yoan: In this demo I’d like to walk you through the new Gutenberg site editor. The site editor allows you to edit the theme templates beyond the post content, it introduces several new blocks like the query loop. When you make a modification like adding a featured image, it naturally adds it to every post in the query. You can configure the layout to make simple tweaks and it propagates to all the posts. If you prefer the featured image above the titles, no problem. All the familiar block interactions are available.
Yoan: While the header is a separate template part, it could be edited seamlessly, everything is a block: navigation, the site title, the tagline, making it easy to edit anything and make use of all the block tools available. The block list view shows all the different areas like header and footer for quick access. Since everything is created with blocks, it’s easy to edit. The site editor engine keeps track of all the modifications, giving the user a clear overview of what has been modified: the site title, the header area, etc..
Matt Mullenweg: You can open the 404 template and modify it like any other content. With the introduction of block patterns to WordPress, themes will be able to offer any number of designs, providing a shortcut to replicating demo sites or swapping out aspects users may not like with another that they do. This is the culmination of several ongoing projects to improve and expand upon the customization possibilities in WordPress.
Yoan: Both templates and regular pages can be edited in the site editor, small previews can be seen when hovering the different templates. The style customization panel allows making global changes like text, link or background color. These modifications can be quickly checked against the different pages in the site. You can customize any template of a site such as the page template, drag and drop the page title into a cover block to use a gradient for that page. Possibilities are endless. We can’t wait to see what you build with this.
Matt Mullenweg: As you can see, we’ve come a long, long way with Gutenberg from those first versions you might have seen and tried out. If you haven’t given it a try recently I encourage you to check out Gutenberg. By creating this common framework that every theme and plugin can build on or reducing the (?) within WordPress from people who are solving these problems in lots of different ways and providing what I believe is the basis for the next decade of WordPress’s growth. For about two years into a 10 year project we’ve got good chunks of Phase 1 and Phase 2 of Gutenberg done. That’s supposed to be page editing and then editing the entire site. I’m excited to continue these in 2021 and hopefully start to get to Phases 3 and 4. So if WordPress has ever helped you or WordPress has let you help others, I invite you to learn more about the WordPress project. It’s a global community of experts and amateurs and enthusiasts that collaborate to maintain, sustain and improve the software. And we do it all without locking you into a walled garden of technology. I often get asked how WordPress has avoided the burnout or tragedy of the Commons or things that commonly afflict other open source projects, and I attribute a lot of that success to our kind of culture of generosity. Well, this program called Five for the Future, Five for the Future is the idea that whatever time your’re WordPress is supporting you do, whether that’s a business or many employees or freelancing, they try to take five percent of that and put it back into the commons, volunteering for something you’re passionate about in the WordPress community, something that leaves the community a little better than you found it.
Matt Mullenweg: For some companies, this might be full time folks that are contributing. For some individuals, that might be, you know, five percent would be about four hours a week or start two hours a week. So think about what that five percent means for you. It’s kind of metaphorical means different things to different people. And if your organization is part of it, please make sure to list yourself and set a good example by what you’re doing on the Five for the Future page on WordPress.org. So with that, we come to the end of our first ever virtual distributed State of the Word. If you’d like to follow me some more I’m photomatt on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. I have a podcast at distributed.blog and I blog myself at ma.tt and matt.blog all powered by WordPress, of course. So please check it out. And without further ado, we’re going to try to head to another first, which is a distributed Q&A so questions and answers submitted by you all over the past week or so. And myself and others within the WordPress community are going to do our very best to answer these questions. So let’s dive in.