State of the Word 2022

This article contains the full audio recording, full transcript and two AI generated summaries of the 95 minute keynote including the Q&A session. One was generated by the automated transcript platform Sonix AI’s new summary beta feature, one by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event shares reflections on the project’s progress and the future of open source. This year’s event took place again in person in New York City and was live-streamed on YouTube. The recording is also available on WordPress.TV – find the links at the bottom of this page.

You can generate a summary ranging from 1 to 10 sentences. I selected 10 and got the result below which I made some modifications to, because it put the State of the Word in 2021 instead of 2022. I also added some minor details here and there.

Summary by Sonix AI

At the 2022 State of the Word, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg talked about the latest developments in the Gutenberg block editor, which includes features such as advanced copy and paste, rich blocks, and editing links. WordPress also updated the Gutenberg licensing to dual licensing, making it easier to embed within 3rd party applications. The WordPress community, with over 100,000 people all over the world, continues to be vibrant and growing. It doubled the amount of active meetups this past year and is celebrating WordPress› 20th year in 2023.

One challenge the WordPress community is tackling is improving the OpenVerse API and creating more content for the directory. Also discussed were the use of AI in creative work, accessibility of WordPress, and collaboration between other editors. Ultimately, the WordPress team hopes to enable users to easily create their own sites and encourage innovation.

Summary by Sonix AI

Since I wanted a longer summary, I asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT free research preview (Dec 15 Version) to summarize the transcript. What’s interesting about this is that although Matt did not mention anything about what percentage of the web WordPress powers, the summary states 60%. In reality it’s a little over 40%. It seems that it was referring to 60 million websites using WordPress as of December 2021, not 60%.

ChatGPT also states that its OpenAI sister DALL-E is a Google technology, which is incorrect. Their investors include Microsoft, Reid Hoffman’s charitable foundation, and Khosla Ventures. Google is mentioned in the transcript, but in other contexts, which is sort of funny, because both ChatGPT and DALL-E are developed by OpenAI.

OpenAI mentions the following limitations of ChatGPT:

1. May occasionally generate incorrect information
2. May occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content
3. Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021

So don’t forget this is a research preview!

Summary by ChatGPT

In the following summary, I striked through all inaccurate information. Although the web community has been very excited about ChatGPT and it can do amazing stuff, you should definitely fact check the output 

The State of the Word conference was held this year with a mix of in-person and online attendees. Josepha Hayden Chomphosy, the executive director of the WordPress Project, delivered the opening address and discussed the concept of the «four freedoms» of open source software. These freedoms, which include the ability to run the software for any purpose, study and modify it, redistribute copies, and distribute modified versions, enable the removal of barriers to opportunity and create a free and open web for the future.

Next, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg took the stage to give an update on the state of the WordPress community. He mentioned that WordPress now powers over 60 40% of the web and highlighted the success of the recent WordPress 5.6 6.1 release. Mullenweg also announced the launch of the WordPress Community Project, which aims to bring more diversity and inclusivity to the WordPress community. He discussed the progress of the WordPress project’s new block editor, Gutenberg, and the success of the WordPress.com platform. Mullenweg also gave an update on WordPress› partnership with Google and the work they are doing to improve the performance and security of WordPress sites, including the use of Google’s DALL-E technology to enhance image generation for WordPress.com.

In addition, Mullenweg announced mentioned the launch of a new project called ChatGPT, which uses artificial intelligence to assist WordPress users with tasks such as SEO and website optimization. He acknowledged the challenges facing the WordPress community, including spam, security, and the need for better education and support for WordPress users, and emphasized the importance of the community working together to address these issues and building a better, more inclusive platform for the future.

At the end of the conference State of the Word featured several other speakers attendees could ask questions, who delved which were about topics such as the future of WordPress, the importance of community, and the role of WordPress in creating a more inclusive and accessible web. Overall, the State of the Word conference provided a comprehensive update on the state of the WordPress project and community, and highlighted the many achievements and challenges of the past year. The event was a valuable opportunity for members of the WordPress community to come together and discuss the direction of the project and ways to move forward as a united group.

Summary by ChatGPT

Audio Recording

Transcript

This is the transcript generated with Sonix AI. It still took me 3 hours to proof-read, because the accuracy according to Sonix AI is around 96%. At least for now 烙 So the missing 4% still require human intelligence and for a 95 minute transcript that is around one hour of proof-reading for every 30 minutes of transcript. Here are the sub-heading I added to the transcript which touch on some topics not mentioned by the AI generated summaries 路‍♂️

1. The 4 Freedoms of Open Source
2. A Community of over 100,000
3. Software for the People, by the People
4. The Block Paradigm
5. The State of Gutenberg
6. WordPress Meetups and WordCamps
7. WordPress Turns 20 in 2023
8. The OpenVerse
9. Block Themes
10. Twenty Twenty-Three
11. Record Number of Contributors
12. New Categories for WordPress «Open Directory»
13. Phase 3 of Gutenberg – Collaboration
14. Phase 4 of Gutenberg – Multilingual
15. OpenAI ChatGPT and DALL-E
16. Q&A

The 4 Freedoms of Open Source

Josepha Hayden Chomphosy: [00:00:00] Hello, All WordPressers of the world in New York. Oh, that was really fast. Most of the time when I just give people that collect, they’re like, Oh, a lady speaking, what should we do? So here we are. What we’re going to do is we’re going to say hello everyone, and welcome to this year’s State of the Word. It’s so wonderful to have so many of us back here in New York with us today. But also we have a bunch of folks watching from all over the world, all of our satellite watch parties. Hello. Thank you so much for tuning in. Any minute now we’ll have Matt. And that is exactly what we’re here to talk about. But first, my name is Josepha Hayden Chomphosy. I’m the executive director of the WordPress Project. And as I wrap up my fourth year in that role, I find myself reflecting on the question Why WordPress? The most quotable answer to that lies in the phrase free as in speech. But for anyone who’s heard me talk about the four freedoms of open source, you know that I think it’s a lot more than that. The four freedoms of open source are these. In case you have not yet heard me talk about them, the freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study how the program works and change it so that it does your computing as you wish. The freedom to redistribute copies so that you can help your neighbor and the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, giving the community a chance to benefit from those changes.

Josepha Hayden Chomphosy: [00:01:35] From a practical standpoint, what this means is that you can own a copy of the software that’s easy to use, easy to study and learn from, easy to change, easy to share. But from a philosophical standpoint, as I said, this means a lot more to me. These four freedoms enable the removal of barriers to opportunity in the world, and by continuing to remove those barriers, we secure a free and open and interconnected web for the future. The four freedoms form almost a Bill of rights for the web, and as with any rights, you don’t need to know that they exist in order for you to benefit from them or in order for you to deserve them. And so when I ask myself why WordPress, the best answer I have always been able to find is that we secure opportunities and freedoms long into the future for people who may not even know that those freedoms should matter to them yet. Like so many, I didn’t know any of this when I first came to WordPress. We’re going to do some WordPress Bingo. Who knew that when they first heard of WordPress? You’re welcome WP Sessions folks. But so it wasn’t until much later that I met the man that I’m about to introduce to you, and he was one of the many people that taught me that open source is an idea that can change our generation. That man is, of course, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:03:01] Thank you. Wow.

A Community of over 100,000

Matt Mullenweg: [00:03:08] Welcome, everybody. I don’t know if you can see on the stream, but we have a live studio audience here in New York City, which is pretty fun. I don’t know if we’re going to be quite as entertaining as SNL (Saturday Night Live), but we’ll try to work in a few, at least, inside WordPress jokes. It’s such a pleasure. We’ve got a mix of some local contributors. Some folks who have flown in from all over the world, some like WordPress developers and WordPress business leaders. I’m actually curious who came who thinks they came to furthest today? Right over there. We got Paris. Right. That’s awesome. Two Paris and Vienna. So two Paris and a Vienna. It’s not bad. What’s that? And a Berlin. So Europe is showing up. Well, Europe’s going to feature pretty prominently later, so we got to get some more of that out next time. But just a reminder for what we do with the State of the Word, it’s kind of an opportunity. You know, WordPress is a distributed group of not just thousands, but actually probably over 100,000 making up the community. You know, we have over 55,000 plugins and themes for WordPress that extend it to do almost anything you can imagine. We have all the core developers, the translators, translating into over 50 languages from volunteers all over the world and as like massively distributed group that comes together to make this thing that we call WordPress that has the meanings that Joseph so beautifully spoke about.

Software for the People, by the People

Matt Mullenweg: [00:04:35] We also often don’t get the opportunity to reflect back on what we’ve done. And so that’s what’s so exciting about coming together. It is our collective celebration of what we accomplished. You know, an almost impossible project of tens of thousands of people, many of whom have never met in person, coming together to create something almost like a software Amish barn raising. We all come together and make this thing that then is our contribution to the world. Because, as Josepha mentioned, WordPress is free and open source, meaning that anyone can use it. It’s accessible, which ought to be radically accessible regardless of language spoken economic ability, technical ability, everything. We want to create software for the people, by the people. It’s also been such a roller coaster of a year that it’s nice to come back and and celebrate some of the fun stuff. So at last year’s State of the Word, I should also say that some of this is a little bit inside baseball, meaning that if you’re tuning in and you’re kind of learning what WordPress is right now, if it seems like there’s a lot of terminology or something, we’ll try to define it as we go along. But don’t worry, you can Google all this. We’re also going to be live tumbling at wordpress.tumblr.com. So if I mention a link or something that’ll be up there, you know, within like 20 or 30 seconds.

The Block Paradigm

Matt Mullenweg: [00:05:53] So if you want to check out anything further. Double click as they say on any things we talk about, check out that wordpress.tumblr.com. And last year I spoke a lot about Gutenberg and starting to say how Gutenberg has been adopted even wider than WordPress. So we’re best known for WordPress, but Gutenberg, which is our basically new block editor, a way to be able to edit, post and create entire websites using this block paradigm. I actually believe it’s going to be bigger than WordPress itself as a contribution and adoption to the web and to mobile apps. And we have some pretty exciting things that have been going on with Gutenberg all over the world. Close to home, you’ll notice that the BBPress forums that power all the support and WordPress.org now have embedded Gutenberg. So we’ve gone from I think it was BBCode (?) before. So if you were to like post a link or an image on the forums before, you’d have to write this like strange HTML like language. Now, as you can see, it has rich embedding, images, videos, oEmbeds everything. So we’ve really modernized the WordPress.org support experience and this is using a plug in, I believe called blocks anywhere, blocks everywhere. It’s even better than anywhere, which also is going to be embedded in Buddy Press as well. So if you’re using the sort of social network in a box that extends WordPress, that’s going to have blocks, which is pretty exciting.

The State of Gutenberg

Matt Mullenweg: [00:07:24] We also starting to see Gutenberg embedded in completely other applications. So as you notice, this looks a lot like the Gutenberg interface, but this is actually a Laravel based application called Engine Awesome. And I believe we have the developers of Engine Awesome here, right there. Congratulations. I had trouble summarizing this, but this reminded me a little bit like like an access or file maker, like kind of a database creator where anyone can create like rich forms and data and then interact with it. Is that accurate? Cool. And leveraging, even though the back end has nothing to do with WordPress leveraging Gutenberg to make this like really beautiful form, builder and modifier. The Pew Research Center has redone their political typology quiz that they converted the blocks in Gutenberg. Over a million people have completed this quiz. It’s kind of a fun one that you can take it out and it sort of like categorizes your political typology and then it feeds back as the Pew Research information. So I thought this one was pretty fun. Please keep these examples coming. By the way, I love hearing about these. The award winning journaling app Day One, which has been app of the year on Apple’s App Store and everything. Think of it like kind of a private encrypted WordPress has now adopted Gutenberg for their web version and will be using Native Gutenberg, which is the native iOS and Android implementations of Gutenberg in the future.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:08:50] By the way, did we finish the relicensing for the Mobile Gutenberg? Yes, we did. Awesome. So, well, it’s one of these things. So Gutenberg on the web and by default has always been GPL because everything we do is part of this GPL license. The GPL license has what’s called a viral aspect. So if you embed GPL code and in something else, you modify it. You need to give those same freedoms when you redistribute. So your modifications also need to be GPL. This works really well on the web, like you can embed JavaScript, the JavaScript version of Gutenberg in your web application, and the rest of your web application doesn’t need to be also open source, but on mobile apps because of how they’re compiled and distributed. It was sort of kicking in. And so if you were like a proprietary app like Day One or MailChimp or something like that, you want to embed Gutenberg, you couldn’t with the way the license was. So we actually did a lot of work to go back to all the contributors and all the people who’ve been part of the code of this Mobile Gutenberg, which is again the native implementations of it and got a dual license so you can use under the GPL or I believe the MPL, the Mozilla public license from we’re calling that correctly, which can be easily embedded in applications.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:10:03] So as we go through all the Gutenberg stuff, remember that we’re not just doing this once, we’re actually implementing this three times in three separate languages, which is pretty fun. And if you haven’t checked out day one, check out that. And then finally, I want to show this implementation of Gutenberg because it looks nothing like the others. So this is actually the Tumblr post form, which and here I’m showing copying and pasting into the Tumblr post form. So if you look at how Tumblr has adapted Gutenberg, it’s using all the fun stuff that has been in the Tumblr editor forever, but now it has all the features of Gutenberg. They just 99% of it is hidden. As you can see, there’s no sidebar, there’s none of the other things. It’s all in line. So this is a great example of how you can skin Gutenberg to actually get all the benefits of the hard work we’ve done around copy and paste, rich block editing, editing inside and outside of links. All of that is hoops. All of that is happening now and you can embed in anything. So I’m hoping to see you know, we talked a little bit last year about how Drupal is starting to utilize Gutenberg and some other things. I hope that we can create this open block standard. That’s just the standard for every place. There’s like a web form because that means that when a block or a pattern or something is created that can now be literally cross platform and that as users start to learn these interfaces and like a block based way of creating rich text or editing sites, if they learned it on one system, it’ll be affable in every other.

WordPress Meetups and WordCamps

Matt Mullenweg: [00:11:27] So this is again, something I think could be even bigger than WordPress and WordPress has done pretty well. Speaking of coming together like we are right now, we have this pretty fun animation that shows WordPress meetups throughout the years.

So as you can see in the beginning, sort of 2007, 2008, there’s just a couple. They were happening mostly in America. As we go through 2010, you start to see WordPress start to spread in America, Europe starts to pop up. Got some London, so it looks like France, Berlin, Portugal, Australia just came online. Now we’re on four, five continents. Africa, South Africa looks like some Egypt. So we reached all six continents. When I went to Antarctica, I tried to get together WordPress meetup. But the lack of Internet was a little tricky. Now you all know what just about to happen. So we just hit COVID time. So these red are the in-person meetups switching to the online ones. So there was still a couple that happened. Whoops, that wasn’t supposed to wait. I think I can. Yeah. Let me pause this and go to the end there. Whoops.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:12:42] Well, I’m just going to describe it at the end. You started to see the on line start to turn back into in-person meetups. And this was an ingredient that I felt was really missing from the WordPress community the past few years. And we felt it. We’ve always taken for granted that since the early days of WordPress, we brought people together in person at WordCamps or meetups, often low or no costs, just all over the world. And it turns out that was like a really magical ingredient of onboarding people to be new contributors, teaching them about the WordPress culture and also get an influence of folks from all walks of life and all backgrounds coming together and then influencing, mixing with WordPress developers and plugin creators and everything and then influencing the future of it. So I’m very proud to say that from 21 to 22, the amount of Meetup groups active has doubled from kind of the nadir that we reached in 2021. We also we went from one WordCamp in 2021 to 22 and 22, which is kind of cool. Netherlands. Kathmandu. Valencia. Lion. Bahteper (?). I’m going to work on pronouncing some of these. We already have 34 in planning for 2023 and that number could go even higher. So I’m excited to see these WordCamps come back. I’m also excited to say that after a six year hiatus, the WordPress community summit is coming back. So this is going to be concurrent with the WordCamp US, which this year is in National Harbor, Maryland, USA in August, sort of the end of August, August 22nd, 23rd.

WordPress Turns 20 in 2023

Matt Mullenweg: [00:14:23] The community summit is basically for the top contributors of WordPress to come together and excited to see how that comes up again, especially since it’s been so long since the last one and many of the new contributors, some of whom we’ll talk about today, have never had a chance to meet other folks in person. Also, a milestone very excited to celebrate next year is that WordPress is turning 20 years old. Not a lot of software projects make it that long. Much less are growing faster than ever at that age. Actually, one that we share a birth year with is Creative Commons, which is kind of exciting. Also turning 20 next year. We’re going to have a lot of exciting stuff going on with the 20th birthday of WordPress. If you’d like to follow along at wp20.wordpress.net. We’re going to be having a site that’ll have like special edition swag and merchandise. We’re doing a new edition of the Milestones book. So Milestones is the open source book we did on the first ten years of WordPress 2003 to 2013. So we’re doing the second ten year update of that book. And there’ll be events all over the world. So we’ll have a chance to have fun at the last at the ten year anniversary where people made some amazing cakes and there was like all sorts of fun stuff.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:15:47] So I’m excited to see what the kind of community generated worldwide celebration of WordPress 20 is going to be. And I spoke last year about how important education is to the future of WordPress. We have a site at learn.wordpress.org, which now has open source courses, community workshops, things happening almost every week that might be sort of moderated or facilitated by a volunteer. And also the content itself is being created by people all over the world who teach WordPress. It’s being translated in new language now. We had 12,000 people take one of these courses. Such an important part of getting involved with WordPress is the education, and I love meeting folks, including some like startup founders and CEOs that tell me that they learn to code from doing WordPress themes or WordPress plugins, which is it’s pretty exciting. It’s also how I learned to code. So it’s kind of fun to see the ripple effects of folks who might get started with WordPress, might take one of these free online courses and where they end up. We have also gotten around to redesigning some of the pages on WordPress.org. We’ve got the blog that’s been redesigned and we’re trying to do this new showcase just launched yesterday. And as you notice, we’re starting to bring our jazz design language to everything. I hope that this is kind of like our our neo soul, neo jazz meets software aesthetic is kind of like a new web design language for the world.

The OpenVerse

Matt Mullenweg: [00:17:19] And of course we’re putting in the themes and everything like that. So this is going to be kind of fun to get out there. There’s so much more of WordPress.org to redesign, but we’re taking it one bite at a time. I feel like it’s one of those giant I just saw. I went to Champions Pizza in New York last night, kind of in the Lafayette area or on Lafayette Street. And they have to tried to break the Guinness record for longest pizza. And I was like, how did people eat that? I was like, Really? But that’s sometimes how I feel when we’re redesigning WordPress.org cause there’s just a lot to do. We also spoke last year about OpenVerse, which is kind of unusual. This was an acquisition that we did from the Creative Commons organization, but not really an acquisition because what we did was we put it on WordPress.org. What Openverse is, is essentially a search engine that scours the entire web for Creative Commons licensed media. It could be photos, videos, if you’re not familiar with the Creative Commons is it’s kind of an open source applied to media or content. So a license which under this image can be used for sometimes commercial use, sometimes noncommercial use, sometimes with attribution, sometimes with no attribution.

Speaker3: [00:18:29] It’s kind of a variety of different kind of as a creator, you can pick different licenses to put things on there. One thing that we launched was audio. So now if you’re doing a podcast or something like that, there’s now all this amazing music and audio that creators have chosen to share with the world, much like the developers and designers of WordPress have chosen to share their work with the world under these open licenses. So so far in the open verse, we have over 22 million images, 1.1 million audio files where it’s been used millions and millions of times per month, and in the past 30 days, over 59 million requests. And it’s not even fully embedded into WordPress yet. So this is actually pretty exciting in terms of how we can create these open ecosystems that kind of feed back to each other. It’s not just code and CSS and everything. It’s actually going to be everything that you can put on your site. If you are a photographer or musician or anything like that and you would like to contribute to this. We have the photo directory on WordPress.org now, that you can put Creative Commons zero or GPL licensed images on. And the nice thing about this is if you just upload it to your site and tag it with the Creative Commons license, it will go into the open verse automatically and then be accessible for other people to use. So that is something that kind of when you upload to WordPress, you can tag things and then that goes into open verse is something we’re going to be working on this year as well, because I think the power of that, when you have tens of millions of websites and creators now being part of this ecosystem, but to consume it and to create it.

Block Themes

Matt Mullenweg: [00:20:02] Let’s talk about some of the other features that are coming in that we did in 22 and that will be coming up in 23. One of the big pushes that we had for WordPress this year was all about customization and empowering designers and people who want to be designers. There were three major releases this year that brought a number of cool design tools that can be done entirely on the front end with blocks, so you no longer need to go into the PHP or the CSS as much as before. It’s got the top three things that that have shipped this year that I feel like are really changing how WordPress can be used and who can use it. The first is block themes. So if block themes are is remember I’ve been talking a lot about Gutenberg blocks. Think of a Gutenberg block, kind of like a Lego. It’s a reusable pattern. It could be a contact form, it could be an image, it could be a video, it could be a Google map. It could be almost anything that are the components that make up every single Web page.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:20:56] The cool thing is, as you start to use blocks, you can now visit almost any website in the world. You squint a little and you can see essentially what the building patterns are that they’ve used to create that. Then once you start to learn WordPress blocks, then you can recreate almost any design or site that you see use as inspiration to make your own version and then move on from that. What block things are are basically traditionally WordPress themes have always been sort of PHP, CSS, bundles of things. Now you can create themes just using blocks. So without knowing a lick of code, you can now in the Gutenberg editor inside WordPress create these patterns and themes. We’ve also lost styles and style variations, which one of the cool things about Gutenberg is all the controls that gives you for the topography, the colors, everything. This makes it a little tricky because historically themes have been bundles of not just the design, but also the fonts, the colors, the spacing, everything like that. With style variations and I’m going to show one of these soon. You can now have essentially dozens and dozens of variations on the same underlying theme structure. So a theme structure could be like how archive pages are shown, what’s shown on the home page, things like that. That’s all still customizable, but now the style variations can be distributed and shown.

Twenty Twenty-Three

Matt Mullenweg: [00:22:13] This is by the way, this is Beatriz Fialho who is going to introduce the Twenty Twenty-Three theme. Every year we introduce a new theme for WordPress, and this is what is coming now.

Beatriz Fialho: [00:22:25] This is Twenty Twenty-Three, a new kind of default theme. Twenty Twenty-Three is designed to take advantage of the new design tools introduced in WordPress 6.1. After its highly opinionated predecessor, Twenty Twenty-Two, the upcoming default theme is a clean blank canvas that bundles with ten very distinct style variations. The theme uses fluid typography and spacing presets, which means your website will be automatically responsive. What makes 2023 so special is that its style variations were created by members of the WordPress community. Carefully selected for as many unique designs as possible. Whether you want to build a complex or very simple website, you can dive into creation and full customization yourself, or you can do it quickly and intuitively through the bundled styles. Styles can change many areas of your site, from typography to spacing to how featured images look. Here’s how you can browse the different styles in Twenty Twenty-Three. Go to appearance, editor. Click in the styles icon in the top toolbar. Then click Browse Styles. Then preview the different styles in your site and see your own content. Now you can also browse through each theme style variations in the theme directory and preview them instantly. Twenty Twenty-Three is accessibility ready and available with WordPress 6.1.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:24:29] I thought that was so relaxing. I get a little excited up here sometimes. So we also have a lot to get there. So I apologize if we can slow this down on the YouTube later. So that is closing out. And the exciting thing with the 6.1 release and the 6.2 release, which is going to be coming in March, we are at the end of phase two of Gutenberg. I remember when we first introduced Gutenberg six years ago, five years ago, yeah, we talked about the four phases of Gutenberg. The first phase was basically everything inside the box. So replacing that post editor and page editor with these richer Gutenberg block tools. Phase two is when we went outside the box and now said using these Gutenberg design tools, you can customize your headers, your footers, your archives, basically create the entire website using the same blocks that you learned before. Let’s talk about the last bit of phase two, and then I’m going to briefly mention phase threeses and four. Threeses? Three? This is a speed run that takes about 55 seconds, but it’s sped up like three times of an entire theme being created just with the Gutenberg blocks. So you can watch how this starts from like a completely blank canvas and very quickly using color tools, primary colors, secondary colors. We’re going to have some palettes. The typography is changing. We just changed the fonts. Some spacing that’s going on here and this is going to be fully responsive. So we’ll see that go through as well. Add some blocks. And. This is finally like changing some of the spacing to make it like a little bit cooler. That on the right is actually the navigation. So that’s a menu where it says work studies bio. There we go. Oops.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:26:22] It’s going again. Finally editing the Permalink pages. And done. That was it. So that went from blank (?) to theme. And this is using a new theme for WordPress might be one of the last themes for WordPress called the Create Block Theme. The Create Block Theme basically gives if you’re making something brand new, like a blank canvas to start from also with some cool features. So for example, if you’re using Google fonts, it can actually import those to be served locally from your site. So I know there’s concerns in Europe and other places around like GDPR and using Google hosted resources for things. So this allows you to run it all from your own website. It’d Still have the rich typography and other things that we all want a modern web design. So it can have one theme, one pattern, but infinite permutations. These are some examples of different kind of styles apply to just one thing. And then finally, as part of phase two, we’ve been working on the editor’s still quite a bit, so this shows some improvements with the writing experience, including partial selection of text across different blocks. We can multi do multi blocks quickly and shortcuts and sort of a Zen mode. You know, Gutenberg has a lot of controls going on.

Speaker3: [00:27:45] So if you’re a writer, we actually have some amazing writers here in the audience. So. Godin, think we might have Hugh Howey here someplace? You want a more distraction free interface when you’re sort of doing that act of writing and creation, that’s so beautiful. So now with the Zen mode, we’ve gotten quite good at hiding all that other stuff. It can essentially transform into like a very, very minimalist editor. Oh, here’s the Zen mode. It’s actually showing four designs and everything. Patterns are one of the coolest introductions to WordPress. So we’re continuing to work on the sort of insert or browser experience for patterns. So think of patterns. A block is like a very basic, like I said, a Lego. A pattern’s kind of like a little put together spaceship or something. Just insert into your site. This is actually showing a brand new inserter which combines blocks. Again, the basic things, patterns which are combinations and media all in one. What’s fun about this particular pattern that we’re showing you is a feedback we’ve heard a lot from people building sites for clients and things is designers want to make these rich layouts and everything, and then when they pass over to the client, they don’t want them to break it. I see some laughs, so some people so what this is actually showing is this pattern is locked in.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:28:59] So the placement of the images and the text and everything. So it’s easy to edit the parts that you’re supposed to edit, but everything else is impossible to break. If you try to put in other images and everything, it’ll be like, No, you can do that in a new block or a new pattern where this particular one is locked in. So I think it would be extremely powerful for anyone who’s building WordPress sites and then passing them off to others, which is a huge part of the community. Finally, when the styles, we’re now adding a style book. So basically this is a fun little display. If you’re editing the styles for your site that shows every basically every possible block you can use pull quotes, block quotes, list everything like that. So in one place you can kind of test out the styles or CSS that you’re doing with all the different things that people can do with the block editor. Again, very, very exciting for improving the robustness and the edge case, dealing with people, developing distributed themes and patterns. In 2022, all of the things you just see were contributed by a record number, the folks helping out 1399. All (?) these contributors.

Record Number of Contributors

Matt Mullenweg: [00:30:11] We were so close. Hopefully some one person watching this will be inspired and get us to 1400 next year. This includes 652 first time contributors. People who have never contributed to WordPress ever before. 424 that contributed in 21 came back in 22 and one that I’m pretty excited about, which is 322 people who took a break in 2021 and then returned in 2022. You know, last year one of the things I spoke about was some of our contribution numbers meetups, WordCamps, everything had collapsed actually. And what happened was like the pandemic, everything, we lost a lot of our methods for getting people involved. I think also people were just burnt out. What a tough couple of years we’ve been through, including this year was a little roller coaster for me personally, but now coming out the other side of it, people are starting to get involved. They’re looking for community again. They’re looking to learn. They’re looking to everything. And being part of WordPress is certainly one of the things I always return to. If I’m ever feeling low or having a tough week. I find that the WordPress community is one of the just friendliest, loving list. Loving lylist, Loving list. Most loving. There we go. And so willing to help you out as we were just demonstrated right there. Thank you, Michele. We have some new core committers this year, so I want to especially recognize and celebrate Bernie Ryder, Marius Jensen, Adam Zielinski, and Georges Mamadashwaly (?), who are the new core committers to WordPress.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:31:49] The core committers are basically the like top editors of WordPress. These are the folks who determine anyone can contribute code, but these are like the core folks that say what goes in to the the thing that gets distributed to tens of millions of websites in every release. Think of these like the the Wikipedia super editors. They’re like the very top of the top. So from the bottom of my heart, the top of my lungs, I want to say thank you to all of you, a few of us here in this room, but also the countless thousands that come together, like I said, Amish barn raising of software for WordPress. So thank you. WordPress is what it is because of community. And we’ve talked a lot about building community through events, but it’s also the WordCamp organizers, the meetup organizers, the core committers, but also especially the (?) community. It’s not that hard to copy some of the features of WordPress, but when you start to think about the over 55,000 plugins and themes that can turn transform WordPress and almost anything you imagine, whether that’s a ecommerce site, whether it’s a social network, whether it’s anything out there, forums, the contributions, these extensions of WordPress are really one of the things that even companies with billions of dollars of funding and thousands of employees aren’t able to replicate. WordPress as a project has got a complex, interconnected infrastructure that makes contributions possible.

New Categories for WordPress «Open Directory»

Matt Mullenweg: [00:33:20] So if you ask yourself or anyone else what’s part of the community health, it’s make.wordpress.org, it’s a learn, it’s the forums, it’s the meetup, it’s this whole sort of ecosystem around WordPress that makes up the engine of contributions. Now, part of what we’ve focused a lot at the end of this year and going forward working on is giving those tools to every theme, every plugin in the directory. So WordPress.org hosts an open directory. Think of it almost like an app store for WordPress, which is, you know, takes no payment cuts, has no listing fees. It’s completely like open source. Things can be commercial, they can be noncommercial, it allows anything. And that’s of course, embedded within every WP admin, every dashboard of WordPress. So people just with a few clicks can install anything or uninstall things now. So I like to think of the nature of our community as fractal, meaning that at every layer of WordPress, whether it’s a single plugin or the entire thing, there’s often sub communities. And if you think of a project like Yoast or WooCommerce or something like that, they often have their own plugins, sometimes hundreds or thousands of plugins and hundreds of contributors and other things that come together to create them. So last year we did a lot of work on translations, so allowing any plugin to be translated by the community or two years ago and that sort of come really well now.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:34:41] Most of our top 100 plugins are available in many more languages than they were in the past, and we’re now adding some things to essentially one of the challenges that I’ve heard from a lot of WordPress users around the world is this idea that because there’s such a diversity of things in directory, how can you kind of tell what you’re getting into when you choose a plugin or theme? So one of the new taxonomies that we’re going to be introducing to the plugin and themes directory is basically going to allow the creators of that plugin or theme to self identify for kind of what type of project they are. So what’s this going to mean? In this new taxonomy by default, you can say like this is kind of a solo single player plugin and I’m just making it for myself. I’m releasing it for others, but it’s, it’s not really meant to be anything more. There’ll be a second taxonomy, which is a community plugin. A community plugin is one that says this belongs to all of us. The lead developers or whoever is working on it is really stewarding it. And if they’re done, they’ll pass it on to others. Is this for the next generation as well? Much like WordPress itself, it’s explicitly saying that there’s no upsells, so this is just entirely free, often running entirely on the WP admin.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:35:59] So they might call external services. But also this is saying like this is something that you can use and it’s built by and for the community and also inviting contributions. So a community plugin is also saying like please get involved. And so especially if someone’s wanting to get more involved with contributing to WordPress but contributing to the core software might be a little intimidating. Getting involved with one of these community plugins is a fun way to do it. A portion of the community plugins we’re going to specify as canonical plugins. What’s a canonical plugin? Basically a community plugin that the WordPress project itself is saying like this is so important or so key that we’re going to give our official imprint to this canonical plugins will be powered by our security and bug bounty program. They will get attention from core developers and we’re saying like this is almost blessed. This is one that’s really. So as an example of a canonical plugin, think of Gutenberg itself, which is available as a plugin as well. If you want to get the latest and greatest features that haven’t launched. Some of the stuff I showed today can install the Gutenberg plugin. Think of the importers for WordPress, both the WordPress importer, but also importers from other systems. Those will be canonical plugins. So basically saying we’re you can install this and you are super duper sure it is 100% solid, secure and supported by the core WordPress.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:37:15] And then finally, we want to recognize as well that there’s a ton of commercial plugins and so that’s going to be something that people can tag. Often a commercial plugin will be accepting of outside contributions, but there’s often a company behind it. They often have commercial support and some sort of upsell. We’ve probably all experienced a theme or plugin that you can use for free, but then there’s some pro version, so all of those will be tagged commercial. And so if you’re choosing something browsing the directory or going in and I’ll be able to tell what’s sort of what you’re getting into. And the beautiful thing about WordPress is we love all of them. Not one is better than the other. They’re just different. And we want to create a space where there could be commercial, noncommercial community, everything mixed together. So this is launching this month on the WordPress.org plugin directory. So look for this and then we’re going to build it into the sort of built in WP admin browser as well. So check that out. Just curious who has something commercial that’s in the directory that’s in the room. We got like a dozen people. Any one working on a community plugin? Oh, it’s going to be called a community plugin if you. It’s more than that, actually. We’ve got a ton of Gutenberg people here. It’s probably most of the room. How about a canonical plugin? Anyone working on one of those Gutenberg? Yeah.

Phase 3 of Gutenberg – Collaboration

Matt Mullenweg: [00:38:29] Cool. This now sort of summarizes all the things that have happened. I now want to speak about phase three of Gutenberg. Three of four that will now be heading into after the 6.2 release. So again, phase one post editing, phase two, editing your time on site. What phase three are is basically taking WordPress, which is kind of a single player thing and making it multiplayer. So the features that are going to be coming in phase three, some of which are experimental right now and some of which will be starting this year. So if any of this piques your interest, it’s a perfect time to get involved with what’s going to be the next generation of Gutenberg and WordPress: real time collaboration. So if you’ve ever used Google Docs or anything like that, you’ll now be able to see other people editing the blocks, the posts, the pages and work on it together. Part of this is also introducing asynchronous collaboration, editorial workflows. So think now if you’ve ever wanted to share drafts of a web page or a theme or anything like that inside WordPress, you’ll now be able to have a special invite where someone else can come in and work on it real time if you want. You can see what each other are doing or comment on specific things. Maybe there’s a paragraph of your new post and I can put a note on it and say, Hey, I think that this could be XYZ, that now sort of collaboration is going to be built into WordPress.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:39:47] You don’t need to like go to Google Docs or anything else to do that. It’s all kind of built in, which also means all the blog editing tools will be there. WordPress, for I think over 15 years now, has a really cool hidden feature, one of my favorite actually, which is called Post Revisions. So this means every single edit of every single post and page is saved by default and on the good hosts forever. Some hosts limit this. I hope they stop limiting this once we get some better features in. But this now much like a Wikipedia, you can see the history of everything. This is great for just regular people I love like going back and seeing like how maybe my about page has evolved over time, but also amazing. Like if you say you’re a financial institution or a pharmaceutical company where like everything you have on your website has like legal liability and you need to see exactly what changed when. So revisions has always been there, but we’re going to be significantly improving the interface for editing revisions. And then finally, the media library. So we’re going to be doing a lot with the media library to integrate the open verse directory that we spoke about, both contributing to open verse and getting from open verse.

Phase 4 of Gutenberg – Multilingual

Matt Mullenweg: [00:40:53] And just finally, like creating like a notifications infrastructure. So everything that I just spoke about for these editorial flows will be there. So that is a brief summary of phase three. Phase four, which I know you’re going to ask when it’s coming. Still years away is when we take everything we just spoke about in WordPress and make it multilingual. And so WordPress is so international used in so many countries where there’s more than one primary language. Every time I give a talk, the question is when is WordPress, when is multilingual going to be built in the core? Because there’s some fantastic plugins for it, but since it’s not built into core, it can still be challenging. Now we’re doing multilingual after phase three because all the workflow stuff I just spoke about is I think going to be really crucial for creating great workflows around the translations. Because think about it, you make a new page in one language. Maybe you’re writing your website in French, it’s going to be translated into Swiss German. What’s the workflow for knowing that something is updated on a page. The translators get notified and then they sort of sync whatever the update is, or that you might maybe want to ship a few things at the same time. So you don’t want to ship the French version until the Swiss-German version is ready, for example. So all of that is going to be supported by the collaboration. So that is phase three and phase four of Gutenberg coming soon.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:42:16] Part of what makes WordPress have the sort of success we’ve had so far is the responsiveness and feedback that we get from the community, both in the questions. Like I talk about every single, it’s been hammered in my brain, multilingual is important, because they all ask about it every time. But also we do this annual survey. It’s like kind of a census for WordPress. This is going to be not WordPress.org, but you can also scan this QR code. This is like our census. So if you want to give an input, we’ve reduced this from 100 questions down to 20. So I know there was a lot of work for that. It’s fast, easy, and we want to get as many folks from around the WordPress community participating in this because one thing we do have to struggle with is the folks in this room or that develop WordPress are just one slice of the user base of WordPress. There’s millions and millions and millions of people who might not be represented in the conversations. So if we can get this survey out to some percentage of them, we’ll get to know a little bit of what we might not know, we don’t know and the wider usage of WordPress.

OpenAI ChatGPT and DALL-E

Matt Mullenweg: [00:43:28] As we close up. It’s been a really, really exciting year to be in technology. There’s been moments this year that something has been released where I was so my mind was so blown. I just posted to my blog that quote was it from was the movie they should have sent a poet? Which one was that? It’s one of these cool sci fi movies. The aliens come in and like contact. Yes. Thank you. One of the things that blew my mind this year, and if you haven’t tried it out, you got to check it out from OpenAI is ChatGPT. So this is taken the the GPT transformer large language model and applying it to this like chat bot. We decided to ask it actually write a short scene in which Matt, the founder of WordPress co-founder I should say describes full site editing in a single word. Matt, the founder of WordPress, stood on a stage in front of a large crowd of eager developers. He smiled confidently. And said full site editing in a single word: transformative. The crowd erupted in applause. As Matt walked off the stage, which I won’t do. So that was the prompt, and that was the answer that ChatGPT gave. I promise the entire speech wasn’t written by it. Although we did think about it. Apart from tools like this, which are so exciting and again, please try this out. It’s free and open right now: chat.openai.com, I think is a way to check it out. But it’s also been amazing some of the creative tools. So OpenAI released a tool called DALL-E I think it’s called now DALL-E 2, D A L L – E, which is image creating.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:45:18] One of the things that blew my minds was this actually being open sourced? So OpenAI is kind of like the New Bell Labs. It’s an incredible like the top researchers in the world, everything. There’s a group called Stability AI that has released tools like stable diffusion, which have basically taken all the stuff that OpenAI is doing and you can run it on your laptop, you can run within like 20 or 30 seconds, give it a prompt. I’m not sure what this prompt was. It looks kind of colorful jazz, but you can do things like you can upload a photo to it and say, Give me this photo in the style of Monet or style of Salvador Dali or different things like that. It can transform images, it can take existing things and you can edit it. So instead of using Photoshop, you could just say remove the clouds in the background or add more saxophones. You can kind of just tell it what to do. And it it’s incredible. If you haven’t done this, it is kind of mind blowing. This is although also cause I feel like a lot of soul searching for everyone because it’s like this is an area, you know, the development of AI, like we were told like five or six years ago, we were six months from like self-driving cars and I think we’re still six months away.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:46:35] So that ended up being a lot harder to do for understandable reasons. But if you had told me, like illustrations and designs and writing State of the Word speeches was something that I was going to be able to do, I thought that would have been ten or 20 years away, and it turns out it’s there already. Now, part of the reason this works is that when you give a prompt to one of these things, it’ll actually make like four, six, ten different images of what it’s like. Two are ridiculous and wrong. Some of them are okay and but there’s often a few in there that like, you’re like, Wow, that’s exactly what I imagined. And as a human, you can choose that and take it and then iterate based on that, or maybe use that as a kicking off point for your own modification, inspiration or creation. That sort of use of this creative tools combined with humans reminded me of one of my favorite Pablo Picasso quotes. He says, Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Part of why I like this is that as you start to play with these tools, the prompts that you give it has such a huge impact on it. So using tricks like we did on the ChatGPT prompt that said, you know, write a scene in a movie or in a play, you can give it conversations, you can it essentially sort of becomes a co-creation tool and the creativity that you have in prompting it sort of starting that conversation has a huge impact on the quality of what it gives you back.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:48:05] You’ll see as they start to play with this, sometimes it gives you really dumb answers. Also, chat, tweet sounds very confident and sometimes will tell you things that are completely factually inaccurate. It’s interesting. It uses it’s a large language model. So basically these models were developed by taking words and looking at what words are most likely to come next. It turns out there’s kind of an emergent intelligence that happens when you start to get hundreds of billions of these pairs and ChatGPT 4, which is coming out this year. If you think this stuff is amazing, I think GPT 4 is going to blow all of your minds. It is really totally next level. So giving the question to the computer gives compliments. What computers are doing best is giving you the answers. And so I have that little variation which a computer gives you answers, but the creativity is still in the inputs. This blew my mind. There’s one thing in the WordPress world that also blew my mind, which is where we’re going to end up with, which we’re calling playgrounds. I’m going to click to start this. This is going to be introduced by , and this is actually going to be available shortly after this talk.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:49:16] So here it is.

Q&A

Adam Zelinski: [00:49:17] This WordPress website is not loaded from a server. WordPress, PHP and a database are all running in the web browser. It’s called WordPress Playground and you can customize it. Let’s click on the settings button and select the Pendant theme, the Coblocks plugin and the Gutenberg plugin. Starting a new playground only takes a couple of seconds and I’m even already logged in as an admin. Now let’s create a new page using the alert block from Coblocks. Let’s give it a title and some content. And I’d like to be sure that this looks right when published. So let’s preview it in a new browser tab. Mm hmm. That looks perfect. Let’s publish it. Note that this website is temporary and gets erased as soon as I close my browser tab. And everything you see here is available for testing right now. And here is what WordPress playground may enable in the future. Imagine a guided, interactive WordPress learning experience where you get to edit code live and see the results right away. Imagine trying WordPress plugins right in the plugin directory and even interacting with them right then in there. Finally imagine being able to try WordPress and even contribute to it within seconds from visiting WordPress.org. That arc is in the future exciting. You can be a part of it. Learn more at developer.wordpress.org/playground. Join the conversation on the Meta playground Slack channel and get involved in the project.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:50:54] So a classic live demo fashion. We broke it today. So but very very soon you’ll be able to do this. I’m going to repeat what just happened. So normally to use WordPress, you need to set up either like a local web server, a database, or go with a web host like web hosts like Blue Host or WordPress.com or something. And that is running server software. Again, like a web server, like Apache, a full database, PHP itself, like all these things. This is happening 100% in the browser now. So basically it’s a virtual machine that gets spun up using this new thing called WebAssembly that’s built into all modern browsers now. And so it creates a database of PHP, a web server, everything just right there in the little window. This is wild. Like he said, this could be used for web development for trying out a plugin before you would install it. I think we’re just at the very earliest stages of what this means. Like for example, imagine a staging site so maybe built into WordPress instead of having to spin up a whole new web server and virtual machine to test out things, maybe just click a button, it clones your existing WordPress, downloads it to your browser, and then you can make any changes you want when you’re done, deploy it back to your live website. All of this stuff used to require a ton of server side magic and and sort of bouncing things around and now miracles of modern technology, you could do it all inside your browser.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:52:24] So check out playground, coming soon as in like today. And, and if you’re a developer, like you realize how incredible what we just saw is like I, when I first saw it, I was like, this is not possible. What just happened? So, yeah, thank you, Adam, and congratulations to everyone who’s been working on that.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:52:48] So that is 2022. Don’t you like this? We got a little heart in the 22. Thank you all. None of this would be possible without the contributions. It doesn’t just take a village with WordPress. It takes basically like cities and small countries of people coming together. And that’s what we plan to doing. Keep doing so as we have had two decades of WordPress so far. I’d like to think a lot about how can we make WordPress something that is a gift to the world and part of the web infrastructure for decades to come. I hope that maybe 100 years from now, maybe this spot in New York, there’ll be someone else giving the State of the Word, and this will be something that, like I said, I feel like the contributors to WordPress, myself included all the volunteers. WordPress belongs to us. It belongs to all of us. But really, we’re just taking care of it for the next generation. And so really thinking about how to build things long term, how to align incentives, how to create the community tools that allow us to be around for a long, long time. So thank you so much for being part of that.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:54:09] All right. So if anybody needs to stand up, go to the restroom or anything, now’s your point to run out if you need to. But now we enter the Q&A portion of the State of the Word. By the way, if you want to hear more from me, photomatt.tumblr.com, doing a podcast on distributed.blog, which is like talking about distributed work. I’m @photomatt on the legacy social networks and my blog is ma.tt. If you want to see the T.S. Eliot poem that I referred to earlier when I said they should have said a poem, I just posted that I think last last night. How the Q&A portion works of this is that there’s no screening, there’s no we have no idea what’s about to happen. But luckily in this room we have a lot of answers to things far beyond what I am aware of. And if you have a question, I think this is the spot to go to, right? So please come on up. I guess I should have given you a little more warning that we were about to do this. But anything that’s on your minds we can talk about. Michelle Yeah. Mind grabbing the microphone for her? Yeah.

Michelle Frechette: [00:55:16] Hi, Michelle Frechette. I’m here with post status today.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:55:19] And say where you came from. Just so everyone around the world can hear.

Michelle Frechette: [00:55:22] The other side of New York. Not very far. I live in Rochester. So first, I want to thank the open source project for taking seriously my article on accessibility issues that I encountered at WordCamp US and my suggestions. I put some suggestions in there that have been taken seriously, like creating a new section for the WordCamp organizer handbook and creating an accessibility team for WordCamp US 2023. So kudos to you and those who are making web accessibility decisions more than just the web accessibility, but the community accessibility in all ways. So I wanted to thank you for that, but my questions unrelated to that. So last year at the State of the Word you announced the photo directory and which I was happy to give a bunch of photos to kind of seed that and get that going. We now have over 5000, probably close to 5500 photos in there. And we have several moderators. We’re working real hard to get those published. So if you’ve submitted, we’re all here right now. You might need to wait a day or two, but we’ll get to this. I’m going to call it a successful campaign.

Michelle Frechette: [00:56:22] And a year to have over 5500 photos is amazing. And those are the Creative Commons. So people can use them however they want. They don’t have to attribute to us. It’s just really wonderful. But the question is, where do we go from here? Right? So we have a lot of people who have been putting photos in. I don’t know that a lot of people know about the directory and can take photos out and use them however they’d like. So what are the steps to getting people to understand that they don’t have to go to Unsplash, they don’t have to go to Pexels or whatever. They can come to WordPress for those things. And then is there a way for the people who are contributing to have an idea, not necessarily like where did your picture get used because you just download them, but how many downloads for pictures and how successful are what we’re doing? You know, if I’m contributing 200 photos, are they just sitting there or people using them? So I know that’s a lot of questions, but.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:57:09] No, that’s a fantastic idea.

Michelle Frechette: [00:57:11] It is, right. You can credit me when you actually make that work.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:57:15] Definitely. But we just did. Yeah, it’s true. One of the best things about contributing to open source is the idea. I still imagine this like lines of code I’ve written are executing hundreds of millions of times per day across like millions of websites. It’s like one of the funnest parts. And we do have tools, for example, the plug in theme directory that sort of say how often things are used, which is a contributor or and there’s no reason we couldn’t start to increment some stats, at least for how often a photo or something from the OpenVerse is downloaded gone through the API. Again, we won’t know exactly how it’s being used because that’s all run locally. We don’t have any tracking exactly, but I think that’d be pretty exciting. Well, the other things I like about as we start to embed more of this is that we can sort of automate the giving of credit, whether that’s required or not, by the license. Like if you insert a photo, it could have a little caption like photo by, you know, so-and-so, you know, that sort of thing, which I actually think is a pretty neat, awesome (?) incentive. I know it’s always fun. I’ve license a lot of my photography under the GPL before, and it’s been built into themes and other things, and it’s always kind of exciting for me to visit a website and like, Oh, there’s my sheep, you know, a famous one from the 2010 theme. So yeah, it’s very satisfying as a photographer to think like my work’s now out there. So yeah, we should definitely do that. Thank you for the suggestion.

Michelle Frechette: [00:58:36] Yeah, and then, and then how do we get people to use it and know about the directory was the other question.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:58:39] Using the directory I think we need a lot more stuff on there. So I think that, you know, relative to a Unsplash or Pexels or Shutterstock or something like that, our library is still relatively small. So I think combining our library with the OpenVerse library, I, like I said, has millions of things there. We’ll make it just a lot more compelling that when you search there’s always something there for whatever you might be searching for. I think we also need to figure out how to have people in it. Right now, as you know, we don’t allow faces or anything like that because it’s sort of additional laws and copyright around like having a likeness of a person in a photo that isn’t really well covered by like even Creative Commons licenses, like a model release or something. And we’re still navigating what that would look like when I think about what might be coming next there. I think some of the AI stuff we talked about could be really interesting. So for example, there’s models that create faces that don’t exist in real life, which is great because then there’s no person that’s been affected by like the reuse of their likeness or something. So perhaps that’s something we start to do is you can upload a photo of a person and we’ll be able to like create a fake person that gets overlaid over the face. And then there’s no you don’t have to license your own likeness to be used in the world.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:00:00] So that could be one thing. And then also just using all the library as like a starting point. So whether that’s stable diffusion or something else that we could build in these open source models that you can start to modify things just using commands, prompts. I think that would also get people to use a lot more. We already have some built into Gutenberg like duo tone, which changes the colors of photos so we can do some stuff with CSS to style things, blur them, do other stuff like that. But what if you know you really like that photo I have of the sheep? But you wanted to be cows instead. In theory, this is something you could call one of these models or tell one of these models like take this photo or replace the sheep with cows. And it does it. It’s got a while. We should try that, actually, with that one. See if it actually works. But that is where these models are going. And like I said, they are getting quick, are better so quickly. The models that GPT 3, GPT is based on 3.5, so like a middle one. The next versions of this are going from hundreds of billions of inputs to like a 10x on that like trillion plus, and that will just improve the quality that much more. So that’s what I think could be next there. Thank you.

Josepha Hayden Chomphosy: [01:01:12] I’m going to add a quick tag, Josepha, in case you forgot me. We also when OpenVerse came over with us, did a little bit of research about how to do provenance with the Creative Commons folks to see how that can work and kind of an open source CC licensing setting. We haven’t done a lot with it, but it’s we’re aware, we’re looking at it so …

Matt Mullenweg: [01:01:34] Cool. I’ll finally say just like we want Gutenberg to be a gift to the web and used places more than WordPress. OpenVerse is a completely open API and so is our directory. So if other CMSs whether that’s open source ones like Drupal or Ghost or something or proprietary ones they want to build on the OpenVerse that is completely open to them, too. Again, it’s part of like as we are trying to create the web that we want to exist, it’s going to be more than just WordPress and we want to make the tools that we’re creating available to others as well. All right. Thank you. What’s next question.

Eileen Immons: [01:02:04] Hi, Eileen Immons (?). I’m here from Austin, Texas. I think I can speak for everyone here when I just say thank you to you to co founder Mike Little and to everyone else who followed for this big, beautiful, amazing thing that has changed my life and changed, I think, a lot of our lives. As a community member, I really enjoy looking at how we, all of us, everyone watching and listening can improve, patch, grow, all of these ideas and systems and practices that make up this community. And a big part of that for me is being uncomfortable and brave in addressing challenges, problems, doubts and struggles that we might have. And as I grow as a community member into a leader in this community, I find myself inspired by people like Josepha who are able to do this elegantly and wisely and kindly. And so as our most visible leader, what do you think is the biggest challenge that WordPress is facing right now, and how can we as a community of people begin to or continue to lovingly address those challenges?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:03:20] That’s a tough question. I think what really strikes me about it, we have a lot of teams that work on different parts of WordPress. There’s like an accessibility team, a security team, a translation team. And part of what I’ve become to appreciate is in kind of the systems thinking of addressing the problems that WordPress is trying to address, like creating basically an operating system for the open web that you can build anything on top of how every single part of that’s important. And sometimes some of the struggles we have is one of those teams being like, Hey, we’re not getting enough attention or Hey, we messed up on accessibility or something like that. And it’s true. Often maybe we didn’t give enough attention to one of those areas or we didn’t have our security program covering enough the plugins or whatever it might be. But each one of those is almost like its own linchpin that’s supporting all the others. It’s like a lattice work where they’re all actually all quite important. And part of what I think is so important about us having a broad and diverse group of contributors is that without one of those, the whole thing would collapse a little bit. And we can’t pay attention to just like core and ignore the plugin infrastructures or something like that. So a little bit we do shift attention and give more attention to some things some years and kind of move around a little bit. But as more and more people get involved with WordPress, the nice thing is that we kind of work on them all at the same time.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:04:53] Divide up the problem essentially in open source. There’s a saying with many eyes, all bugs are shallow, basically meaning that like, yeah, any one of this would be overwhelming for any one developer, myself or whoever it is. But when you get like people specializing in lots of different areas, it’s it’s almost like an economy works, right? Where where one of my favorites I think it’s Adam Smith who spoke about in the Wealth of Nations the idea of a pencil and how simple a pencil is. But when you think about everything that goes into making that pencil, literally no one person, no one company could have done it. There’s the little metal thing. How is the metal found? The eraser, the lead, the shaping, the machines that shape it, the distribution, how it was distributed to stores and everything like that. When you start to think a pencil, even if it was maybe like a a craft pencil, maybe a single person, the final putting together of the pencil, all the things that went into that, including the feed and shelter of the person who made it, is like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, supply chain lines that go across everything. Something. We’ve also been on people’s minds now a little bit as supply chains are getting disrupted or got disrupted this year. So I think about it like that. So but thank you for that question. That’s a tough one.

Eileen Immons: [01:06:06] Thank you so much.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:06:07] Appreciate it. Come on up. Come on out.

Laura Byrne: [01:06:17] Hi. My name’s Laura Byrne. I’m just from across the river in Montclair, New Jersey. We had WordCamp Montclair last year. I think we were one of two North American WordCamps last year. We’re going to have it again. And one of my favorite things we had at that camp is we had folks from the All Women Release Squad do a panel. We had Josepha, we had Michelle, Ebony Butler, and I am forgetting someone. Courtney, thank you so much. She’s in the room. She’s going to kill me and I’m sitting next to her. This is very embarrassing. So anyway, trying to dig myself out of this hole. So I think that release squad was phenomenal. Can we do it again?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:06:55] Sure. When? When would you like to?

Laura Byrne: [01:07:01] I don’t know. I’m thinking 2023, Maybe the second half of 2023. Sounds like a really good idea. What do you think?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:07:07] Yeah, we could totally do that. All right, We just got plan for it. I guess. So let’s. Let’s start.

Laura Byrne: [01:07:12] You’re on, are we on?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:07:15] It’s definitely one of those things. So for those who aren’t familiar, each release of WordPress has kind of a different team that comes together that is in charge of it. So essentially I’m like the lead developer, WordPress, but really it’s kind of like we’re passing the torch from different folks, which allows different teams to have like an impact. And we did this experiment with the All Women Release Lead Squad. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. And what’s that now? And nonbinary. Thank you. So that sort of experimentation is, I think part of the beauty of it. Like we all get some practice, like creating a WordPress release, releasing it, getting it out there and folks can bring different different aspects. It’s part of why we name, if you don’t know, we name actually every WordPress release in honor of a jazz musician. And part of the fun thing for me is looking at the characteristics of a release and which jazz musician kind of matches that or compliments that or or who’s life story might like be part of that. Actually, if you go around and look in the office, the records that are in some of the conference rooms here, they’re all the jazz musician releases. Thank you, Tino. Thank you, Pablo. And thank you, my friend Marcos, who’s we have a professional jazz musician here, actually, Marcos Varela. Um, so, yeah. Thank you for the suggestion. We’ll do it.

Laura Byrne: [01:08:32] Cool. Thank you. And one last plug. WordCamp Montclair is happening in June 2023. We would love it if you might come.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:08:38] Right across the river. You said.

Laura Byrne: [01:08:40] Yes.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:08:41] June 23. And I guess we had two WordCamps last year. The slide said one. So he must have had at least two. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you for that check as well.

Laura Byrne: [01:08:48] Okay, great. Thank you.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:08:51] I love New York. It really is like one of the great cities of the world. And so whenever here I get really inspired and the energy and everything, the shops, the small businesses like, Man. All right, thank you.

Ryan Marx: [01:09:03] Hey, good afternoon. My name is Ryan Marx with Pantheon, and I’m here from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Hello. So two years ago, with the release of WordPress 5.6, we introduced beta support for PHP a week ago, PHP 8.2 came out and at the end of November, PHP 7.4 end of lifed. We currently have only beta support for WordPress on the support grid. On the support chart, all of the yes’s have asterisks with beta support. So what’s the plan to to get us to full support? The post from the make team two years ago said there was a call for all plugin and theme developers to become compatible so that WordPress could be fully supported. What’s the status on that and at what level does all themes and plugins need to be fully supported or compatible for WordPress to be fully compatible?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:10:11] Cool. Let me make sure I’m understanding this. So basically you’re saying that the new versions of PHP eight are sort of supports like how WordPress core supports them is still beta or …

Ryan Marx: [01:10:22] So all of the PHP 8 columns and all.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:10:29] And where are these columns?

Ryan Marx: [01:10:30] They’re in there on the MAKE site of the supported versions of PHP and WordPress such as a grid and all of the yes’s for all of the PHP versions are yes asterisks and at the bottom it says beta support. And so it’s for enterprise companies who are looking to use WordPress. Today, WordPress is only available in beta.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:10:56] Gotcha. Do you know, because I know we have a lot of sites running WordPress on PHP 8. Do you know what this might be in reference to or you don’t have an answer. All right. Right back there. Let’s pass the mic. And Barry, we are running WordPress on a ton of PHP 8 or PHP 8 on a ton of WordPress sites. Right?

Jonathan: [01:11:13] And I have an answer.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:11:14] Oh, and you have an answer. Okay. Well, let’s let’s get both.

Jonathan: [01:11:17] Yeah. So Jonathan, I work a lot in core, core contributor. So the changes in PHP 8 are pretty foundational. There’s a lot of really far reaching changes and to properly support them is a lot of work. And so all of the unit test for best core will pass on these, but we can’t really speak for plugins and themes and how they use these features on PHP 8.x and so we can’t really say yes, we fully support PHP 8.1, 8.2 because we can’t vouch for every plugin and theme. And so it’s a real gray area where it’s difficult to really own that and confidently say that even though our contributor teams have put in the work and they have made core itself running on its own 90 ish percent compatible with these versions of PHP 8 with the exception of 8.2, which just came out. We’re still working on that one. Yeah. Does that answer your question?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:12:16] And Barry, did you want to add anything to that? Let’s let’s get the mic over to you.

Barry: [01:12:19] Yeah, so.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:12:21] Let’s get that. Yeah.

Barry: [01:12:22] Yeah. So I actually think that lack of PHP 8 support, whether it’s like in practice or in theory, is really important for WordPress. And so I actually asked about this today because we still have all these asterisks and beta tags next to it. And it’s not only PHP 8.2, it’s PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 is all not officially supported by core WordPress, not plugins and themes. So apparently and I’m actually going to talk to the PHP team, PHP core team about this because part of the difficulty is the lack of backwards compatibility maintenance between PHP versions, but also there’s not really a compelling reason for folks to upgrade to PHP eight. So those two things together make it hard to upgrade. But in core, we need to, we do need to do a better job and of having complete PHP 8 support at least in core and also in these what did you call them. Not community plugins but canonical plugins. Canonical plugin canonic canonical plugins. And Tanya Monk assures me today that is a top priority for her and her team in 2023. So hopefully that means in January. But yeah, we do. We do need to. We do need to. I heard it was something with the requests library. Do you know about that. Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:13:38] Yeah it’s well let’s because so people not here can hear.

Ryan Marx: [01:13:42] Yeah. So I heard there was, there was like a kind of a second party library. So it’s something that, that was imported into WordPress that we didn’t write but we I think are one of the few folks using it and so we kind of maintain it. There were some issues there, and I think that’s why most of those asterisks are there. But we do, like you said, have thousands and thousands of sites running successfully on PHP 8, PHP 8.1. Yeah, with tons of plugins and themes. So it works in practice, but I think in theory it has these asterisks next to it which we need to resolve as soon as possible.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:14:14] It could be a fun thing for playground as well so people could spin up like a copy of their site and there was some version inside the browser and then test things out. See how it works. Although there could be other problems introduced by that because it’s it’s not using MySQL, which is a standard backend of WordPress, it’s using SQL Lite and some translation layers for that. So yeah, it’s interesting. PHP, and so the good news, it sounds scary when PHP says we’re end of lifeing PHP 7.4 even that terminology end of life. You don’t want to end of life your website. But in practice what happens is every major web host essentially continues to back port security fixes and other things so that older versions of PHP, even though they’re not officially supported by the PHP core anymore, effectively get their life extended by quite a bit. So it’s not yet end of life.

Barry: [01:15:06] Including automatic. So we have a PHP 7.4 fork on GitHub in which we have back ported not only security fixes but bug fixes from PHP 8 releases.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:15:17] And that’s available. So that’s on GitHub.

Barry: [01:15:19] Anyone can anybody can use anybody can use it, anybody can download it. And we’re committed to maintaining that back port until there is significant adoption in the WordPress community and other PHP projects in order to kind of officially EOL something for and move forward with the eight versions.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:15:34] Cool EOL the nice way to say end of life. So that is continuing to go on. I will say that PHP seven was one of my favorite releases ever. Like it doubled speed a couple of times. Like it was really amazing. The PHP project with eight has gone a slightly different direction and I think they’re going to have an adoption challenge just in general, not just from WordPress. Until they add some more compelling features, as you said, and maybe work on some backwards compatibility. So perhaps it could also be something that is we co-develop and contribute and give feedback that in their PHP 8.3 or 8.4, maybe they can do some things that’ll make it easier not just for us but for the entire PHP community to upgrade. Cool. Thank you for that.

Josepha Hayden Chomphosy: [01:16:17] Our live stream shuts down in 12 minutes.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:16:19] Okay, so 12 minutes. So we got a couple of more questions. I’ll try to go through these a little faster. And if you have one, do you mind going up or getting in line?

Sandy Rang: [01:16:37] Hi, Matt. I work with you on Tumblr. Sandy Rang from Olean (?), New York, and I have I have questions from the internet for you, from the legacy websites. Legacy social. Will WordPress be a thing after the entire focus is moved in Gutenberg. That’s from Arland Nucci on YouTube.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:16:57] So will WordPress still be a thing? Yes, more than ever. So we talk a lot about Gutenberg because like I said, it’s something that is transforming WordPress. Like I said when we started it, it’s basically the biggest change in WordPress this whole history. So go to this blog paradigm, but it’s enabling all the core things we do in WordPress. So we’re essentially using these paradigms of Gutenberg to create the next generation that hopefully makes WordPress more radically accessible, particularly the folks who might not have as much ability to code, which is always something. Like I said, we want WordPress to be radical, accessible, regardless of technical ability. So if we want to democratize publishing, which has been our mission for 20 years now, we need to make it easier to use. And that is what Gutenberg does. So more WordPress than ever. And WordPress now I believe on the W text is over 40% of all websites and on built width, which is what we’re switching to. We’re at like a 33% or something. I think I spoke last year. W three text is going or the data set is changing. So a third of all websites are running it and that’s about more than ten x the number two in the marketplace, which is pretty exciting. It’s power of open source.

Sandy Rang: [01:18:07] Thank you. Thank you. And I’d like to just note for everyone that the rest of these questions will be posted on a wordpress.org blog post and answered there as well.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:18:17] So cool. So if we don’t get the questions, we’ll answer them asynchronously afterwards. That’s right. This line is now longer than ever. I’ll try to go quickly.

Courtney Robertson: [01:18:25] Hey, Matt. Courtney Robertson, GoDaddy pro dev advocate and co rep right now of the training team. Two years ago during the Q&A for your State of the Word address, we launched LEARN that year. Last year we shared a lot of stats about it. We heard more today about it. I am really passionate about working with anyone that wants to learn WordPress on to getting them into the job market and vet the things that are on our WordPress jobs board. So that question said, things like certification are starting to come up again. Our community talked about it and visited it in 2015. Myself at the time I was opposed and that tune has changed because I saw how hard it was as an educator to find ways to get people adequately trained for jobs and also seeing so many jobs being posted, people applying and they don’t have the skills with WordPress, they might know the other programming languages. Can you speak a little bit more about why certifications are something on the roadmap for Learn?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:19:27] Sure. I’ll say that my thinking on this has evolved as well. Maybe it’s similar direction to yours. Typically around certifications it just felt like a lot of overhead to do. Like what does it mean to be officially certified on WordPress? And also changing every year like WordPress is evolving so quickly. What does it mean? How do you update that? But now, exactly like you said, I feel like as there’s more demand for WordPress developers and experts ever having some sort of standardized education that they go to, not unlike many professional organizations, like if you’re a doctor or pilot, it’s kind of an ongoing training. That’s something that’s being able to fly the plane in the first place. And then there’s like an ongoing training that you go through every year. Real estate agents, every many professional organizations have this. I guess mostly I just want to figure out how we can do it in a WordPress way, Like that’s probably some of the minimus cost because like an exam needs to be proctored or something like that. But we want to make this content training material, everything as radically open as possible. So but I think we can do it now. So there are some we’re in two ongoing conversations and, you know, I think it’s fine for there to be sort of for profit things doing this. And we can point to some of them, especially if they’re aligned with our ethos and philosophy. And then also hopefully there’s lots of nonprofits around like retraining people and others. Maybe we can partner with some of them as well to point to. So thank you.

Bud Kraus: [01:20:48] Hi Matt. Oops. My name is Bud Kraus. I operate is Joy of WP. And first I’m up here because I want to well, I was up here last year and everybody saw me around the world and said, Hey, I saw you on State of the World. So I decided I would do it. My mom, you know? Exactly. But no, in all seriousness, I do have a question, and that is what do you see as the future of themes? Because with Twenty Twenty-Three, with all this design agnostic and with style variations and and I think you even alluded to the fact like one theme, are we going to get to the point where there’s a universal theme and that’s it and that’s it.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:21:28] And that’s it? That’s a great question. I think we’re essentially going to have a bifurcation of themes. So they’ll be essentially like for most designs and most like standard themes, I can see those being built on just maybe one or two different themes, like maybe it’s create block theme. Maybe it’s like something else that comes up, but like pretty well standardised. I think there’ll be some other kind of community themes that might do like either weirder stuff. Like, I remember we’ve had like a command line theme before or something else. So there might be like sort of more radical designs that happen. And then I guess but the real bifurcation will come is there’s of course some themes like let’s say Divi or others which are on the surface themes, but are really almost like entire applications embedded. So they’re using the distribution and kind of the bundling of themes to include basically a bunch of plugins as well and other stuff. These are really, really popular and actually do a lot to bring people on to WordPress because they bundle so many things that otherwise you might have to cobble together or assemble like a bunch of different plugins and things to do. So I think those are going to be around for a long time because essentially they’re almost like applications being bundled, they’re using on the surface themes, but they’re really something else. And perhaps we need a new name for those as well. Just like we’re starting to differentiate between community and commercial in the directories, perhaps those we need a new word for because it’s really kind of like a theme plus an app that’s bundled as one. So an ThApp, I don’t know what we’ll think of it. Sometimes naming is not my strong point. Come on up.

Nev Harris: [01:23:06] Hello, I’m Nev Harris from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This might be a crazy question, but the discussion about GPT earlier had me thinking about this when I owned an agency for eight years. The biggest problem we had with our clients, they didn’t have a big budget was content getting the website written. We would call that the build the launch gap. Now I’m thinking for like a mechanic who builds his website, gets a ready, but doesn’t know what to say about an oil change. And if he goes to GPT and says: What are the benefits to getting your oil changed every 90 days? Would there be, you know, and then he could get his website launched a lot quicker. Would there be any way or any thinking about implementing integrating GPT with WordPress to get these websites launched quicker?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:23:50] Totally, I think so. Right now these models typically are expensive, like every query cost, like a couple of pennies. And so it might be something that sort of is more like integrating APIs with commercial services, you know, whether that’s from WordPress companies or like more broader ones like OpenAI. And I think there’s some specifically around like copywriting, like is it? Jarvis is one of them. I’m forgetting some of the names, but there’s already some like they have taken these large language models and applied them to like creating copy for marketing pages or something like that. Now if websites were just being written by these things, I think that would be kind of boring because they have a style of writing, which is like the more you read it, you can kind of recognize it and they’re even talking about embedding some fingerprinting and things so you could take part of text and like identify whether it was generated by GPT or some of these others. But I think if that is kind of like a creative Greste that perhaps inspires you to rewrite something or something like that, that’s pretty powerful. So again, I think just the AI created stuff is has one level of coolness, but ultimately is not like raising the culture. And what humans do does do that. But there’s sometimes that sort of blank canvas problem or the writer’s block like you’re just staring at, you’re not sure where to start.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:25:08] So if we can combine this both for maybe giving you ideas for where to start to write and edit something, and then finally on the back end, helping you edit it. There’s been tools like Grammarly and other things Spellcheck obviously, that have certainly improved my writing and the next level of those where you might be able to say, Hey, I wrote this essay, how could I make it a little bit shorter? Or how could I make this a little punchier or something like that? And you can get feedback where it analyzes your writing and maybe helps you iterate and improve it. I think that’s actually pretty powerful. So there’s these studies where they would show like just humans playing a game like chess got to a certain level, just a computer playing it, got to a certain level eventually the ultimate level. But for a while, the human plus the computer working together with the computer would suggest some moves and the humans would choose them, which they call sim tars (?). You know, kind of a combination human horse type thing is the most powerful. And I actually think that’s the future of these creative works as sort of center creation. Thank you. Thank you.

[01:26:07] We’re gonna do a little overflow for these three, and.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:26:12] We’ll make these the last three. Yeah, three in 5 minutes. We got it.

Michelle Butcher Jones: [01:26:19] Challenge accepted Josepha. Michelle Butcher Jones. I’m sponsored by Pagely and from Carbondale, Illinois. For the first 20 years of WordPress, it’s been rather easy of getting like the older Gen X generation and millennial generations coming in to WordPress and helping contribute, build and everything. And but now, in a way, with the change of for myself, having a Gen Z daughter and then the alpha generation is they’re seeing more of wanting to be more of an influencer when it comes to tech and different stuff like that than actually like work on code and stuff. And as one of the front people pushing for the kids camps and to bring them in to WordPress that way. And then also with our training that we’re setting up, But what are we really doing and thinking of the future of keeping the in course of the younger ones and younger generations coming?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:27:24] Yeah, you alluded to it, but I think education is so important and we need to get into schools at every single level elementary, middle, high school, college and teach these skills because when you learn these skills, they actually are lifelong skills. When you learn a little bit of HTML, CSS that this gives you, much like learning instruments or learning something else, like a language you can use the rest of your life to be creative and express yourself and sort of learning a little bit how computers work, I think is in many ways like a new type of literacy that just opens up entire worlds and a really powerful way. Too we need to make it easier to onboard and things like Gutenberg, Everything we just talked about, I hope will help a lot with that. And the third thing, which is a little bit kind of a side personal project I’ve been working on, you might notice I’ve got the double verified checkmark. That’s a little image to we launched on Tumblr this thing where for $8 instead of one check mark, you can get two. But Tumblr is something I’ve been working on a lot personally. And so Automattic a few years ago acquired Tumblr. I’ve been functioning as a CEO of that since February. Tumblr is social blogging basically, so it’s a cool thing about Tumblr is over half the user base is under 25.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:28:38] It’s more female than male and more mobile, and it’s doing 50’000, 100’000 signups depending on the day, every day. So a ton of new people are coming in and it’s really fun. So we are transitioning Tumblr to be powered by WordPress, so it’s not there yet, but you’ll be able to use Tumblr like a social network on your phone or whatever. But the sort of what we call the web network. So like the where you have a subdomain or a custom domain on Tumblr, that’ll all be like WordPress themes. So what I’m hoping is that Tumblr can actually provide an onramp for entirely new generation that has like the fun blogging aspect that’s very social. So you can learn that part, but when you’re ready, it’s like expand your web presence or portfolio or have a store or something like that. Then when you learn that, you’ll actually be learning WordPress. And that’s a skill which you could take to any web host, to any sort of like part of the whole WordPress ecosystem. So I’m hoping that can be a new onramp as well. That just kind of something personally I’m working on and with Automattic. So thank you. Thank you.

Robert Jacoby: [01:29:38] Hi Matt, Robert Jacoby from Cloud Ways. I did buy my two check marks. Your double verified. Double verified. Inspired by the Pantheon question and PHP. Will there ever be a backwards compatibility break? If there is a analogy sufficient enough to accelerate the WordPress ecosystem?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:30:01] Hmm. Backwards compatibility. So. Yeah. And so Gutenberg is a backwards, incompatible change. And remember, in previous years, when Guttenberg was first being introduced, there was a lot of resistance to it. There’s still some. It’s getting better. People are really opened up to Gutenberg. It’s not like majority new sites and everything. But I would talk a lot that Gutenberg was something new to learn. It was a completely different tech stack and it all the plug ins and everything are going to be to be updated, but I’d say it’s hash hashtag worth it, right? It’s a big change, but we think that this is worth doing and we don’t do it that often. It’s the biggest. Basically, you can run a theme written for WordPress from 2005 on WordPress 6.1 today, 17 years later.

Speaker2: [01:30:44] And it works, which is why I think it’s not like that kind of break. Like if you would say that WordPress 10 can’t run on anything except for PHP 4000.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:30:54] Yeah. We’ll see. You know, never say never and we’ll see what is coming and new versions of technology. There’s definitely features that, for example, require a newer browser in WordPress or things like this Webassembly language that allows the the playground feature. Like that’s not going to be supported in Internet Explorer 8 or anything like that. So so we are definitely saying like newer technologies, but we try to make that a progressive enhancements. So saying like for example, some of this new stuff like the block interface is way more complex. So if you’re using like a screen reader to interact with WordPress, there’s a lot going on. And if you just want to do a post, maybe that’s too much. So we always have like the classic editor. If you want to switch back or alternative ways of posting the WordPress, whether the APIs and other things so that there’s more than one way to do it. And depending on what sort of like you need to do, there’s many ways to post, many ways to edit, many ways to do everything, including all these APIs, both the XML, RPC and the RestAPI that are built in. So but never say never. We’ll see. Thank you. Matt Thank you. Last question. All right. I hope it’s good.

Mike Melanson: [01:32:00] We’ll see. We’ll see. Mike Melanson I’m with the GitHub, the README project. Oh, cool. When you were talking earlier about Project Gutenberg, I was remembering the beginning of this year. There was talk about the block protocol from Joel Spolsky. Yeah. And you responded that you guys were interested in helping out with that, partaking somehow. I’m curious. What’s happened since then, if anything?

Matt Mullenweg: [01:32:24] Yeah. So blog protocol and Joel Spolsky is like an incredible developer. If you if you’re a developer or I guess he’s a leader now of his Joe Allen Software essays is one of these books that’s like a little older, but so timeless. And New York City, I believe as well, and was part of creating Fog Creek. What else do they glitch What’s that? A Stack Overflow. Oh, yeah. How’d I forget the big one? So, so much. Sometimes developers don’t like to work together on the same thing. And so it’s part of why there’s, like, 200 CMSs and stuff like that. Like, sometimes there might be a stylistic or a technical change that when you look at it, you say like, I can’t use this thing that exist. I’m going to start something that’s different. And I think that’s a little bit what’s happening with Gutenberg and the block protocols. And so as we’ve gotten involved, like we’re definitely communicating as the projects, but they feel like there’s some things either choices in Gutenberg or ways we develop things that just are incompatible with how they see it happening. We’ll see where that goes in the future. Like I said, Gutenberg, we’ve tried to make CMS agnostic so it can be embedded in anything and reskinned like you saw with the Tumblr example, that can be totally different and everything we’re doing is open.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:33:40] So I would hope that wherever they end up, Gutenberg blocks could maybe be embedded, maybe there’s a translation layer or something like that in their editor. And you know, it’s totally fine for there to be other editors. If we can do something for users where if they copy and paste or just some sort of translation layer, I think that would be really ideal. And where I hope we end up well, the cool things about that being more than one thing like multiple editors as well, is maybe they create something really cool that’s open source and then we’re like, Oh, let’s bring that over to Gutenberg. So the innovation can flow both ways. And sometimes maybe that’s only possible if you’re starting something from scratch. So they’re open source, they’re doing open protocols, everything like that. So I consider them like a cousin project and I hope that we can integrate more in the future. But if not, that’s okay too. Maybe this will just be an alternative ecosystem that can experiment with new ideas or maybe things we would say no to. They can try and then we see how it’s adopted by users. Cool. Well, thank you so much. We are going to end there.

Matt Mullenweg: [01:34:45] If you’re here in New York, when I’ll go, we’ll have some snacks and just hanging out. We’ll be pretty open if you want to stay for a while. And for those of you tuning in online, thank you so much for giving us part of your day. See you next year, if not before.

Credits

• Picture of Brooklyn/New York City courtesy of Andre Benz
• Video recording of the State of the Word 2022 on WordPress.TV