State of The Word 2022

[00:00:00] Most of the time when I just give people that call act, 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 as a state of the word.
[00:00:23] 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. Uh, watching from all over the world, all of our satellite watch parties. Hello, thank you so much for tuning in. Um, any minute now we’ll have Matt and that is exactly what we’re here to talk about. But first, my name is Joseph Hayden jumbo, C 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.
[00:00:54] 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 opensource. 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.
[00:01:18] 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. 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.
[00:01:38] 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.
[00:01:58] 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 asked 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.
[00:02:22] 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 had, who knew that when they first heard WordPress? You’re welcome. WP sessions folks.
[00:02:36] Um, 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.
[00:03:01] Wow. Welcome everybody. Um, I don’t know if you can see on a stream, but we have a live studio audience here in New York city. Which is pretty fun. Um, I don’t know if we’re going to be quite as entertaining as SNL, but we’ll try. Work in a few, at least inside WordPress jokes. It’s such a pleasure.
[00:03:19] We’ve got a mix of some local contributors and folks have flown in from all over the world. Sound like WordPress developers and WordPress business leaders. I’m actually curious who came, who thinks they came to furthest? Today.
[00:03:35] Right over there. We got Paris, right? That’s also to Paris and. And a Vienna. So to Paris in a Vienna. It’s not bad. What’s that. And a Berlin. Ah, Europe has shown up. Well, you’re just going to have feature pretty prominently later. So we’ve got to get some more of that out next time. But just a reminder for what we do with a state of the word, it’s kind of an opportunity.
[00:04:00] WordPress as a distributed group. Not just thousands, but actually probably over a hundred thousand making up the community. You know, we have over 55,000 plugins and themes for WordPress that extended to do almost anything you can imagine. We have all the core developers, the translators translators, and over 50 languages.
[00:04:18] From volunteers all over the world. And as I like massively distributed group that comes together to make this thing that we call WordPress. That has the meanings that Josepha so beautifully spoke about. Um, 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.
[00:04:36] It is our collective celebration. What we accomplished. Uh, you know, an almost impossible project of tens of thousands of people, many of whom have never met in person. Coming together to just create something. Almost like a software Amish barn raising. We all come together.
[00:04:54] And make this thing that then is our contribution to the world. Because as I mentioned, WordPress is free and open source, meaning that anyone can use it. It’s accessible, which are to be radically accessible, regardless of language spoken, economic ability. Uh, technical ability, everything we want to create software.
[00:05:12] For the people by the people. Um, it’s also been such a rollercoaster of a year. That it’s nice to come back and celebrate some of the fun stuff. So at last year, state of the word. I should also say that some of this is a little bit inside baseball. 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.
[00:05:38] You can Google all this. We’re also going to be live tumbling@wordpressdottumblr.com. So if I mentioned a link or something, that’ll be up there. You know, within like 20 or 30 seconds. So if you want to check out anything further DoubleClick, as they say. Anything’s we talk about, check out that wordpress.tumblr.com.
[00:05:55] And last year I taught, 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. Uh, way to be able to edit post and create a whole entire websites using this block paradigm.
[00:06:15] I actually believe it’s going to be bigger than WordPress itself as a contribution 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. Um, close to home. You’ll notice that the BB press forums that parallel the support and wordpress.org now have embedded Gutenberg. So we’ve gone from.
[00:06:37] I think it was BB code. So, if you were to post a link or an image on the forums before you’d have to write this like strange HTML, like language. Um, now, as you can see, it has rich embedding images, videos. Oh, and beds everything. So we’ve really modernized. Um, the wordpress.org support experience. And this is using a plugin I believe called blocks anywhere.
[00:07:02] Blocks everywhere. It’s even better than anywhere. Which also is going to be embedded in buddy press as well. So if you using the sort of social network in a box that extends WordPress. That’s going to have blocks, which is pretty exciting.
[00:07:18] We also started to see Gutenberg and bedded in completely other applications. So as you notice, this looks a lot like the Gutenberg interface, but this is actually a layer of hill based application called engine. Awesome. And I believe we have the developers of engine. Awesome. Here. Right there.
[00:07:39] I had trouble summarizing this, but this reminded me a little bit like, like, uh, Access or FileMaker, like kind of a database crater where anyone can create like rich forums 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, modifier.
[00:08:02] The pew research center has redone their political topology 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’s sort of like categorize, these are political typology and then it feeds back to the pew research information. So I thought this one was pretty fun.
[00:08:21] Um, please keep these examples coming by the way. I love hearing about these, the award winning Germany 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. Um, has now adopted Gutenberg for their web version. And we’ll be using native Gutenberg, which is the native iOS and Android implementations of Gutenberg in the future.
[00:08:45] By the way it did. We. Finished a relicensing for the mobile Gutenberg. Yes. Awesome. So.
[00:08:53] Well, as 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 GPO 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 bet JavaScript.
[00:09:17] The JavaScript version of Gutenberg and your web application and the rest of your web application, doesn’t need to be also open-sourced. But on mobile apps because of how they’re compiled and how distributed. It was sort of kicking in. And so if you were like, I prepared a app like day one or MailChimp or something like that, and you want a bank 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.
[00:09:45] Implementations of it and got. Dual license. So you can use under the GPO, or I believe that MPO the Mozilla public license, if I’m recalling that correctly, which can be easily embedded in applications. 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.
[00:10:03] And 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 tumbler post. Form which, and here I’m showing, copying and pasting into the tumbler post form. So if you look at how Tumblr has adapted Gutenberg, it’s using all the fun stuff that has been in the tumbler editor forever, but now it has all the features of good bird that 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.
[00:10:35] 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. All of that is happening. Now, and you can bet anything. So I’m hoping to see. We talked a little bit last year about how pupil’s starting to utilize Guber Goldberg and some other things.
[00:10:59] Um, I hope that we can break 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 graded, That can now be literally cross-platform and that as users start to learn these interfaces and like a block-based way.
[00:11:15] Of creating rich tax or editing sites. If they learn on one system, it will be applicable in every other. So this is, again, something I think could be even bigger than WordPress and WordPress has done pretty well.
[00:11:28] Um, 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. Uh, they were happening mostly in America. Um, as we go through 2010. You’ll start to see WordPress start to spread in America. Europe starts to pop up.
[00:11:49] We’ve got some London. So it looks like France, Berlin, Portugal, Australia just came online. Okay. Now we’re on. For five continents, Africa, South Africa, it looks like some. Egypt’s so we reached all six continents. When I went to Antarctic, I tried to get together a WordPress.
[00:12:11] But the lack of internet was a little tricky. Now y’all know what just about to happen. So we just hit COVID time. So these red. Or the in-person meetups switching to the online ones. So there were still a couple that happened. Whoops. That wasn’t supposed to wait. I can think I can. Yeah, let me pause this and go to the end there.
[00:12:30] Um, oops.
[00:12:34] Uh, Ah, well, I’m just going to describe it at the end. You started to see. The online, 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. Um, we’ve always taken for granted that since the early days of WordPress, we brought people together in person I’ve worked camps or meetups often low or no costs, just all over the world.
[00:12:58] 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 plugging craters and everything, and then influencing the future of it.
[00:13:19] So I’m very proud to say that from 21 to 22. The amount of meetup groups active has doubled. Um, firm’s kind of the nature that we reached in 2021. We also, we went from one word camp and 2021. So 22 and 22, which is kind of cool.
[00:13:40] Netherlands Kathmandu, Valencia lion, Bart, Bart dipper. But the per I’m going to work on pronouncing. Some of these, we already have 34 implanting for 2023, and that number could go even higher. So I’m inside to see these work camps come back.
[00:13:57] 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 word camp us, which this year is in national Harbor, Maryland. USA in August. Sort of the end of August, August 22nd, 23rd. The community summit is basically for the top contributors or WordPress to come together and.
[00:14:23] I’m 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’re talking 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.
[00:14:48] 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 his creative comments, 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 WP two zero, that WordPress, that nets.
[00:15:13] 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 10 years of WordPress, 2003 to 2013. So we’re doing the second 10 year update of that book. And there’ll be events all over the world. So we’ll have a chance to have fun.
[00:15:36] The last at the 10-year anniversary, WordPress people made some amazing cakes and there was like all sorts of fun stuff. So I’m excited to see. What the kind of community generated worldwide celebration. WordPress 20 is going to be.
[00:15:50] I talked, I spoke last year about how important education is to the future of WordPress. We have a site@learnedwordpress.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 has been created by people all over the world who teach WordPress. It’s been translated in new language now.
[00:16:12] We had 12,000 people. Um, take one of these courses. Uh, such an important part of getting involved with WordPress is the education. And I love meeting folks. Uh, including some like startup founders and CEOs.
[00:16:26] That tells me that they learned to code from doing WordPress themes or WordPress plugins. 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. It might take one of these free online courses and where they end up.
[00:16:44] We have also gotten around to redesigning some of the pages on wordpress.org.
[00:16:52] We’ve got the blog that’s been redesigned and we’re trying to do this, this new showcase just launched yesterday.
[00:17:00] And as you notice, we’re starting to bring our jazz design language. To everything. I hope that this is kind of like our Neo soul Neal jazz. Meet software aesthetic is kind of like a new web design language for the world. And of course we’re doing it, putting in the themes and everything like that. So this is going to be kind of fun.
[00:17:17] I took it 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 Champion’s pizza and, um, In New York last night, kind of in the Lafayette area or on Lafayette street. And they have tried to break the Guinness record for longest pizza.
[00:17:37] I was like, how did people eat that? It was like a really, but that’s sometimes how I feel when we’re redesigning wordpress.org. That’s just a lot to do.
[00:17:45] We also spoke last year about open verse, which is kind of unusual. This was. At 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 open source is, is essentially a search engine that scours the entire web for creative commons, licensed media.
[00:18:05] Uh, it could be photos, videos. If you’re not from what the creative commons is, it’s kind of open source applied to. Media or content. So a license which under this image can be used for sometimes commercial use. Sometimes non-commercial use sometimes with attribution’s. No attribution, it’s kind of a variety of different kind of as a creator, you can pick different licenses to put things under.
[00:18:28] 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 or WordPress have chosen to share their work with the world under these open licenses.
[00:18:44] So, so far in the open verse we have over 22 million images. 1.1 million audio files. Um, where it’s being used millions of 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 feedback 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.
[00:19:17] If you are a photographer or a musician or anything like that. And you’d like to contribute to this. We have the photo directory on wordpress.org. Now that you can put. Creative common zero or GPO licensed images on. And the nice thing about this is if you just upload it to your site and tag it with creative commons license, it will go into the open first, automatically, and then be accessible for other people to use. So that is something that kind of.
[00:19:40] 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 think the power of that when you have tens of millions of websites and craters, Now being part of this ecosystem about the consumer and a great.
[00:19:56] Let’s talk about some of the other features that are becoming, that we did in 22, and that will be coming up in 23. Um, 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.
[00:20:13] 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 a top three things that, that have shipped this year that I feel like are really changing. Um, how WordPress can be used and who can use it.
[00:20:32] The vs. Block themes. So it blocked. The MSR is remember, I’ve been talking a lot about Gutenberg blocks. I think of a good Enberg block, kinda like a Lego. It’s a reusable pattern. It could be a contact form. It could be an image, could be a video. It could be a Google map. Could be almost anything that are the components that make up every single webpage. The cool thing is, as you start to use blocks,
[00:20:53] You can now visit almost any website in the world. He squint a little and you can see essentially what the building patterns are that they’ve used the Creek that then once you start to learn WordPress blocks, then you can recreate almost any designers site that you see use as inspiration to make your own version, and then move on from that.
[00:21:11] What block things 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.
[00:21:29] Which one of the cool things about good burgers, all the controls that gives you for the typography, 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.
[00:21:48] 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 homepage, things like that. That’s also customizable. But now the style variations can be distributed. And shown this is 2023. This is by the way, this is.
[00:22:09] BFAO who is going to introduce the 2023 feet. Every year, we introduce a new theme for WordPress, and this is what is coming now.
[00:22:20] This is 2023. A new kind of default theme. 2023 is designed to take advantage of the new design tools introduced in WordPress 6.1.
[00:22:32] After it’s highly opinionated predecessor, 2022. You’ve coming. Default theme is a clean blank canvas. That bundles with 10 very distinct style variations.
[00:22:45] The theme uses fluid typography and spacing presets. Which means your website will be automatically responsive.
[00:22:54] What makes 2023 so special. Is that it 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 to bundled styles.
[00:23:19] Styles can change many areas of your site. From typography to spacing. To how featured images look.
[00:23:30] Here’s how you can browse the different styles in 2023.
[00:23:34] There were two appearance. Editor.
[00:23:38] Lincoln, the styles icon in the top toolbar.
[00:23:43] And click browse styles.
[00:23:47] Then preview the different styles in your site and see your own content.
[00:23:55] Now you can also browse through each theme style. Variations in the theme directory improved you them instantly.
[00:24:06] 2023 is accessibility ready? And available with WordPress 6.1.
[00:24:23] I said that was so relaxing.
[00:24:27] I get a little excited up here sometimes. We also have a lot to get there. So I apologize if we can slow this down on the YouTube later.
[00:24:37] 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.
[00:24:53] The first phase was basically everything inside the box. So replacing that post editor and page editor with these Richard Gutenberg block tools, phase two is when we went outside the box now said using these Gutenberg design tools, you can customize your headers, your footers, your archives basically create the entire website.
[00:25:12] Using the same blocks. Uh, that you learned before. Um, let’s talk about the last bit of phase two, and then I’m going to briefly mention phase threes and four threes is.
[00:25:25] This is a speed run. It takes about 55 seconds. But it’s sped up like three times. Of an entire theme being created. Just for the Gutenberg blocks. So again, watch how this starts from like a completely blank canvas. And very quickly using color tools, primary colors, secondary colors. Um, we’re going to have some pallets. The topography is changing. We just changed the fonts.
[00:25:51] Um, some spacing that’s going on here and this is going to be fully responsive. So we’ll see that go through as well.
[00:26:00] And at some blocks. And
[00:26:05] 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. It’s going again.
[00:26:21] Finally editing that permanently pages. And. Done.
[00:26:27] That was it.
[00:26:32] Ooh. So that went from Blake to theme. And this is using a new theme for WordPress. I might be one of the last themes for WordPress called the create block theme. The crepe 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 whether using Google hosted resources for things. So this allows you to run it all from your own website.
[00:27:02] It still have the rich topography and other things that we all want a modern web design. So it can have one theme. One pattern, but infinite permutations. Um, these are some examples of. Um, different kinds of styles apply to. Just one thing. And then finally, as part of phase two, We’ve been. Working on the editor is still quite a bit. So this shows some improvements with the writing and Springs, including partial selection of texts across different blocks. We can multi-day multi blocks, quick links, shortcuts, and sort of a Zen boat.
[00:27:35] You know, Gutenberg has a lot of controls going on. So if you’re a writer, we actually have some amazing writers here in the audience. Seth Goden, maybe 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 Zin mode,
[00:27:54] We’ve gotten quite good at hiding all that other stuff. It can essentially transform into. They’re like a very, very minimalist editor.
[00:28:03] Oh, here’s the Zen mode it’s actually shown for designs and everything. Um, patterns, 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. Uh, patterns kind of like.
[00:28:21] A little put together your spaceship or something, just insert into your site. Um, 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 to break it.
[00:28:47] I see some laughs. Some people. So what this is actually showing is this pattern is locked in. So the placement of the images and the text, that 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 another images and everything, it’ll be like, Nope.
[00:29:04] You can do that in a new block or a new pattern, but 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. Um, finally run the styles. We’re now adding a style book.
[00:29:20] 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 are CSS that you’re doing with all the different things that people can do with the block editor.
[00:29:40] Um, again, very, very exciting for improving the robustness and the edge case, dealing with people, developing distributed themes and patterns. Um, in 2022, all the things you just see. Um, or contributed by a record number of folks helping out. 1,399.
[00:30:06] We were so close.
[00:30:09] Hopefully some, one person watching this will be inspired and get us to 1400 next year. This includes 652 first time contributors. People have never contributed to WordPress ever before. 424 that contributed 21 came back and 22. And one that I’m pretty excited about, which is 322 people. Who took a break in 2021 and then returned in 2022.
[00:30:33] You know, last year, one of the things I spoke about was. Some of our contribution number is meetups WordPress’s work camps, 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.
[00:30:50] What a tough couple of years we’ve been through. Um, including this year, it was a little rollercoaster 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.
[00:31:05] Certainly one of the things I always returned to, if I’m ever feeling low or having a tough week, I find that the WordPress community is one of the friendliest loving lists, loving Lee list, loving list. Most loving. There we go.
[00:31:19] And so willing to help you out. As we were just demonstrated right there. Thank you for shell. We have some new core committers this year. So I want to especially recognize and celebrate Bernie writer, Marius Jensen, Adam Zelensky and George mama dash. who are the new poor committers that.
[00:31:43] 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. So the thing that gets distributed to tens of millions of websites and every release, think of these, like the Wikipedia super editors.
[00:32:02] And I liked the very top of the top.
[00:32:05] So from the bottom of my heart, the top of my lungs. I want to say, thank you to all of you with a few of us here in this room, but also the countless thousands that comes together. Like I said, Amish barn, raising of software for WordPress. So thank you.
[00:32:27] WordPress is what it is because of community. And we’ve talked a lot about building community through events, but it’s also the work camp organizers, the meetup organizers core. Committers, but also especially the extender 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 into almost anything you would imagine that’s an e-commerce site.
[00:32:54] 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. Um, WordPress as a project has got a complex interconnected infrastructure that makes contributions possible.
[00:33:15] So if you asked yourself or anyone else, what’s part of the community health. It’s make.wordpress.org to learn. It’s the forums. It’s the meat of this, this whole sort of ecosystem around WordPress. That makes up the engine of contributions. Now part of what we focused a lot at the end of this year and going forward and working on.
[00:33:33] Is giving those tools to every theme, every plugin in the directory. So wordpress.org host and open directory. Think of it almost like an app store for WordPress, which is. Takes no payment cuts has no listing fees. It’s completely open source. Things can be commercial. They can be non-commercial it’s allows anything.
[00:33:54] 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 on install things. So I like to think of the nature of our committee is fractal, meaning that at every layer of WordPress. Um, whether it’s a single plugin. Uh, or the entire thing.
[00:34:12] There’s often sub-communities. If you think of a project like Yoast or WooCommerce or something like that. They often have their own plugins. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of logins. And hundreds of contributors and other things that come together to create them. Um, so last year we did a lot of work on translations. So allowing any plugin to be translated by the community.
[00:34:32] Or two years ago. And that started coming really well. Now, 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 theme,
[00:35:00] Plugins and themes directory. Is basically going to allow the craters add that plugin or theme to self identify for kind of what type of project they are. So what’s this going to mean? And 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.
[00:35:22] But it’s not really meant to be anything more. There’ll be a second taxonomy, which is a community plugin. Uh, community plugin is one that says this belongs to all of us. The lead developers or whoever’s working on it is really stewarding it. And if there are done, they’ll pass it on to others. Is this for the next generation as well? Much like WordPress itself.
[00:35:45] It’s explicitly saying that there’s no upsells. So, this is just entirely free, often running entirely on the WB admin. 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.
[00:36:05] Get involved. And so, especially if someone’s wanting to get more involved with contributing to WordPress, but contributing to the core software, it might be a little intimidating getting involved when these community plug-ins. Is a fun way to do it. A portion of the community plugins. We’re going to specify as canonical plugins. What’s economical plugin.
[00:36:24] 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. Uh, 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 have launched some of the stuff I showed today, you can install the Gutenberg plugin.
[00:36:55] Think of the importers for WordPress. With a WordPress importer, but also importers from other systems. Those will be canonical plugins. So basically saying what were, you can install this and you are super, super sure it is a hundred percent solid, secure, and supported by the core word, press. And then finally we want to recognize as well that there’s a ton of commercial plugins. So that’s going to be something that people can tag. Often the commercial plugin will be accepting of outside contributions, but there’s often a company behind it.
[00:37:21] Um, they often have commercial sport and some sort of upsell. We’ve probably all experienced the theme or plugin that you can use for free, but then there’s some pro version. So all of those will be tied. Um, commercial. And so if you’re choosing something, browsing the directory or going in and not be able to tell what sort of, what you’re getting into.
[00:37:40] 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 they could be commercial non-commercial community, everything mixed together. So this is launching. This month. wordpress.org, plugin directory. So look for this and then we’re going to build it into the sort of built-in WP admin browsers as well. So check that out.
[00:38:03] Just out of curious, who has something commercial that’s in the directory, that’s in the room. Here. We got like a dozen people, anyone working on a community plugin. Oh, it’s going to be called the community plugin. A few it’s more than that. Actually. We’ve got a ton of Gutenberg people here. That’s probably most of the room.
[00:38:19] How about economical plugin? And we’re working on one of those good Berg. Yeah. Cool. Um,
[00:38:27] this now sort of summarizes all the things have happened. I now want to speak about phase three of Gutenberg, three of four that we’ll now be heading into after the 6.2 release. So again, phase one. Post editing phase two, editing your turn at a site. But phase three R is basically taking WordPress, which is kind of a single player thing and making it multiplayer.
[00:38:47] So the features that are going to be coming in phase three, some of which are in experimental right now, and some of which we’ll be starting this year. So if any of this peaks 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.
[00:39:01] 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 a draft of a web page or a theme or anything like that. And so I worked best, 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. And you can see what each other are doing or comment on specific things.
[00:39:31] Maybe there’s a paragraph of your new posts. 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. 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.
[00:39:48] Um, WordPress for, I think over 15 years now has a really cool, hidden feature when my favorite actually. Which is called poster visions. So this means every single edit of every single post and page is saved. Um, by default and on the good host forever. Some post limit this, I hope they stop limiting this. Once we get some better features in.
[00:40:07] 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.
[00:40:29] So revisions has always been there, but we’re going to be significantly improving the interface for edit editing revisions. And then finally the media library. So we’re going to be doing a lot with the media library to interview. Integrate the open verse director that we spoke about. Both contributing to open verse and getting from open verse.
[00:40:47] And just finally like creating like a notifications infrastructure. So everything that I just spoke about for these editorial flows. We’ll 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 and WordPress and make it multi-lingual.
[00:41:07] And so WordPress is so international used in so many countries where there’s more than one primary language. Um, every time I give a talk. The question is when is WordPress going? When is multi-lingual 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.
[00:41:24] Now we’re doing multi-lingual after phase three, because all the workflow stuff I just spoke about. Is I think going to be really crucial for creating rate workflows around the translations, because think about it. You make a new page in one language, maybe you’re writing your website and French. It’s going to be translated into Swiss German.
[00:41:42] What’s the workflow for knowing that something is updated on a page, the translators get notified, and then they sort of sink 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.
[00:41:55] For example. So all of that is going to be supported by the. Collaboration. That is phase three and phase four of Gutenberg coming soon.
[00:42:10] Part of what makes WordPress. Pav. 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 at every single it’s been hammered in my brain multilinguals and forward. ’cause they’ll ask about it every time, but also we do this annual survey.
[00:42:31] It’s like kind of a census for WordPress. This is going to be that wordpress.org, but you can also scan this QR code. Um, this is like our census. So if you want to give an input, we’ve reduced this from a hundred questions down to 20.
[00:42:48] I know there was a lot of work for that.
[00:42:51] It’s fast, easy, and we want to get as many folks from around the WordPress community. Um, participating this because one thing we do have to struggle with. This is the folks in this room or that develop WordPress. Um, or just one slice. Of user base of WordPress, there’s millions and millions and millions of people who might not be represented in the conversations. So we can get this survey out to some percentage of them.
[00:43:15] We’ll get to know a little bit of what we might not know. We don’t know. Um, and the wider usage of WordPress.
[00:43:22] As we close up. Um, it’s been a really, really exciting year to be in technology. Um,
[00:43:30] there has 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, it was the movie. They should’ve sent a poet. Which one was, that is why these cool scifi movies, the aliens come in and like, Uh, contact. Yes. Thank you.
[00:43:51] Um, one of the things that blew my mind this year, and if you haven’t tried it out, you gotta check it out from open. AI is chat GBT. So this has taken the GBT transformer, large language model. And applying it to this, like chatbots. We decided to ask it actually. Right. A sort scene in which Matt, the founder of WordPress co-founder should say describes full site editing and single word. Matt, the founder of WordPress stood on a stage in front of a large crowd of eager developers.
[00:44:19] He smiled confidently.
[00:44:23] And said. Full site editing and a single word transformative. The crowd erupted in applause.
[00:44:37] As Matt walked off the stage, which I will do.
[00:44:41] So that was the prompt. And that was the answer that chat GBT gave. I promised the entire speech wasn’t written by it. Although we did think about it.
[00:44:50] Um, apart from tools like this, which are so excited. And again, please try this out. It’s free and open right now. Um, chat.open ai.com I think is the way to check it out. What’s also been amazing. Some of that creative, creative tools. So open AI released a tool called Dali. I think it’s called now Dolly to D a L L dash E.
[00:45:11] Which is image creating one of the things that blew my mind.
[00:45:15] The. Oh, nevermind. Was this actually being open-sourced so open AI 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, the fusion, which have basically taken all the stuff that OpenAI is doing. And you can run it on your laptop.
[00:45:37] 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 under style, a Salvador Dali or different things like that. It can transform images.
[00:45:57] It can take existing things and you can edit it. So instead of using Photoshop, you could just say, remove the clouds to the background or add. More saxophones. And 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 caused, I feel like a lot of soul searching for everyone.
[00:46:18] Because it’s like, this is an area. 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. And 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.
[00:46:39] Word state of the word speech. So it’s something that the AI was going to be able to do. I thought that would have been 10 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 ask, you make like 4, 6, 10 different images.
[00:46:56] Of watch, like two are ridiculous and wrong. Some of them were okay. And, but there’s often a few in there that 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.
[00:47:15] Um, that sort of use of this creative tools. Combined with humans. Reminded me of one of my favorite Pablo Bokassa quotes. Um, 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 that.
[00:47:42] Chat TBT prompt that said, you know, write a scene in a movie or in a play. You can give it conversations. You can 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.
[00:47:59] You’ll see, as they start to play with this, sometimes it gives you really dumb answers. Also chat GBT sounds very calm, confident, and sometimes we’ll tell you things that are completely factually inaccurate.
[00:48:11] 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 chat.
[00:48:23] Our GBT four, which is coming out this year. If you think this stuff is amazing. I think GBT four is going to blow all of your minds. It is really totally next level. So giving the questions to the computer. Gives compliments what computers are doing best versus giving you the answers. And so I have that little variation, which is computer gives you answers.
[00:48:43] But the creativity is still in the inputs. Um, 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.
[00:48:59] I’m going to click to start this. This is going to be introduced by Adam Zielinski. And. This is actually going to be available shortly after this talk. So here. Like this website is not low. That for my server, WordPress PHP and a database are all around. The web browser it’s called wards. Display ground and you can customize it. Let’s click on the settings button and select the pendant theme.
[00:49:26] That public’s flagging. And the Gutenberg plugin. Starting a new playground only takes a couple of seconds and I move an already logged in as an admin. Now let’s create a new page using the other blog from code blocks. Let’s keep it a title. And some content. And I like to be sure that this looks right when published, so let’s preview it in a new browser tab.
[00:49:53] That looks perfect. Let’s publish it. Now 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’s how it worked was playground. My enabling the future. Imagine a guided, interactive, forged Chris’ learning experience where you get to edit code live and see the results right away.
[00:50:17] Imagine trying gorgeous blagging is right in the blogging directory and even interacting with them right then in there.
[00:50:27] Finally imagine being able to try WordPress and even contribute to it within seconds from visiting WordPress, that arch. The future exciting. You can be a part of it. Land more@developer.org. Because the arc slash playground, Johnny that conversation on the metal playground, slack channel and get involved in the project.
[00:50:48] So a classic live demo fashion. We broke it. Today.
[00:50:54] 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 post, like web posts, like. Blue host or wordpress.com or something. And that is running server software again, like a web server, like Apache.
[00:51:17] A full database PHP itself, like all these things. This is happening a hundred percent 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, a PHP, a web server, everything just right there in a little window.
[00:51:39] 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, imagining 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, even 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.
[00:52:07] All of the 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. So check out playgrounds. Coming soon as in like today. And. And if you’re a developer, like you realize how incredible what we just saw is.
[00:52:28] I, when I first saw it, I was like, this is not possible. Which has happened. So, yeah. Thank you, Adam. And congratulations to everyone who’s been working on that.
[00:52:42] So that is 2022. And she’d like this. We got a little heart on the 22.
[00:52:48] 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, to keep doing. So, as we have had two decades of WordPress, Uh, so far.
[00:53:07] I 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 helped that maybe a hundred years from now, maybe in this spot in New York. At least someone else. Given 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.
[00:53:29] Um, 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 lasts be around for a long, long time. So thank you so much for being part of that.
[00:54:03] All right. So if anybody needs to stand up, go to the restroom or anything now, Point to run out. If you need to. But now we enter the Q and a portion. The state of the word, by the way, if you want to hear more from me, Fotomat dot tumbler during a podcast on distributor.blog, which is like talking about distributed work.
[00:54:21] I’m at photo map. On the legacy social networks and.
[00:54:27] And my blog is T T if you want to see the TSLA poem. I referred to earlier when I said they should’ve sent a poet. I just posted that, I think last, last night, Um, how the QA 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’m aware of.
[00:54:48] And if you have a question. I think this is the spot to go to. Right? So. Um, please. Come on up. I guess I should’ve 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. Don’t mind grabbing the microphone for her. Yeah.
[00:55:11] Um, Michelle Frechette, I’m here with plus status today and say where you came from, just so everyone kind of around the world can hear. In New York,
[00:55:20] 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 that word camp us. And my suggestions. I put some suggestions in there that have been taken seriously, like creating a new section for the word cable organizer handbook.
[00:55:37] And creating an accessibility team for word camp us 2023. So kudos to you and those who are making web accessibility decisions. Um, more than just the web accessibility, but the community accessibility in all ways. So I wanted to thank you for that. But by questions, unrelated to that.
[00:55:55] So last year I stayed of the word. Um, you announced the photo directory. And which I was happy to give a bunch of potatoes to kind of see that and get that going. We now have over 5,000, probably close to 5,500 photos in there. Um, 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.
[00:56:15] I’m going to call that a successful campaign in a year to have over 5,500 photos is amazing. Um, and those are all the creative comments, so people can use that. 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. You 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 that I have to go to Pexels or whatever they can come to WordPress for those things.
[00:56:44] 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 the, what we’re doing? You know, if I’m contributing 200 photos. They just sitting there people using them. So I know there’s a lot of questions, but.
[00:57:03] No, that’s a fantastic idea. It is right. You can credit me when you actually make that work. But we just did.
[00:57:13] Yeah, it’s true. One of the best things about contributing to open source is the idea. I still matter 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. Like one of the funnest parts. And we do have tools, for example, the plugin 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 open versus downloaded.
[00:57:41] I got into 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. Um, 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. Um, whether that’s required or not by the license, like if you answered a photo, it could have a little caption, like.
[00:58:02] Photo by, you know, so-and-so. That sort of thing. I actually think it’s a pretty neat, also incentive. I know it’s always fun. I’ve licensed 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.
[00:58:19] A famous one from what the 2010 theme.
[00:58:23] So, yeah, it’s very satisfying as a photographer. I. My work’s now out there. Um, so yeah, we should definitely do that. Thank you for this job. And then, and then how do we get people to use it and know about the director? Was the. Using the directory. I think we need a lot more stuff on there. So I think that, you know, relative to Unsplash or Pexels or Shutterstock or something like that.
[00:58:43] Um, our library is still relatively small. So I think combining our library with the open verse library, I, like I said, it has millions of things there. Um, we’ll make it just a lot more compelling that when you search, there’s always something there. Um, for whatever you might be searching for. I think we also need to figure out.
[00:59:01] Um, I’d have people in it right now, as you know, we don’t allow faces or anything like that because this sort of additional laws and copyright around like having a likeness of a person. Uh, in a photo that isn’t really well covered by like even creative commons licenses. Like the model release or something, and we’re still navigating what that would look like.
[00:59:23] When I think about what might be coming next, there. Um, 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.
[00:59:41] Um, 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. So that could be one thing. And then also just using all the library as like a starting point.
[01:00:00] Um, so whether that’s stable, the fusion or something else that we could build in these open source models. That you can start to modify things, just using commands prompts. Um, I think that would also get people to use it. A lot more. We already have some like, built into good burgers. Like duo tome was changes the colors of photos. So we can do some stuff with CSS to style things, blur them, do other stuff like that.
[01:00:22] But what F 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, replace the sheep or cows. And it does it. It’s got a, well, we should try that actually with that one.
[01:00:38] See if it actually works. But that, that is where these models are going. And like I said, they are getting quick are better so quickly. The models that GBT three. Chat GBT 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 10 X on that.
[01:00:57] Like Sheree and plus. And that will just improve the quality that much more. So that’s what I think could be next day. I’m going to add a tag. Going to add a quick tag Joseph out in case you forgot me. Um, we also, when open verse 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 in kind of an open source CC licensing setting. We haven’t done a lot with it, but it’s, we’re aware we’re, we’re looking at it. So.
[01:01:28] Cool.
[01:01:30] I’ll finally say, just like we want Gutenberg to be a gift to the web and used places more than WordPress open versus a completely open API. And so as our directory. So if other CMS is whether that’s open source ones like Drupal or ghost or something, or proprietary ones, they want to build in the open verse that is completely open to them too.
[01:01:48] 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. Alright, thank you. Next question. Hi, Allie Nimmons. I’m here from Austin, Texas.
[01:02:04] Um, 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. Um, as a community member, I really enjoy looking at how we, all of us, everyone watching and listening can improve patch, uh, grow all of these ideas and systems and practices that make up this community.
[01:02:33] Uh, and a big part of that for me, is being uncomfortable and brave in addressing. Challenges problems, doubts and struggles that we might have. Um, 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.
[01:02:55] Um, and so as our most visible leader, what do you think is the biggest challenge that we’re pressed is facing right now? And how can we, as a community of people begin to, or continue to lovingly address those challenges? Mm. That’s a tough question.
[01:03:20] I think what really strikes me about it. Um, 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 began to appreciate. Isn’t 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.
[01:03:41] 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.
[01:04:03] Um, but each one of those is almost like its own linchpin. That’s supporting all the others. It’s like a lattice work. Um, 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.
[01:04:23] Uh, without one of those. The whole thing would collapse a little bit. Um, 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.
[01:04:41] Um, 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. Um, divide up the problem essentially. Um, in open source, there’s a saying with many eyes, all bugs are shallow. Basically meaning that like, There are any one of those would be overwhelming for any one developer myself or whoever it is. But when you get like people specializing in lots of different areas,
[01:05:04] It’s it’s almost like an economy works. If where, where. Um, one of my favorites, I think is Adam Smith who spoke about, and 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.
[01:05:22] There’s the little metal thing. How does the metal found that 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 made by a single person, the final putting together the pencil.
[01:05:39] All the things that would enter that, including the feed and shelter. The person who made it. It’s 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.
[01:05:55] Um, so I think about it like that. So, but thank you for that question. That’s a tough one. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
[01:06:08] Come on up. Come on up. Hi, my name’s Laura burn. I’m just from across the river in Montclair, New Jersey. Cool. We had word camp Montclair last year. I think we were one of two north American word camps last year. We’re going to have it again. And one of my favorite things we had at that camp is we had, uh, folks from the all women release squad.
[01:06:29] Do a panel. We had Josepha, we had Michelle, uh, Ebony Butler, and I am forgetting someone, Courtney, thank you so much. She’s in the room. She’s going to kill me.
[01:06:40] And I’m sitting next to her. This is very embarrassing. So anyway. I try to dig myself out of this hole. So, um, I think that really squad was phenomenal. Can we do it again? Sure.
[01:06:52] When would you like to. I don’t know, I’m thinking 20, 23, maybe the second half of 20, 23. Sounds like a really good idea. What do you think. Yeah, we can totally do that. All right. We just got playing for it, I guess. So. Let’s let’s start. Your honor beyond release. Um, it’s definitely one of those things. So for those who aren’t familiar.
[01:07:12] Um, 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 of WordPress for a really, it’s kinda like we’re passing the torch from different folks, which allows different teams to have like an impact. And we did this experiment for the all women released lead squad.
[01:07:30] That was a lot of fun.
[01:07:32] And what’s that. And non-binary. Thank you. Um, so that sort of experimentation is I think part of the beauty of it, like we all get some practice at like creating a word, press release, releasing it, getting it out there and, you know, folks can bring different different aspects. It’s part of why we name, if you don’t know we name actually every.
[01:07:52] 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 compliment sitter or whose life story you might like be part of that. Um, actually if you go around and look in the office, the records that are in some of the conference rooms here,
[01:08:10] Um, they’re all the jazz musician releases. Thank you Dina. Thank you, Baba. So, thank you. My friend Marcus who’s waiver professional jazz musician here, actually Marcus Varella.
[01:08:24] So, yeah. Thank you for this session. We’ll do it. Cool. Thank you. And one last plug word camp Montclair is happening in June, 2023. We would love it. If you might come right across the river, you said yes. June 23. And I guess we had to work camps last year. The slide said one. So he must have had at least two. Yeah. Cool.
[01:08:41] Well, thank you for that. Check as well. Great. Thank you.
[01:08:46] 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. Hey, good afternoon. Uh, my name is Ryan Marks. Uh, I’m with Pantheon and I’m here from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
[01:09:02] Cool. Uh, so two years ago with the release of WordPress 5.6, we introduced beta support for PHP. Uh, a week ago, PHB 8.2 came out and at the end of November, PHP, 7.4, end of lifed. Uh, we currently have only beta support. For WordPress on the support grid on the support chart. Uh, all of the yeses have asterisks with beta support.
[01:09:31] So what’s the plan to, to get us to fully, uh, full support. Um, they request the posts, but from the make team two years ago, said, Uh, there was a call for all plugin and theme developers to. Become compatible. Uh, so the WordPress could be fully supported. Um, what’s the status on that? Uh, and at what level does all themes and plugins need to be fully supported or a compatible?
[01:10:01] For WordPress to be fully compatible. Cool. Let me make sure I’m understanding this. So basically you’re saying that the new versions of PHP aids. Um, our sort of supports like how WordPress core supports them is still beta or. So all of the PHB eight. Uh, Uh, columns. And all. And where are these columns? They’re in order on the make site.
[01:10:27] Of the supported versions of PHP and WordPress. There’s a grid. And all of the yeses for all the PHP versions are. Yes, Asteris. And at the bottom, it says beta support. And so it’s, uh, for enterprise companies who are looking to use WordPress today, WordPress is only available. In beta. Gotcha. Do you know? Cause I know we have a lot of sites running WordPress on PHB. H two, do you know what this might be in reference to or.
[01:10:58] No one ever an answer. All right, right back there. Let’s pass the mic. And Barry, we are running WordPress on a ton of PHP. Eights are PHP on ton of WordPress sites, right?
[01:11:09] Oh, and you have an answer. Okay. Well, let’s, let’s get both. Yeah, so. Jonathan. Uh, I work a lot in core contributor. Um, so the changes in PHP are pretty foundational. There’s a lot of really far reaching changes and to properly support them is a lot of work. Um, And so all of the unit tests, forest Corps will pass on these, but we can’t really speak for plugins and themes. And how.
[01:11:33] Uh, they use these features on PHP eight X. And so we can’t really say yes, we fully support PHB, eight.one dot two. Uh, because we, 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. Um, even though our contributed teams have put in the work and they have made core itself running on its own.
[01:11:59] 90 ish percent compatible with these versions of PHP eight. Um, with the exception of 8.2, which just came out, we’re still working on that one. Yeah. Does that answer your question? And Barry, did you want to add anything to that? Let’s let’s get the mic over to you. Uh, let’s get the. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually think that lack of PHP eight support, whether it’s like in practice or in theory is.
[01:12:25] Really important for WordPress. And so I actually asked about this today because we still have all these asterisks and beta. Uh, tags next to it. And it’s not only PHP two 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, um, part of the difficulty is the lack of backwards compatibility.
[01:12:52] Um, maintenance between PHP versions, but also the there’s not really a. Um, compelling reason for folks to upgrade to PHB 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 a complete PHP, eight support, at least in core, and also in these.
[01:13:11] Um, What did you call them a. Not community plugins, but cononical plugins now a component. That’s it on a canonical plugins and Tanya monk. Assures me today. That is a top priority for her and her team. I 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?
[01:13:32] Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Because some people not here can hear. Yeah. So I heard there were, there was a, there was like a, kind of a second party library. So it’s something that, that was imported into. To 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 or there was 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, eight PHB, eight one.
[01:13:58] Yeah. Um, 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, could be a fun thing for playground as well. So people could spin up like a copy of their site and the Watson version. Uh, inside the browser and then test things out, see how it works. Although.
[01:14:18] There could be other problems introduced by that because it’s, uh, it’s not using my SQL, which is a standard backend of WordPress. It’s using a SQL Lite and some translation layers for that. So. Yeah, it’s interesting PHB. And so the good news, it sounds scary when PHB says we’re. End of lifeing. Uh, PHP 7.4.
[01:14:36] Even that terminology end of life. You don’t want to end up life, your website. But in practice, what happens is every major web host essentially continues to back port security, fixers, and other things so that older versions of PHP, and then they’re not officially supported by the PHP core anymore. Effectively get their life extended.
[01:14:58] And I quite a bit, so it’s not yet end of life, including automatic. So we have a PHP, seven, four fork on GitHub in which we have backport to not only security fixes, but bug fixes from PHB releases. And that’s available. So that’s all good. How anyone can, anybody can use it. Anybody can use it, anybody can download it. And we’re committed to, uh, maintaining that back port until there is significant adoption.
[01:15:21] Um, in the WordPress community and other PHP projects in order to kind of officially EOL. So in foreign move forward with the eight versions. Cool EOL, the nice way to say end of life.
[01:15:32] So that is. Uh, 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’s, it was really amazing. At the PhD 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.
[01:15:50] Until they add some more compelling features, as you said, and maybe work on some backwards compatibility. So perhaps it could be also be something that as we co-develop and contribute and give feedback that in their PHB 8.3 or 8.4, maybe they can do some things. That’ll make it easier, not just for us, but for the entire page community to upgrade.
[01:16:07] Cool. Thank you for that.
[01:16:13] Okay. So 12 minutes. So wait. We got a couple more questions. I’ll try to go through these a little faster. And if you have one. Do you mind going up or get in line?
[01:16:31] Hi, Matt. Um, I work with you on tumbler Sandy ring from Olin, New York. I have. I have questions from the internet for you. And the legacy websites. Legacy social. Um, will WordPress be a thing after the entire focus is moved in Gutenberg? That’s from Arland. Nucci on YouTube. Ma. So will WordPress still be a thing? Yes. More than ever.
[01:16:55] So we talk a lot about Gutenberg. Cause like I said, it’s something that is transforming WordPress. Um, I guess I had, when we started it, it’s basically the biggest change in WordPress. This whole history. So go to this block paradigm. Um, 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 radically accessible, regardless of technical ability.
[01:17:26] So if we want to democratize publishing, which has been our mission for 20 years now, um, we need to make it easier to use, and that is what Goldberg does. So they have more WordPress than ever. And WordPress now I believe on the w three taxes over 40% of all websites and on built with, which is what we’re switching to rent like a 33% or something.
[01:17:47] I think I spoke last year, w three texts is going or the data set is changing. So. A third of all, websites are running it and that’s about more than 10 X. The number two in the marketplace, which is pretty exciting. It’s power of open source. Thank you. Thank you. I’d like to just note for everyone that the rest of these questions.
[01:18:06] We’ll be posted on a.org. Blog post and answered there as well. So cool. So if we don’t get the questions, we’ll answer them. We synchronously afterwards. That’s right. This line is now longer than ever. I’ll try to go quickly.
[01:18:19] Hey, Matt. Uh, Courtney Robertson, GoDaddy pro dev advocate and co rep right now of the training team. Uh, two years ago during the Q and a for. Uh, your state of the word address we launched learn that year. Uh, last year we shared a lot of stats about it. We heard more today about it. I am really passionate about, uh, working with anyone that wants to learn more, press on to getting them into the job market and help that the things that are on our WordPress jobs board.
[01:18:47] Um, so that question said things like certification are starting to come up again. Yeah. 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.
[01:19:09] Um, 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. Sure. Um, I’ll say that my thinking on this has evolved as well. Maybe it’s similar direction to yours.
[01:19:27] Um, 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? Um, But now exactly, like you said, I feel like as there’s more demand for WordPress developers and experts ever.
[01:19:48] Having some sort of standardized education that they go to now that like many professional organizations, like if you’re a doctor or a pilot, it’s kind of an ongoing training. It’s something that gets. Be able to fly the plane in the first place. And then there’s like ongoing training that you go through every year. Real estate agents, every many professional organizations have this.
[01:20:05] I guess mostly, I just want to figure out how we can do it in a WordPress the way. And I guess probably some diminimous costs cause like an exam needs to be proctored or, or something like that. Um, but we want to make this content training material, everything as radically open as possible. Um, so, but I think we can do it now.
[01:20:21] So I, there are some. We’re in to ongoing conversations. And I think it’s fine for there to be sort of full-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.
[01:20:37] Maybe we can partner with some of them as well to point to. Thank you.
[01:20:42] Hi, Matt. Oops. Uh, my name is Kraus a operator’s joy of WP. And, um, first I’m up here because I want to, when I was up here last year and everybody’s showing me around the world and said, Hey, I saw you on state of the world. Should I just send it? I would do it. Hi mom. Exactly. But no, in all seriousness, I do have a question and that is.
[01:21:03] What do you see as the future of themes? Because with 2023, with our, this design agnostic, It was style variations and. And I think you even alluded to the fact that 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. And that’s it. That’s a great question.
[01:21:24] Um, 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 things. It’s like maybe it’s crate block pain. Maybe it’s like something else that comes up.
[01:21:41] Um, but like pretty well standardized, I think there’ll be some other kind of community themes that might do. Like either weird or stuff. Like, I remember we’ve had like a command line theme before 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.
[01:22:03] I got to say Devi or others, which are on the surface themes, but are really almost like entire applications embedded. So they using the distribution and kind of the bundling of themes include basically a bunch of plugins as well and other stuff. Um, these are really, really popular and actually do a lot to bring people onto 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.
[01:22:33] Are they 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 and the directories, perhaps those. We need a new word for, cause it’s, it’s really the, kind of like a theme plus an app that’s bundled as one. So.
[01:22:52] Uh, I don’t know what we’ll think of it. Sometimes naming is not my strong point.
[01:22:58] All right, come on up. Hello. Harris from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Okay. 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 their website, right.
[01:23:17] And we would call that the, uh, build the launch gap. No. I’m thinking for like a mechanic. Who. He builds his website gets already, but doesn’t know what to say about an oil change. If he goes to JPT and says, what are the benefits to getting your role changed every 90 days? Would there be. You know, and then he can get his website launched a lot quicker. Would there be any way or any thinking about implementing, integrating GBT with WordPress to get these websites launched quicker? Totally.
[01:23:45] I think so right now, these models typically are spending it like every query costs, like a couple pennies. And so it might be something that sort of is more like integrating APIs with commercial services. Um, you know, whether that’s from WordPress companies or like more broad ones, like open AI. Um, 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.
[01:24:13] Um, 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 texts and identify whether it was generated by GBT or some of these others.
[01:24:33] Um, But I think if that is kind of like a creative grist 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.
[01:24:59] Or the writer’s block, like you’re just staring at you, not sure where to start. So, if we can combine this both for maybe giving you ideas, where to start to write and edit something, and then finally, on the back end, helping you edit. There’s been tools like Grambling and other things. Spell check, obviously.
[01:25:13] That has certainly improved my writing. And. The next level of those where you might be able to say, Hey, I wrote this essay. Um, how could I make it a little bit shorter? How can I make this a little punchier or something like that? And you can get feedback where it analyzes your writing and maybe helps you.
[01:25:29] I 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 to computer playing. It got to a certain level, French, like the ultimate level. But for awhile, the human plus the computer working together, or the computer would suggest some moves and the humans would choose them. Let’s say called Sindar’s.
[01:25:50] I mean, you know, the capita combination, human horse type thing. Um, it’s the most powerful, and I actually think that’s the future of the, these creative works as sort of Sentara creation. Thank you. Thank you.
[01:26:06] Oh, well, we’ll make these the last three. Yeah, three and five minutes. We got it.
[01:26:11] Cool.
[01:26:13] Challenge accepted Joseph.
[01:26:17] Michelle Butler Jones. I’m sponsored by Pagely and from Carbondale, Illinois. Um, for the first 20 years of WordPress, it’s been rather easy of getting like the, um, older gen X generation, the millennial generations coming into 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.
[01:26:47] Is there seeing more of wanting to, um, be more of influencer when it comes to tech endeavor, stuff like that, then actually like work on code and stuff. And as one of the. From people, um, pushing for, um, the kids camps in 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.
[01:27:18] Yeah. Uh, 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. Um, because when you learn these skills, they actually are lifelong skills. When you learn a little bit of HTML, a little bit of CSS that get this gives you much like learning an instrument or learning something else, like a language you can use the rest of your life.
[01:27:40] To be creative and express yourself and sort of learning a little bit how computers work, I think is. In many ways I can do type of literacy. That just opens up entire worlds and then where the powerful way. Um, to, we need to make it easier to onboard and things like Gutenberg, everything we just talked about, I, I hope will help a lot with that.
[01:27:59] 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 check mark. That’s a little.
[01:28:09] We launched on tumbler, this thing where for $8 instead of one, check mark and get to. Um, but tumbler is something I’ve been working on a lot personally. And so automatic a few years ago, acquired tumbler. I’ve been functioning as a CEO of that since February. Um, tumbler is social blogging, basically. So it’s.
[01:28:28] A cool thing about Tumblr is over half. The user base is under 25. It’s more female than male. And, um, more mobile. And it’s doing. 50 a hundred thousand 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 rehab, a sub domain, or a custom domain on tumbler, that’ll all be like WordPress themes.
[01:29:01] So what I’m hoping is that Tumblr can actually provide on-ramp 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 a like expands 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 hosts to any sort of like part of the whole WordPress ecosystem. So I’m hoping that can be a new on-ramp as well.
[01:29:25] That just kind of something personally I’m working on and with automatic, so. Thank you. Thank you.
[01:29:32] Hey, Matt, Robert Jacoby from cloud lays. I did buy my two. Check mark check mark. So you’re double verified. The top one verified, uh, inspired by the Pantheon question and PHB, will there ever be? A backwards compatibility break. If there is a. Knology sufficient enough to accelerate the WordPress ecosystem.
[01:29:55] Um, backwards capacity. So, yeah. And so Gutenberg is a backwards incompatible change. I remember in previous years when Gutenberg 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 sound like majority of new sites and everything.
[01:30:14] Um, but I would talk a lot that Gutenberg was something new to learn. It was a completely different tech stack and it ever all the plugins and everything are going to be to be updated, but I’d say it’s hashtag worth it. Right. Like. 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 backward. Like basically you can run a theme written for WordPress from 2005.
[01:30:36] Onward press 6.1 today, 17 years later. And it works, which is why I think it’s not a sh like decorative break. Like if you would say that WordPress 10 can’t run on anything except maybe 4,000. Yeah. Um, we’ll see. You know, never say never. And we’ll see what is coming and new versions of technology.
[01:30:55] There’s definitely features that for example, require a newer browser. In, in WordPress or things like this web assembly language that allows the playground feature. Like that’s not going to be supported in. You know, Internet’s floor aid or anything like that. So, So we are definitely saying like newer technologies, but we try to make that a progressive enhancements.
[01:31:13] 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. 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 API is and other things.
[01:31:32] 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 mean ways to edit, meaning ways to do everything, including all these API APIs, both the XML, RPC, and the rest API that are built in. So, um, But never say never. We’ll see. Thank you, man. Thank you.
[01:31:51] Last question. All right. I hope it’s good. We’ll see, we’ll see. Uh, Mike Blanton I’m with the get hubs, the read me project. Oh, cool. When you were talking earlier about project Gutenberg. I was remembering, uh, 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.
[01:32:11] Helping out with that partaking somehow I’m curious. What’s happened since then, if anything. Uh, yeah, so block protocol and Joel Spolsky is like an incredible developer. If you, if you’re a developer or I guess he’s a leader now. Um, his Joel on software essays. Um, is one of these books. That’s like a little older, but so timeless.
[01:32:34] Um, And New York city, I believe as well. And it was part of creating fog Creek. What else do they do glitch?
[01:32:42] What’s that. A stack overflow. Oh yeah. I forget the big one. So so much. Um, sometimes developers. Don’t like to work together on the same thing. And so it’s part of why there’s like 200 seen messages 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 exists. I’m going to start something that’s different.
[01:33:06] And I think that’s a little bit what’s happening with Gutenberg in the block protocols. And so as we’ve gotten involved, like we’re definitely communicating as the projects, but, um, 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.
[01:33:22] Um, We’ll see where that goes in the future. Um, like I said, goodbye, we’ve tried to make CMS agnostic so it can be embedded in anything. And re-skinned like you saw with the tumbler example, I can be totally different. And everything we’re doing is open. So I would hope that wherever they end up.
[01:33:37] Gutenberg blocks could maybe be embedded. If there’s a translation layer or something like that. And 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 there. I think that would be really ideal.
[01:33:53] And where I hope we end up. Um, well, the cool things about that, being more than one thing, like multiple editors, as well as maybe they create something really cool, that’s open source. And then we’re like, oh, let’s bring that over to Goldberg. So the innovation can flow both ways and sometimes maybe that’s only possible if you’re starting something from scratch.
[01:34:08] Um, so they’re open source. They’re doing the 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.
[01:34:25] And then we see how it’s adopted by users. Cool. Well, thank you so much. We are going to end there.
[01:34:39] 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 awhile. 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.