Will Data Liberation Grow WordPress?

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Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Matias Ventura, Matt Mullenweg, and team hosted the State of the Word 2023 in Madrid this week. Delivering a familiar presentation we’ve come to appreciate over the last few years.

Ventura continues to take the role of “WordPress product” lead with his demonstration of what Gutenberg and site editing has achieved over the past year, with a nod to the future. One stand out feature I’m looking forward to are the enhancements to custom field compatibility as dynamic content within template editing.

My biggest takeaway was Mullenweg’s announcement of the “Data Liberation” initiative.

Mullenweg portrays the project as a signal to the open web and ease of data portability. A tasteful sleight of hand to see the increased adoption of WordPress from users leaving closed platforms, in my opinion. Overall, I think it’s a positive direction for the platform, as someone that had to home cook a migration workflow from a simple open source Ghost website to WordPress.com, I welcome new tools for these use cases.

One thing that took me by surprise: plugin authors waiting in lines longer than TSA checkpoints during the holiday season, could see their plugins reviewed on .org in 24 hours if you’re building something for the Data Liberation collection of tools.

A good opportunity for those of you wanting to get into plugin development, and a lump of coal for others still standing in line.

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SOTW Roundups

The WP Minute SOTW recap + audio and transcripts of the event
Courtney Robertson shares her breakdown on GoDaddy’s blog https://godaddy.com/resources/news/wordpress-state-of-the-word-2023
Devin Walker has a 10 minute recap on his YouTube channel (sorry, too many minutes, Devin!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-vD_Icwovw
An Automattician volunteered a very biased recap of the event on WP Tavern https://wptavern.com/state-of-the-word-2023-hola-wordpress
WordPress.org has a nice landing page of SOTW 2023 YouTube + past events State of the Word
Joost de Valk was in attendance and shared his excitement on Post Status State of the Word 2023: excitement all around!