Hello.
Wow it's a packed room. How's everyone doing?
[cheering]
Whoo! Man that's a lot of people.
Where did everyone come from?
Just out of curiosity.
New York. DC. Brazil. DC. Boston.
Texas. Who's from Texas here? Yeah, we've got a good crew.
Before we even get started
I first want to thank our Golden Gate sponsors
Bluehost and DreamHost. Great hosts I'd both use.
[cheering]
And then two, go ahead and raise your hand
if you are a volunteer at WordCamp San Francisco.
Let's give a round of applause to these folks.
[cheering]
Without them it would not be nearly as smooth as it has been.
And you guys have been having a good time
the past day and a half, right?
[cheering]
Alright, alright.
Well. I guess without further ado
it's time for the 2013 State of the Word.
So my name is Matt Mullenweg.
I say that every year.
My... if you want to tweet me during this
my twitter is @photomatt
and my blog is, of course, ma.tt
Now today we continue our annual transition.
It's actually the 8th WordCamp San Francisco.
[cheers]
It's funny to think back to when it started
because we did it with about three weeks of planning.
We announced the date before we had a venue
and about 300 people showed up.
I recommend for WordCamp organizers out there:
don't announce a date before you have a venue.
I brought some cool photos from it
just to kind of look back
because it's been so long.
We put a t-shirt over a parking sign so people could find it.
Registration actually had a line around the block.
Not because there were so many people
because we decided to print out the badges
when people arrived.
[laughing]
Like, as they arrived.
Networking was very sophisticated.
[laughing]
As you can see we had the finest
in Linksys consumer grade materials.
There weren't seats for everybody
so lots of people sat on the floor.
But it was a lot of fun
And, you know, we had a great time.
We even had a little bit of music.
And I had a lot less hair at the time
If you can believe it.
But from then until now
the ideas of WordCamps have remained
largely the same.
The idea was a simple low cost event
that all around the world
people could come to either
learn about deep technical topics
like perhaps Mike Adams or Nikoli's talks
you might have seen
or user topics on how to become
a better blogger, or photographer
or whatever it is you're putting into that
WordPress powered blog.
The rest we've been kind of figuring out
as we go along.
We prefer local events to regional ones
to try to get people to connect more.
And then we try to keep it as low cost as possible
We try to have cool t-shirts
of which I see lots of in the audience.
In fact when you go to the Automattic office tomorrow
we have an actual t-shirt museum.
So we've been trying to collect t-shirts
from all the WordCamps around the world
and just kind of display them in a cool artistic way.
Just out of curiosity
who is here at their first ever WordCamp?
Beau, put your hand down.
[laughter and cheering]
Alright, I'm going to call that survey not accurate.
Who's been to more than ten WordCamps?
More than 20 WordCamps?
This year?
[laughter]
It's possible.
There have been over 314 WordCamp to date.
Seventy two this year alone.
Here's what blew me away though-
Who can guess how many
unique speakers there are at WordCamps?
One thousand and twenty six
in just the past year!
So that's just the past twelve months.
And finally--this blew me away even more--
there's been over one point four million views
of the WordPress TV WordCamp videos.
So no pressure if you're a presenter
but these get viewed way more
than even the sometimes
intimidating number of people in the room.
So, what else have we been up to?
In terms of some of you might remember
from the hangover the following day
we celebrated our 10th anniversary on May 27th.
[cheering]
As far away from Austin, Texas to Hanoi, Vietnam
there were celebrations all over the world.
I think we had 4,999 people show up at them
according to meetup.com.
So, I mean, I don't know where that last person was...
that's all we needed.
But it was totally surreal.
Wasn't that neat?
And this I think was the plugin pinata.
[cheering]
Some people were at that party.
[more cheers]
It was so surreal
--not just the pinata--
but to see pictures streaming in
from around the world
basically over a 24 hour period
coming from this thing that
Mike Little and I helped get started
you know, a decade ago
as it aged into the double digits.
I can say with 100% certainty
that neither of us would have ever predicted
that there would be a WordPress pinata
being beat around.
So, sort of a year in review:
besides three point, ah sorry
besides turning 10 years old
What's else have we been up to?
Of course there's the Elvin release
Which was very popular
for we finally redid media.
We did a Twenty Twelve theme.
So here's new media
with a Twenty Twelve theme.
And we also did our first pass at making
the Admin crisp on retina devices.
Now I know there's been a lot of questions
and rumors about the 3.6 release.
Almost as many about Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake
being at the after party tonight.
For a variety of reasons
we are not going to release 3.6 this weekend.
We're here to have a good time.
Not that doing a release isn't a good time
but we are going to do something a little bit different.
Which is for the very first time ever
we're going to do a world premier
of the 3.6 release video
for you guys here in the room.
You ready for that?
[cheering]
Alright, lets dim the lights.
Make it a little darker in here.
We should put some music on, right?
sings Lets get it on...
Here we go.
We tried to do a little something different with this video.
[music]
voice over It's 2013
[music]
We hired professional actors.
[laughter]
[music]
[laughter]
You saw that right?
[music]
[laughter]
[music]
[cheers]
[music]
[cheers]
If we could have Mark Jaquith and Aaron Hockley...
where are you guys?
Aaron Campbell, sorry, Aaron Campbell.
The leads for 3.6
[cheering]
So that will be out
and I hope I'm not saying anything untoward
very soon.
And as you might have noticed
"Oscar" is the jazz name we chose for this
for the great Oscar Peterson.
[cheers]
So we also had a number of updates
to WordPress.org over the last year.
Some of the big ones were
of course the make.wordpress.org blogs.
We've had over ten thousand
posted comments over the past year.
So huge. More than doubling from last year.
And some of you who are plugin authors...
Who is a plugin author here?
Just out of curiosity.
Man that's a good amount.
They always make fun of me
when I say the percentage of the audience
that raises the hands
so we'll say that's 90%
[laughter]
of the audience
The new plugin review system
so now all ratings are attached to reviews
meaning that no one can just
give you one star
without saying why it's a one star.
And every single one of those reviews
is now a thread that you can respond to
and the original poster
can change their rating later.
[cheers]
This has been something to watch
because I've seen a lot of those one stars
turn into five stars.
And I've also seen plugin authors become a lot more active
in some of the forums surrounding their plugins.
So it's funny how just one little change
I mean this wasn't that much code behind it
has had a big impact on behavior.
And in the future we're going to actually
retire the way ratings work
and they will be 100% driven by plugins.
So we'll do kind of a plugin review ratings reset.
And I think Otto knows the exact number
I think we've had over fifty thousand of these so far?
Is that about right?
Forty thousand.
So over forty thousand of these
has been done since this
sort of soft launch.
And then finally which some of you might have read
we released the first chapter
of WordPress the Book.
As in the history of WordPress.
First of many chapters to come.
But something we're doing that's
a little bit different is this is the first book
at least the first book that I've been involved with
that's written on GitHub.
So you can actually see the change history and
make pull requests and everything
for the text that's being written
for the history of WordPress.
Which I think is very appropriate
that the book is being done
in a similar way to the software itself.
And that is Siobhan and Christa are working on that
so a round of applause for them.
[cheers]
Some other activity on the core project:
we had over 46 million downloads
or about 147,000 thousand
every day of the year
which always blows me away.
We added 336 themes
or about 2.3 times the amount
the number we did the last year.
And it's worth noting that
every single one of these
goes through the theme review process
so there's a lot of review
for every single one of these coming in.
And then 9,334 plugins were requested, 6,700 approved.
I apologize to the other 3000 or so- it was probably spam.
But it's been great to see we finally
passed 26,000 plugins on the directory.
So, I mean, it's really starting to tick up
the number of things available there.
The final thing I wanted to highlight was
mobile apps have been doing well.
We have fifteen updates of the mobile apps
three for iOS
and six each for Android and Windows phone.
So these are starting to get better faster
which I'm pretty excited about.
Every year when we talk about contributors
we like to highlight a few folks
some of the new faces in the community
to introduce them to you
and the world watching on the web right now.
The first one is actually a square
we have Konstantin squared.
[cheering]
Next we have Mike and Adam.
And this picture of Adam was taken hours ago
[cheers]
so you can look for that man.
He'll be wearing that exact outfit.
We have Scott and Drew.
[cheers]
Is he a superhero?
Is he a WordPress contributor?
We're not sure.
And finally Dave Martin and Joen Asmussen
on the design side.
[cheers]
Every year we also talk about the survey.
We had over 30,000 responses this year
from over 178 countries.
As always we like to ask people what
a few of their favorite things were.
Raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens
did not make the cut
but community and ease of use were still
top of people's minds.
And on least favorite, once again
plugins takes the crown.
I guess those 26,000 plugins
some of them are causing trouble.
But I also like that nothing was on there.
[laughter]
But the runners up were updates and security.
We asked a new question this year
that I was pretty curious about, which was,
what devices do you use to access WordPress?
This was multiple choice.
So for example if I answered this I would have said
I use WordPress on the web,
on the iPad, on the iPhone,
and on the Android phone.
And so this is what those numbers turned out to be
and I found them pretty interesting.
They fly in.
So of course
I found it interesting on the edges
the middle I kind of expected.
First I'm wondering who the 2%
that don't use it on the web at all are.
That's interesting, and how did they take the survey?
I guess they took it on the phone.
Then at the right I found it interesting
that 12% are using WordPress
from a desktop app like MarsEdit.
That's way more than I would have expected.
So this is a non-browser desktop app.
But then also you know
everything I've heard or read in the news
about Android tablets
is that they're dead on arrival.
And so I was pretty surprised to see that
18% of people are using WordPress
from their Android tablet.
Is anyone in this room using an Android tablet?
Right now?
laughing nice
I think that we said Fire in there
that should include the Kindle Fire as well.
Then next we of course
we asked the standard question:
what do you use WordPress for?
Which is always interesting to look at year to year.
So I've included both last year's
and this year's on there.
They both had CMS up a little bit.
Blog/hybrid use down a little bit.
Blog only use down a little bit.
And then a new entry which is
using WordPress as an application platform
which is now at 7% of the 30,000 people.
So that's, you know, over...
what's that, 1500 people?
Using WordPress mainly as an application platform.
And it's kind of funny
when we first started talking about that
a year or two ago
I said we're at the very beginning of this cycle.
So it's nice to see that start to pick up.
and I expect that to sort of approach
to our hybrid/blog/CMS numbers.
We did one additional thing this year
Actually we didn't do it
but our fine friends at WPengine did.
And they did a sort of broad statistically valid
representative sample of United States adults
and asked them one question:
Have you heard of WordPress?
I think they asked them some other questions as well but
this is basically what's called like a brand awareness thing
Just under 30% had.
Now I haven't decided
if this is a good or bad thing yet.
But it does match the anecdotal data
I've been getting from flying on planes
and having seatmates.
Now about 1 in 3 people
don't look at me like I'm so crazy
or wonder why I have WordPress all over my body.
Like, what's that W thing?
So that's nice.
Again I don't know if this is good or bad
but it'll be interesting to see as a baseline
for years coming
where we'll be able to bring
I feel like one third is pretty mainstream already
but whether we can take it to
even more mainstream.
You know, like Justin Bieber levels.
[laughter]
Without the monkeys.
See there's some Bieber fans that follow
that monkey story.
He apparently had a monkey
and he took it to Berlin
and the monkey got stuck in customs
and he left the monkey there.
Right?
Don't boo.
Oh, sorry, just that slide again.
And then finally, which is kind of the main measure
we use to track our progress
on our main goal of democratizing the web
we are now up to 18.9%
of the web running WordPress.
[cheering]
Yeah
I. This never. It just blows me away every time.
And it's actually broader than it used to be.
It used to be a survey that of the top million sites
and now it's sort of the top ten million sites.
That is as good as you're gonna get.
This data is all awesome
and I think we should be very happy
about the progress we've made the past year.
But I think there is some danger
lurking behind the numbers.
Oh. You can't see it. That's a bomb.
Ahh man.
Last year at WordCamp
there was a presentation in the morning
that I think was one of the most important
presentations that has been given at WordCamps
including my own.
It's from a local product guy
named Nir Eyal.
I'm gonna butcher what he talked about
but if you want to see the real version
you can check out his presentation on WordPress TV
and of course he has a site
Nir and far dot com.
Right. It's the only way I remember
how to pronounce his name.
That's really excellent.
It's actually one of my favorite blogs to follow.
Before I talk about what he talked about
first we're going to do a survey
it actually wasn't that long ago
that at a WordCamp I asked who had a smartphone
and less than half the room raised their hand.
Like, it's easy to forget that the iPhone is only
five years old and before that we all had
I don't know...
Treos or Blackberry.
So I'm gonna assume everyone has a Smart Phone.
We're gonna do a different survey.
Who has ever felt a phantom buzz?
Right?
How about when, like,
your friend's phone buzzes
and you reach for your pocket?
Or like something when the table vibrates
a little and like everyone kinda spazzes out?
And then of course
there's the new yawn of the world,
which is where one person at the table
takes out their phone
and then everyone else does.
Kind of becomes like that
sort of shared thing- it's contagious.
So it turns out there's a study
done at Indiana University
and 89% of undergraduates
experienced a phantom buzz
in the last two weeks.
It turned out-
they don't know exactly what causes this-
but it turns out
that the more emotional significance
you attach to whatever causes
your phone to buzz, particularly
text messages, the more likely you are
to experience them.
Which I found kinda crazy.
It's almost like these are now parts of our body
that we feel weird when they're not there.
Let's be honest who
has looked at their phone since this presentation started?
Ooph, ooph, I'll try to spice it up next year.
[laughter]
More guys with huge beards right?
I don't know if you saw
but my favorite part of the video
and we actually tried to boost the audio
so it came out a little bit
but after they did the high five, they snapped.
Which is awesome.
So Nir has a theory
of why he talks about this happening
that he calls A.T.A.R.I.
The "A" is a little bit of cop-out.
The "A" stands for "A hook has four parts."
But the T.A.R.I. part is pretty interesting.
A "T" is a trigger.
"A" stands for action.
"R" stands for reward.
And "I" stands for investment.
A trigger can be internal or external.
An external trigger
is something like your phone buzzing
maybe seeing a sign
when you're driving down a street
and deciding to do something.
Or getting email notification
that you have a new comment available on WordPress.
An internal trigger is
usually a feeling or a state of being:
tired, lonely, bored, hungry, hangry.
Does anyone ever get that?
Those are internal triggers
that you have a default response to.
Like for example let's say you're lonely
and so you go to Facebook.
Now your brain does these
without even thinking.
They're an automatic response.
When they do brain scans
They don't- the partof the brain that shows sort of active
ah what's it called?
There's a word... autonomous? Something.
The high functioning part of the brain
doesn't actually engage.
Like literally it's just
the part in the middle, the lizard brain
that just kinda goes straight to things.
And an interesting thing happens.
Like let's say, a comment notification.
Your buzz phone because- your buzz phoned?
Your buzz phoned. Or your phone buzzed.
Because you got a comment notification
from Buzz Lightyear
and you wanna read it.
You click the WordPress icon.
It turns out that the dopamine hit to your brain,
the reward center,
activates before you get the reward.
It's the anticipation of the reward
that causes it to kick off.
When you actually receive the reward
like say that wonderful comment
from Buzz Lightyear
the rewards, the dopamine actually goes down
and that part of your brain doesn't activate as much
which is really fascinating.
The second thing is
as we all learned from the experiments
from Skinner and everything else
is that the rewards are most effective
when they're intermittent.
So let's say for example
there could be a comment
from someone you like
or an email notification
of let's say, you know
your paycheck has been deposited
in your bank account.
Or a notification
saying a Nigerian prince
would like to deposit something
into your bank account.
[laughter]
These have different value.
And that's part of what makes the system
so addictive to us all.
Because when that phone buzzes,
and you start to take it out
and the dopamine hits
by the time you open it-
it's not every single time
that you get the paycheck deposited, right?
Unless you're only checking
your email once or twice a week
or once every two weeks.
And finally there's the "I", or investment.
And that's making it your own.
The best way to think about this.
Is... who here has ever built IKEA furniture?
[laughter]
You get all those parts
and like the inscrutable directions
you work and like you're trying to fit things together
and like you finish
and you kinda take a step back
and you look at it
and it's a little crooked.
And you have a few extra pieces
you don't think you should have.
But darn it, you made that!
And it feels good.
I've actually moved IKEA furniture across the country.
It's cheaper to trash it and buy a new one
than it is to actually move it across the country.
It turns out that this is part of the investment.
When you work on something
you are far more attached to it.
They did a study with origami
where they had professional origami makers,
you know, doing the paper, it looked amazing.
And they had people make their own origami.
And then they had third parties rate both of them.
So the professional guys were obviously 100%.
Everyone liked it, looked amazing.
So the people who made the art,
who rated their own origami
as about 90% the value of the professional.
The third party, independent auditor of this origami skills
rated it at about 10%.
So we over-value our own work about nine times
what the rest of the world sees it as.
And you can also think about
this if you know, spend hours looking
for the perfect header for your Facebook profile
that, like, perfectly describes your personality.
Or, you spend an hour sifting through 26,000 plugins
to find the one that's perfect for your site.
These investments make you far more attached
to the results.
So I think it's interesting to
think about habits, loops, hooks, and triggers
in the context of users of WordPress.
What if someone
never touches the code?
What if someone's a developer?
What if someone's a plugin release(r)?
Like, what are the hooks for that?
This is one sort of idea
of a WordPress hook for a user:
You can have an idea
get inspired, that's the trigger.
Your first impulse is to write
so you log into WordPress.
You write, you publish it,
and then you start to get the feedback.
That can be the reward.
And sometimes
a post you spend a long time on
no one comes to.
Don't you hate that?
It's always a post that you like,
fired off in five minutes
that get all the hits
and the ones you spent hours and hours over
they're like, just fall like a
a thought on a log.
Is that a thing?
And the investment
is the time you put into it
but also sort of a value stores.
So things like numbers of subscribers
things that go up all the time that sort of are
representation of all the time you've invested
into this platform.
So like let's say your Twitter followers
or subscribers to your blog
are sort of representation of all the time
you've put into your blog
or to tweeting
or to something like that.
I've actually been getting a lot of inspiration
from the mobile apps around this.
Not because of the small screen size or anything
but also partially because
of the shortened attention span
that people have when on their mobile devices.
Or when listening to a State of the Word
and looking at their mobile devices.
These constraints breed creativity.
And if you look at sort of the evolution
of where the apps have evolved to
they've really honed in
on a few key experiences.
Yes you have the standard
WordPress stuff around
writing and designing
but a lot of the evolution
what has people coming back to the apps
have been things like the Reader
which is a cure for boredom,
Stats, which is sort of an ego feeder,
Notifications, which is basically all triggers, right?
As these features get better and better
I think that we're going to see
the number of people
for whom WordPress is part of their daily habits
like many of us here in this room
Or at least part of our Saturday
in San Francisco habits,
grow exponentially.
The mobile apps, the mobile team,
has actually grown a lot this year as well
and so we're gonna see the features
that are coming faster and better.
As we saw we already had fifteen
releases over the past year
and I think that's actually gonna go a lot up
in terms of major new things
coming to the mobile apps.
And I've seen an interesting shift
which is something we haven't seen
with the mobile apps before
which is people- the mobile apps being
for basically existing WordPress users
to shifting to actually bringing an entirely new
audience into the WordPress experience.
So when you think about it
the mobile apps loop
sort of shows the consumption
which is the notications, the reader
production, which is the writing
and then the management.
We did our first iteration on the NUX
what we call the New User Experience, of iOS.
And overnight, we tripled signups
coming from the iPhone device.
And so that's that 2%
that maybe never uses that web-
uses the web to access WordPress.
This is undeniably a new generation of people
who will be using WordPress.
Especially as we democratize publishing
in parts of the world where laptops or tablets
aren't something that people use.
That's something that's gonna happen.
Like we said, we saw that 7%
using WordPress as an application platform.
I got this video sent to me the other day
by Brian Richards
that I thought was pretty cool.
We can dim the lights again.
That shows WordPress being used
as an application platform
in a way that I never would have imagined.
I hope illustrates to you some of what that's going on.
Sexy time lights.
Alright, there we go.
[video playing]
This part isn't that important- she's buying something.
[video playing]
So everything you see on that iPad there
is WordPress powered on the backend.
And what you don't see is
see the camera at the top of the iPad?
What people can do is, they can actually hold
their membership card in front of the iPad.
It scans it and then pulls up their profile.
It's all WordPress on the backend.
It's not even a website, right?
That's really something.
[cheering]
It was on this very stage a few years ago
that we first introduced the concept
of WordPress as an application platform.
And we showed something much like this
sort of talking about the evolution of WordPress.
Saying you know, 2003 to 2007
was WordPress as blog.
Two thousand-call it 2008 through
2012 or 2011 was sort of WordPress as a CMS.
And 2012 onward, the next five year trend
will be WordPress as an application platform
as sort of the dominate thing.
I think that's wrong.
Don't get nervous!
Basically I just think that
we've been thinking about this the wrong way.
We've been taking about this in a serial fashion,
as one thing leading to another.
And I think actually what's going on
is all three are happening simultaneously
at different levels.
And in fact if you think back
to the very first release of WordPress
there are elements
of WordPress as an application platform
perhaps around the database layer,
the user login system.
Elements of it as CMS
You know, with 1.5 introduction of pages and themes.
And of course, blogging from the beginning.
Of course the first version of WordPress
looked kinda like this:
like an upside-down pyramid.
The platform part was not very solid.
And so we were somewhat unstable
in how we were able to build things on top of it.
But this is now more of how I think about
this sort of blog platform- blog, CMS, platform evolution.
And in fact more than just a pyramid
It's almost like the WordPress platform
is something that we're plugging in different things.
The CMS is one of the applications
or blog is one of the applications of CMS.
There's also e-commerce.
And there'll be other things built on top of it in the future.
I think this'll be, you can plug in every single feature
we've ever put into WordPress
into one of these three layers.
And pretty much every single plugin
into one of these three layers.
Or possibly one of these grey legos.
There's a lego theme-
who saw Siobhan's presentation with all the legos?
That was awesome.
I don't know why I'm a chicken though.
There's a history of WordPress
illustrated with Lego People
and the Mike Little character
was like a hundred years old
which I felt bad about
because he was like 30 when WordPress started.
And I'm a chicken.
Like, full on, wings for arms.
I tried to find a chicken suit for you guys...
[laughter]
But there weren't any with
the WordPress logo on it, so...
Every single, like I said, every single
every single things fall into these three.
Which kinda brings us to talking about 3.7.
Now the first thing I'm gonna tell you about 3.7
which will also be the most shocking
and surprising
is that it's going to be released
at the beginning of October.
What?
That's what I said!
It's gonna be a platform-focused release.
So working on that bottom layer,
the WordPress as an applicable platform.
Led by Andrew Nacin and John Cave,
who are both here.
Andrew, John, please stand up.
[clapping]
And the focus is gonna be stability and security
evidenced by things like language packs
auto-updates for minor releases
and enhancements around passwords
to make passwords and cookies more secure.
The reason we think we're gonna
be able to do this so quickly
is that a lot of this is already done as a plugin.
We're also going to use the three point release
to sort of reset things a lot.
So for example
there's now over 3800 tickets open on Trac
so we definitely want to do a little bit of cleanup there
because that is a larger number
than we are comfortable with.
That's the highest it's ever been in WordPress.
But also making some new developer resources.
So we're announcing for the first time
developer.wordpress.org
Which looks kinda like this if you visit it.
There's nothing there yet.
[laughter]
Basically the idea is to show a function reference
for WordPress essentially
powered by the code and php doc
versus powered by people editing the Codex.
And the idea is that we'll both be able
to redirect Codex pages to
sort of always up to date version of this
on developer.wordpress.org
And also link in WordPress 3.7 the function definitions
when you edit things in the plugin or theme editor
directly to this developer resource.
So should be pretty cool.
[clapping]
These underlying components aren't as sexy
from a user point of view
but I think they're really really important
for that platform story
and allow us to build things on top of it.
So to talk about what some of the things
that we might be building on top of it.
First I want to tell you a story about MP6.
Now we started the 3.6 cycle
at the beginning of 2013
from then to now there were two major features pulled out.
One was sort of a refreshed icon aesthetic.
And the other was post formats.
Icons were pulled out in February,
post formats in May.
And the icons were something I had sort of
taken responsibility for
so that's why I wanted to talk about it.
So historically
WordPress didn't have any icons or graphics-
zero.
Partially because we didn't feel
like there were any open source ones
that represented us.
Also, we didn't really have anyone who knew
how to make them.
So you know, that was a bit of a blocker.
Jen had the idea about the 2.7
redesign to do a contest
for people to submit them- GPL license icons.
And we got some pretty interesting submissions.
This is actually a few of the submissions that came in.
You will recognize- this is around Crazy Horse
if you remember that-
You'll recognize the one on the right because it was
from a gentleman named Ben Dunkle
who I believe is here in the audience.
Ben, where are you?
Oh hey!
[clapping]
By the way find me later
I haven't had a chance to talk to you yet, so let's hang.
This man has singlehandedly designed
not just all the icons in WordPress
but pretty much all the major icons
for any WordPress plugin or product around everything.
[laughter]
When I pitched a flatter aesthetic for 3.6
I knew that it- when we did icons
It wasn't just going to end there.
Much like, let's say,
when you clean a room.
Like say you clean off the countertops
and sweep the floor.
Then you look around and you realize
that you need to paint the walls.
And then once you paint the walls
you look around and you realize
man, the furniture is all in the wrong place.
And then once you move the furniture around
you realize, man, I don't need that wall to begin with.
And you knock it down.
And that's kinda what happened with MP6 a little bit.
If I were to rank order, in importance
the most important things to bring to WordPress
icons would pretty much be at the bottom of it.
Not that important.
But I knew that bringing those in would force us
to deal with resolution independence
with perhaps responsive design
and this is some of the things.
This is just a comment of it being taken out, March first.
I try to set a good example
for when things are behind schedule
to pull them out early.
So the first thing I did was create the team.
I pinged Matt Thomas
and said, what are you doing this week?
And he said he'd be up for taking a pass through Core.
Otto, Yoen, and Ben joined.
Ben was already working on this.
And I started cranking on it.
I registered a plugin called MP6.
The name of which, the meaning of which is still a secret
and I will not reveal.
It has nothing to do with
Justin Timberlake or Jay-Z, by the way.
But over the next seventeen weeks
we did seventeen releases of MP6.
And iterated to include a number of things.
It worked, I think, for seven reasons.
At the time, in hindsight especially,
I feel like taking it out of Core so early
you know, in kind of end of February
for a release that's just coming out this week
maybe was premature.
It wasn't as behind as we thought it was.
One of the main reasons was
for example we didn't, hadn't had
all the icons for WYSIWYG done yet.
We didn't feel like there'd be time
before the release to finish.
It turned out though in hindsight
maybe it didn't need to.
It ended up being the best possible thing
for the project
because it was able to operate
as like a Core thing but outside of Core
which revealed a number of interesting dynamics.
The first was we designated very very clear leadership
and a core endorsement.
So both Core said, and the MP6 group said
Okay, MT, who's a designer
I've worked with for 7 or 8 years now
very talented, he's designed a lot of WordPress.com,
WordPress.org, worked a lot on the 2.7 redesign.
He's kinda like my Johnny Ives.
We brain meld in a lot of ways.
The entire Core team agreed that
whatever MT said would go in, would go in.
Meaning that it wouldn't you know,
because naturally the Core team
being a very diverse and different group of people
has different opinions on aesthetics and everything.
And we didn't want this to get bogged down
in a design-by-committee or anything like that.
So having clear leadership was really important.
You'd think it would be
disenfranchising for the contributors
but it turns out it was really exciting
because you only had one person to convince.
There wasn't like an amorphous community
or anything like that.
Or you weren't sure if we had to take a vote
or whatever it was to make a decision.
Just a single person making a decision.
Second was we focused on process over outcome.
Meaning that, actually I said to him,
Well, I think I have the chat here-
I think the chat is a slide or two later.
But basically I said
Let's just do a release every week
and change something every single week
ship a new feature.
And then I modified that
and said, well, maybe let's just change one thing
maybe it's not a new feature.
And then he said
well, let's just try to change one thing
but whatever what happens
every Friday we're gonna do a release.
Monday through Thursday,
and often Monday through Friday afternoon
we'll work on this.
And then sometime before Friday is over
we'll put it out there.
That worked really well because it meant that
if you were doing, well one because
it was a plugin that people could download and use.
They were able to test it really easily
and we got a ton of feedback.
And two, it was never more
han six days from when you put something you in
to when it was actually in front of the world
for better or worse.
But that tighter cycle really was nice.
Next is something that I'm not sure
was a good thing or a bad thing
But it was a thing.
Which is, the chat happened on Skype,
so there was a, the chat room of all the people involved
was kind of an asychronous, always on.
And the people would log into it from different devices.
So generally we do things in IRC.
For some reason this started and kept on Skype.
I'm not saying that we should do this every again.
But it was interesting the dynamics
it sort of encouraged.
So for example I felt like people
were more comfortable sharing things
or putting more vulnerable things out there
without worrying about someone
from the world seeing it
or drive-by feedback
or even sometimes the negative comments
that you can get on the make blogs.
That sort of safe space allowed
at least the creative group of designers behind MP6,
to kind of, feel like have a more iterative
and open process
certainly between them
and made it more likely
for candid feedback between folks.
Where if it was on a public blog
you might not be willing to say
man, that's ugly.
Because it's someone who you like.
You don't want to insult your buddy.
But privately, if it's not in front of anyone.
Those sort of conversations can happen.
Like I said the feedback was really tight.
And finally we opened it up
to anyone that was passionate
so we started with four
it's ended up with over 14 committers.
And the plugin was very very active.
In fact when Nacin ran the stats for
this, I think, six thousand-ish, six thousand five hundred
people that have committed plugins
basically in the past four months
Matt Thomas became number 28.
Out of all those six thousand
that have been active in the past year.
Finally, I mean, the best and brightest
design minds in the WordPress world
were involved with this.
And you can tell from this header.
[laughing]
As you notice
just to point out all the levels of awesomeness here.
You have Papyrus and Comic Sans.
You have the fauxgo with a rainbow gradient.
And for the typography nerds, a widow
in the word on its own.
Pretty much... --had lens flare--
we put all the awesome we could in there.
In some ways this was a joke
because we were saying, don't use MP6.
We were telling people not to test it
to get them to test it.
But it also, that element of fun,
brought the group together a little bit.
And I think that's also something
we should think about going forward
is how do we, because sometimes,
with localization and internationalization and everything
we lose some of the inside jokes
in the WordPress codebase.
You know, "You're cheatin' huh?"
or Ghostbuster references,
keymaster, things like that.
Some of that gets kind of sanded out.
And I think some of those rough, sometimes funnny
sometimes not funny, edges are nice.
In fact the Matrix thing has been removed right?
There's a Matrix easter egg
that we removed when we did the revisions iteration.
Has everyone seen the Matrix easter egg?
Anyone not seen the Matrix easter egg?
Oh man, it's cool!
So do it in the next day or two
have a post with revisions
and compare the revision to itself.
The radio box lets you compare something to itself.
And I won't tell you what happens next.
So, it went well.
We ended up with some
resolution independent icons.
This is sort of a before and after.
Because we completely got rid
of all the sort of 7 or 8 years
of accumulating CSS in the admin
and we did it from scratch
it's now trivial to do things like
change the colors of the admin.
This is not Core
this is about 25 lines of code
to completely change the colors
so if you don't like the dark look of MP6
it's very easy to change that.
We also made it full of responsive
so this should start moving in a second...
So now the menu goes
to a little hamburger in the top.
You might be wondering why that's called a hamburger.
It's called a hamburger button
because it has the three layers
and I guess it looks like a hamburger.
That's not a good-
I don't know why everyone
calls it a hamburger button.
It would have been cool...
Actually, like, in my mind I call it
the SAMO button. You know the artist Basquiat?
He did the three lines?
He never put, he never put the vertical line on his E.
It also was on the cover of Jay-Z's Blueprint 3 album.
So from now on let's call it the SAMO button.
Oh, his graffiti name was SAMO for same old stuff.
So made it responsive.
And like I said it looks great at any size.
I think that this sort of illustrates the power of plugins.
Plugins even just looking at the stats around WordPress,
we've had about 1500 people
who've been active in WordPress
Core development over the past year.
That's leaving comments on Trac,
patches, commits, everything.
We've had over 6500 who've committed to a plugin.
And of course plugins are easier for people to test.
Where sometimes there might be a struggle
to get someone to you know apply
and run your patch, and test it.
Same one click install a plugin is really easy.
And as we all know
usage, oops, usage is oxygen for ideas.
This is something I say and truly believe.
That you don't really know
how something's going to work
until you get people really really digging into it
and using it every single day.
This is something we struggle with
in Core WordPress releases
where sometimes we do something and then
it might be the beta part of the cycle
when things are suppose to be more locked down
and we start using it
and we're like, huh, huh.
The earlier you can get that daily usage the better.
So decoupling the development from Core
ended up being the best thing.
And I think provides an interesting model for 3.8.
Now the most surprising thing
I'm gonna tell you about 3.8
is that it features Luke Skywalker.
No, don't worry, we're not moving away
from our jazz naming scheme.
But 3.8 is gonna start tomorrow,
the same day as 3.7.
We're going to start the development
at the same time.
And we're aiming for a release
at the beginning of December.
[clapping]
...or die trying.
[clapping]
And it's very much the same things
that we're sort of pioneering with 3.7
we're gonna try to apply to 3.8.
So, smaller teams, quicker iterations
fewer bottlenecks, and temporary hooks.
So in 3.7 all of the development of all new features
will be done as independent units, as plugins.
And each one of those plugins will
try to follow the model I just outlined
of what we sort of stumbled upon working for MP6.
There'll be a clear leader
people can get commit really easily to the plugin
there will be releases as frequently as possible
and there'll be kind of things
you can play around with and use.
If you think about it it's kind of
remember when we used to talk about
canonical, or Core plugins?
It's kind of turning that whole idea on its head.
So instead of saying there's these less important features
that aren't good enough for Core
but we're still gonna kind of maintain them like Core
we're saying these are
the most important thing for Core
and we're gonna development them
in a way that can be as inclusive and open as possible
and see what happens.
I'm excited about this because
two of the things that can be
headlines for the 3.8 release
are already pretty far along.
And that's the MP6 plugin
which again you can download and use today
especially if you loves fauxgos and Papyrus.
And the Twenty Fourteen theme
which I would like to make a change in actual release
I want to go to more of a car company model
releasing Twenty Fourteen before 2014 is mostly over.
[laughing]
When you think about it there's kind of a loop
for Core contributors
and it perhaps looks something like this:
You have an idea.
You patch it.
You get review and feedback.
And it get included.
And then you throw a party.
And you have another idea.
You patch it.
Etcetera etcetera.
There's many places where this leaks right now though.
And I think that moving for example
by the 3800 Trac tickets that are open
some number of Trac tickets
that don't even have a review or a response yet.
If we can tighten that
I think that it'll be a lot more engaging
for people to be involved.
The other thing I almost forgot about
with, actually, a 3.7 thing,
we're changing how components
work in WordPress.
So right now we have what is it, sixty components?
Sixty components.
We're moving that to ninety.
But there's only gonna be
many of those will be sub-components
There will only be about 35 top level components.
A component is kind of a logical section
of the WordPress code base.
So a component might be commenting
or it might be the WYSYWYG or something like that.
So we're moving that in and
the idea is that
someday each one of the these components
could be like its own team
with leads and everything like that
just like Core does.
Furthermore, we're changing it
so that you can subscribe
just to a single component.
Because following the fire hose of Trac
comments and everything like that has gotten pretty big
and you might not need to follow everything.
So you'll be able to subscribe
just to the stuff that has to do with that.
I already talked about what's coming in 3.8
I said when. The bomb, the thing behind the data
that I think that sort of the danger
in what we need to move faster to address.
This is just some data from WordPress.com.
Of 50,000 blogs that were created, let's say, 7 days ago,
only 4% of those are going to be active today.
So we're having a 96% attrition rate
of people that are starting a blog.
We think this is actually higher
for WordPress.org users
because there's the additional sort of steps
and things around plugins and themes.
That's a lot.
So the good news and bad news.
Bad news is 96% of people
aren't sticking around with their blog.
The good news is there's still a huge number
coming in the door every day
so the absolute numbers go up
in the ways that we've talked about.
The other good news is that
4% is ridiculously low.
We can improve that a lot.
And if we do, when I'm on stage next year,
the numbers will be much much much much higher
than we've talked about.
And we'll be that much closer to our goal
of democratizing publishing on the web.
So this is not going to be easy.
It's a huge challenge.
But I think we can do it
One of the things that came through...
How are we gonna do it?
One of the things that I talked about with MP6
was like I said, it was kind of
that code on the paint on the wall,
coat of paint on the wall.
So about a month ago
I went to the designers
and said well,
if you weren't constrained by sort of our charter
which was only changing the aesthetics
what were some things you would do
to the WordPress Admin?
And I just have a couple of these right here
in terms of different layouts.
And I'm gonna show you my very favorite one
in terms of menus, WYSYWYG.
So what if there's an idea like for example
instead of post formats being something
that applies to a whole post
it's something that you can
have multiple of in a post
and you can drag and drop and rearrange.
So inserting a map, a quote,
an image, a gallery with a set of images,
would just be as easy as that.
Ideas like this I think are the kinds of things
that we can explore in plugins
that would be difficult to in Core
if for nothing else
then we'd be worried about breaking something.
One of the main reasons that we had trouble
doing some of the resolution independent stuff
in Core prior, was we kinda got stuck on thinking
well how are we gonna do the font files
and embedding that and licensing it and linking it
and everything like that.
And sometimes, major developments
can get lost in those
sort of weeds of implementation.
I think we can turn that on its head.
And the good news is that
there has never been a better time
to get involved with WordPress.
This model is gonna open it up quite a bit.
I think WordPress has been successful so far
not because of some magic features it has,
like some competitors believe when they copy us.
It's been successful because
we've never been satisfied with our process.
And as a community we've been
maniacally focused on improving things
for you guys here in the audience, the user
It's been great: that process has allowed us
to serve 18% of the web so far.
And be one of the last
remaining stalwarts of the sort of independent web.
You know for any of you that have ever complained
about say a social network
selling your personal data to an advertiser
or policies that you disagree with
in Terms of Service
or anything like that.
Be the change that you want to see on the web.
Get involved with WordPress
and contribute
whether it be through support, documentation, code, design
whatever it is.
And we can make this change.
If we don't do it
I don't think anyone is.
And that sort of way of thinking
is why now a decade later,
I still feel like WordPress is just getting started.
Thank you very much
[clapping]