Right.
Hello everyone.
Hello.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining.
So whether you're here with us inperson or tuning in from across
the globe, welcome and thankyou for being a part of this.
WordPress doesn't run on servers,it runs on people who show up.
And that's you.
This is my first year as servingas the executive director of the
WordPress project, and I stood infront of you last year in Tokyo.
And since then I've been listening,working, traveling, and learning
from contributors around the world.
And what I've seen has only deepenedmy belief in what this software can do.
I've met people using WordPressto unlock new careers.
I've met contributors who started a singletranslation or forum post and ended up,
or are now leading major pieces of theproject in latam Europe and the states.
I've seen students get access toWordPress tools and start building
faster than we could ever imagined.
I've watched communities buildin public, resolve disagreements
in the open and collaborateacross languages and time zones.
And it's not alwayseasy, but it's working.
And what we have is more than code,it's momentum and it's culture.
And it's a system that lets peoplelearn by doing and lead by showing up.
And today's a big day.
Uh, it's the first time we'llbe releasing a new version of
WordPress live at State of the Word.
Woohoo.
Yeah.
So stay tuned for that andwe'll let you know exactly when
WordPress 6.9 is officially out.
We'll dive a lot more into that later,but I'll say this now, it's 6.9 is fast.
It's polished and it'sbuilt for collaboration.
The kind of progress you canfeel when you publish, not
just read it from a change log.
WordPress is shipping faster,listening better, and building
for teams, not just individuals.
And speaking of progress,2025 has been a year.
AI and WordPress has reallystarted to change what's possible.
And so earlier this year, we actually,uh, created the first dedicated AI
team inside the WordPress project.
They've been working hard on toolsthat support contributors and site
builders and not replace them.
So some of them are here with ustoday, and you're gonna hear more
about their work later in the show.
But at its core, WordPressis still about freedom.
It's not just software freedom.
It's built to freedom to publish,to build, to learn, and to
participate from classrooms, tocorporation, from Lagos to London.
WordPress is powering ideas and unlockingpossibilities for millions of people.
And it works because it belongs toall of us and those who contribute.
And now I'd like to welcome someonewho's been contributing for more
than 20 years, and as automaticcelebrates its 20th anniversary and
WordPress moves into its third decade.
I'd like to welcome MattMullen to the stage.
Thank
you, Mary.
Yeah.
Oh, howdy, howdy, everyone.
Howdy.
Uh, what a special spot to be enjoying.
Like after Tokyo, I was like, Idon't know if we can top that, but,
you know, this is, uh, not too bad.
So thank you all who are here today.
Thanks for those, uh, you know,at the warehouse and other
places in the watch parties allaround the world and everything.
So, ah, gosh, it's, uh,it's so good to be back.
Like, you know, to think back, thiswas a original screenshot of WordPress.
You know, it launched WordPressstarted with just a blog post,
you know, that I posted that.
Then Mike Little commented on a daylater, by the way, it's a belief
that publishing should be free,you know, over two decades of it.
Spearing, shipping, scaling, and it stillfeels like we're just getting started.
There's so much left to do.
Like our mission is still going.
Um, I never imagined from that firstblog post, those first couple of
blogs that really I had to like,set up for my friends 'cause no
one would download the software.
Um, that would be over40% of the web today.
Um, also automatic, you know, thefor-profit that I was lucky to start
with some folks, uh, a few years, aWordPress, uh, is now 20 years old.
And it's very exciting to be ableto sort of build a company that
tries to show how is a consciouscapitalism, like how for-profits
and open source can work together ina way that, uh, makes both better.
In a way that's not, uh, sort of tradingoff open source ideals, but actually
like, uh, embracing the nature of opensource, um, as it grows and scales.
So let's zoom out a little bit to see whatthe community's built over the past year.
So in the big picture, we'reat about 43% of websites and
about 60% of the CMS market.
That number is held steady.
When you think about operating in scale,half web, steady, a massive amount of
infrastructure, when you also thinkof all the, uh, billions of dollars.
So the number two hereis Shopify with 6.8.
So think of the billions of dollars ofadvertising marketing r and d engineering
that's being spent by all the proprietarycompanies that are trying to lure people
away from open source, essentially.
And so with open source, we havethe ability to like, give people
freedom agency independence.
It's, you know, it's a creed, it's a,it's a, it's a way of living that gives
people more agency and it's, uh, servingas a counter to what are the more, you
know, proprietary, taking away yourfreedom forces in the world and software.
Um, you know, some people ask like,is 43 3% where we're gonna hit?
I do think that there have been someheadwinds, but, um, it's interesting
to look in certain markets like Japan,where actually if you zoom in, um, we're
now actually 58.5% of all websites inJapan, 83% of the CMS market share.
Which is, I guess it was goodthat we were in Tokyo last year.
Um, I think that what happens is that,you know, when if we do a good job of
listening to our users, serving ourcommunity, and, you know, being, uh,
responsible to our core values, that opensource software earns the right to become
sort of a default that people like to use.
And instead of like building yetanother wheel, we can say, okay,
let's, you know, share these sort ofprimitives together and then build
interesting stuff on top of it.
Um, it has been a global shiftin the adoption of WordPress,
which, uh, is interesting.
Japanese is now the second most popularlanguage used in WordPress today, the
first language other than English,which has also been very fun to see
how Japan has really like risen up.
Uh, so it's, as we move the sort ofstate of the words and word camps all
around the world, it's fun to sort ofactivate the different local communities.
It's not just about Japan.
Um, this is also the first year thatwe clicked over to where over 56% of
WordPress sites are now in non-English.
So where, uh, we're, we have a, a,a good market share, the global web.
But I think also what's so powerfulabout this sort of community approach
of WordPress is that it can be sortof everywhere, everything all at once,
you know, to reference the movie.
Um.
Where we're breaking some new ground aswell and getting some new, uh, uptick
is actually in the top 1000 sites.
So one of the magical things aboutWordPress is the democratizing
technology is it can be used fora small individual blog, which is
a few post, but also powering someof the top websites in the world.
And we are now at 49.4% of thetop 1000 websites in the world,
which is up 2.3% from last year.
So we're trying to democratize the web,take this technology that the biggest
sites in the world can use, but also thesmallest sites are available for free.
Anyone can download it, run itwith playground, you can even
boot it up in your browser.
And, um, we're trying to changehow things are being built as well.
So the health WordPress isreally in, in the ecosystem.
And like I said, like the,the core software is cool,
but what's really amazing iswhat's being built on top of it.
So we're now at over 60,000 plugins,which is up 68%, uh, of approved
plugins since 2024, where we saw 3,900.
So the rate of approved plugins isgoing, we're at 2.1 billion downloads
of plugins by the end of year.
And, uh, looking at theme side ofthings, there's been over 1500 themes
released this year alone, bringingus to over 14,000 themes total.
So you add it all up as 74,000plugins and themes available to make
WordPress as individual and uniqueas every single person in the world.
And here in this room is, we've seen overa 40% adoption in block themes, which, uh,
we're over a thousand block themes now.
And finally, uh, with contributors,we're looking at where, uh, with our most
latest releases, we've reached a peak ofnow 921 contributors to WordPress 6.8.
So that's the pipeline, thefuture of the project right there.
Uh, our first release this year,6.8, Cecil racked up 79.5 million
downloads since April, which isup 13% from what we saw last year.
Every one of those downloads representssomeone choosing WordPress, choosing
open source and choosing to buildsomething, which is very exciting.
So that brings us today the launchof WordPress 6.9 are just called
Jean in honor of Jean Harris,the amazing, uh, pianist known
for his warm and soulful style.
We had over 900 contributors to, uh, 6.9,230 of them were first time contributors,
and that led to 340 enhancements and fixesfor a really stable jam packed release
that we'll dig into a little bit of later.
But we have a few of thosecontributors here today have
flown in from all over the world.
And, uh, we're gonna do, I'vegot a little button here.
We're gonna do something we've never donebefore, which is actually do the release
of WordPress live with all of you today.
So let's get everyone up on stage.
Warm up.
All right.
So I think if I press this button,there'll be a little countdown.
Let's see.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Thank you.
All these are like thehidden heroes of WordPress.
Like they don't get on stage asmuch as I do and things like that.
But, um, this is, and you know, thisdoesn't represent everyone, but it's
so exciting to be able to have some ofthe folks, uh, that lead the releases,
that do the hidden work of shippingsoftware to 40% of all websites several
times, usually three times per yearwith, uh, you know, auto upgrades going
out to millions of billions of sites.
We'll maybe check in on thedownload counter a little bit
later to see how it's going.
So thank you.
All round of applause for the 6.9 leads.
And where did y'all come in from?
So we got Florida.
Where else?
Massachusetts.
Massachusetts, Spain, Spain,Chicago, Canada, Spain, Canada.
Nice.
All right.
Um, so, uh, this is what the flywheelof open source contribution looks like.
You get contributors, users, creators,you know, we're going from strength to
strength if there were 2 billion plugand downloads, countries like Japan
with the 80 80th percentile contributorsremaining imagining what's impossible.
What's possible, oneline of code at a time.
But what happens when you takethese, uh, sort of like different
things that we're all doing?
And of course it couldn'tbe a presentation 2025
without talking about ai.
So in 2022, actually before therelease of chat, GPTI asked the
WordPress community to learn AI deeply.
And what I didn't know then, whatno one realized, which is how crazy
the next couple years would be.
We're actually just a couple days awayfrom the anniversary of, I think it was a
few days ago, of chat GBT being launched.
It was kind of funny.
There's a tweet from Sam Altman saying,Hey, we built this little thing.
You can chat with it, check it out.
Um, the capabilities of thesemodels is kind of insane.
So we've gone from the launchof chat to bt, we've now got
the image models from Google.
Has anyone played with nano banana?
Yeah, like things that I remember in thenineties, like buying the Photoshop books
and like, you know, spending like hoursjust to remove the clouds or add clouds
to like a, a picture in the background waslike one of the tutorials, like all the
things that used to be like, so manual,you're zooming in, going pixel by pixel.
Um, now you could just literallytalk to the image and say, Hey,
add some clouds, move this around.
It's like the things that l alums havegotten amazing at is, um, kind of insane.
And the obviously like, likehumanity, like beautifully flawed.
It's kind of amazing that we've createda form of coding, which is like,
just like us, like non-deterministic.
Um, but the thing that is magical at likelanguage translation, which you now have
the real time language translation in theAirPods, you have the image generation.
Um, some of the coding stuffis, uh, pretty amazing.
So with AI and WordPress, we'retrying to take an approach where we're
empowering and not replacing people.
And I really think that humans and AIworking together are gonna enable, um,
so much of what, uh, we're gonna see.
So we've got a little bit of a videohere right now showing, um, uh, using
Anthropics model context protocol or MCP,which launched late last year, um, uh,
basically connecting to a WordPress site.
And I think I have toclick for this to play.
Okay, here we go.
So what's happening now is Iwant you to provide a concise.
What did it say?
Helpful information about my site,helpful information about my site.
So it goes, it reads the site, talksto the MCP server, tells it how
many active plugins, how much spaceit's using, and tell me about my
top post and give me the top fuseand what should I blog more about?
So it's hitting jet packs statsand gathering all the stats.
And so you can now, like the ais cannow interact through with your blog
in a way that's pretty exciting.
Um, so the MCP adapter that'scoming to WordPress, um, allows us
to connect to all the different,uh, you know, AI systems out there.
And it's our first applicationof our new Abilities API.
And we're gonna talk, we're gonna havea whole panel on AI in a little bit.
Um, it exposes these ai, uh,abilities externally in a standardized
way, so any MCP compatible toolcan understand and newsom this
adapter pattern means WordPress canparticipate in AI workflows without
duplicating logic or creating separateintegrations for every a i platform.
So you can now connect a WordPressinstallation to properly tools like
Claude Copilot and many other platformsthat support MCP and MCP aside over
in the terminal and IDE, ClaudeCode Cursor client, and other ways
to change code for the good means.
You can refactor projects, search codebases, automate task run scripts with
W-P-C-L-I, alongside the AI agent.
These LLM CLI and development environmentssync up with legacy automation,
write, test and deploy a plugin.
Now it generates, integratesgenerative AI with classic commands.
We're bringing the best of both worldsand a whole new scale and velocity.
So Josh just happening in chat interfacesCLI are IDs and WordPress integrations.
Summer, I got early access to comment.
Perplexes adjunctive browser gaveme my first brain explode moment I
talked about at Word Camp us and uh,now, uh, chat GBT, you know, OpenAI
has released their version of it.
Um, you can ask it to do things.
And WP admin, so this is an example,and this is actually one of the
things I'm not sure how things aregonna play out, whether how much of
AI is gonna be embedded in the app.
Probably with things like image editingor translation and how much is gonna
be sort of an agent that exists at yoursort of operating system or browser
level has context of all your files,your data, your everything like that.
But then can operate on the website.
This is an example of again,with not MCV or any other
integration, just browser control.
Um, from open AI's browser, uh,doing all these things inside of
WordPress, which is kind of insane.
Um.
One of the most important ways I thinkwe can help, uh, AI and WordPress
word together is actually in the,the realm of benchmarks and evals.
So see, a big area of investment thatwe're gonna do in 2026 is creating
some benchmarks and evals that allthe AI models can test themselves
against for doing WordPress task.
And that could be changing plugins,editing things, or with some
of these browser agents perhapsactually directly manipulating,
um, some of the, uh, interfaces.
So let's get a little more hands-on.
Let's show some actual things.
Shipping in the WordPress space,real tools, making real impact.
So hosting Hoster Lost Cody, uh, their AIassistant lives right inside of WordPress.
You just can describe a site ideaand 60 seconds later you've got a
fully functional WordPress site.
It's not a template or site.
It actually like writes yourabout page, your blog post
troubleshoot errors automatically.
This is from one of the hostingcompanies that's, uh, big supporter of
WordPress, Elementor, and we actuallyhave the CEO of Elementor here today.
Kioni and Miriam coming in from Israel.
Uh, so it doesn't just, uh, replacedesigners, it accelerates them.
So their ai co co-pilot suggesttariff sections and they actually
have three, uh, different formsof AI they're gonna be doing.
So we had a great meeting yesterdaytalking about like all the fun AI
stuff that element investing in.
Um.
So, and we've got AI in Jetpack two.
So now when you're writing Gutenberg,you can ask AI for a comparison table.
You can ask it to adjusttone, to edit your text.
There's all sorts ofexciting things happening.
Yos is using AI for keyword clustering.
You know, things that you used to haveto pay a, you know, SEO consultant or
things, thousands of dollars to do,or now just right in the interface.
And automatic wordpress.com.
We've built the AI site builder,sort of a big sky project, which
you can describe what you wanna do.
And again, seconds later, it buildsa fully functional site for you.
And you know, when it works, it's magical.
Sometimes it gets things a littlebit wrong, but we're also like,
you know, the models are gettingbetter like every couple of months.
And so like everything thatyou use is the worst version of
it that you're ever gonna see.
So just imagine this gettingbetter and better and better.
It's a bunch more like AI engineand AI power turn WordPress into
automated conversational platforms.
You have e-commerce storeslike now generating better
product images and other things.
So there's like so much happening.
And I do believe that AI is kindof the biggest technological
revolution I've seen in my lifetime.
It's on par with kind of electrification.
So think of it as affecting everysingle industry, every single
business, everything in the worldis gonna be, uh, influenced and
augmented and accelerated by ai Ag.
You know, for us, I'm very excitedabout where it can help us automate
things in terms of plugin reviews,theme reviews, translation,
validation, and theme security.
So, you know, uh, there's so much thatwe've, uh, invested in, and particularly
with the plugin, we'll talk a littlebit about plugin reviews in a bit.
But we're now able to do things,you know, 'cause although there are
a lot of contributors to WordPress,it is a relatively small number of
people supporting a lot of software.
When you think of how manycountless, millions lines of code
are across that 74,000 plugins andthemes and WordPress core itself.
Um, so AI being able to help us scan thatcode, find vulnerabilities, fix things,
suggest things, um, is I, I think, gonnareally accelerate the security of the
web and the speed of our developments.
And finally, I, I sort ofdropped the word camp us a few
months ago, the Telex project.
So if you haven't tried this out yet,telex is something that can create, uh,
really interesting Gutenberg blocks.
So, um, you go in, you tell itsomething that you want, and it, uh,
it builds it and it can build things.
You can even ask it to buildlike an entire doom game
inside of Gutenberg Block.
You can see at Telex do automatic ai, andI'm gonna share a few world real world
examples from our friend Nick Hamey, who'susing Telex not just as a demo tool, but
as a backbone to a fully working shop.
So, something that he did is.
So he actually created apricing, uh, comparison thing.
So you see Telex is working here.
It just generated this entirepricing comparison thing.
So again, something that a developerused to have to ask to, you know, build
this custom is now just, you know,again, what we saw in a few seconds.
Uh, generating very rich,interactive web elements.
Um, the header block of his IZZ is GYm.com, which I guess is like a, a store
that he has pulls data from Googleplaces, give him real time hours, a
map link, an open and close status,just like the big chain store, but
it's for his little micro business.
It's got a carousel partner.
Logos.
This was built with telex, no hand coding.
Uh, a uniform post grid created ablock, so every post card on the
homepage has like same height.
Um, this calendar integration.
So with Telex, he was able tobuild something that pulled in his
Google Calendar data and was alsooptimized for mobile usability.
And finally, Allego price calculator.
So I guess part of his business islike buying and selling people's Legos.
And so he's got something in there whereyou can kind of put your Lego in there
and it'll tell him like what price he'llbuy it at and discounts and, you know, um.
So is again, things that you usedto have to like hire developers, do.
Custom software like this would'vecost thousands, tens of thousands of
dollars to build even just years ago.
Um, we're now able to doin a browser for pennies.
It's kind of insane.
Um, if you wanna check out some other coolthings that have been happening, we have
Tammy Lister, who's actually here today.
Hi Tammy.
Uh, she did something very fun calledBlock Tober Fun, which is every single
day in October, she built a new blockusing telex, including a playable
askie version of Tetris, A blockthat's an actual terminal window, a
roadmap, block matrix effect, and atrick or treat block for Halloween.
So, democratizing democratizationof technology is not just about
smart eye, it's about like lettingpeople do things, have access
to the sort of creative energy.
And I'm so excited to see becauseevery single one of us has like, that
sort of unique spark, has our uniqueideas, and seeing that unleashed is
gonna be a very, very, very excitingtime to be aligned, uh, alive.
So, um, WordPress is about communityand so much of what we do is, uh,
about trading the next generations.
So as we create these new capabilities,how do we teach people how to use it?
So, um.
We're now gonna talk about some education.
I'm gonna invite Mary hed up totalk about some of the things we've
been investing in to invest inthe next generation of WordPress.
Fantastic.
Around policy.
Thank you.
And it's just, it's great to careabout, uh, all the progress in
our ecosystem and how AI amplifieswhat's possible in so many ways we
couldn't have imagined where we areor even where we're headed with this.
Um, but behind all the tech, it'speople and who people are who
make WordPress happen one day, onerelease, and one event at a time.
And word camps are one of the mostimportant ways that we bring people
together to share, to learn, to celebratewhat the community makes possible.
Oops.
And this year we broke some prettyamazing ground with 81 word camps
spanning over 39 countries organized byover 5,200 volunteers and reaching over
a hundred thousand people in person.
Yeah.
Yes.
That's unreal.
And we actually still have 16lined up, so before the end of the
year, we're gonna take it to 97.
Wow.
So that's before you factor inWordPress tv or social media and every
other ways that folks can tune in.
And so it's quite a leap from last year.
So growing from the number ofevents by over a third in a single
year is absolutely incredible.
So hats off to everyoneinvolved in making that happen.
And these aren't just conferences.
We know that they'rewhere community happens.
Where contributors meet and whereconnections really turn into action.
And word camps are just the tipof the iceberg when it comes to
bringing folks together to learnand to make stuff with WordPress.
And of course not everyonecan get to Word Camp, right?
So that's why it's so importantthat there are more ways to
connect and to pick up the platformand run with it from anywhere.
And that's where learn.wordpress.orgcomes in learn.wordpress.org for more
than 1.5 million users this year.
And the engagement qualityimproved in a very meaningful way.
After WordCamp us the averageengagement, time per user increased by
32%, which tells us that students andcontributors are spending real time
learning, not just passing through.
People aren't just showing up,they're sticking around and they
wanna learn, they wanna build, andwe're making sure that they can.
wordpress.org reach more than 113 millionusers, and the new users grew by 38%.
So that tells us the topof the funnel is expanding.
The more people are discoveringWordPress for the first time.
Right?
And so the data shows us something that'svery important, and users are landing
on wordpress.org at a very high volume.
And they're comparing platforms.
They're looking for documentation,they're searching for a way to.
Into the ecosystem and thepath is not always clear.
And this is exactly why education matters.
learn.wordpress.org, the WPCC, WordPresscredits our student organizations, they're
giving people a structured way to go fromcurious visitor to confident builder.
And once people reach the rightresources, they stay and they learn.
And the opportunity now is to close thegap between discovery and participation.
So the work that we're doing ineducation is positioning WordPress
to guide new users from awarenessto skill, building to contribution.
And as we improve navigation andsimplifying the experience, which
is fantastic, we all have aneven stronger system that turns
interest into long-term involvement.
And so we are making progress and thedata shows that growth is at the edge
of our ecosystem, and now we need tochannel that growth into participation.
And so that's how we're making itpossible for anyone, anywhere to learn,
master and contribute back to WordPress.
So what excites me so much about howeducation is changing, what is possible
for WordPress and how we can bringnew people into the platform, educate,
train, teach, and on community on campus.
So Campus Connect started as anexperiment and it's already expanded
across universities around the world.
Students are learning WordPress,shipping real work, and earning academic
credit for contributing to open source.
So they're not just future contributors,they're contributing today.
And education gives people theskills to use and all the new tools
that are emerging in the ecosystem.
So like Matt said, it's like a piano.
So for years we had oneoctave, and now we have eight.
So AI and new abilities open upmore keys, more range, and more
capability than ever before.
But you still need someone whoknows how to make music, someone
who understands what a site shouldbe, what businesses need, how to
turn intention into execution.
And that is why theseprograms matter so much.
They prepare students not justto use WordPress, but to think,
design, and build with a purpose.
So the work used to be longhours of manual effort.
Now the work is understandingthe goal, shaping the idea, and
knowing which keys to press.
So the jobs don't disappear,they evolve, they shift.
And campus connect.
And WordPress credits give us a pipelineof people who can thrive in that world.
Humans still build the web.
We are just giving them a better set oftools and a clearer path to get started.
And WordPress has been investing heavilyin global education, and these programs
have opened the door for institutions tojoin us in creating a direct pathway for
students into the open source ecosystem.
A university in Costa Rica is agreat example of what can happen
when a university steps intoopportunities that WordPress has built.
Okay, I'm gonna try very hard here.
Fel es University dad.
I tried.
Um, university in Costa Rica is wherewe launched the beta and they've
been an incredible partner to us.
Um, to tell you more about this andhow we've come together, I'd love to
invite Stephanie Garita Johnson from theuniversity to the state to tell us about.
Thank you.
No worry.
Thank you so much.
Universita has been commitmentto WordPress and its global
community for years now.
Long before we sign our agreement withthe WordPress Foundation this year we
were already deeply involved in theecosystem hosting Word Camp San Jose
and creating community spaces thatbrought a student into the conversation.
This year we were excitedto host WordPress Campus
Connect San Jose in September.
This event was part of the broaderAcade academic engagement model
to WordPress and brought togethera student faculty professional
and international contributors.
It is trained a role as a partnerin connecting academia with the
global open source community.
From that experience, come the work.
Press Fidelity Test Club, a studentled initiative that's found learning
opportunities and preparing newgeneration to participate in the
global ecosystem through hands-onlearning, leadership and collaboration.
After singing our agreement with theWordPress Foundation, we took the next
step formally integrating WordPressinto our academic program for our
computer system engineering degree.
This established an instructor modelfor a student to participate in
official WordPress credit processwhere they earn recognition for real
contributions, whatever to be codedesign, documentation, accessibility,
any on all of the essential areas.
This aligned perfectly with our STEMmodel, which in which prioritize
hands-on learning, applied research,and solving real world problems.
WordPress has become a platform fordeveloping digital skills, technological
entrepreneurship, and upward contributionright within our academic environment.
We're proud to be bold in thisbridge between the global WordPress
community and the new generation whoare creating the web of the future.
I'm, I'm excited to see this impactspreading across Latin America.
From this process, we gained keylearnings that confirmed that
academic and institutional value.
What worked especially well was the earlyand sustained engagement of a student for
university fidelity, combined with facultyguidance through clearly a structure
mentor and man contribution pathways.
The integration with the officialWordPress credits empowers students
to make real contribution to theecosystem while development applies
skills leadership and globalvisibility in a collaboration open
source development environment.
Some students also recognize thatthe stronger personal organization
of their time will allow them toparticipate with an ever greater
continuity showing their awareness andownership of their learning process.
This feedback far from this mission,the experience has highlights how
rewarding the initiative has beenoverall and reinforce what is so
excited and worth trying for others.
It's demonstrate that the academiacan become a trust getaway into the
global open source contribution.
Unlocking inspiring opportunity forstudents to grow, lead, and contribute
to the future of the web from adeeply satisfied and education space.
Thank you so much for havingme here and back to Matt.
Thank you.
That's amazing.
All righty.
Uh, it's amazing to see howWordPress is becoming like
generally multi-generational.
We now have like parent and childcontributors, you know, it's fun to
see like the kid camp things thathappens at different work camps and
uh, you know, as we just heard fromStephanie, like kids learning workforce
at school, they're teaching you theyounger siblings and it's beautiful
because this is a skill that then youcan take with you the rest of your life.
You know, something that you canuse to like, you know, in, in school
to make money, to like do creativeprojects, all sorts of things.
Um, you know, the unexpectedambassador to all of this has been a
WaPo, which actually we got from ourfriends in the Japanese community.
For those who don't know,it was the WordPress mascot.
It was born in Japan in 2011.
And one of the best gifts, uh,of a local community to the
global WordPress community.
Word regions all over theworld have be WaPo their own
and kids absolutely love it.
It's funny because I always say like,if anyone had asked me to approve
this, I would've never approved
Wahoo.
But Wahoo just happened.
He's actually GPL, and, uh, soit's totally open source and it has
become a sort of global phenomenon.
And also amazing because at thecore is people not just taking the
original WaPo, but making it their own.
And there are now thousands of variations.
Uh, we're actually gonna bring onlike a cool little WaPo museum on
wordpress.org that we're gonna try tospin up next year to just document all
the different ones all around the world.
Um, and that's even before you couldask AI to make new wapos, all the
ones so far were manually created.
So if you're here in the audienceday or you're listening, like, um,
consider like teaching, you know, ayounger generation to WordPress, uh,
consider how you can bring 'em on.
Um, you know, while all the competitorsin the marketplace have, you know,
grown often through spending, you know,countless millions or billions of dollars
in marketing, WordPress hasn't had that.
It's really been, you know, peerto peer, person to person, word of
mouth, people using it, learning,telling, and trying and failing, and
then bringing other people along.
It's not unlike how I got started atmy very self, where the predecessor
of the WordPress was called B two.
I started using it and, um, I had aquestion in the forums, so I went to the
forums, asked a question and 'cause I wasbreaking it, I didn't know how to use it.
And then one day I went tothe forums to ask a question.
I saw someone askingsomething that I already knew.
Even though it was brand new.
So I thought, oh, I'llreply to this person.
And that was sort of my first littleentree into contributing to an open
source product, which of courselater snowballs with the code.
And now all this crazystuff we're here today.
So it can start with just smallest stepand you never know where it's gonna lead.
So I want to mentionYouth Day and Nicaragua.
So Youth Day and Nicaragua is whathappens to give young creators
the keys and just let them go.
Back in October 75 kids, and I mean kidsages 88 to 88 to 20 showed up in Manna
Mangu to build the first WordPress sites.
Regional volunteers helped out, but thesessions were actually run by teenagers
teaching out the teenagers, which iskinda like the future right there.
The whole day was hands-on, noboring lectures or PowerPoints
like we're doing here.
They sat down bit the projectthey cared about and built it.
So the peer led sessions met 16year olds who've done this before.
Were showing the 10 year olds howto pick a theme or outta contact
form, uh, that kinda learning sticks.
And very similar to what I wasdoing when I was 17, 18, 19.
You know, it's exploring on theinternet, asking questions, but then
also trying to help other people.
As I learned, um, the attendancetripled compared to the 24.
2024 pilot.
Um, so they got 75 participantswhen they were hoping for
just about 30 and word spread.
Kids were telling their friends, thisis now becoming a little bit viral.
Oops.
I think I, I I get this.
David Gonzalez a volunteered to use a,created a video game kind of Mario bro.
Mario bro style.
And WaPo is the main character.
The wa p's name isabsolutely is aptly game poo.
You can follow the link andplay it right in your browser.
This isn't just a one-off avenge anymore.
You know, people now are using WordPressas an entire development platform,
you know, and so it's fun to see.
I, I know for many of us who gotstarted in computing, gaming was like
one of the first things we did, right?
And so being people actuallylike have fun and play games
with WordPress is pretty cool.
I think we've got a little video here.
Again, this was built at the use day.
Um, I have to say, when we werestarting WordPress as blogging
software, I never imagined this
a crud application, right?
You know, we write some text in the boxand we post on the webpage, like now being
used as a platform to build things like.
Game p
uh, so, you know, this is, we'rejust getting started with this.
This program is just brand new and soI can't wait to see what people start
to build and what they start to learn.
And, you know, embracing open sourcetechnologies is the development
framework, PHP, all the thingsthat we've known to, to love.
You know, part of the things aboutWordPress versus other development
frameworks is it's sort of accessibilitythe way it kind of makes sense.
You can, you know, it's kind ofeasy to use, uh, from Costa Rica to
Nicaragua, dozens of other places,the momentum's building worldwide.
So it's, we had a couple pilot programsturning into a genuine movements.
Next year's gonna be wild.
We're looking at expansion in Asia,Europe, and Latin America, and
ramping up things in the states.
So speaking of foundations,6.9 is how it's all about.
How are we doing on timingwith the podcast, by the way?
We're good.
We're good?
Yeah.
Um, there's a whole lot of APIaction going on some AI developments.
We've got AI agents and MCP, thebuilds, A-P-I-H-T-M-L-A-P-I Block
Buildings, API, interactive, API.
So 6.9 is really bringinga lot of foundational work.
And to tell you more aboutthat, let's hear from our lead
architect, Mathias Ventura.
So s Howdy.
Thank you Matt.
And hello everyone.
I wish I could be there in person.
Let's dig into WordPress 6.9 lastyear in Tokyo, we look at what was
new and upcoming through four lenses.
Write, design, build, and develop.
Let's revisit themtoday to see what's new.
We have a lot of beautiful additionsto the writing and publishing process.
First up, let's talk aboutcollaboration, which is a big
part of our current roadmap.
WordPress 6.9 introduces notes tothe block editor for the first time.
This allows authors, writers, andcollaborators to leave comments
and feedback directly inside theeditor while working on a post.
It has a beautiful design where commentsare attached to specific blocks.
When you select a comment, onlythe block is highlighted and the
rest of the content fades away.
Since these are also built as commentsbehind the scenes, you can receive email
notifications when new notes are added
in the spirit of the features.
This was truly a collaborative effortin itself with work from Fuel, multi
Dots, automatic GoDaddy, human madearticle, as well as a contributor
sponsored by LU Hosting Jar Kinta.
And finally, this is just the beginningof a full set of collaboration
features that will make WordPressa true multiplayer experience.
Let's also highlight one ofmy favorite small features.
WordPress has always been about thepotential of human expression, and
now this is extended to math notation.
You can now write beautiful math usingblocks or through inline formatting.
It all renders nicely andpreserves the LA formatting.
You can access it through a popoverand the preview renders beautifully.
Now, moving into design, this warprep release introduces several
new blocks and design tools.
Let's focus on just a few of them.
First.
There's a much better experiencewhen using drag and drop,
bringing a more intuitive anddirect manipulation of blocks.
It works across all sort of blocktypes, so you can drag a list item to
reorder a list without having to handdown the drug handle In the toolbar,
it's overall a lot more intuitive asyou can manipulate the objects directly.
For example, it makes it thateasy to put images side by
side and construct galleries.
You can drag the images themselves, nolonger requiring to find the drug handle.
It's overall more visual, moreintuitive, and more reliable.
Another small but big win is thatgallery blocks now support aspect
ratio attributes, so you can make allthe images fit together seamlessly.
There's also a new typographyoption called stretchy text, which
automatically adjusts the font sizeto fill the dimensions of a container.
This is done through theinteractivity API, and it updates
in real time as you type in.
It's perfect for hero sections.
Call to action areas, anywhere youwant text that really fits the space.
Another new block that had a lot ofpopular requests is the accordion block.
It's supports inner blocksfor infinite possibilities and
is built with interactivityAPI for the best performance.
You get a lot of a lot of optionsto customize whether the accordion
is open by default, whether andwhere to show an icon along with
many of the usual styling options.
This was a long requested featuresby FMO source and creators.
When it comes to buildingsize with WordPress.
There are also some incrediblerefinements and additions.
Up until now, the command palettewas restricted to editor context.
It has now been made available acrossthe entire admin experience, so you can
now access it from any part of your site.
This allows quick navigation betweenadmin screens and is a step towards
easier management of WordPress.
Since the command palette is meant tobe powered by abilities, it would also
allow triggering several differentsets of commands directly from
anywhere in the WordPress interface.
For a while now, container blockshave supported the ability to
restrict what blocks can be insertedin a given area, but it required
diving into code to set it up.
Now, this is available directlyin the user interface, giving
real control for site creators.
You can provide highly usableflows without needing to
create entirely custom blocks.
There are also important announcementsto the usability of the navigation
block, including a prominent editnavigation call to action when
selecting a header or any templatepart that contains a navigation block.
There's also more customizationoptions for sub menu opacity, which
previously require adding custom CSS.
And finally, the page creationflow is also improved with more
clarity over whether a page isgoing to be drafted or published.
WordPress 6.9 also brings the ability tohide blocks entirely from the front end.
That means you can draft differentdesigns or come in soon information
directly in the editor and onlyshow them when you're ready.
And that's really just the start for afuture, which would support conditional
display of blocks to allow for betterresponsive controls from hiding
and showing blocks based on screensize to broader controls for block
visibility like login and logout views.
And of course, plugins will be able toextend and register its own conditions.
Finally, the Block Bindings user interfacehas been upgraded to improve how different
data sources are displayed in the editor.
Users can now easily switch betweensources as well as buying and and
buying attributes with a single click.
Developers can also registertheir own custom sources.
This is part of making Blocks alot more powerful and connected to
the data structures of WordPressand its plugins by default.
Let's now look at some of the developertools shipping with WordPress 6.9.
The new abilities.
API sets in motion a common patternthat the entire ecosystem can adopt.
This API creates a unified registry offunctionality that can be discovered,
validated, and executed consistentlyacross different contexts, including
PHP, the rest, API, endpointsand Future AI Power integrations.
This common language will power theevolution of the Command PAL and is being
rapidly adopted for AI driven workflows.
The H-T-M-L-A-P-I continues to enablenew ways of reliably working with
and modifying HTML Code server side.
This effort is cutting down the complexityand the cost of modifying HTML within PHP.
The safety and accuracy of theH-T-M-L-A-P-I enables server side
rendering in interactivity, API, andbrings dynamic content to guttenberg.
With block bindings, it is avaluable tool for developers, aim
for performance and reliability.
Finally, for developers', theme authorsand block authors, the interactivity
API is maturing with smoother routing,better state management, and more
performant interactive blocks.
This means you can start building richinteractive user interfaces that match
the state of the art, but without thetrade off of full JavaScript stacks.
In terms of the broader WordPressecosystem, this is a step closer to an
interactive block Islands architecture,similar to modern frameworks, but
baked into WordPress native tooling.
It reduces fragmentation and providesa standard interactive frontend.
API WordPress core is already using itto power multiple features, including
some of the new blocks highlighted today.
So that wraps up some of themain WordPress 6.9 features.
I'll pass it now.
Back to you, Matt.
Thank you everyone.
All right.
And I've heard that the streamis back online, so sorry for the,
so the technical difficulties.
Um, so that's 6.9 through thefour lenses we discussed writing,
designing, building, and development.
But there is more.
Oops.
So previously the plugin checkerwas a plugin that we had to help
plugin authors apply, you know,security measures, look at things,
and, uh, sort of do it before upload.
But now with AI from going from doing10 reviews in 10 minutes, uh, we can do.
Sorry, we can now do reviews wayfaster than we were able to before.
So we're seeing about a hundred moresubmissions to the plugin directory
per week than we did in 2024.
So before where we had this huge queue,as I talked about at state, uh, work camp
us, um, backlog of plugin reviews we'renow under seven business days, um, for
getting new plugins up in the directory.
This was a volunteer crewfrom all over the world.
Um, now with the plugin check, uh,check plugin, plugin check, plugin
plugins all the way down, uh, updatesto plugins are also being checked, where
before we only checked new submissions.
And so basically we're gonna be able toupgrade the code quality and security
everything, um, of every plugin in theworld, which I'm sure as you read the
news or something, whenever you see aheadline in the, in the news about there's
a problem with the WordPress sites.
Um, if the news site is good,they say it's a WordPress plugin.
It's usually not core.
I mean, we're human, so we'll haveproblems before, knock on wood.
But, um, but typically around those 60,000plugins and themes, um, that's where,
you know, some combination of them or, orsome, some smaller one that maybe has like
less resources or more newer developersis where some of the issues come from.
So, um, but I think using ai, we'regonna be, and education, we're
gonna be able to really upgradethe security and the, um, of.
Well, basically the web,which is kind of exciting.
I really appreciate all the contributionsthat we're getting from Google and
other places, uh, to help us do this.
So, as I've said before, I wantWordPress to be the gold standard of data
liberation and, uh, interoperability.
You know, one quality of life improvementwe're shipping with 6.9 is the WordPress
importer and it's the author mappingstep, which now is a new checkbox that
lets you turn ul rewriting on or off.
Checked by default means that duringimport, the system automatically
updates the old links, things theyused to have to use, search and replace
for or do manually, um, taking theold sites URLs with the new ones.
So everything works seamlessly oncethe content is live, and we're going
to continue making investments in datadeliberation and improving importers.
I want WordPress to be the place thatyou can take content from anywhere,
and then once it's in WordPress,as you know, for the rest of your
life, you'll be able to get it outinto any API, any export anything.
It'll belong to you.
So last year we spoke about what'sto do with WordPress playground.
Playground has been updatedwith a new file browser.
So you can now create, edit and testfiles directly from your browser.
There's also a visual gallery of blueblueprints that are great starting
points for different types of sites.
So think of this almost like a recipe.
So you can take, uh,again, with just a link.
Um, you can take a set of themes,plugins, customizations, everything,
and apply it to a WordPress playground.
And again, playground is the thing thatallows you to boot up an entire container
of WordPress in your browser in seconds.
Again, things that before used to havea server or set up a cloud or set up
databases and everything like that.
Um, WordPress Studio, which is the,you know, open source development
app based on playground now includesblueprints as a starting guide.
And, uh, and now we have a commandline interface, the playground, CLAI,
which reached stable in October.
So this has new features for developersincluding XD bug support and options
for AI assisted developments.
Um, with all the WordPress recommendedPHP extensions and MySQL emulation now
in playground, it supports now then morethan 99% of the plugin directory and
even supports PHP my admin composer,and Laravel, which is very cool.
Blueprints can now load files directlyfrom GI repositories, even private ones.
So you can bring private gitcode right into the playground.
The all new all PP blueprints dotP-A-R-C-L-I commands can run everywhere
that you can run WordPress Sincethe last day of the word you used
playground 1.4 million times from 227countries to showcase your plugins,
try code changes, and teach others.
And we've now translatedplayground docs into six languages.
Oops.
Uh, and now something I'm veryexcited about for plugin authors.
Uh, when you release an update,there's now a 24 hour safety
window before it really choosesites with auto updates enabled.
So if your update goes live immediately,anyone checking for updates can
manually grab it right away.
For sites with automatic updatesenabled, there'll be a 24 hour window.
So that way if something breaks,you can hear about from early
adopters, people update manually,they can give you the feedback.
And it's the first step towards what wewanna get to, which is percentage based
rollouts, something that app stores, likethe Google Play Store and iOS store roll.
So you'll be able to roll itout to say, 10% of sites, 20%
of sites, 50% of sites, so on.
So again, improving thingsfor plugin developers.
Some, some claps from someplugin developers here.
Um, again, we're, we're auto updatingcode across millions of sites,
very heterogeneous environments,like everything from like raspberry
pies to, you know, big cloudservers, um, like Google or AWS.
And so running WordPress in allthese different environments,
there's lots of edge cases.
So giving developers the tools to beable to like reliably ship software
to all these different placesis gonna be so, so, so powerful.
We'd love feedback from the communityto make this even more useful.
So there's a lot to be excited about.
And, uh, one of the thingsI'm also excited about is
using AI more thoughtfully.
So we're actually gonnapull up a little panel here.
We've got James LaPageleads AI at Automatic.
We've got Mary Hubbard, Felix Rnzfrom Google, and Jeff Paul from 10 Up.
I'm gonna join, we're gonnado a little panel on WordPress
and ai, the path forward.
So,
and actually while you're uphere, Matt, I brought you a
chair so you can join as well.
So it's a little last minute, butsince Matt did such a great job
with ai, I asked him to to join.
Right.
Thank you.
So I, I mentioned a little earlier,we actually launched the WordPress AI
team in the project earlier this year.
And so you're looking at themajority of the folks that are, are
helping out, uh, leading the way,um, and in general, the new tools,
they're landing every single week.
And so I want to justjump right into the panel.
I think everyone's heard me talk enough.
So the first I'd like to ask you,James, there has been a lot happening
in 6.8 and a lot of the AI workis actually landing alongside 6.9.
So can you just fill us in what, what'sactually shipped and what are the
foundational pieces of AI for WordPress?
Yeah, yeah,
go ahead.
Well, first off, hello everybody.
Great to see y'all.
Um, there's been a lot going on inAI and WordPress for a while now.
So quick history lesson.
The core AI group was created andannounced about six months ago.
Um, when we were created about sixmonths ago, we published a strategy
called AI Building Blocks, andthat represented the work that we
wanted to do moving into the future.
But that strategy was somethingthat we put together informed by
years of thought and effort into ai.
Matt mentioned Learn AI Deeply in 2022.
Um, we then moved on in 2023 tobecome, begin officially messaging
around AI through the project.
And we also tracked where theindustry was going and what.
Was happening in terms of AI models,what their capabilities were, what they
were good at, what they weren't good at.
So when we were announced six monthsago, all of that thought and effort
went into that announcement and wentinto the work around creating this
strategy, this roadmap of building blocks.
Um, to directly answer your question,the building blocks, we have four.
And when we announced six months ago, Idid not expect to say that all four are
delivered for 6.9, but they are, they are.
Um, thank you.
Incredible work from the team.
Yes.
And we should absolutely direct thoseapplauds to the contributors and the
team that actually built all of this.
So to go through these four, we have theabilities API was mentioned a few times
in the presentation, and that is thisunified registry of logic that allows.
Both humans and AI systems to understandwhat can be done on WordPress.
Um, and it gives basically a list ofhere's what you can do and to do it.
Here's the information that we need,and here's what the expected outcome
of running a single ability is.
And that's really exciting.
In isolation, you can use it togo and create a whole bunch of
different things like commands forthe command, palette for rest, API
endpoints, CLI, things like that.
But for WordPress, you can basically boxup a bunch of these abilities, give it to
an LLM and say, LLM, go run these things.
Go.
I want to do something.
Go read through this list and choosethe right ability for the job.
And that in isolation is an agent.
So we've made it very easy to build agentsinto WordPress and around WordPress.
The second big package is the WP uh,AI client or WP client, ai, AI client.
I always mix these up.
We have tongue twister names.
This is something that allows us toimmediately and directly interface
with LLMs from WordPress and Felix.
Actually architected most of it, soI'll let him speak more about it.
But, uh, something I'm very excitedabout is that it just released a
version 0.2 0.0 yesterday, and thatincludes direct support for abilities.
So you can now provide abilities toan LLM from open AI or Anthropic or
Google or whoever you want, and say,go run these abilities and create
those agents that I just mentioned.
We also have the MCP adapter.
Matt mentioned during hispresentation version 0.3 0.0.
You can use that to take all yourabilities, connect it off to a third
party service like Claude or OpenAI,and have a AI pilot your WordPress
website through this abilities,adapted out through this protocol.
The adapter pattern is really excitingto me because it's very persistent.
It means that we can expose things outto MCP, but say MCP changes and we really
don't like it anymore, we can go andadapt out to another protocol very easily.
Then finally, all of this surfaces inthe AI experiments plugin, which is a
representation for developers on howyou can use these blocks, but it's also
something for end users to actually useAI features in WordPress, powered by
the blocks that we've created, and it isnow on the WordPress plugins repository,
and I'll let Jeff speak more aboutthat, but that is a big, big milestone.
So that's what is in 6.9, and that's whatwe said we were going to do, and we didn't
expect to do it all by 6.9, but we did.
So here we're,
so, let's, let's talk alittle bit about the, the PHP.
Do you wanna to add and talkabout what you've architected?
Uh, yeah.
So I mean the WordPress, or, I meanWPI client or WordPress AI client,
whatever you call it, um, the, theWPI client is, um, is it allows you
to communicate with any kinds ofgenerative AI models with a uniform API.
So what that means, taking a step backhere is, um, whenever any of us uses,
let's say chat, GPT or Gemini appor whatever we use in the back end,
there's some AI model running or somegroup of AI models and all of these,
they are from different, they're fromdifferent providers though, right?
Like you have Google as one of the popularproviders, OpenAI or Anthropic also,
there's three examples, but there are.
Dozens, several dozens of differentproviders that have AI models.
And I think in practice, many of us havesome preference for whatever reason.
Maybe we, we just have, wejust have started getting a
subscription with one and that'swhy we use that one all the time.
'cause that's the thing, like allof these, all of these cloud-based
providers, they are state of, theyprovide state of the art models.
They're super capable at solvingany kinds of different tasks or
doing complex research for us.
Um, they are proprietarythough, and they're paid.
So we, as WordPress, as the open platformthat we are, we cannot, we cannot,
and we should not like, um, promoteany particular one or even enforce it.
So what this WordPress, that's, that'swhere the WordPress AI client comes in
and it provides an abstraction layerwhere you can, as a developer, just
you just prompt AI and you don't needto worry what model is running behind.
So, and the way that this works inpractice is that, um, once this is,
once this is available, when thisis available on the WordPress side,
the user can, for example, configurewhichever AI provider they want to use,
or they can provide, they can configuremultiple AI providers and, um, yeah.
And then things just work like the plugindevelopers, plugin developers that want
to use this AI data WP AI client, theycan, uh, they can simply write a prompt.
And let's say for example, um, let'ssay for example, you wanna have one
of these prompts like generate thepost title based on this post content,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
That, that could be a prompt that you wanthave for like a title generation feature.
Um, and what happens under the hood,that's, that's really like this
prompt is really what you need topro all that you need to provide.
And what happens under the hoodthen is that the AI client checks
which models, which providers areavailable on this, on the concrete
WordPress side that this is running on.
And then it also determineswhich ones are best suitable to
respond to this particular query.
So that way things remain reallyagnostic, like, and like the, any,
their site owner controls which modelsthey want to use, and the plugins work
no matter which models are configured.
And that's important.
Yeah.
That's important, uh, for us to remain, toremain open and also to remain adaptable
to whatever is the latest models and thelatest different provider models that
yeah, people want to, people want to use.
Great.
And so Jeff, you've been more involvedon the agency side of building things.
So what experiments are youseeing in the wild right now?
Sure, there's some things that arepredictable, like chat based search,
uh, to parallel something thatmight be, you know, a historical
elastic press based search.
Uh, there are things that havebeen technically and highly manual,
like content distribution and, andtranslation out to, you know, multi-site
or, or different WordPress installs.
Um, and then things like leveragingin browser and local models that
are, uh, private, that are moreaffordable, uh, compared to cloud
models as, as well as for the WordPressproject that are more aligned with,
uh, the licensing of the project.
So those are some things thatare, um, that we're seeing.
And then, uh, in terms of somethingthat is really relatively new and
in line with WordPress six nine is.
Uh, leveraging the block notes andproviding feedback on content and
suggestions, so like accessibilityrecommendations or aligning to
tone of a certain, uh, brand.
And having those in notes aligned in theeditor, uh, is something that is literally
just being built right now and is prettyexciting to see people leveraging stuff
that has just been shipped in the last sixmonths with this team as well as what's,
what's, what's coming in six, nine.
So, uh, really bleeding edge right there.
Pretty exciting.
I'm still blown away that theteam started six months ago.
It feels like it's been much, much longer,but AI will say it's like dog years.
Yes.
Like one month in AI is like a
year and like normal development time.
You say six, six months in for AI time.
That's like six years.
Yeah.
And how, and so I mean, that's a great,a great point and how, how is this team
and how is WordPress going to stay,like, I guess not even keep up, but
surpass, like how is WordPress going tocontinue to push the boundary and ensure
that we are on the forefront of ai?
That's a good question.
It, it really stems back tocreating the foundational pieces
of WordPress to build AI and thenseeing what the ecosystem does.
So if you look back to WordPressitself, it gave the frameworks
to go create plugins and then youended up with humongous e-commerce
solutions and learning managementtools and things that I bet you
Matt did not expect to blossom here.
Oh my
goodness.
The stuff we saw, I, I think it allcomes back to each of us though, right?
Because what is WordPress?
It's created by each of us,some of us here in the room,
people all around the world.
And so that whole learn AI deeply thing.
Um.
I don't even think Ineed to ask it anymore.
Like just everyone'sgonna end up doing it.
And so I, I don't worry about, um,it causing a surpassing, I think it's
actually gonna embed, you know, atevery single part of everything we
do is gonna be, you know, changedin sometimes small, sometimes big
ways with people using AI tools.
That could be even just little thingslike perhaps it's like helping you
filter your spam better on your emailor like, you know, just helping you
at some part of your life and thenthat gives you more time to do a
little coding or something like that.
But it'll start to again, bepersuasive and ubiquitous.
And I love that you broughtup the open source models.
Something I, I wouldn't havepredicted was, um, you know, with the
countless billions being spent mm-hmm.
And the huge, it's, it's, it's kindof amazing seeing all the biggest
companies in the world spendingthe most money we've ever seen.
A huge perks of all of GDP growth.
It's coming from the investments inthese data centers and other things.
Um, I kind of assumed that open sourcewas gonna be, you know, years behind.
In fact, we've seen some of these opensource models catch up pretty quickly
and in fact, with a deep seek release.
Yes.
Just the other days ago.
Um, you know, the benchmarks can sometimesbe games, so, you know, benchmarks
versus real world use or whatever.
But, um, testing very, very well.
Um, so the models out of China,France, other places in the world, um.
That are open source, open weights, a lotof exciting things that are happening.
Um, so I'm very, you know, the, boththe depth and the credible things
coming from the frontier mm-hmm.
Investments and when you think of someof the smartest minds in the world are
now working on this problem combined withkind of like, you know, the open source
kind of, you know, creating some ubiquity,low cost of access, maybe creating
some innovations which then filterback into some of the frontier things.
Um, this sort of feedback loopof having the whole world kind
of working on the same thing atthe same time is pretty exciting.
And something we've seenonly a few times in history.
You know, when you think of like howthe world came together to address
COD or other things like when youkind of get like everyone working
on kind of a similar problem,like it's, we'll see what happens.
Yeah.
To add to the open source models,there's, there's very encouraging
developments happening there right now.
Like in, um, like Chrome and Edgealready have built in models in the
browsers though, that's gonna bereally powerful once this is fully
rolled out because it will mean thatanybody using this browser, these
browsers, they will just have AI modelswithout any, doing any configuration.
And these I AI models are free to use andthey are more privacy friendly because
you don't send anything to any cloud.
And that's also something that weare actively working towards to
support in the, in, in the WordPressAI client and all these, all the
surrounding projects to have to keepthings open, open minded, right?
Like we have client client sidemodels that are local to the machine
on the, on the user's machine.
We have the cloud-based models and wecan also do hybrid approaches where.
Where maybe, yeah, you can have differentideas where like you may use a cloud
model for one part, one task and theclient side model for another task.
Or you could do it so that if acloud model is not available for
the task, I use a client sidemodel or something like that.
There's different ways to combine them.
And I think the way that we areapproaching those foundational
blocks is really sets us up for beingflexible and adaptable for the future.
Like those models move so fast,the different technologies
around them move so fast.
Like James already said, like if, if MCPat some point I, I cannot predict this.
If MCP is gonna be the, thegold standard for long term,
maybe then we're already set up.
If, if tomorrow something new comesout and the ecosystem shifts towards
it, we have the abilities API, whichis our own foundational building
block, we didn't develop againstsome very specific technology.
Mm-hmm.
And that's gonna be the samewith the concrete models.
And that's, that's those two, those twobuilding blocks, the abilities API and
the WordPress AI client really, um, allowus to remain agnostic and adaptable.
Yes, I love that.
'cause it's continued flexibility.
I also, I think if you asked us a, ifyou asked me two years ago if WordPress
would have first class tooling to buildAI and agents, I'd be like, I don't know,
you know,
but now it's blog suffer, right?
Yeah.
It's just a blog.
Mm-hmm.
We do have that and it sitsdirectly besides content,
which is king in, in AI era.
So it's really fun to see.
Not just these come together,but actually build with them and
contribute to the AI experimentsplugin and just see how easy it is.
It's awesome.
Well then it's great to talkabout vision and, and what your
long-term plan is, but I think forpeople in this group or even people
watching, what are we doing for 7.0?
Like what's the immediate next step?
I have
to open my notebook of 7.0.
I mean, right.
What are we, what arewe thinking about for?
So there are, there
are a few things coming in the near futureand the long future, and I'll cover both.
Um, near term the abilities APIis going to continue to improve.
Uh, we shipped this server,half of it, but we're shipping
this client half of it in 7.0.
And that gives you complete coverageof the entire software of WordPress.
It allows us to easily inthe future, interact with AI
browsers more effectively.
Um, it's pretty impressive.
But we're also introducing asister API that sits besides the
abilities API and that's workflows.
And you might've actually seen a Easteregg in the, the code snippet from Matias
that said workflows abilities are awesome.
They're individual units of whatyou can do on a WordPress site,
but they can become really powerfulwhen you string them together
and you have more determinism.
And I know that when an email happensor when a, when a order happens in
WooCommerce, I'm gonna send an email.
These are two abilities.
I string them together and theyrun on a trigger or they run
when I command palate them.
Um, and that API is going to be a very,very powerful and interesting one.
It will also be able to be adapted out.
Exposed through MCP, um, and reallycreate a foundational piece of
WordPress to do automations and somereally interesting stuff with ai.
Um, we also have the WP AI client,that exciting thing that Felix
mentioned coming to 7.0 as well.
And the plumbing to interact with AIwill be a core piece of WordPress,
which means that everybody who buildsthese features, everybody who builds
plugins, can build in a unified way.
And that allows us to go and easilyplug into providers like Google,
but also easily have a host or anagency offer a provider of their own.
And any plugin that uses thisAPI will immediately have ai.
So I don't want to completely saywe're democratizing ai, but we
are democratizing access to AI
through this inclusion.
Um, well it's fun 'causeyou're bringing kind of like
the ethos of WordPress mm-hmm.
With some of this new technology.
Yes, exactly.
So we can kind of like, youknow, provide the access.
It's kind of cool how a buildings APIhas a lot of parallels to the sort of
plugin hook and, and filter system.
Yes.
Which was kind of the big innovationof like WordPress's plugin system.
So it's kind of like a, it feels tome like a next generation of that.
Yeah.
And it's also the big three, also, actionsin WordPress, you can trigger workflows
and abilities through actions as well.
So I think there's a lot of likenew and old merging together.
It's really, it's exciting to me.
Final on my list is the, and Jeffmentioned this, but the overlap
with collaborative editing.
So that's a very big cornerstonefeature of WordPress 7.0, phase three.
And I think when it was designed, wedidn't necessarily design it with the
intention of AI being the way AI is today,but there's a very, very natural and
helpful overlap there where collaborativee collaborative editing means there
are other entities sitting next to youon a page helping you edit and create.
And we always expected it to be people.
Right?
Again, when we announced the Gutenbergroadmap, I thought collaboration
was gonna be people, it might
be robots.
Exactly.
So I think that's a really good,also, um, roundup of this is how
WordPress wants to empower people.
It's not, we're gonna just addsparkle buttons everywhere.
We're gonna do some crazy stuff here.
It's more that we're gonna build into theway you interact with creating content,
with expressing yourself digitally andgive you more power, more control, um, and
be, make you more effective at creating.
So that overlap with collaborativeediting through block notes, through
the actual collaboration aspects,suggestions a lot coming in the future.
There I can see reallyclear coverage there.
I can also go long term if we want.
I'd love to hear long term.
I think that we have the time for it too.
Cool.
Let's go a little, what are wethinking a little longer term?
Um, and Matt, feel free to jumpin and interject, but everybody
feel free.
WordPress.
WordPress has been around for20 years and we want it to be
around for the next 20 years.
And the next 20 years looks likeWordPress remaining what it is today,
which is the center of the Open Web.
That open web is going to change.
It will move and shift and changeas AI changes the way people
consume content and create online.
But I do expect the openweb to be something that can
be a cornerstone feature.
I mentioned before content is king.
Um, AI needs content to run well.
We don't have open AI robotsflying around reporting the news.
We have to report the news.
Um, we have to manage the content.
We have to create andexpress ourselves digitally.
I was thinking a few days ago,the act of writing and publishing
is almost more important now withAI because I want my thoughts.
I want who I am and the story ofhow Abilities API was created,
which I published on my blog.
I want when people ask thatto chat GBT for it to show up.
Um, so creating these fundamentalsystems allows us to create a piece
of software that does also adapt withthe open web and remain that central
place that humans express themselves.
And that's what we expect tocontinue pushing towards with 7.0,
but also into the future as well.
And introducing these foundationalfundamental pieces to go and build really
interesting and express expressive,uh, solutions for you in a unified way.
Um, I have two asks for people,especially developers and hosts.
Um, we have introduced these blocksto be used, and the people who operate
within WordPress are the plugindevelopers, and they are the hosts.
And for the plugin developers, wereally ask you to take a look at these
abilities and use them to create AIfeatures yourself, but also expose the
existing functionality of your tools outto the AI assistance that are coming.
WordPress, the ones that can alreadyinteract through MCP, um, use the blocks.
Go and use the WP AI client to gobuild AI features into your software.
And for the developers, really trackthe WP AI client, or for the hosts,
really track the WP AI client.
Um, I can easily see a world whereall hosts, and I know that three major
hosts already will provide bundled AIcredits into their plans, which means
that you will have AI out of the boxfor any plugin that uses this API and
interacts and, and says, I will fall backto whatever PRI provider's available.
And that means AI can become a commodityand it becomes something that everybody
can use, everybody has access to.
And it really pushes us back to pluginsextending WordPress, working with AI and,
and not being this core primary feature,but just something that supercharges
the way we work with WordPress.
So those, those are the two asks there.
The final ask is for everybody togo try the AI experiments plugin.
It's on the WordPress repository as of,I think yesterday, yesterday, yesterday.
So wordpress.org/plugin/ai.
Um, that's a representation offeatures that you can actually use,
but also the blocks working together.
And that will be a way we deliver reallyimpressive features into the future.
You can also contribute to that as well.
So those are my asks.
Those are fantastic.
Ask f do you have anythingthat you'd like to say?
Uh, final,
final thoughts?
Not much to add.
I mean, yeah, try, try out theabilities API and the, the VPI client.
Let us know what everything, whether arethere anythings not working well for you.
Um, break things, try crazy prompts.
Um, and I want to add again to the,to the Abilities API really wanna
emphasize that the abilities API, ithelps us facilitate ai and this is
an AI panel, but the abilities API isrelevant for pretty much any plugin.
Uh, even if you're as a plugin developer,you don't care about using ai, you
still would, you still might wanna, um,use the abilities API to expose your
features in this standardized way thatthe Abilities API allows you to do so
that any AI integrations and WordPressthat someone else builds can use that.
And that makes your pluginbetter to the ecosystem
and the global command palette thatwas mentioned here, will US Abilities.
Oh yeah.
Right.
And Jeff, any final thoughts?
Uh, just that there's, you know,more coming in the, uh, experiments
plugin for, uh, non-technical users.
Things that are table stakesfunctionality like excerpt generation,
image generation, alt text generation,uh, slightly farther future things,
uh, like design and layout assistance.
Uh, so kind of like howTelex likes to build blocks.
Also being able to do thatin the site editor with.
Templates and patterns.
Um, and then for developerexperience, sort of tooling, uh,
there'll be an abilities, explorers.
You can, uh, see the inputs andoutputs of the abilities that
are, uh, live on your site.
Uh, there'll be an MCP demo to tryand play with, uh, the tooling there.
Uh, and then also, uh, an AIplayground just to kind of test
out how prompts work with thedifferent models you might be using.
So some things that are a bit moretechnical that are coming, some things
that are a bit more, uh, table stakes.
And then, um, some, uh, things that arein the not too far future, but coming.
Great.
And then Matt, you've alreadysaid today, learn a couple of
years ago, learn, learn deeply.
Mm-hmm.
What would you say some today fromthe, not just the community, from
the developers, from everybody, whatwould you say your final thoughts?
You know, nothing to add.
Y'all put it so beautifullyand so just thank you all.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you everyone.
So at this point, thank you.
Thank Matt.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you all.
You know, I learn so muchfrom all the people who work
in WordPress, uh, every day.
And, you know, you see it on the panel.
One of the coolest parts aboutgetting involved with WordPress or
any open source project is you get towork with all the other cool people
who are contributing and doing it.
And you'll become someone wholearns and like gets to, you know,
I get very, very inspired by sortof my colleagues, uh, both on the
volunteer and on the automatic side.
Um, every day.
So we've covered a lot today.
So, like we said, with ai, I thinkthat we're gonna be able to, not
replace, but literally augmentso much of what we're doing.
Um, you know, the AI client, theabilities, API, everything we've
been working on, um, you know, veryexcited to see what we're doing.
Um, we're gonna break for just twominutes and then head into q and a.
Does that sound good?
All right.
I've been doing this since 2003.
Some of you were in theroom in Tokyo last year.
Some of you're at the firstwork camp San Francisco in 2006.
A few folks here and we planned withlike two or three weeks of ahead of time.
Um, some of you, some contributors toWordPress weren't even born when WordPress
1.0 came out, which is really wild to me.
Um, but I just wanna say thank you.
You know, phase three is here.
We've got blocks, themes,collaboration, you know, perhaps
going into multilingual soon.
But we'll see.
Ah, if you're not a make teamyet, please get involved.
And I just wanna say thank you all.
All right.
Uh, what's that?
Matthew McConaughey say?
Yeah, McConaughey you say.
Alright.
Alright, alright.
All right.
So now for my favorite part of every stateof the word or work camp or anything,
which is the question and answers.
So we've got some mic runners around here.
We're gonna run around the room, so if youhave a question, um, let's open this up.
We took a little break soyou can think of questions.
Boy, no one wants to be the first one.
Hey, Matt, Robert Jacoby Black Wall.
Uh, I have a question about we'regetting faster and faster now.
We have more endpoints andthings, uh, to connect to with ai.
And now we also have wonderful singlepoints of failure like CloudFlare.
And how is something like CloudFlare gonnaimpact, in fact, get in the way of having
AI do those things that it wants to do?
Huh?
I'm
not sure the connection between likeCloudFlare ai, could you explain
just the edge caching and all ofthat and how that would maybe impact,
uh, ag agentic work and all that?
Oh, well I think, you know, anytimeyou have a service as sort of like
powerful and successful as CloudFlaregets adopted, and so inevitably when,
like any internet service, you know,something happens, um, you really notice.
Like when AWS East two goes down, you'relike, wow, so much of the web happened.
But I think also what happens is everytime this happens, we learn from it.
And both as you know, consumers ofthese services, you develop more
like sort of elegant failovers.
And of course you can imagine, youknow, all the engineers at the company
where something, you know, happenedto fail, which again, is gonna
happen to all of us at some point.
Um, you know, learn from that.
And so I think in technology we alwaystry to make new mistakes and just sort
of see like, uh, so every failure, everyedge case, everything that you've never
imagined is just another opportunityto, um, to find that new itch case.
And then once you build the resiliencyaround it, hopefully you know, nothing
hap you knock on wood for a little while.
You think you thank the deity tolike, you know, be like, wow, uh,
by the grace of God, go, go us.
It didn't happen to us this time.
But, um, but then, you know, youkinda see what the new pro, the new
bottlenecks are, and these things arebeing scaled and adopted so quickly.
Like the amount of traffic flowing overthe internet, the usage as you talked
about that we're gonna have with LLMs.
Um, so I guess to more go to the pointa little bit, although, you know, the
frontier models and everything, um,have incredible capabilities, um, with
things like the, you know, the AI.
Uh, sort of abstractionlayer we built in WordPress.
Um, you could have failovers.
So if you're calling one model andit's not returning in time or not
returning a results, you expect youcould fail over to a different model.
Or as you know, Felix broughtup, you know, some of these
things that are gonna be runningdirectly in the browser or others.
Um, my expectation is that, you know,you don't need to call like the multi
gigawatt, you know, X AI data center,you know, with nuclear power plants,
powering it to like maybe check yourspelling or something, you know.
So I imagine that in the future we'llactually have hundreds, if not thousands
of different specialized models thatmight be tuned for different things.
In fact, in some of our work at Automaticaround like our site builder, like
we're finding that models that are tunedspecifically for like logo creation or
other things can be essentially finetuned or smaller, you know, cheaper to
run, uh, sort of less memory, et cetera.
Um, can do more specialized tasks.
And so, you know, again, thinking ofthem like little robots that can be
specialized, these agents that youmight call for different things and the
agents are gonna talk to each other,they're gonna interact with them.
And I imagine, not unlike likewhen you load a WordPress page,
it's making, you know, dozens ofdatabase calls and calling different
functions and everything like that.
That's, uh, computing In the future,like as we use our devices, they'll
be in the background like dozensif not hundreds of different models
running to do different things.
You know, listing for what you say.
I'm not gonna say the, the catch word'cause I'll activate it for everyone, you
know, the, the hey, whatever, you know,or whatever the, uh, things that activate
the different voice assistance and, um,so yeah, that's where I think it's going.
Cool.
Thanks.
Thank you Robert.
Hey Matt.
Um, I really love the likecollaborative commenting and everything
in the editor that's coming up.
Um, I think it introduces sort ofa whole new dynamic for WordPress.
Can you maybe give us an idea of wherethat could be going in the future?
What other like, multiplayerreal time things might be coming?
Ah, well, yeah, so for those who don'tknow, the collaborative editing is
basically, um, like if you use likeGoogle Docs or Notion or one of these
sort of like things where editing a docand it becomes multiplayer as you put it.
I love putting it in a game analogy.
Um, in WordPress you'll beable to see like people editing
things and moving things.
Um, we're doing this just insideof Gutenberg right now, but I could
definitely imagine a future of whereyou could think of the entirety of WP
admin and all the things plugins arebuilding on it, having some sort of way
to have states or streaming updates sothat we have a little bit of this right
now, like, um, some things like on the.
Well, there's a commentpage, stream new things.
Now it does, if you moderate orremove stuff, it'll bring something
new in, but I don't think itbrings like a new comment in.
But for things like the P two themefor WordPress, you know, you sort of
have a real time when you, when youload a, a page in P two, which is just
kinda like collaborative, like, um,uh, think of it like a, a collaborative
realtime blog built on top of WordPress.
When a new comment comes inor an edit, it streams live.
So you kind of get this like moreinteractive way of having a conversation.
You have to reload thepage or get a notification.
So, um, now there's probably differentparts that, that could be better or worse.
Like, you know, Bo who, for thosewho don't know, leads the WooCommerce
project, which is this little opensource e-commerce plugin for WordPress,
which is now, um, I think runningon 8% of all websites or something.
8.9% of all websites are runningWooCommerce and it's doing tens
of billions of sort of goodsand services sold every year.
Um, so you could imagine something likea orders page, something like that.
Like a, a merchant sort of watchingnew orders streaming in real time
could be kind of exciting places.
And, um, so what I hope is that as wedevelop these things inside Gutenberg,
we can create the abstraction.
Just like we have with AI that allowother developers to tap into some of this.
And then, as we mentioned, the AI panel,like the idea that perhaps some of
the collaboration or feedback might becoming from sort of specialized agents.
And there's, um, some very cool thingsI've seen that the name's escaping me
at the second, but like, uh, where youcan kind of have a, a website design and
it can, you know, an agent that comesin and says, here's some accessibility
tips, or here's some, you know, copydesign tips, or here's some layout tips.
Um, you could imagine like sort ofdifferent sort of like, you know,
WaPo like bots, maybe, maybe differentflavors of WaPo coming in and suggesting
different things for your site.
So,
cool.
Thank you.
By the way, just to give a headsup, we're gonna do something
very unusual, uh, for this.
So has anyone heard of TVPN?
It stands for the technology business,uh, podcast Network, I think.
Uh, so imagine like ESPN, but for tech.
So every day they do a three hourlive stream, which is the, these
two guys, Jordan and, and Jordy, um,sort of do like A-E-S-P-N style where
they'll bring people in, you know,the GitHub conference the other day,
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.
He didn't go on CNBC orBloomberg, he went on TBPN.
So we're actually gonna patch in TBPN.
So we'll have about 20 minuteswhere it'll connect sort of our
audience to this broader, it's kindof the, the new hot show in tech.
Uh, so, we'll, we'll, it's anexperiment, so we'll see if it works.
And, you know, internet hopefully stays upand everything, but should be kind of fun.
So, we'll, we'll have some questionsfrom them, uh, that we're kind
of switching to maybe, you know,talking about some WordPress stuff
for a more mainstream audience.
So that'll, that'll come in a few minutes.
All right.
Uh, I think we got, let's go over here.
Yeah.
Uh, wait for the mic andplease introduce yourself.
Oh, I'm, uh, I'm Ray King with adomain registrar called Pork Bun.
And I'm wondering with, um, allthe changes we're seeing, which
are monumental, I think in thisperiod of time, how you feel domain
names will continue to play partin identity for people on the web.
Oh, that's such a good questionand I'm glad you asked it.
'cause you and I are probablyboth domain name enthusiasts.
Um, you know, when you think aboutA DNS and the domain name system.
Which is at the heart of the openinternet is one of the most incredible
systems that we've, we've created inthe past, you know, 40 or 50 years.
And the cool thing about a domain iswhen you own a domain, it, it's like
your, your real estate on the web.
It's the thing that truly belongs to you.
I, I've said before in previousstocks that like, you know, it's, it's
great that to be a subdomain or subdirector in someone else's domain.
Um, and, you know, we offeredthat on wordpress.com.
You can be username wordpress.com,that's free, but at the end, you're kind
of like a digital sharecropper, right?
That doesn't actually belong to you.
It's more like renting an apartmentin someone else's building.
And if they decide to kick you outof that building someday, or the
building goes outta business, allof a sudden that URL goes away, as
we've seen with countless times withservices like GeoCities and others
just disappearing from the internet.
And, um, you know, luckily we havethings like the internet archive project.
Shout out to archive.org, whichtries to like, uh, you know, which
WordPress Foundation also donatesto, and, and we just launched a
very cool internet archive plugin.
So check that out.
So there's now a, a cool new officialplugin developed, you know, with support
from automatic and internet archive,that'll actually automatically scan
all your all blog posts and updatelinks that go out of, uh, that's break
and update them to an archive.orglink on the, the way back machine.
So visitors to your, your blogpost will now see like a snapshot
of what you were linking to atthe time, even if it goes away.
But, um.
To go back, like when these thingsgo offline, um, you know, you don't
have, uh, you don't have any recourse.
So now the plus or minusthe domains is like they
expire@atautomaticallywordpress.com.
We now offer a hundred year domainplan, I suppose a hundred year hosting
plan that does some things to sort oflike ensure the continuity of that.
But there still is sort of a way ofmaintenance and I'm curious in the
future of seeing ways that even iflike the original owner of a domain is
no longer paying for it, that perhapsother people could gift or donate.
We actually have a feature likethis on wordpress.com where if for
some reason, like a site owner isno longer paying for their plan,
you could sort of gift them a plan.
So having a way that sort of justlike important books keep getting
reprinted or things, uh, ways thatwe can keep domains, um, online.
And, you know, been around the internetlong enough that I have had friends that
have passed and their domains have goingto disuse or even worse, get snatched up
by like a domain squatter or something.
So, um, that's the one thing I'd like tosee improved in domains in the future.
Uh, but I think it is a veryimportant system and everyone
in here get your domain.
If you have a kid buy their domain.
I have some friends here who had a,a beautiful child that has as their,
their gift when they were born, I wasable to get them their first name.com.
So, uh, she's not using it yet.
She's how old now?
Four.
So, you know, not using WordPressyet, although hopefully come to
some word camps in a few years.
You got mine, the AI assistant, I thinkwe're gonna jump in a little earlier now.
Oh, nice.
With the AI assistant, she mightstart playing some things or building
some games or things like that.
Like I could totally see her.
She's very precocious, smart little girl.
Um, but I hope that someday, you know,she might have a site there or use
it for her sort of portfolio or evenjust having like a little Lincoln bio
type site, you know, just a littleplace on the web that belongs to you.
So when people search, they'renot just seeing your profiles
on different social media, but aplace that actually belongs to you.
My sister, that's your domain.
Was it?
Charlene dot mullen weight.comhas a nice little one pager.
It's like a little bio links to a fewother places and things she do does, I
think every person on the internet shouldhave one of these actually gravita,
which is the globally recognized avatar,service built WordPress and other things.
Um, we now support domain mapping.
So it's a very, very simple way tocreate like a nice one pager with some
links and, you know, you can link yourdifferent verified social media profiles.
You can link to sort of, uh, youknow, crypto wallets, all sorts of
different things, um, all on one page,and now you can map a domain to it.
So I'm hoping also to see likedomains get built into more things.
I love the new services like Blue Sky, youknow, actually allow you to map a domain.
There's a username.
So on Blue Sky I am at MAtt, which is kind of fun.
Um, and so, you know, seeing thissort of like globally namespace, which
is actually about to open up again,we're about to have some new TLDs.
So for the first time in how many years?
Uh, 2012.
Last round next week, 20 20, 20 12was, uh, the last round of new TLDs.
TLDs was after the dot.
So originally there's like.com, dot org,dot net and a bunch of country ones.
Um, and then in 2012 there startedto be all these new ones, uh, blog
like.blog, which is, uh, one of ours.
But, you know, do engineering.lawyer.
AI is actually a country,a very lucky country.
What is it?
Anguilla.
So there's like a TV as well thathappened to be a country code, but you
know, there's all these other ones anduh, now in 2026 there's gonna be a new
round of these, new dot somethings.
What was nice about that is as, asyou know, like the dot coms, some
of the good ones got taken early on.
Um, so opening up these new name spacesand also people getting normalized to use
these other dots, somethings I think isreally, really cool 'cause everyone should
be able to have a memorable domain name.
Cool.
How we doing on timing withthe podcast and everything?
We're almost ready.
Almost ready?
Yes.
Cool.
So maybe time for one more quick question.
Yeah.
Hello.
My name's David Prager.
I work with Automatic.
Um, so I was thinking about what James thepage was saying about content and humans
creating content and everyone has a blog.
You gotta go create the news, you gottapedal your wares and pedal your services.
But the age agentic web iskind of changing some of that.
People used to talk about SEO and nowyou're talking about how do you get
discovered by all these frontier modelsand how do you see website creation,
website design as it relates to howpeople will be using AI agents to
do some of their biddings for them?
Ooh, this is a very interesting areawhere I think we're just at the very,
very beginning, so interrupt me whenwe're, when we need to switch over.
But, um, there's some fun stuffhappening here, I think, uh, para
Al's new company called Parallels,which is sort of thinking about like
what it looks like for an en web.
So, and we're seeing itin our traffic patterns.
Cloud flares talked about this, Ithink I've talked about it publicly
before, where the amount of trafficcoming from AI bots crawling is now
dwarfing some of the human traffic.
And this is just with some of them doingthe indexing of the web, much less sort of
the real time interactions that'll happen.
Like when you, you know, ask your chatbot to do something and then visits a
website can where there's new thingsaround like checking out and commerce
being integrated directly with ai.
Um, so, you know, in WordPress we, wewere sort of vamping on some of the
things thinking about for the future.
One thing I've been wondering about is a,a cool feature of WordPress is actually
every webpage that you visit actuallyhas, um, if you sort of twiddle the
query string, you can actually get, uh,a feed representation of that and it kind
of goes to the feed engine WordPress.
So you can get a R ss twoversion of it or, you know, atom
version or r ss 9.2 or whatever.
And it basically allows you to createlike a different representation.
So you've got kinda the HTML pagethat gets served to humans, but,
uh, Bach could in theory connectrequest a sort of XMO version.
Um, you know, something that we could addto this feed engine is a markdown version.
Some people started to experiment thiswhere you essentially get like either
with a sort of varies header http headeror requesting like a.md version of a
webpage could be something that, um, issort of, uh, smaller and easier to parse.
So there's often, with a lot of theAI models, there's sort of these
context windows or token lengths.
So essentially distilling down the sortof meat of a webpage or a blog post.
So it's sort of like barest form, whichmarked down as a beautiful sort of
text version of um, could essentiallyallow webpages to be ingested by AI
things in a more efficient manner.
And, uh, something I could definitelysee as building into 7.0 or 7.1.
This is kind of just an idea right now.
It's more of in the notebook,mostly notebook phase.
But, um, something I've been noodling onis how we can sort of make different, uh,
representations of websites accessible.
Um, and of course this all needsto be balanced with sort of like
different websites might have differentmonetization or business models.
You know, uh, I'm very much in the, inthe camp that, um, you know, James talked
about or I think, uh, Gordon bloggedwhere like, I want my thoughts and my
thinking to be part of the trainingof, of, uh, these AI models sort of
part of the future super intelligences.
Um, but other folks might monetizeby people visiting the website.
So what does that look like?
Um, what are ways we can sort of startto embed micropayments and some of
the stuff, you know, micropaymentsis kinda like Linux on the desktop.
It's always been something that'slike always right around the corner.
But Linux on the desktopis actually happening now.
There's some very cool stuff likethe, is it Archy project, you know,
with DHH and some other cool thingswhere some fun things happening.
And actually I think we now are startingto get some things with like stable
coins, uh, where you could actuallyhave things that look a lot more like
micropayments are always, and I knowthere's a lot of folks at AI Labs and,
and folks like, you know, productscompany that are thinking about, you
know, if we're answering a query orsomething, like we can actually perhaps
attribute how much of that came fromlike, different websites and if they're
registered or like sort of registerperhaps in like a royalty like fashion,
not unlike, you know, as cap BMI do formusical rights or other things that sort
of licensing other creative works mightbe able to attribute and perhaps even
pay out, uh, sort of different creators.
So it's the early days of this, and inthe beginning so much like when streaming
started, everyone was like, ah, uh, youknow, used to sell an album for 1799 and
now I'm just getting pennies per stream.
But over time, if you look at thetrends, like the music business is
making more than ever, or, you know, in,in newspapers and in media they talked
about, you know, uh, print dollarsbeing replaced by digital pennies.
But now for, you know, some likeNew York Times, like the digital
subscriptions are driving.
All the revenue growth and everything.
So we might see a dip or somesort of adapt adaptation as
these technologies start to beadopted the first couple years.
But I think the long term, there'sgonna be way more usage, may way more
adoption and hopefully way more sortof, um, sort of abundance to go around.
And that's even before the singularity.
And you know, money just startsto not matter 'cause we all get,
you know, everything all the time.
One more minute.
Cool.
I think we had a questionup here, Jonathan.
Hi, I'm Jonathan Deros.
I'm a work at Blue House.
There's a five for the future contributor.
And my question is, well, to stage it,one of the things I've been noticing
lately and the things that I'm mostexcited about with AI is, um, I
categorize it as learning and empowerment.
And with that I've seen a trend of peoplestarting to, um, take more ownership
and the things that they do and they.
Own and they take on themselves.
And from the perspective of the web andall these wall walled gardens that we've
become accustomed to over the past decade,um, besides the importer and exporting
our WordPress sites, what ways, uh, whatobservations do you have around this and
what other ways can WordPress help withthis trend that seems to be out there
of reclaiming our content and our stuff?
Huh, that's a good question.
Just before you pass on the mic, like,I'm curious, like, is there something
in mind or something that you'veseen that sort of like inspired this?
Um, I
think SS is becoming morepopular again, in some ways.
It's kind of funny.
Yeah.
And, and that's such a, you know,well established older technology.
And so that's really nice to see,especially where, uh, there's some
new feed readers popping up and sinceGoogle got rid of theirs, there hasn't
been a good replacement for that.
Um, but then just in general, peoplebeing able to, like I said, just learn
and then that empowers them to, um, haveeducated opinions and, and resources that
they can publish themselves on things.
Um, and physically I'm also seeingpeople are recognizing that the
trades are, uh, more valuable again.
And so people are starting to see,oh, a plumber is an electricians is
a good path, uh, to earn a living.
Yeah.
Um, and that's from.
Whether it's AI type stuff or whetherit's just frustration with society and
the way things, certain things are going.
Um, but I think they're allkind of connected in some ways.
So I'm, I'm just curious ifyou have any WordPress related
observations to that effect.
Well, and it's funny you brought up RSS,so I think of technology sometimes, like
you shouldn't throw away your old clothes'cause they come back in fashion Again.
SS coming back and actually very exciting,you know, the inventor of RSS and one of
the OG bloggers, Dave Weiner has gottenvery active in the WordPress community
and he's building like alternativeposting clients and it's very fun.
I actually got to see him speak atWord Camp Canada a few weeks ago, which
was like an amazing, uh, word camp upin, was it Ottawa, um, that I visited.
And, um, well incredible set ofspeakers, but also, you know, to
have sort of the, one of the creatorssort of innovators of like blogging
and RSS and everything like that.
Um, sort of engaging with WordPress.
Um, check it out.
Uh, Dave's done actually some greatblogging about, um, sort of why WordPress
matters and everything like that.
So his site is scripting.com, but if youjust google like Dave Weiner WordPress,
um, you'll see some of the writing there.
So, um, I think, you know, when you, whenyou go back to the, I love the Jess pages
quotes where like, it's harder to predictthe future, but maybe easier to look
at the things that aren't gonna change.
So for Amazon, he always talked aboutlike, there's no day when people are gonna
say, I would like my packages slower.
So investments they make and like,you know, and the countless, you know,
logistics they've invested in and likethe shipping networks and the trucks
and all the fulfillment centers andeverything, like that's a long-term bet.
That's now, you know, in some places Ican now order something and it's showing
up literally like hours later, whichwhen you imagine like the early days of
like ordering from catalogs or thingslike that, like you order, it shows up,
you know, weeks later you sort of forgetyou ordered it and you're, you're lucky
when the doorbell rings and, and nowit's like sort of this instant thing.
Um, in WordPress, I like to think ofthe things that aren't gonna change.
And so, um, I think freedomand agency freedom is so at the
core of everything that we do.
Um, so our commitment to open sourceand, you know, enabling it not just
in our words, but the actions andthe sort of like constitution of
the license of open source, um, Ithink is not gonna go outta style.
In fact, perhaps evenbecome more important.
Um, I think things like user controland privacy, which privacy is kind
of like an embedded into that.
Um, again, a long-term trend thatI'd be very comfortable with our sort
of principles and investments there.
And also how sort of our coretechnology stack, uh, goes to it.
And, um, you know, the final thingI'll, I'll say is like, you know,
free people and community building.
So, um, I, when I speak to entrepreneursor or other folks building things, I
like to say don't just build software.
Don't just build a product.
Try to build a movement.
You know, build somethingthat people can believe in.
Something that's more than just whateveryou're doing, but actually aspires
to a higher goal, um, or principleand, you know, make it people first.
So that kinda like person to person.
What we do at the work camps, whatwe do at events like this, which
is, you know, this part is fun, thetalking, but my favorite is before
and after everyone, like mingling andmeeting people, or I love seeing like
folks I know that don't know eachother yet meet for the first time.
And that's sort of like Sparkor fri that gets created from
those interactions or collisions.
Um, I think it's one ofthe best parts of it.
So, you know, I'm sure there's a fewmore principles we could think of,
but um, those are a few that in theWordPress world at least, I think are
gonna remain, um, uh, not gonna change.
We hot mic.
Welcome.
About to come on the screen.
All right, well little drum roll y'all.
Y'all all about to experienceTVPN for the first time.
Our audience, we are streaming on them.
They're streaming on us.
Ah, folks.
Bob, too.
Fantastic.
How are you doing?
Howdy, howdy.
Uh, thank you so much for, I know this isa little non-traditional, so we're, it is.
Love it.
We're kind of like two hours into like ourbig annual address, the state of the word.
It's kinda like our state of union speech.
And, um, but thank you so muchfor allowing us to connect them.
I'm kind of imagine a lot offolks in the room have never
heard or seen TV VPN before.
Fantastic.
So this will bring a lot of new folksinto your world and I'm excited for some
of your world to learn about workforce.
Yeah,
yeah.
Give me the state of the word.
Uh, and then also I want your,your personal word of the year.
We've been debating what theword of the year should be.
Ooh.
Uh, so state of the word and I'llsay the state of the word is strong.
Okay.
There we go.
That's good.
Let's hit the gong.
We're hitting the gong for that one.
The strong state of the word.
Uh, congratulations.
We actually just did a liverelease of WordPress 6.9.
So WordPress does majorreleases three times per year.
We were able to do it right here on stage.
We had a little button that we pushed.
We gotta get it gone next time.
I love it.
That was, uh, that was pretty fun.
Don't worry, I didn't just ship it again.
It's, but um.
You know, uh, one of the things aboutWordPress is, is it's a, it's not
just built by one company, but it's acommunity of WordPress, 6.9, over 900
contributors from all over the world,different countries, different languages,
different companies all coming together.
And so that was pretty exciting.
Uh, my word of the year, and actuallya thing we were just talking about
is I'm going to choose freedom.
Uh, so, you know, powerful as technology,like starts to influence more and
more of our lives, you know, how wetravel, who we date, the things we
learn, the news we're supposed to, um,you know, the sort of freedoms that
are embedded in open source license.
I like to refer to open sourcelicenses, sort of like a
bill of rights for software.
Um, gives you inable rights that nocompany or person can take away from you.
And that freedom and agency I think isreally, really important and something
that, um, I think, you know, astechnologists or builders that we should
try to embed into everything that we do.
Give us an update on beeper.
I was super fascinating.
I was super fascinated by that product.
Uh, I love, I love walled gardens.
I also love tearing downthe walls of gardens.
Uh, it seems like a, a good shotacross the bow of the, uh, the
iMessage, uh, walled garden.
Uh, how's the progress going there?
Are you using theservice personally daily?
Are we gonna see a lot of growth there?
Um, well, obviously I'm using it daily.
Um, so I would think of it not as like areplacing a wall of garden, but more like
allowing your gardens to come together.
Um, so I'm sure you like me.
I have friends on lots of differentnetworks and some of them always
love to use WhatsApp and someof 'em always love to use, you
know, Instagram or LinkedIn dm.
Sometimes I even get someinteresting stuff there.
Um, and I hate it when I missthese messages, you know, because,
you know, checking all thedifferent apps sometimes, or in the
notifications, I might miss something.
So think of it not unlike how emailclients, you know, can bring in
lots of different email accounts.
Beeper takes all the differentnetworks where your friends
already are and maps 'em together.
Um, now the plus and minus is that you're,it's not gonna replace the networks.
Like, I still keep all the differentsort of specialized messaging apps
because like for example, if someonesends you an Instagram story, when
you click on that, you're gonnawanna load Instagram, for example.
So I think of it as complimentaryand hopefully even increasing
the usage in a very small way.
Right now it's, it's pretty nascent,but in the future, think of it as
like serve a different interface.
So you might still have like thededicated apps, but then having
this all in one inbox that youcan sort of manage everything.
Uh, tag people have folders and doescool features like schedule messaging
across all platforms, or even justlike weird heuristics that are pretty
simple to do, but like, show me allthe, not, don't just show me unread,
but show me all the people I've messagedthat haven't messaged me back yet.
Oh yeah, sure, sure.
Uh, we, we've talked tosome young hackers, some
startups, uh, who are building.
You know, sort of Bieber competitorsand their whole value prop is like,
we've figured out a way to getit into the iMessage ecosystem.
Uh, do you think that, uh, we needa new regulation there or some
sort of law change or some resultto actually open up iMessage?
Or do you think that, uh, withenough tricky hacking it can be done?
Um, well, technically,uh, it's, it's not hard.
Well, it is hard, but it's hard.
It's very possible to reverseengineer these networks.
Yeah.
Um, however, as we saw with sortof a previous iteration of beeper,
if, uh, the network really, reallydoesn't want you to do that, um,
it's probably not good to pick afight with a trillion dollar company.
Yeah.
So, um, perhaps these things might happenthrough open source or something, but as
a commercial company, I think ultimatelyyou have to be somewhat respectful
and try to compliment these networks.
Um, so how beeper works today is we don'tsupport iMessage on the mobile or Android.
Um, in theory we could, butApple has indicated that's
something they don't want.
We do support on the Mac OS clients.
We have a way to integrate with sortof iMessage using some APIs that
are available on Mac Os and so on.
Mac os we can bring in your iMessage.
Um, but again, I'm building thisfor the long term and we are
a commercial company as well.
So, um, you know, we, we wanna workwith the networks and, um, you know,
perhaps there can be, uh, regulationslike the European DMA or things
that can encourage interoperability.
Um, but.
Ultimately, I think that the, the sortof people who run these networks have
to see a longer term benefit for themand for things like, um, you know,
some of the other networks I mentionedthat people works with, I think, um,
their business model and everything,the increased usage is really useful.
Them I think for today.
Apple's business model of, particularlyin the us kind of the lock in effect
to the device business, which isof course where they make, uh, a
lot of money from iMessage probablyindicates that and less forced to,
I, I doubt, uh, they will adopt, uh,sort of iMessage interoperability.
Uh, but who knows, sort of like they usedLightning for a while and eventually got
USBC and all of our lives got better.
Um, who knows what'llhappen in the future.
Talk about links on the internet.
I feel like we're at a point in timewhere social media platforms are
trying to keep users in, in theirown applications so that they can
monetize them to the fullest extent.
Meanwhile, you have LLMs, which areultimately doing a lot of the same thing.
They're taking content from all overthe internet, trying to keep users
in the individual applications.
Uh, feels like WordPress in, in manyways is, uh, uh, making moves to kind
of like almost fight back against that.
I might have that incorrect, but Ifeel like it's important if you're
running a business independentlyonline, it's great to have people like.
On your own website so you can developa, a deep, uh, relationship with them.
Uh, but what, what is your view on that?
We're very much anchoredaround X as a, as a business.
Obviously X has had, uh, issues,uh, with links or, you know,
chosen to, um, demote them in thealgorithm over the last couple years.
But, uh, give us kind of thestate of the union on, on links.
That's a broad one.
Well, I will say X is actuallya great example and I've, I've
talked to Nikita about this.
So they now, um, they've shifted some ofthe balancing of links and they now have
this really nice in sort of app browser.
So you've probably noticed thatnow that when you load a link, you
actually still have the ability tolike, like, and re blog and everything.
And I think that's kinda the future.
Um, so I, I do think that there, youcan have things that are complimentary
'cause so much of the like great contentand everything is more on this open web.
It doesn't have to be likefully embedded in an app.
Um, but that is sort ofa technological change.
So I would say actually point to Xas someplace where I think things
are going in the right direction.
Although I do agree that sort of.
Time when links got really de boostedand everyone had to do it as like a
reply was kind of weird and sucked.
Um, yeah.
So for, for WordPress publishers,you know, we support so many
different types of websites anddifferent types of websites, I think
might have different motivations.
So for example, um, a popular pluginfor WordPress is called WooCommerce.
It's the e-commerce plugin.
It actually runs on about 8.9% ofall websites in the world are now
running this e-commerce plugin.
You can think of it likea open source Shopify.
And when you, if you're sellingsomething, a merchant, um, you don't,
you just wanna sell the product.
You don't, might not necessarily care thatsomeone comes to your website to buy it.
So something new things that arehappening with, in partnership with AI
and others where we're allowing productsto actually be like browsed and bought
inside of the LLM are pretty exciting.
Um, I also think that the incentivesof these, uh, open source chat
bots in particular, um, are verycomplimentary to the open web.
So for example, like if you're onAmazon, Amazon really wants you to say,
or eBay or Etsy or something like that.
They want you to stay in theirmarketplace on their system.
But when you think of how Google worksand sort of the growth of Google and
the open web, you know, they, they havetheir search pages, but they also would
link out, and that was whole part oftheir business model and how they grew.
Um, we're seeing thatwith the chatbots as well.
And in fact, something I talked abouta little bit earlier is that the
traffic from bots, both from themcrawling, but also user initiated
actions is exploding and has alreadysurpassed sort of human traffic.
And it'll be interesting to seewhere that goes in the future.
So, you know, there's never a bettertime, I think to invest in having a
domain, but also invest in publishing.
And, you know, just like you might have adirect relationship, like for example, I
suppose I could get like a, you know, chatGPT to summarize today's TBPN episode.
But it's more exciting to watch it.
I think that creator's developing adirect relationship and brand is, is
gonna be, um, part of the future as well.
Very, very cool.
Well, there's so many morethings that I want to ask.
Yeah.
But, uh, I know you're in the midstof, of your own presentation, so,
uh, thank you for, for tuning in.
Come back on, uh, soon.
And, uh, thank you for having us.
The, the view is spectacular as
well, so it's a pleasure to meet.
I love to come down and hang out.
One, we're, I'm in LAnext, so thank you so much.
That'd
be fantastic.
Let's do it.
Thanks so much.
We'll talk to you soon.
Great chatting, cheer.
Have a good rest, rest of your day.
See you.
Bye.
They, they have this fun thingwhere they, they do really cool ad
reads, so for all their sponsorsand everything, they'll like go
into like an ad read in the middle.
So, and as you see, they have thesort of tickers and everything.
Um, very cool.
Show.
Check it out if youhaven't seen it before.
TBPN Oh and Cool.
That was cool.
That was Jason Freed from Basecamp.
I think they're launchingsomething today as well.
So he just got on.
Um, cool.
So how are we doing ontime and everything?
All right, well.
Um, this has been a very exciting day.
We've seen so much amazing,uh, sort of things launch.
Um, it has been quite the year,uh, you know, had some highs and
lows, a rollercoaster every a year.
Um, you know, I've, I've seen this acrossthe community for me personally as well.
But coming out at the end of it, it isso amazing, uh, to see like, you know,
in the tough times, that's actuallywhen people come together, I think.
And to see the WordPress community,uh, the things we built and shipped the
AI team going from Genesis six monthsago to like all the amazing things
that are shipping 6.0 and with a veryexciting 7.0 right around the corner.
I won't announce a date yet,but call it early next year.
Um, we've got some fun things in mind,so let's keep building together, hack
the planet, keep hacking together, um,you know, fight for freedom, fight for an
open web and I will see you all online.
Check the number.
Oh, and check the number.
Wait, what is the numberof WordPress downloads?
So we did the live release, not downloads,but 700,000 sites are running 6.9.
Over 700,000 sites havealready updated to WordPress.
6.9. Wow.
So, and just the time we've been talking,700,000 sites are, I'll check it.
So
see y'all.