Right.
Hello everyone.
Hello.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining.
So whether you're here with us in person or tuning in from across
the globe, welcome and thank you 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 serving as the executive director of the
WordPress project, and I stood in front 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 deepened my belief in what this software can do.
I've met people using WordPress to unlock new careers.
I've met contributors who started a single translation or forum post and ended up,
or are now leading major pieces of the project in latam Europe and the states.
I've seen students get access to WordPress tools and start building
faster than we could ever imagined.
I've watched communities build in public, resolve disagreements
in the open and collaborate across languages and time zones.
And it's not always easy, 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 people learn by doing and lead by showing up.
And today's a big day.
Uh, it's the first time we'll be releasing a new version of
WordPress live at State of the Word.
Woohoo.
Yeah.
So stay tuned for that and we'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's built for collaboration.
The kind of progress you can feel 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 really started 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 tools that support contributors and site
builders and not replace them.
So some of them are here with us today, and you're gonna hear more
about their work later in the show.
But at its core, WordPress is 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, to corporation, from Lagos to London.
WordPress is powering ideas and unlocking possibilities for millions of people.
And it works because it belongs to all of us and those who contribute.
And now I'd like to welcome someone who's been contributing for more
than 20 years, and as automatic celebrates its 20th anniversary and
WordPress moves into its third decade.
I'd like to welcome Matt Mullen 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, I don'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 all around the world and everything.
So, ah, gosh, it's, uh, it's so good to be back.
Like, you know, to think back, this was a original screenshot of WordPress.
You know, it launched WordPress started with just a blog post,
you know, that I posted that.
Then Mike Little commented on a day later, by the way, it's a belief
that publishing should be free, you know, over two decades of it.
Spearing, shipping, scaling, and it still feels 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 first blog 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 over 40% of the web today.
Um, also automatic, you know, the for-profit that I was lucky to start
with some folks, uh, a few years, a WordPress, uh, is now 20 years old.
And it's very exciting to be able to sort of build a company that
tries to show how is a conscious capitalism, like how for-profits
and open source can work together in a way that, uh, makes both better.
In a way that's not, uh, sort of trading off open source ideals, but actually
like, uh, embracing the nature of open source, um, as it grows and scales.
So let's zoom out a little bit to see what the community's built over the past year.
So in the big picture, we're at 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 think of all the, uh, billions of dollars.
So the number two here is Shopify with 6.8.
So think of the billions of dollars of advertising marketing r and d engineering
that's being spent by all the proprietary companies that are trying to lure people
away from open source, essentially.
And so with open source, we have the 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, serving as a counter to what are the more, you
know, proprietary, taking away your freedom 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 some headwinds, 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 in Japan, 83% of the CMS market share.
Which is, I guess it was good that 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 our community, and, you know, being, uh,
responsible to our core values, that open source software earns the right to become
sort of a default that people like to use.
And instead of like building yet another wheel, we can say, okay,
let's, you know, share these sort of primitives together and then build
interesting stuff on top of it.
Um, it has been a global shift in the adoption of WordPress,
which, uh, is interesting.
Japanese is now the second most popular language 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 of state of the words and word camps all
around the world, it's fun to sort of activate the different local communities.
It's not just about Japan.
Um, this is also the first year that we 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 powerful about this sort of community approach
of WordPress is that it can be sort of everywhere, everything all at once,
you know, to reference the movie.
Um.
Where we're breaking some new ground as well and getting some new, uh, uptick
is actually in the top 1000 sites.
So one of the magical things about WordPress is the democratizing
technology is it can be used for a small individual blog, which is
a few post, but also powering some of the top websites in the world.
And we are now at 49.4% of the top 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 the smallest sites are available for free.
Anyone can download it, run it with playground, you can even
boot it up in your browser.
And, um, we're trying to change how things are being built as well.
So the health WordPress is really in, in the ecosystem.
And like I said, like the, the core software is cool,
but what's really amazing is what'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 is going, we're at 2.1 billion downloads
of plugins by the end of year.
And, uh, looking at theme side of things, there's been over 1500 themes
released this year alone, bringing us to over 14,000 themes total.
So you add it all up as 74,000 plugins and themes available to make
WordPress as individual and unique as every single person in the world.
And here in this room is, we've seen over a 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 of now 921 contributors to WordPress 6.8.
So that's the pipeline, the future of the project right there.
Uh, our first release this year, 6.8, Cecil racked up 79.5 million
downloads since April, which is up 13% from what we saw last year.
Every one of those downloads represents someone choosing WordPress, choosing
open source and choosing to build something, which is very exciting.
So that brings us today the launch of 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 fixes for a really stable jam packed release
that we'll dig into a little bit of later.
But we have a few of those contributors here today have
flown in from all over the world.
And, uh, we're gonna do, I've got a little button here.
We're gonna do something we've never done before, 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 the hidden heroes of WordPress.
Like they don't get on stage as much as I do and things like that.
But, um, this is, and you know, this doesn't represent everyone, but it's
so exciting to be able to have some of the folks, uh, that lead the releases,
that do the hidden work of shipping software to 40% of all websites several
times, usually three times per year with, uh, you know, auto upgrades going
out to millions of billions of sites.
We'll maybe check in on the download 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 flywheel of open source contribution looks like.
You get contributors, users, creators, you know, we're going from strength to
strength if there were 2 billion plug and downloads, countries like Japan
with the 80 80th percentile contributors remaining imagining what's impossible.
What's possible, one line of code at a time.
But what happens when you take these, uh, sort of like different
things that we're all doing?
And of course it couldn't be a presentation 2025
without talking about ai.
So in 2022, actually before the release of chat, GPTI asked the
WordPress community to learn AI deeply.
And what I didn't know then, what no one realized, which is how crazy
the next couple years would be.
We're actually just a couple days away from 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 these models is kind of insane.
So we've gone from the launch of 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 the nineties, like buying the Photoshop books
and like, you know, spending like hours just to remove the clouds or add clouds
to like a, a picture in the background was like 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 literally talk to the image and say, Hey,
add some clouds, move this around.
It's like the things that l alums have gotten amazing at is, um, kind of insane.
And the obviously like, like humanity, like beautifully flawed.
It's kind of amazing that we've created a form of coding, which is like,
just like us, like non-deterministic.
Um, but the thing that is magical at like language translation, which you now have
the real time language translation in the AirPods, you have the image generation.
Um, some of the coding stuff is, uh, pretty amazing.
So with AI and WordPress, we're trying to take an approach where we're
empowering and not replacing people.
And I really think that humans and AI working together are gonna enable, um,
so much of what, uh, we're gonna see.
So we've got a little bit of a video here 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 to click for this to play.
Okay, here we go.
So what's happening now is I want 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, talks to the MCP server, tells it how
many active plugins, how much space it's using, and tell me about my
top post and give me the top fuse and what should I blog more about?
So it's hitting jet packs stats and gathering all the stats.
And so you can now, like the ais can now interact through with your blog
in a way that's pretty exciting.
Um, so the MCP adapter that's coming to WordPress, um, allows us
to connect to all the different, uh, you know, AI systems out there.
And it's our first application of our new Abilities API.
And we're gonna talk, we're gonna have a whole panel on AI in a little bit.
Um, it exposes these ai, uh, abilities externally in a standardized
way, so any MCP compatible tool can understand and newsom this
adapter pattern means WordPress can participate in AI workflows without
duplicating logic or creating separate integrations for every a i platform.
So you can now connect a WordPress installation to properly tools like
Claude Copilot and many other platforms that support MCP and MCP aside over
in the terminal and IDE, Claude Code Cursor client, and other ways
to change code for the good means.
You can refactor projects, search code bases, automate task run scripts with
W-P-C-L-I, alongside the AI agent.
These LLM CLI and development environments sync up with legacy automation,
write, test and deploy a plugin.
Now it generates, integrates generative AI with classic commands.
We're bringing the best of both worlds and a whole new scale and velocity.
So Josh just happening in chat interfaces CLI are IDs and WordPress integrations.
Summer, I got early access to comment.
Perplexes adjunctive browser gave me 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 are gonna play out, whether how much of
AI is gonna be embedded in the app.
Probably with things like image editing or translation and how much is gonna
be sort of an agent that exists at your sort 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 think we 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 that we're gonna do in 2026 is creating
some benchmarks and evals that all the 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 perhaps actually 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 AI assistant lives right inside of WordPress.
You just can describe a site idea and 60 seconds later you've got a
fully functional WordPress site.
It's not a template or site.
It actually like writes your about page, your blog post
troubleshoot errors automatically.
This is from one of the hosting companies that's, uh, big supporter of
WordPress, Elementor, and we actually have the CEO of Elementor here today.
Kioni and Miriam coming in from Israel.
Uh, so it doesn't just, uh, replace designers, it accelerates them.
So their ai co co-pilot suggest tariff sections and they actually
have three, uh, different forms of AI they're gonna be doing.
So we had a great meeting yesterday talking 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 adjust tone, to edit your text.
There's all sorts of exciting things happening.
Yos is using AI for keyword clustering.
You know, things that you used to have to 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 builds a fully functional site for you.
And you know, when it works, it's magical.
Sometimes it gets things a little bit wrong, but we're also like,
you know, the models are getting better like every couple of months.
And so like everything that you use is the worst version of
it that you're ever gonna see.
So just imagine this getting better and better and better.
It's a bunch more like AI engine and AI power turn WordPress into
automated conversational platforms.
You have e-commerce stores like now generating better
product images and other things.
So there's like so much happening.
And I do believe that AI is kind of the biggest technological
revolution I've seen in my lifetime.
It's on par with kind of electrification.
So think of it as affecting every single industry, every single
business, everything in the world is gonna be, uh, influenced and
augmented and accelerated by ai Ag.
You know, for us, I'm very excited about 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 that we've, uh, invested in, and particularly
with the plugin, we'll talk a little bit 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 many countless, millions lines of code
are across that 74,000 plugins and themes and WordPress core itself.
Um, so AI being able to help us scan that code, find vulnerabilities, fix things,
suggest things, um, is I, I think, gonna really accelerate the security of the
web and the speed of our developments.
And finally, I, I sort of dropped 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 it something that you want, and it, uh,
it builds it and it can build things.
You can even ask it to build like an entire doom game
inside of Gutenberg Block.
You can see at Telex do automatic ai, and I'm gonna share a few world real world
examples from our friend Nick Hamey, who's using 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 a pricing, uh, comparison thing.
So you see Telex is working here.
It just generated this entire pricing comparison thing.
So again, something that a developer used 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 GY m.com, which I guess is like a, a store
that he has pulls data from Google places, 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 a block, so every post card on the
homepage has like same height.
Um, this calendar integration.
So with Telex, he was able to build something that pulled in his
Google Calendar data and was also optimized for mobile usability.
And finally, Allego price calculator.
So I guess part of his business is like buying and selling people's Legos.
And so he's got something in there where you can kind of put your Lego in there
and it'll tell him like what price he'll buy it at and discounts and, you know, um.
So is again, things that you used to have to like hire developers, do.
Custom software like this would've cost thousands, tens of thousands of
dollars to build even just years ago.
Um, we're now able to do in a browser for pennies.
It's kind of insane.
Um, if you wanna check out some other cool things that have been happening, we have
Tammy Lister, who's actually here today.
Hi Tammy.
Uh, she did something very fun called Block Tober Fun, which is every single
day in October, she built a new block using telex, including a playable
askie version of Tetris, A block that's an actual terminal window, a
roadmap, block matrix effect, and a trick or treat block for Halloween.
So, democratizing democratization of technology is not just about
smart eye, it's about like letting people do things, have access
to the sort of creative energy.
And I'm so excited to see because every single one of us has like, that
sort of unique spark, has our unique ideas, and seeing that unleashed is
gonna be a very, very, very exciting time to be aligned, uh, alive.
So, um, WordPress is about community and 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 to talk about some of the things we've
been investing in to invest in the next generation of WordPress.
Fantastic.
Around policy.
Thank you.
And it's just, it's great to care about, uh, all the progress in
our ecosystem and how AI amplifies what's possible in so many ways we
couldn't have imagined where we are or even where we're headed with this.
Um, but behind all the tech, it's people and who people are who
make WordPress happen one day, one release, and one event at a time.
And word camps are one of the most important ways that we bring people
together to share, to learn, to celebrate what the community makes possible.
Oops.
And this year we broke some pretty amazing ground with 81 word camps
spanning over 39 countries organized by over 5,200 volunteers and reaching over
a hundred thousand people in person.
Yeah.
Yes.
That's unreal.
And we actually still have 16 lined up, so before the end of the
year, we're gonna take it to 97.
Wow.
So that's before you factor in WordPress 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 of events by over a third in a single
year is absolutely incredible.
So hats off to everyone involved in making that happen.
And these aren't just conferences.
We know that they're where community happens.
Where contributors meet and where connections really turn into action.
And word camps are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to
bringing folks together to learn and to make stuff with WordPress.
And of course not everyone can get to Word Camp, right?
So that's why it's so important that there are more ways to
connect and to pick up the platform and run with it from anywhere.
And that's where learn.wordpress.org comes in learn.wordpress.org for more
than 1.5 million users this year.
And the engagement quality improved in a very meaningful way.
After WordCamp us the average engagement, time per user increased by
32%, which tells us that students and contributors 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, and we're making sure that they can.
wordpress.org reach more than 113 million users, and the new users grew by 38%.
So that tells us the top of the funnel is expanding.
The more people are discovering WordPress for the first time.
Right?
And so the data shows us something that's very 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 the path is not always clear.
And this is exactly why education matters.
learn.wordpress.org, the WPCC, WordPress credits our student organizations, they're
giving people a structured way to go from curious visitor to confident builder.
And once people reach the right resources, they stay and they learn.
And the opportunity now is to close the gap between discovery and participation.
So the work that we're doing in education is positioning WordPress
to guide new users from awareness to skill, building to contribution.
And as we improve navigation and simplifying the experience, which
is fantastic, we all have an even stronger system that turns
interest into long-term involvement.
And so we are making progress and the data shows that growth is at the edge
of our ecosystem, and now we need to channel that growth into participation.
And so that's how we're making it possible for anyone, anywhere to learn,
master and contribute back to WordPress.
So what excites me so much about how education is changing, what is possible
for WordPress and how we can bring new people into the platform, educate,
train, teach, and on community on campus.
So Campus Connect started as an experiment 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 the skills 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 one octave, and now we have eight.
So AI and new abilities open up more keys, more range, and more
capability than ever before.
But you still need someone who knows how to make music, someone
who understands what a site should be, what businesses need, how to
turn intention into execution.
And that is why these programs matter so much.
They prepare students not just to use WordPress, but to think,
design, and build with a purpose.
So the work used to be long hours of manual effort.
Now the work is understanding the 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 pipeline of people who can thrive in that world.
Humans still build the web.
We are just giving them a better set of tools and a clearer path to get started.
And WordPress has been investing heavily in global education, and these programs
have opened the door for institutions to join us in creating a direct pathway for
students into the open source ecosystem.
A university in Costa Rica is a great example of what can happen
when a university steps into opportunities that WordPress has built.
Okay, I'm gonna try very hard here.
Fel es University dad.
I tried.
Um, university in Costa Rica is where we launched the beta and they've
been an incredible partner to us.
Um, to tell you more about this and how we've come together, I'd love to
invite Stephanie Garita Johnson from the university to the state to tell us about.
Thank you.
No worry.
Thank you so much.
Universita has been commitment to WordPress and its global
community for years now.
Long before we sign our agreement with the WordPress Foundation this year we
were already deeply involved in the ecosystem hosting Word Camp San Jose
and creating community spaces that brought a student into the conversation.
This year we were excited to host WordPress Campus
Connect San Jose in September.
This event was part of the broader Acade academic engagement model
to WordPress and brought together a student faculty professional
and international contributors.
It is trained a role as a partner in connecting academia with the
global open source community.
From that experience, come the work.
Press Fidelity Test Club, a student led initiative that's found learning
opportunities and preparing new generation to participate in the
global ecosystem through hands-on learning, leadership and collaboration.
After singing our agreement with the WordPress Foundation, we took the next
step formally integrating WordPress into our academic program for our
computer system engineering degree.
This established an instructor model for a student to participate in
official WordPress credit process where they earn recognition for real
contributions, whatever to be code design, documentation, accessibility,
any on all of the essential areas.
This aligned perfectly with our STEM model, which in which prioritize
hands-on learning, applied research, and solving real world problems.
WordPress has become a platform for developing digital skills, technological
entrepreneurship, and upward contribution right within our academic environment.
We're proud to be bold in this bridge between the global WordPress
community and the new generation who are creating the web of the future.
I'm, I'm excited to see this impact spreading across Latin America.
From this process, we gained key learnings that confirmed that
academic and institutional value.
What worked especially well was the early and sustained engagement of a student for
university fidelity, combined with faculty guidance through clearly a structure
mentor and man contribution pathways.
The integration with the official WordPress credits empowers students
to make real contribution to the ecosystem while development applies
skills leadership and global visibility in a collaboration open
source development environment.
Some students also recognize that the stronger personal organization
of their time will allow them to participate with an ever greater
continuity showing their awareness and ownership of their learning process.
This feedback far from this mission, the experience has highlights how
rewarding the initiative has been overall and reinforce what is so
excited and worth trying for others.
It's demonstrate that the academia can become a trust getaway into the
global open source contribution.
Unlocking inspiring opportunity for students to grow, lead, and contribute
to the future of the web from a deeply satisfied and education space.
Thank you so much for having me here and back to Matt.
Thank you.
That's amazing.
All righty.
Uh, it's amazing to see how WordPress is becoming like
generally multi-generational.
We now have like parent and child contributors, you know, it's fun to
see like the kid camp things that happens at different work camps and
uh, you know, as we just heard from Stephanie, like kids learning workforce
at school, they're teaching you the younger siblings and it's beautiful
because this is a skill that then you can take with you the rest of your life.
You know, something that you can use to like, you know, in, in school
to make money, to like do creative projects, all sorts of things.
Um, you know, the unexpected ambassador to all of this has been a
WaPo, which actually we got from our friends 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 the world 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, so it's totally open source and it has
become a sort of global phenomenon.
And also amazing because at the core 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 on like a cool little WaPo museum on
wordpress.org that we're gonna try to spin up next year to just document all
the different ones all around the world.
Um, and that's even before you could ask AI to make new wapos, all the
ones so far were manually created.
So if you're here in the audience day or you're listening, like, um,
consider like teaching, you know, a younger generation to WordPress, uh,
consider how you can bring 'em on.
Um, you know, while all the competitors in 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, peer to 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 at my very self, where the predecessor
of the WordPress was called B two.
I started using it and, um, I had a question in the forums, so I went to the
forums, asked a question and 'cause I was breaking it, I didn't know how to use it.
And then one day I went to the forums to ask a question.
I saw someone asking something that I already knew.
Even though it was brand new.
So I thought, oh, I'll reply to this person.
And that was sort of my first little entree into contributing to an open
source product, which of course later snowballs with the code.
And now all this crazy stuff we're here today.
So it can start with just smallest step and you never know where it's gonna lead.
So I want to mention Youth Day and Nicaragua.
So Youth Day and Nicaragua is what happens to give young creators
the keys and just let them go.
Back in October 75 kids, and I mean kids ages 88 to 88 to 20 showed up in Manna
Mangu to build the first WordPress sites.
Regional volunteers helped out, but the sessions were actually run by teenagers
teaching out the teenagers, which is kinda like the future right there.
The whole day was hands-on, no boring lectures or PowerPoints
like we're doing here.
They sat down bit the project they cared about and built it.
So the peer led sessions met 16 year olds who've done this before.
Were showing the 10 year olds how to pick a theme or outta contact
form, uh, that kinda learning sticks.
And very similar to what I was doing when I was 17, 18, 19.
You know, it's exploring on the internet, asking questions, but then
also trying to help other people.
As I learned, um, the attendance tripled compared to the 24.
2024 pilot.
Um, so they got 75 participants when they were hoping for
just about 30 and word spread.
Kids were telling their friends, this is 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 is absolutely is aptly game poo.
You can follow the link and play it right in your browser.
This isn't just a one-off avenge anymore.
You know, people now are using WordPress as an entire development platform,
you know, and so it's fun to see.
I, I know for many of us who got started in computing, gaming was like
one of the first things we did, right?
And so being people actually like 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 were starting WordPress as blogging
software, I never imagined this
a crud application, right?
You know, we write some text in the box and 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're just getting started with this.
This program is just brand new and so I can't wait to see what people start
to build and what they start to learn.
And, you know, embracing open source technologies is the development
framework, PHP, all the things that we've known to, to love.
You know, part of the things about WordPress versus other development
frameworks is it's sort of accessibility the way it kind of makes sense.
You can, you know, it's kind of easy 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 programs turning 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 timing with the podcast, by the way?
We're good.
We're good?
Yeah.
Um, there's a whole lot of API action going on some AI developments.
We've got AI agents and MCP, the builds, A-P-I-H-T-M-L-A-P-I Block
Buildings, API, interactive, API.
So 6.9 is really bringing a lot of foundational work.
And to tell you more about that, 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 last year in Tokyo, we look at what was
new and upcoming through four lenses.
Write, design, build, and develop.
Let's revisit them today to see what's new.
We have a lot of beautiful additions to the writing and publishing process.
First up, let's talk about collaboration, which is a big
part of our current roadmap.
WordPress 6.9 introduces notes to the block editor for the first time.
This allows authors, writers, and collaborators to leave comments
and feedback directly inside the editor while working on a post.
It has a beautiful design where comments are attached to specific blocks.
When you select a comment, only the block is highlighted and the
rest of the content fades away.
Since these are also built as comments behind the scenes, you can receive email
notifications when new notes are added
in the spirit of the features.
This was truly a collaborative effort in itself with work from Fuel, multi
Dots, automatic GoDaddy, human made article, as well as a contributor
sponsored by LU Hosting Jar Kinta.
And finally, this is just the beginning of a full set of collaboration
features that will make WordPress a true multiplayer experience.
Let's also highlight one of my favorite small features.
WordPress has always been about the potential of human expression, and
now this is extended to math notation.
You can now write beautiful math using blocks or through inline formatting.
It all renders nicely and preserves the LA formatting.
You can access it through a popover and the preview renders beautifully.
Now, moving into design, this war prep release introduces several
new blocks and design tools.
Let's focus on just a few of them.
First.
There's a much better experience when using drag and drop,
bringing a more intuitive and direct manipulation of blocks.
It works across all sort of block types, so you can drag a list item to
reorder a list without having to hand down the drug handle In the toolbar,
it's overall a lot more intuitive as you can manipulate the objects directly.
For example, it makes it that easy to put images side by
side and construct galleries.
You can drag the images themselves, no longer requiring to find the drug handle.
It's overall more visual, more intuitive, and more reliable.
Another small but big win is that gallery blocks now support aspect
ratio attributes, so you can make all the images fit together seamlessly.
There's also a new typography option called stretchy text, which
automatically adjusts the font size to fill the dimensions of a container.
This is done through the interactivity API, and it updates
in real time as you type in.
It's perfect for hero sections.
Call to action areas, anywhere you want text that really fits the space.
Another new block that had a lot of popular requests is the accordion block.
It's supports inner blocks for infinite possibilities and
is built with interactivity API for the best performance.
You get a lot of a lot of options to customize whether the accordion
is open by default, whether and where to show an icon along with
many of the usual styling options.
This was a long requested features by FMO source and creators.
When it comes to building size with WordPress.
There are also some incredible refinements and additions.
Up until now, the command palette was restricted to editor context.
It has now been made available across the entire admin experience, so you can
now access it from any part of your site.
This allows quick navigation between admin screens and is a step towards
easier management of WordPress.
Since the command palette is meant to be powered by abilities, it would also
allow triggering several different sets of commands directly from
anywhere in the WordPress interface.
For a while now, container blocks have supported the ability to
restrict what blocks can be inserted in a given area, but it required
diving into code to set it up.
Now, this is available directly in the user interface, giving
real control for site creators.
You can provide highly usable flows without needing to
create entirely custom blocks.
There are also important announcements to the usability of the navigation
block, including a prominent edit navigation call to action when
selecting a header or any template part that contains a navigation block.
There's also more customization options for sub menu opacity, which
previously require adding custom CSS.
And finally, the page creation flow is also improved with more
clarity over whether a page is going to be drafted or published.
WordPress 6.9 also brings the ability to hide blocks entirely from the front end.
That means you can draft different designs or come in soon information
directly in the editor and only show them when you're ready.
And that's really just the start for a future, which would support conditional
display of blocks to allow for better responsive controls from hiding
and showing blocks based on screen size to broader controls for block
visibility like login and logout views.
And of course, plugins will be able to extend and register its own conditions.
Finally, the Block Bindings user interface has been upgraded to improve how different
data sources are displayed in the editor.
Users can now easily switch between sources as well as buying and and
buying attributes with a single click.
Developers can also register their own custom sources.
This is part of making Blocks a lot more powerful and connected to
the data structures of WordPress and its plugins by default.
Let's now look at some of the developer tools shipping with WordPress 6.9.
The new abilities.
API sets in motion a common pattern that the entire ecosystem can adopt.
This API creates a unified registry of functionality that can be discovered,
validated, and executed consistently across different contexts, including
PHP, the rest, API, endpoints and Future AI Power integrations.
This common language will power the evolution of the Command PAL and is being
rapidly adopted for AI driven workflows.
The H-T-M-L-A-P-I continues to enable new ways of reliably working with
and modifying HTML Code server side.
This effort is cutting down the complexity and the cost of modifying HTML within PHP.
The safety and accuracy of the H-T-M-L-A-P-I enables server side
rendering in interactivity, API, and brings dynamic content to guttenberg.
With block bindings, it is a valuable tool for developers, aim
for performance and reliability.
Finally, for developers', theme authors and block authors, the interactivity
API is maturing with smoother routing, better state management, and more
performant interactive blocks.
This means you can start building rich interactive user interfaces that match
the state of the art, but without the trade off of full JavaScript stacks.
In terms of the broader WordPress ecosystem, 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 provides a standard interactive frontend.
API WordPress core is already using it to power multiple features, including
some of the new blocks highlighted today.
So that wraps up some of the main WordPress 6.9 features.
I'll pass it now.
Back to you, Matt.
Thank you everyone.
All right.
And I've heard that the stream is back online, so sorry for the,
so the technical difficulties.
Um, so that's 6.9 through the four lenses we discussed writing,
designing, building, and development.
But there is more.
Oops.
So previously the plugin checker was 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 doing 10 reviews in 10 minutes, uh, we can do.
Sorry, we can now do reviews way faster than we were able to before.
So we're seeing about a hundred more submissions 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're now under seven business days, um, for
getting new plugins up in the directory.
This was a volunteer crew from all over the world.
Um, now with the plugin check, uh, check plugin, plugin check, plugin
plugins all the way down, uh, updates to plugins are also being checked, where
before we only checked new submissions.
And so basically we're gonna be able to upgrade the code quality and security
everything, um, of every plugin in the world, which I'm sure as you read the
news or something, whenever you see a headline 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 have problems before, knock on wood.
But, um, but typically around those 60,000 plugins and themes, um, that's where,
you know, some combination of them or, or some, some smaller one that maybe has like
less resources or more newer developers is where some of the issues come from.
So, um, but I think using ai, we're gonna be, and education, we're
gonna be able to really upgrade the security and the, um, of.
Well, basically the web, which is kind of exciting.
I really appreciate all the contributions that we're getting from Google and
other places, uh, to help us do this.
So, as I've said before, I want WordPress to be the gold standard of data
liberation and, uh, interoperability.
You know, one quality of life improvement we're shipping with 6.9 is the WordPress
importer and it's the author mapping step, which now is a new checkbox that
lets you turn ul rewriting on or off.
Checked by default means that during import, the system automatically
updates the old links, things they used to have to use, search and replace
for or do manually, um, taking the old sites URLs with the new ones.
So everything works seamlessly once the content is live, and we're going
to continue making investments in data deliberation and improving importers.
I want WordPress to be the place that you 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 out into any API, any export anything.
It'll belong to you.
So last year we spoke about what's to do with WordPress playground.
Playground has been updated with a new file browser.
So you can now create, edit and test files directly from your browser.
There's also a visual gallery of blue blueprints 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 that allows you to boot up an entire container
of WordPress in your browser in seconds.
Again, things that before used to have a 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 includes blueprints as a starting guide.
And, uh, and now we have a command line interface, the playground, CLAI,
which reached stable in October.
So this has new features for developers including XD bug support and options
for AI assisted developments.
Um, with all the WordPress recommended PHP extensions and MySQL emulation now
in playground, it supports now then more than 99% of the plugin directory and
even supports PHP my admin composer, and Laravel, which is very cool.
Blueprints can now load files directly from GI repositories, even private ones.
So you can bring private git code right into the playground.
The all new all PP blueprints dot P-A-R-C-L-I commands can run everywhere
that you can run WordPress Since the last day of the word you used
playground 1.4 million times from 227 countries to showcase your plugins,
try code changes, and teach others.
And we've now translated playground docs into six languages.
Oops.
Uh, and now something I'm very excited about for plugin authors.
Uh, when you release an update, there's now a 24 hour safety
window before it really choose sites 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 updates enabled, 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 we wanna get to, which is percentage based
rollouts, something that app stores, like the Google Play Store and iOS store roll.
So you'll be able to roll it out to say, 10% of sites, 20%
of sites, 50% of sites, so on.
So again, improving things for plugin developers.
Some, some claps from some plugin developers here.
Um, again, we're, we're auto updating code across millions of sites,
very heterogeneous environments, like everything from like raspberry
pies to, you know, big cloud servers, um, like Google or AWS.
And so running WordPress in all these different environments,
there's lots of edge cases.
So giving developers the tools to be able to like reliably ship software
to all these different places is gonna be so, so, so powerful.
We'd love feedback from the community to make this even more useful.
So there's a lot to be excited about.
And, uh, one of the things I'm also excited about is
using AI more thoughtfully.
So we're actually gonna pull up a little panel here.
We've got James LaPage leads AI at Automatic.
We've got Mary Hubbard, Felix Rnz from Google, and Jeff Paul from 10 Up.
I'm gonna join, we're gonna do a little panel on WordPress
and ai, the path forward.
So,
and actually while you're up here, Matt, I brought you a
chair so you can join as well.
So it's a little last minute, but since 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 the majority 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 just jump 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 work is actually landing alongside 6.9.
So can you just fill us in what, what's actually 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 in AI and WordPress for a while now.
So quick history lesson.
The core AI group was created and announced about six months ago.
Um, when we were created about six months ago, we published a strategy
called AI Building Blocks, and that represented the work that we
wanted to do moving into the future.
But that strategy was something that 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 to become, begin officially messaging
around AI through the project.
And we also tracked where the industry 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 months ago, all of that thought and effort
went into that announcement and went into 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, I did 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 those applauds to the contributors and the
team that actually built all of this.
So to go through these four, we have the abilities API was mentioned a few times
in the presentation, and that is this unified registry of logic that allows.
Both humans and AI systems to understand what can be done on WordPress.
Um, and it gives basically a list of here'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 to go and create a whole bunch of
different things like commands for the command, palette for rest, API
endpoints, CLI, things like that.
But for WordPress, you can basically box up 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 choose the right ability for the job.
And that in isolation is an agent.
So we've made it very easy to build agents into 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 to immediately and directly interface
with LLMs from WordPress and Felix.
Actually architected most of it, so I'll let him speak more about it.
But, uh, something I'm very excited about is that it just released a
version 0.2 0.0 yesterday, and that includes direct support for abilities.
So you can now provide abilities to an 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 his presentation version 0.3 0.0.
You can use that to take all your abilities, 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 exciting to me because it's very persistent.
It means that we can expose things out to MCP, but say MCP changes and we really
don't like it anymore, we can go and adapt out to another protocol very easily.
Then finally, all of this surfaces in the AI experiments plugin, which is a
representation for developers on how you can use these blocks, but it's also
something for end users to actually use AI features in WordPress, powered by
the blocks that we've created, and it is now on the WordPress plugins repository,
and I'll let Jeff speak more about that, but that is a big, big milestone.
So that's what is in 6.9, and that's what we 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 a little bit about the, the PHP.
Do you wanna to add and talk about what you've architected?
Uh, yeah.
So I mean the WordPress, or, I mean WPI client or WordPress AI client,
whatever you call it, um, the, the WPI client is, um, is it allows you
to communicate with any kinds of generative AI models with a uniform API.
So what that means, taking a step back here is, um, whenever any of us uses,
let's say chat, GPT or Gemini app or whatever we use in the back end,
there's some AI model running or some group of AI models and all of these,
they are from different, they're from different providers though, right?
Like you have Google as one of the popular providers, OpenAI or Anthropic also,
there's three examples, but there are.
Dozens, several dozens of different providers that have AI models.
And I think in practice, many of us have some preference for whatever reason.
Maybe we, we just have, we just have started getting a
subscription with one and that's why we use that one all the time.
'cause that's the thing, like all of these, all of these cloud-based
providers, they are state of, they provide state of the art models.
They're super capable at solving any kinds of different tasks or
doing complex research for us.
Um, they are proprietary though, and they're paid.
So we, as WordPress, as the open platform that we are, we cannot, we cannot,
and we should not like, um, promote any particular one or even enforce it.
So what this WordPress, that's, that's where the WordPress AI client comes in
and it provides an abstraction layer where you can, as a developer, just
you just prompt AI and you don't need to worry what model is running behind.
So, and the way that this works in practice is that, um, once this is,
once this is available, when this is available on the WordPress side,
the user can, for example, configure whichever AI provider they want to use,
or they can provide, they can configure multiple AI providers and, um, yeah.
And then things just work like the plugin developers, plugin developers that want
to use this AI data WP AI client, they can, uh, they can simply write a prompt.
And let's say for example, um, let's say for example, you wanna have one
of these prompts like generate the post title based on this post content,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
That, that could be a prompt that you want have 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 to pro all that you need to provide.
And what happens under the hood then is that the AI client checks
which models, which providers are available on this, on the concrete
WordPress side that this is running on.
And then it also determines which ones are best suitable to
respond to this particular query.
So that way things remain really agnostic, like, and like the, any,
their site owner controls which models they 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, to remain open and also to remain adaptable
to whatever is the latest models and the latest different provider models that
yeah, people want to, people want to use.
Great.
And so Jeff, you've been more involved on the agency side of building things.
So what experiments are you seeing in the wild right now?
Sure, there's some things that are predictable, like chat based search,
uh, to parallel something that might be, you know, a historical
elastic press based search.
Uh, there are things that have been technically and highly manual,
like content distribution and, and translation out to, you know, multi-site
or, or different WordPress installs.
Um, and then things like leveraging in browser and local models that
are, uh, private, that are more affordable, uh, compared to cloud
models as, as well as for the WordPress project that are more aligned with,
uh, the licensing of the project.
So those are some things that are, um, that we're seeing.
And then, uh, in terms of something that is really relatively new and
in line with WordPress six nine is.
Uh, leveraging the block notes and providing feedback on content and
suggestions, so like accessibility recommendations or aligning to
tone of a certain, uh, brand.
And having those in notes aligned in the editor, uh, is something that is literally
just being built right now and is pretty exciting to see people leveraging stuff
that has just been shipped in the last six months 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 the team 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 to continue to push the boundary and ensure
that we are on the forefront of ai?
That's a good question.
It, it really stems back to creating the foundational pieces
of WordPress to build AI and then seeing what the ecosystem does.
So if you look back to WordPress itself, it gave the frameworks
to go create plugins and then you ended up with humongous e-commerce
solutions and learning management tools and things that I bet you
Matt did not expect to blossom here.
Oh my
goodness.
The stuff we saw, I, I think it all comes 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 I need to ask it anymore.
Like just everyone's gonna 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, at every single part of everything we
do is gonna be, you know, changed in sometimes small, sometimes big
ways with people using AI tools.
That could be even just little things like perhaps it's like helping you
filter your spam better on your email or like, you know, just helping you
at some part of your life and then that gives you more time to do a
little coding or something like that.
But it'll start to again, be persuasive and ubiquitous.
And I love that you brought up the open source models.
Something I, I wouldn't have predicted was, um, you know, with the
countless billions being spent mm-hmm.
And the huge, it's, it's, it's kind of amazing seeing all the biggest
companies in the world spending the most money we've ever seen.
A huge perks of all of GDP growth.
It's coming from the investments in these data centers and other things.
Um, I kind of assumed that open source was gonna be, you know, years behind.
In fact, we've seen some of these open source 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 sometimes be 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 lot of exciting things that are happening.
Um, so I'm very, you know, the, both the depth and the credible things
coming from the frontier mm-hmm.
Investments and when you think of some of the smartest minds in the world are
now working on this problem combined with kind of like, you know, the open source
kind of, you know, creating some ubiquity, low cost of access, maybe creating
some innovations which then filter back into some of the frontier things.
Um, this sort of feedback loop of having the whole world kind
of working on the same thing at the same time is pretty exciting.
And something we've seen only a few times in history.
You know, when you think of like how the world came together to address
COD or other things like when you kind 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 Edge already have built in models in the
browsers though, that's gonna be really powerful once this is fully
rolled out because it will mean that anybody using this browser, these
browsers, they will just have AI models without any, doing any configuration.
And these I AI models are free to use and they are more privacy friendly because
you don't send anything to any cloud.
And that's also something that we are actively working towards to
support in the, in, in the WordPress AI client and all these, all the
surrounding projects to have to keep things open, open minded, right?
Like we have client client side models that are local to the machine
on the, on the user's machine.
We have the cloud-based models and we can also do hybrid approaches where.
Where maybe, yeah, you can have different ideas where like you may use a cloud
model for one part, one task and the client side model for another task.
Or you could do it so that if a cloud model is not available for
the task, I use a client side model or something like that.
There's different ways to combine them.
And I think the way that we are approaching those foundational
blocks is really sets us up for being flexible 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 MCP at some point I, I cannot predict this.
If MCP is gonna be the, the gold standard for long term,
maybe then we're already set up.
If, if tomorrow something new comes out and the ecosystem shifts towards
it, we have the abilities API, which is our own foundational building
block, we didn't develop against some very specific technology.
Mm-hmm.
And that's gonna be the same with the concrete models.
And that's, that's those two, those two building blocks, the abilities API and
the WordPress AI client really, um, allow us to remain agnostic and adaptable.
Yes, I love that.
'cause it's continued flexibility.
I also, I think if you asked us a, if you asked me two years ago if WordPress
would have first class tooling to build AI 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 sits directly 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 experiments plugin and just see how easy it is.
It's awesome.
Well then it's great to talk about vision and, and what your
long-term plan is, but I think for people 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 are we thinking about for?
So there are, there
are a few things coming in the near future and the long future, and I'll cover both.
Um, near term the abilities API is 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 coverage of the entire software of WordPress.
It allows us to easily in the future, interact with AI
browsers more effectively.
Um, it's pretty impressive.
But we're also introducing a sister API that sits besides the
abilities API and that's workflows.
And you might've actually seen a Easter egg in the, the code snippet from Matias
that said workflows abilities are awesome.
They're individual units of what you can do on a WordPress site,
but they can become really powerful when you string them together
and you have more determinism.
And I know that when an email happens or when a, when a order happens in
WooCommerce, I'm gonna send an email.
These are two abilities.
I string them together and they run 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 really create a foundational piece of
WordPress to do automations and some really 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 AI will be a core piece of WordPress,
which means that everybody who builds these features, everybody who builds
plugins, can build in a unified way.
And that allows us to go and easily plug into providers like Google,
but also easily have a host or an agency offer a provider of their own.
And any plugin that uses this API will immediately have ai.
So I don't want to completely say we're democratizing ai, but we
are democratizing access to AI
through this inclusion.
Um, well it's fun 'cause you'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, you know, provide the access.
It's kind of cool how a buildings API has a lot of parallels to the sort of
plugin hook and, and filter system.
Yes.
Which was kind of the big innovation of like WordPress's plugin system.
So it's kind of like a, it feels to me like a next generation of that.
Yeah.
And it's also the big three, also, actions in WordPress, you can trigger workflows
and abilities through actions as well.
So I think there's a lot of like new and old merging together.
It's really, it's exciting to me.
Final on my list is the, and Jeff mentioned this, but the overlap
with collaborative editing.
So that's a very big cornerstone feature of WordPress 7.0, phase three.
And I think when it was designed, we didn'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 collaborative e collaborative editing means there
are other entities sitting next to you on a page helping you edit and create.
And we always expected it to be people.
Right?
Again, when we announced the Gutenberg roadmap, 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 add sparkle buttons everywhere.
We're gonna do some crazy stuff here.
It's more that we're gonna build into the way you interact with creating content,
with expressing yourself digitally and give you more power, more control, um, and
be, make you more effective at creating.
So that overlap with collaborative editing through block notes, through
the actual collaboration aspects, suggestions a lot coming in the future.
There I can see really clear 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 we thinking a little longer term?
Um, and Matt, feel free to jump in and interject, but everybody
feel free.
WordPress.
WordPress has been around for 20 years and we want it to be
around for the next 20 years.
And the next 20 years looks like WordPress 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 change as AI changes the way people
consume content and create online.
But I do expect the open web 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 robots flying around reporting the news.
We have to report the news.
Um, we have to manage the content.
We have to create and express ourselves digitally.
I was thinking a few days ago, the act of writing and publishing
is almost more important now with AI because I want my thoughts.
I want who I am and the story of how Abilities API was created,
which I published on my blog.
I want when people ask that to chat GBT for it to show up.
Um, so creating these fundamental systems allows us to create a piece
of software that does also adapt with the open web and remain that central
place that humans express themselves.
And that's what we expect to continue pushing towards with 7.0,
but also into the future as well.
And introducing these foundational fundamental 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 blocks to be used, and the people who operate
within WordPress are the plugin developers, and they are the hosts.
And for the plugin developers, we really ask you to take a look at these
abilities and use them to create AI features yourself, but also expose the
existing functionality of your tools out to the AI assistance that are coming.
WordPress, the ones that can already interact through MCP, um, use the blocks.
Go and use the WP AI client to go build AI features into your software.
And for the developers, really track the WP AI client, or for the hosts,
really track the WP AI client.
Um, I can easily see a world where all hosts, and I know that three major
hosts already will provide bundled AI credits into their plans, which means
that you will have AI out of the box for any plugin that uses this API and
interacts and, and says, I will fall back to whatever PRI provider's available.
And that means AI can become a commodity and it becomes something that everybody
can use, everybody has access to.
And it really pushes us back to plugins extending 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 to go 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 of features that you can actually use,
but also the blocks working together.
And that will be a way we deliver really impressive 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 anything that you'd like to say?
Uh, final,
final thoughts?
Not much to add.
I mean, yeah, try, try out the abilities API and the, the VPI client.
Let us know what everything, whether are there 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, it helps us facilitate ai and this is
an AI panel, but the abilities API is relevant 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 that the Abilities API allows you to do so
that any AI integrations and WordPress that someone else builds can use that.
And that makes your plugin better to the ecosystem
and the global command palette that was 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 stakes functionality like excerpt generation,
image generation, alt text generation, uh, slightly farther future things,
uh, like design and layout assistance.
Uh, so kind of like how Telex likes to build blocks.
Also being able to do that in the site editor with.
Templates and patterns.
Um, and then for developer experience, sort of tooling, uh,
there'll be an abilities, explorers.
You can, uh, see the inputs and outputs of the abilities that
are, uh, live on your site.
Uh, there'll be an MCP demo to try and play with, uh, the tooling there.
Uh, and then also, uh, an AI playground just to kind of test
out how prompts work with the different models you might be using.
So some things that are a bit more technical that are coming, some things
that are a bit more, uh, table stakes.
And then, um, some, uh, things that are in the not too far future, but coming.
Great.
And then Matt, you've already said today, learn a couple of
years ago, learn, learn deeply.
Mm-hmm.
What would you say some today from the, not just the community, from
the developers, from everybody, what would you say your final thoughts?
You know, nothing to add.
Y'all put it so beautifully and 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 much from all the people who work
in WordPress, uh, every day.
And, you know, you see it on the panel.
One of the coolest parts about getting involved with WordPress or
any open source project is you get to work with all the other cool people
who are contributing and doing it.
And you'll become someone who learns and like gets to, you know,
I get very, very inspired by sort of 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 think that we're gonna be able to, not
replace, but literally augment so much of what we're doing.
Um, you know, the AI client, the abilities, API, everything we've
been working on, um, you know, very excited to see what we're doing.
Um, we're gonna break for just two minutes 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 the room in Tokyo last year.
Some of you're at the first work camp San Francisco in 2006.
A few folks here and we planned with like two or three weeks of ahead of time.
Um, some of you, some contributors to WordPress 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 team yet, 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 state of 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 you have a question, um, let's open this up.
We took a little break so you 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're getting faster and faster now.
We have more endpoints and things, uh, to connect to with ai.
And now we also have wonderful single points of failure like CloudFlare.
And how is something like CloudFlare gonna impact, 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 like CloudFlare ai, could you explain
just the edge caching and all of that and how that would maybe impact,
uh, ag agentic work and all that?
Oh, well I think, you know, anytime you have a service as sort of like
powerful and successful as CloudFlare gets 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're like, wow, so much of the web happened.
But I think also what happens is every time this happens, we learn from it.
And both as you know, consumers of these services, you develop more
like sort of elegant failovers.
And of course you can imagine, you know, all the engineers at the company
where something, you know, happened to 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 always try to make new mistakes and just sort
of see like, uh, so every failure, every edge case, everything that you've never
imagined is just another opportunity to, um, to find that new itch case.
And then once you build the resiliency around it, hopefully you know, nothing
hap you knock on wood for a little while.
You think you thank the deity to like, 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, you kinda see what the new pro, the new
bottlenecks are, and these things are being scaled and adopted so quickly.
Like the amount of traffic flowing over the internet, the usage as you talked
about that we're gonna have with LLMs.
Um, so I guess to more go to the point a 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 abstraction layer we built in WordPress.
Um, you could have failovers.
So if you're calling one model and it's not returning in time or not
returning a results, you expect you could fail over to a different model.
Or as you know, Felix brought up, you know, some of these
things that are gonna be running directly 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 your spelling or something, you know.
So I imagine that in the future we'll actually have hundreds, if not thousands
of different specialized models that might be tuned for different things.
In fact, in some of our work at Automatic around like our site builder, like
we're finding that models that are tuned specifically for like logo creation or
other things can be essentially fine tuned 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 of them like little robots that can be
specialized, these agents that you might call for different things and the
agents are gonna talk to each other, they're gonna interact with them.
And I imagine, not unlike like when you load a WordPress page,
it's making, you know, dozens of database 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 dozens if 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 like collaborative commenting and everything
in the editor that's coming up.
Um, I think it introduces sort of a whole new dynamic for WordPress.
Can you maybe give us an idea of where that could be going in the future?
What other like, multiplayer real time things might be coming?
Ah, well, yeah, so for those who don't know, the collaborative editing is
basically, um, like if you use like Google Docs or Notion or one of these
sort of like things where editing a doc and it becomes multiplayer as you put it.
I love putting it in a game analogy.
Um, in WordPress you'll be able to see like people editing
things and moving things.
Um, we're doing this just inside of Gutenberg right now, but I could
definitely imagine a future of where you could think of the entirety of WP
admin and all the things plugins are building on it, having some sort of way
to have states or streaming updates so that we have a little bit of this right
now, like, um, some things like on the.
Well, there's a comment page, stream new things.
Now it does, if you moderate or remove stuff, it'll bring something
new in, but I don't think it brings like a new comment in.
But for things like the P two theme for WordPress, you know, you sort of
have a real time when you, when you load 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 in or an edit, it streams live.
So you kind of get this like more interactive way of having a conversation.
You have to reload the page or get a notification.
So, um, now there's probably different parts that, that could be better or worse.
Like, you know, Bo who, for those who don't know, leads the WooCommerce
project, which is this little open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress,
which is now, um, I think running on 8% of all websites or something.
8.9% of all websites are running WooCommerce and it's doing tens
of billions of sort of goods and services sold every year.
Um, so you could imagine something like a orders page, something like that.
Like a, a merchant sort of watching new orders streaming in real time
could be kind of exciting places.
And, um, so what I hope is that as we develop these things inside Gutenberg,
we can create the abstraction.
Just like we have with AI that allow other 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 be coming from sort of specialized agents.
And there's, um, some very cool things I've seen that the name's escaping me
at the second, but like, uh, where you can kind of have a, a website design and
it can, you know, an agent that comes in and says, here's some accessibility
tips, or here's some, you know, copy design tips, or here's some layout tips.
Um, you could imagine like sort of different sort of like, you know,
WaPo like bots, maybe, maybe different flavors of WaPo coming in and suggesting
different things for your site.
So,
cool.
Thank you.
By the way, just to give a heads up, 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 hour live 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 or Bloomberg, he went on TBPN.
So we're actually gonna patch in TBPN.
So we'll have about 20 minutes where it'll connect sort of our
audience to this broader, it's kind of the, the new hot show in tech.
Uh, so, we'll, we'll, it's an experiment, so we'll see if it works.
And, you know, internet hopefully stays up and everything, but should be kind of fun.
So, we'll, we'll have some questions from 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 and please introduce yourself.
Oh, I'm, uh, I'm Ray King with a domain registrar called Pork Bun.
And I'm wondering with, um, all the changes we're seeing, which
are monumental, I think in this period of time, how you feel domain
names will continue to play part in identity for people on the web.
Oh, that's such a good question and I'm glad you asked it.
'cause you and I are probably both domain name enthusiasts.
Um, you know, when you think about A DNS and the domain name system.
Which is at the heart of the open internet is one of the most incredible
systems that we've, we've created in the past, you know, 40 or 50 years.
And the cool thing about a domain is when 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 previous stocks that like, you know, it's, it's
great that to be a subdomain or sub director in someone else's domain.
Um, and, you know, we offered that 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 apartment in someone else's building.
And if they decide to kick you out of that building someday, or the
building goes outta business, all of a sudden that URL goes away, as
we've seen with countless times with services like GeoCities and others
just disappearing from the internet.
And, um, you know, luckily we have things like the internet archive project.
Shout out to archive.org, which tries to like, uh, you know, which
WordPress Foundation also donates to, and, and we just launched a
very cool internet archive plugin.
So check that out.
So there's now a, a cool new official plugin developed, you know, with support
from automatic and internet archive, that'll actually automatically scan
all your all blog posts and update links that go out of, uh, that's break
and update them to an archive.org link on the, the way back machine.
So visitors to your, your blog post will now see like a snapshot
of what you were linking to at the time, even if it goes away.
But, um.
To go back, like when these things go offline, um, you know, you don't
have, uh, you don't have any recourse.
So now the plus or minus the domains is like they
expire@atautomaticallywordpress.com.
We now offer a hundred year domain plan, I suppose a hundred year hosting
plan that does some things to sort of like ensure the continuity of that.
But there still is sort of a way of maintenance and I'm curious in the
future of seeing ways that even if like the original owner of a domain is
no longer paying for it, that perhaps other people could gift or donate.
We actually have a feature like this on wordpress.com where if for
some reason, like a site owner is no longer paying for their plan,
you could sort of gift them a plan.
So having a way that sort of just like important books keep getting
reprinted or things, uh, ways that we can keep domains, um, online.
And, you know, been around the internet long enough that I have had friends that
have passed and their domains have going to disuse or even worse, get snatched up
by like a domain squatter or something.
So, um, that's the one thing I'd like to see improved in domains in the future.
Uh, but I think it is a very important 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 was able 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 WordPress yet, although hopefully come to
some word camps in a few years.
You got mine, the AI assistant, I think we're gonna jump in a little earlier now.
Oh, nice.
With the AI assistant, she might start 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 even just having like a little Lincoln bio
type site, you know, just a little place on the web that belongs to you.
So when people search, they're not just seeing your profiles
on different social media, but a place that actually belongs to you.
My sister, that's your domain.
Was it?
Charlene dot mullen weight.com has a nice little one pager.
It's like a little bio links to a few other places and things she do does, I
think every person on the internet should have 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 to create like a nice one pager with some
links and, you know, you can link your different verified social media profiles.
You can link to sort of, uh, you know, 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 like domains get built into more things.
I love the new services like Blue Sky, you know, actually allow you to map a domain.
There's a username.
So on Blue Sky I am at MA tt, which is kind of fun.
Um, and so, you know, seeing this sort 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 12 was, 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 started to 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 that happened to be a country code, but you
know, there's all these other ones and uh, now in 2026 there's gonna be a new
round of these, new dot somethings.
What was nice about that is as, as you know, like the dot coms, some
of the good ones got taken early on.
Um, so opening up these new name spaces and also people getting normalized to use
these other dots, somethings I think is really, really cool 'cause everyone should
be able to have a memorable domain name.
Cool.
How we doing on timing with the 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 the page was saying about content and humans
creating content and everyone has a blog.
You gotta go create the news, you gotta pedal your wares and pedal your services.
But the age agentic web is kind of changing some of that.
People used to talk about SEO and now you're talking about how do you get
discovered by all these frontier models and how do you see website creation,
website design as it relates to how people will be using AI agents to
do some of their biddings for them?
Ooh, this is a very interesting area where I think we're just at the very,
very beginning, so interrupt me when we're, when we need to switch over.
But, um, there's some fun stuff happening 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 it in our traffic patterns.
Cloud flares talked about this, I think I've talked about it publicly
before, where the amount of traffic coming from AI bots crawling is now
dwarfing some of the human traffic.
And this is just with some of them doing the indexing of the web, much less sort of
the real time interactions that'll happen.
Like when you, you know, ask your chat bot to do something and then visits a
website can where there's new things around like checking out and commerce
being integrated directly with ai.
Um, so, you know, in WordPress we, we were 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 actually has, 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 two version of it or, you know, atom
version or r ss 9.2 or whatever.
And it basically allows you to create like a different representation.
So you've got kinda the HTML page that gets served to humans, but,
uh, Bach could in theory connect request a sort of XMO version.
Um, you know, something that we could add to this feed engine is a markdown version.
Some people started to experiment this where you essentially get like either
with a sort of varies header http header or requesting like a.md version of a
webpage could be something that, um, is sort of, uh, smaller and easier to parse.
So there's often, with a lot of the AI models, there's sort of these
context windows or token lengths.
So essentially distilling down the sort of meat of a webpage or a blog post.
So it's sort of like barest form, which marked down as a beautiful sort of
text version of um, could essentially allow webpages to be ingested by AI
things in a more efficient manner.
And, uh, something I could definitely see 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 on is how we can sort of make different, uh,
representations of websites accessible.
Um, and of course this all needs to be balanced with sort of like
different websites might have different monetization or business models.
You know, uh, I'm very much in the, in the camp that, um, you know, James talked
about or I think, uh, Gordon blogged where like, I want my thoughts and my
thinking to be part of the training of, of, uh, these AI models sort of
part of the future super intelligences.
Um, but other folks might monetize by people visiting the website.
So what does that look like?
Um, what are ways we can sort of start to embed micropayments and some of
the stuff, you know, micropayments is kinda like Linux on the desktop.
It's always been something that's like always right around the corner.
But Linux on the desktop is actually happening now.
There's some very cool stuff like the, is it Archy project, you know,
with DHH and some other cool things where some fun things happening.
And actually I think we now are starting to get some things with like stable
coins, uh, where you could actually have things that look a lot more like
micropayments are always, and I know there's a lot of folks at AI Labs and,
and folks like, you know, products company that are thinking about, you
know, if we're answering a query or something, like we can actually perhaps
attribute how much of that came from like, different websites and if they're
registered or like sort of register perhaps in like a royalty like fashion,
not unlike, you know, as cap BMI do for musical rights or other things that sort
of licensing other creative works might be able to attribute and perhaps even
pay out, uh, sort of different creators.
So it's the early days of this, and in the beginning so much like when streaming
started, everyone was like, ah, uh, you know, used to sell an album for 1799 and
now I'm just getting pennies per stream.
But over time, if you look at the trends, 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 dollars being replaced by digital pennies.
But now for, you know, some like New York Times, like the digital
subscriptions are driving.
All the revenue growth and everything.
So we might see a dip or some sort of adapt adaptation as
these technologies start to be adopted the first couple years.
But I think the long term, there's gonna be way more usage, may way more
adoption and hopefully way more sort of, um, sort of abundance to go around.
And that's even before the singularity.
And you know, money just starts to not matter 'cause we all get,
you know, everything all the time.
One more minute.
Cool.
I think we had a question up 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 most excited about with AI is, um, I
categorize it as learning and empowerment.
And with that I've seen a trend of people starting 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 and all 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, what observations do you have around this and
what other ways can WordPress help with this 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've seen that sort of like inspired this?
Um, I
think SS is becoming more popular 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 since Google got rid of theirs, there hasn't
been a good replacement for that.
Um, but then just in general, people being able to, like I said, just learn
and then that empowers them to, um, have educated opinions and, and resources that
they can publish themselves on things.
Um, and physically I'm also seeing people 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 whether it's just frustration with society and
the way things, certain things are going.
Um, but I think they're all kind of connected in some ways.
So I'm, I'm just curious if you 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 gotten very active in the WordPress community
and he's building like alternative posting clients and it's very fun.
I actually got to see him speak at Word Camp Canada a few weeks ago, which
was like an amazing, uh, word camp up in, was it Ottawa, um, that I visited.
And, um, well incredible set of speakers, but also, you know, to
have sort of the, one of the creators sort 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 great blogging about, um, sort of why WordPress
matters and everything like that.
So his site is scripting.com, but if you just google like Dave Weiner WordPress,
um, you'll see some of the writing there.
So, um, I think, you know, when you, when you go back to the, I love the Jess pages
quotes where like, it's harder to predict the future, but maybe easier to look
at the things that aren't gonna change.
So for Amazon, he always talked about like, 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 like the shipping networks and the trucks
and all the fulfillment centers and everything, like that's a long-term bet.
That's now, you know, in some places I can now order something and it's showing
up literally like hours later, which when you imagine like the early days of
like ordering from catalogs or things like that, like you order, it shows up,
you know, weeks later you sort of forget you ordered it and you're, you're lucky
when the doorbell rings and, and now it's like sort of this instant thing.
Um, in WordPress, I like to think of the things that aren't gonna change.
And so, um, I think freedom and agency freedom is so at the
core of everything that we do.
Um, so our commitment to open source and, you know, enabling it not just
in our words, but the actions and the sort of like constitution of
the license of open source, um, I think is not gonna go outta style.
In fact, perhaps even become more important.
Um, I think things like user control and privacy, which privacy is kind
of like an embedded into that.
Um, again, a long-term trend that I'd be very comfortable with our sort
of principles and investments there.
And also how sort of our core technology stack, uh, goes to it.
And, um, you know, the final thing I'll, I'll say is like, you know,
free people and community building.
So, um, I, when I speak to entrepreneurs or 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 something that people can believe in.
Something that's more than just whatever you're doing, but actually aspires
to a higher goal, um, or principle and, you know, make it people first.
So that kinda like person to person.
What we do at the work camps, what we do at events like this, which
is, you know, this part is fun, the talking, but my favorite is before
and after everyone, like mingling and meeting people, or I love seeing like
folks I know that don't know each other yet meet for the first time.
And that's sort of like Spark or fri that gets created from
those interactions or collisions.
Um, I think it's one of the best parts of it.
So, you know, I'm sure there's a few more principles we could think of,
but um, those are a few that in the WordPress 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 experience TVPN 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 is a little non-traditional, so we're, it is.
Love it.
We're kind of like two hours into like our big annual address, the state of the word.
It's kinda like our state of union speech.
And, um, but thank you so much for allowing us to connect them.
I'm kind of imagine a lot of folks in the room have never
heard or seen TV VPN before.
Fantastic.
So this will bring a lot of new folks into 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 the word of the year should be.
Ooh.
Uh, so state of the word and I'll say 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 live release of WordPress 6.9.
So WordPress does major releases 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 about WordPress is, is it's a, it's not
just built by one company, but it's a community 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 actually a 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 we travel, 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 source licenses, sort of like a
bill of rights for software.
Um, gives you inable rights that no company or person can take away from you.
And that freedom and agency I think is really, really important and something
that, um, I think, you know, as technologists 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 down the walls of gardens.
Uh, it seems like a, a good shot across the bow of the, uh, the
iMessage, uh, walled garden.
Uh, how's the progress going there?
Are you using the service 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 a replacing 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 different networks and some of them always
love to use WhatsApp and some of 'em always love to use, you
know, Instagram or LinkedIn dm.
Sometimes I even get some interesting stuff there.
Um, and I hate it when I miss these messages, you know, because,
you know, checking all the different apps sometimes, or in the
notifications, I might miss something.
So think of it not unlike how email clients, you know, can bring in
lots of different email accounts.
Beeper takes all the different networks 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 different sort of specialized messaging apps
because like for example, if someone sends you an Instagram story, when
you click on that, you're gonna wanna load Instagram, for example.
So I think of it as complimentary and 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 the dedicated apps, but then having
this all in one inbox that you can sort of manage everything.
Uh, tag people have folders and does cool features like schedule messaging
across all platforms, or even just like weird heuristics that are pretty
simple to do, but like, show me all the, not, don't just show me unread,
but show me all the people I've messaged that haven't messaged me back yet.
Oh yeah, sure, sure.
Uh, we, we've talked to some young hackers, some
startups, uh, who are building.
You know, sort of Bieber competitors and their whole value prop is like,
we've figured out a way to get it into the iMessage ecosystem.
Uh, do you think that, uh, we need a new regulation there or some
sort of law change or some result to actually open up iMessage?
Or do you think that, uh, with enough 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 reverse engineer these networks.
Yeah.
Um, however, as we saw with sort of a previous iteration of beeper,
if, uh, the network really, really doesn't want you to do that, um,
it's probably not good to pick a fight with a trillion dollar company.
Yeah.
So, um, perhaps these things might happen through open source or something, but as
a commercial company, I think ultimately you have to be somewhat respectful
and try to compliment these networks.
Um, so how beeper works today is we don't support iMessage on the mobile or Android.
Um, in theory we could, but Apple has indicated that's
something they don't want.
We do support on the Mac OS clients.
We have a way to integrate with sort of 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 this for the long term and we are
a commercial company as well.
So, um, you know, we, we wanna work with the networks and, um, you know,
perhaps there can be, uh, regulations like the European DMA or things
that can encourage interoperability.
Um, but.
Ultimately, I think that the, the sort of people who run these networks have
to see a longer term benefit for them and for things like, um, you know,
some of the other networks I mentioned that 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, particularly in the us kind of the lock in effect
to the device business, which is of course where they make, uh, a
lot of money from iMessage probably indicates 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 used Lightning for a while and eventually got
USBC and all of our lives got better.
Um, who knows what'll happen in the future.
Talk about links on the internet.
I feel like we're at a point in time where social media platforms are
trying to keep users in, in their own applications so that they can
monetize them to the fullest extent.
Meanwhile, you have LLMs, which are ultimately doing a lot of the same thing.
They're taking content from all over the internet, trying to keep users
in the individual applications.
Uh, feels like WordPress in, in many ways is, uh, uh, making moves to kind
of like almost fight back against that.
I might have that incorrect, but I feel like it's important if you're
running a business independently online, it's great to have people like.
On your own website so you can develop a, a deep, uh, relationship with them.
Uh, but what, what is your view on that?
We're very much anchored around X as a, as a business.
Obviously X has had, uh, issues, uh, with links or, you know,
chosen to, um, demote them in the algorithm over the last couple years.
But, uh, give us kind of the state of the union on, on links.
That's a broad one.
Well, I will say X is actually a great example and I've, I've
talked to Nikita about this.
So they now, um, they've shifted some of the balancing of links and they now have
this really nice in sort of app browser.
So you've probably noticed that now that when you load a link, you
actually still have the ability to like, like, and re blog and everything.
And I think that's kinda the future.
Um, so I, I do think that there, you can have things that are complimentary
'cause so much of the like great content and everything is more on this open web.
It doesn't have to be like fully embedded in an app.
Um, but that is sort of a technological change.
So I would say actually point to X as someplace where I think things
are going in the right direction.
Although I do agree that sort of.
Time when links got really de boosted and 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 and different types of websites, I think
might have different motivations.
So for example, um, a popular plugin for WordPress is called WooCommerce.
It's the e-commerce plugin.
It actually runs on about 8.9% of all websites in the world are now
running this e-commerce plugin.
You can think of it like a open source Shopify.
And when you, if you're selling something, a merchant, um, you don't,
you just wanna sell the product.
You don't, might not necessarily care that someone comes to your website to buy it.
So something new things that are happening with, in partnership with AI
and others where we're allowing products to actually be like browsed and bought
inside of the LLM are pretty exciting.
Um, I also think that the incentives of these, uh, open source chat
bots in particular, um, are very complimentary to the open web.
So for example, like if you're on Amazon, Amazon really wants you to say,
or eBay or Etsy or something like that.
They want you to stay in their marketplace on their system.
But when you think of how Google works and sort of the growth of Google and
the open web, you know, they, they have their search pages, but they also would
link out, and that was whole part of their business model and how they grew.
Um, we're seeing that with the chatbots as well.
And in fact, something I talked about a little bit earlier is that the
traffic from bots, both from them crawling, but also user initiated
actions is exploding and has already surpassed sort of human traffic.
And it'll be interesting to see where that goes in the future.
So, you know, there's never a better time, I think to invest in having a
domain, but also invest in publishing.
And, you know, just like you might have a direct relationship, like for example, I
suppose I could get like a, you know, chat GPT to summarize today's TBPN episode.
But it's more exciting to watch it.
I think that creator's developing a direct relationship and brand is, is
gonna be, um, part of the future as well.
Very, very cool.
Well, there's so many more things that I want to ask.
Yeah.
But, uh, I know you're in the midst of, 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 LA next, 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 thing where they, they do really cool ad
reads, so for all their sponsors and everything, they'll like go
into like an ad read in the middle.
So, and as you see, they have the sort of tickers and everything.
Um, very cool.
Show.
Check it out if you haven't seen it before.
TBPN Oh and Cool.
That was cool.
That was Jason Freed from Basecamp.
I think they're launching something today as well.
So he just got on.
Um, cool.
So how are we doing on time 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 across the community for me personally as well.
But coming out at the end of it, it is so amazing, uh, to see like, you know,
in the tough times, that's actually when 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 months ago to like all the amazing things
that are shipping 6.0 and with a very exciting 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 number of WordPress downloads?
So we did the live release, not downloads, but 700,000 sites are running 6.9.
Over 700,000 sites have already 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.