Hola a todos. Hola a todos.
Hello everyone.
Bienvenidos. A State of the Word dos mil veintitrés.
Welcome to State of the Word 2023. It's a true joy, is a true joy to be here with you all, especially as we're gathering in my home country, Spain,
where warmth and passion blend just as beautifully as they do in our vibrant WordPress community.
Today is not only about WordPress development, it's about people.
It's about people all of you and all the people who are watching us from their homes today, who are the ones who make WordPress.
I'm thrilled to introduce Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the WordPress project executive director, who embodies our community values.
Josepha's leadership and dedication have been key in shaping WordPress into the dynamic and inclusive platform
we share. After Josepha takes the stage, the project's co founder, Matt Mullenweg will deliver the keynote address for which we are all tuning in.
Matt's vision has been at the core of WordPress from its inception and I for one can't wait to hear his insights and outlook for the project's future.
Welcome again. Let's make this an unforgettable experience here in Madrid, Spain.
Bienvenidos a Madrid. Bienvenidos a WordPress.
Thank you Rocio, my friend. Thank you everyone also for listening to my lovely joke earlier.
Hola, WordPress España.
What a time to be involved in WordPress. Am I right?
(audience applause)
I'm about to start pretty soon my 10th year working with this project and it has been an absolute honor to serve these past four years as your executive director.
You have so much heart and spirit and it is that heart of this community that keeps me filled with hope for the future of WordPress and the web and the world.
Just last month, we, WordPress, wrapped up WordPress 6.4, which was run by a group of people from underrepresented genders.
And as we all collaborated on that project across time zones and boundaries, I was reminded just how much the WordPress project comes together to ensure not only the freedoms of the open web, but the freedoms of people we welcome into our communities.
It's that feeling of shared responsibility for our project that has brought us this far, 20 years into the project, and it's about, and it's probably also what will take us into the next 20 years.
And so now, my friends, I would to introduce to the stage WordPress project co-founder, Matt Mullenweg.
Thank you.
Wow. All right.
Hello. Do I need to hold this or will these work? Hello, hello? Okay, I'll hold this. Ah,
thank you, Rocio. Thank you, Josepha. Hola, WordPress España.
What an amazing time to be involved with WordPress. This is also our very first international State of the Word.
So thank you for starting perhaps a new era. We'll do more of these around the world in the future.
Should I say this is going to be state of the word? Or should I say -- I'm told this is a joke in Spanish -- Estado de la palabra?
Literal translation, right? It's really great to be here in Madrid in such a beautiful venue.
I hope we can show what the roof of this looks . And also it's a great way to honor the spanish community, which has really been leading the world and setting example in amazing WordCamps.
I believe the first WordCamp after Covid was here and some of the most WordCamps ever. Was that Sevilla? This is our time to really... First of, we're going to start with sort of celebrating some of the things we did in 2023.
We're going to move on to a little bit what's coming next, and we've got some fun announcements for you today. So, as you may have heard, WordPress turned 20 this year on May 27.
I feel a little bit a proud parent. And actually we can all feel a proud parent because we are all part of making WordPress what it is.
In the past two decades, WordPress has evolved from starting very humbly, as just sort of a journaling or blogging tool, to really being something that can build entire websites and be a framework for applications.
You can build all sorts of things on the APIs and now running over a third of all websites in the world. I got a chance to celebrate. First, and this was in Tokyo.
As you can tell, we had a really awesome cake. But actually there were amazing 20th anniversary celebrations all over the world and it turns out we really cake.
This was a year as well of us coming together again.
So this year there have been 70 WordCamps in 33 countries.
That was a subset of the 3300 gatherings, including about 300 dedicated to learning events WordPress.
School Days. As I mentioned before, bringing future generations into WordPress is very important. So things KidsCamps and others.
To put in perspective, the 70 WordCamps for this year, obviously in COVID we dipped. In 2021, we only did 19. And in 2022, we only did 26.
So we have more than doubled year to year. And it's really exciting to see the community coming back. Although I couldn't be there physically to WordCamp Asia,
I'm very, very excited. So mark your calendars. The next big WordCamp is going to be in Taipei for March 9.
The last batch of tickets are on sale. And actually, although I've traveled the world -- I think I've been to over 500 cities --
I've never really been to Taiwan. So this will be my first time there. I'm looking forward to exploring the country. I think I connected in the airport once, but I don't count that.
So this will be my first time to actually get out of the airport, explore the amazing food and meet some of the-- I think, what's the attendees' registration so far for WordCamp Asia?
Do we know? I think it's coming up there. It might even beat WordCamp Europe. Around 2000.
So I don't know... See? A little competition. But get ready for a little bit of a surprise.
There were over 2500 organizers that made this possible, including 1600 meetup organizers and 800 WordCamp organizers.
So thank you so much to all the people.
And with all things in WordPress, we are always trying to get better and always trying to learn.
So we are right now running a survey for how to make meetups better. So for those who don't know, meetups are basically local, typically monthly, events that are often sort of the feeder to later becoming WordCamps.
So we got a QR code here. You can scan it or there'll be a link to it on WordPress.org as well.
We want to learn how to make these better and also create great feedback loops to get them going all over. It can feel challenging to keep track of so many WordPress.org events in the world.
So one thing we're doing, you may have noticed in WP Admin on the dashboard, there's a nice little widget that shows nearby events, sort of geolocates.
We are adding this now to WordPress.org. So at w.org/meet, there is going to be a sort of thing that'll show you all the events happening in your area.
Other things that have launched is we've relaunched how the showcase works. So if you go to w.org/showcase, it's now a great sort of example of what can be done with WordPress.
I find this is the most effective antidote to when you meet someone and they're , can WordPress scale?
Is it secure? Can it grow? Well, it turns out it can scale enough to handle Swifties as we saw the other day where time.com named Taylor Swift the Person of the Year and at their peak, they were serving over 100,000 requests per second.
I know it's kind of the new Digg effect or Slashdot effect, when Taylor Swift joins.
And can it be secure? Well, it runs whitehouse.gov and nasa.gov, and many other incredible websites around the world.
So the answer is, "Yes." and I find examples are the best way to show this. So check out the showcase. We're also hoping to expand this in the future with more case studies, particularly around enterprise WordPress, which is something that, as I've mentioned, is very, very-- It's happening.
But we're still fighting some perceptions of people who think that open source can't do these things. Of course, we know it really can.
Finally, and we've talked about this before, as our community grows and matures, we want a way to honor and remember those who are no longer with us.
So at w.org/remembers you will see a place where we can honor those WordPress community members who are no longer here.
We've talked about the Openverse before. For those who aren't familiar, the Openverse is basically a project that we took over from the Creative Commons, which aims to index all the open license content in the world, including that under Creative Commons license CC0, CC.
There's a variety of Creative Commons licenses. The Openverse work actually just won an award this year, got the Open Education award for Excellence in Open Infrastructure.
We've also been growing our Photos Directory and everything. So basically we're trying to make it where all the open content on the web, just WordPress has become a repository and a resource for great open source code and functionality, we want to make it so other content is available.
So congrats to the Openverse team on this win.
Another project that's been super exciting is the Playground. Who's played with the Playgrounds? Yeah, a good number in this room.
So for those who haven't seen this, it's one of the most mind blowing things you'll see, especially if you've been working with web technology.
So what the playground is, is basically using Wasm (Web Assembly)
we can actually find a way to load all of PHP and a little web server and a little database in your browser in a few seconds. So you can visit it, and it basically creates an entire virtual machine on the fly in your browser.
This allows for a lot of fun experimentation. When we did Contributor Days and other things in the past, a big challenge was always getting people's development environments set up, all those sorts of things.
Now it can happen literally in seconds, and you can do all this learning and development in the browser.
We have a little demo here, I believe, narrated by Adam Zieliński showing some cool stuff with Playgrounds.
The Block Editor Handbook tutorials now provide more than just code snippets. They provide actual life examples built with WordPress Playground, this one here.
You can now interact with blocks as you learn about them. And there's more. The upcoming Plugin Editor block will enable interacting with the code directly in the tutorial.
And here are the latest features in Playground. You can store your Playground in the browser and retain it beyond a page refresh.
You can load more PHP extensions libxmL. You can even give Playground access to network to interact with APIs, or simply to browse plugins directly in WP Admin.
And you can also stay ahead of the latest WordPress features with the latest nightly WordPress version preview.
Furthermore, you can even test specific upcoming features with a new WordPress pull request previewer.
Just paste a link to a WordPress PR of your choice to try it in Playground. And by the way, previews: WordPress plugins, this interactive code block, may now opt into a live preview feature in the WordPress plugin directory.
With a single click, you get a pre-configured Playground where you can try the plugin out without risk.
You can also use Playground to develop WordPress plugins. First synchronize Playground with your local directory, then update the code on your computer here. We are updating the admin color from navy to purple.
Finally, sync your changes back into Playground and voila, the admin is now purple without any local setup.
Want to learn more? Visit developer.wordpress.org/playground.
That will never cease to amaze me. Think of how much you used to have to set up with running things locally on your device or servers.
Just blows me away. In the past six months, almost 57,000 of you have worked with this tool, and the buzz that's growing is really phenomenal.
So there's been great enthusiasm at WordCamp Europe. We also got to display this at the Google I/O conference in California, and we're hoping to see a tenfold increase in users in the next year, especially with this live preview.
It's really a testament to the spirit of innovation in the community and the closest thing to Sci-Fi I think we have going on right now in WordPress.
Another fun achievement of this year is the Twenty Twenty-Four theme. So 2023 saw the finalization of phase two of the Gutenberg roadmap, which is around customization and our most recent default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four, is a great example of everything that's been accomplished there.
It's got over 35 patterns built in and it really can meet the needs of anyone, whether you're an artist, an entrepreneur, or a prolific writer.
It's kind of the first to take advantage of the full powers of Gutenberg and show it can be done. So I also hope that this inspires many, many other themes being built.
If you haven't tried it yet, set up a demo site, maybe using Playground, and check out the Twenty Twenty-Four theme.
It is quite, quite powerful. It's been getting some great reviews so far. Jamie Marsland said, "It's the best default WordPress theme we've ever seen.
Rae Moray says, "WordPress 6.4 and Twenty Twenty-Four are a match made in heaven."
And Brian Coords says, "Personally, I think this theme is a game changer." So please check it out if you have not already.
Here's a little short demo of it.
So basically what you're seeing here, everything, all of these screenshots were made with default Twenty Twenty-Four.
and just editing through the site editor. You can see you can make portfolios, you can make business sites.
Literally everything you're seeing here is, this is a great sort of gallery. Everything you're seeing is being done with Gutenberg.
That was a little blog going by.
Look at that. All of that. Now built in.
We've have 1339 new contributors to WordPress this year.
That is five better than being leet, or two better, right? 1337.
To remind you of the four phases of Gutenberg. The first phase was around editing. Second phase was customization.
We're currently working on phase three, which is collaboration, and phase four is going to be multilingual.
Something that might be exciting here in Europe.
I would now to invite my esteemed colleague and lead architect of WordPress, a very influential person in many, many ways, Matías Ventura.
Thank you. Matt.
[Speaking in Spanish: Good afternoon everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. It feels very homely. I had thought about doing this part in the unknown dialect of a Uruguayan, but I was told that most might not understand it, and that it would require two translations, from Uruguayan to 'Cashtellano', well, Castilian,
and then into English. It was also suggested that if we showed any videos, I would be told that no, here it's said 'vídeo', with a strange accent there.
So, in the end, let's continue in English.] Apologize for that intermission.
So as Matt was sharing, we've got a lot done this year.
And as we move into this phase three, which is called collaboration, I want to touch a bit on the sort of how we conceive Gutenberg as an editor, because it's aiming to do two things extremely well.
So it's a very challenging design effort. One is as a writing environment and the other one is as a design tool.
We've been making a lot of progress on simplifying the writing experience, even though this was technically part of phase one.
We continue to add writing flow improvements. We recently launched this year footnotes.
[speaking in Spanish: Has anyone tried the footnotes from Gutenberg? A few. Ok.]
It's a pretty cool feature. The footnotes and the distraction free is also getting extremely well.
Now we've applied this also to the site editor itself, so you can get a distraction free experience in the design editor.
So this is the context for what we need to do next, which is to start looking into these collaboration and workflows environments.
We're going to continue to polish these experiences as they are now part of the core offering of WordPress.
So collaboration and workflows. We don't have a timeline yet for this, but we do have an actual working prototype of real-time collaboration in the editor.
So pretty interesting flow because it's doing some peer-to-peer. It's establishing a sync engine into WordPress so you can have this side-by-side. And as you're seeing, again, you update an image,
it gets reflected for everyone on the session as soon as it gets updated. You can test this today.
If you install the Gutenberg plugin, you need to enable the live collaboration.
It's going to be buggy, but we want to get as much feedback as possible so that we can figure out how viable these approach is.
So if you can, and if you go to github.com/wordpress/gutenberg. There's a pinned issue with a lot of the sort of next steps that we're looking into for the real-time collaboration feature.
Moving on to some other cool stuff that's coming up with the site editor, we really started emphasizing patterns.
So we want to continue us moving to, like In phase three, we're doing both collaboration and workflows.
For the workflows part, we want to really embrace the idea of patterns as these sort of section elements of design.
Also to answer to a lot of the feedback, which is, "Blocks are great, but sometimes they are a bit too granular."
and people want to have, again, people -- freelancers, agencies, enterprise customers -- they want to define design units that then users can interact with, but they cannot really modify or mess up or deconstruct them.
So patterns are a crucial tool for that. And we're introducing these new modes, we're calling it Zoom Out mode.
So the idea is that you can step a bit back and see the structure of the site and operate at a bit of a higher level.
So the other thing that we're adding to this is the ability to swap patterns that are related to a specific semantic category.
So if you define a hero section, you'll be able to swap between patterns that are related to that.
The other thing that we're adding to patterns is who has played with theme.json files? Good.
Quite a few people. So theme.json can now be applied to specific patterns. So you will be able to have specific style variations that only apply to the patterns.
So, you're not changing your whole site design, you're just changing these units. And this is one tool that we're giving to developers and agencies to ensure that users can have this sort of some ability to customize, but within the boundaries that are established by the creators.
And there's one thing that I'm really excited about, which is I think with this new thing, patterns are going to be gaining superpowers.
So far, patterns came in two flavors. You could either have these reusable pattern blocks where any modification you make to them, they apply across the whole site, or you had these patterns that are sort of a starting point.
You insert them and then you customize them. But once you insert them, you sort of lose that original pattern.
What we're doing now is to have a sort of hybrid between the two. So you'll be able to customize the text of the pattern, so you can add it to 100 pages, customize the text, but still be able to update the design globally.
So this would allow you to, as we're seeing in the demo, to offer people the ability to have this really powerful thing, which is the ability to again change the content, which is what you want to do, and at the same time keep control of the global design.
So once you go into editing the pattern and if you modify the color, the layout, the structure, that would update and reflect across all the pages.
So this is, I think it's going to be a really powerful tool for developers and the workflows between developers and users.
Now we're going to get a bit into custom fields. This has been the UI for custom fields for years now in WordPress. What we're going to have now is the ability to connect blocks to custom fields without having to create custom blocks.
So essentially you can insert a heading or a paragraph and say, "I want this to come from this other custom field."
So then this becomes, again, it's just a regular core block.
The interactions for the user are extremely intuitive, but it's coming from this separate data field.
It's not serialized back to the HTML. So this is a way to bridge the worlds between custom fields which are very developer-friendly, and blocks which are very user-friendly.
So we're trying to make these the best of both worlds.
I want to talk a little bit, another thing that we are constantly doing, which is performance. Performance,
and when we talk about performance here, it applies in two cases.
It's both for the editor itself, so the people, the creators that are using the editor, and it's also for visitors.
We have a responsibility for the people landing on websites that they get something that's both super fast, performant, usable, accessible, and so forth.
So performance was just those two components. So we'll first talk about the editor performance, and we have this beautiful dashboard.
If you scan the code, you can see it live. This tracks the past, sort of like 20 or so commits to Gutenberg,
and what this is measuring is how fast are the basic operations of the editor, typing, inserting, hovering blocks and so forth.
It's a great sort of feedback loop for everyone that's contributing to Gutenberg, especially as we keep adding features that we want the curve of speed to go down.
So we want to add features while at the same time making things faster. And the really cool thing is that over the past few weeks, we're making the editor at least twice as fast.
And hopefully the typing experience might even get like 3x improvement. We still are quite not sure if we're going to get there, but it's looking like this.
If you look at the early portion of the graph, that's 6.4 and 6.5 is going to be a lot significantly faster.
This also, to me, it makes me really proud of everyone that contributes to the project that keeps always this at heart.
Everyone is so passionate about making these sort of improvements, ensuring that it's not just new features, but we are also polishing and making things snappier, more usable and so forth.
The other part of performance is the front-end performance. And we're going to be working this year on this thing we're calling the Interactivity API.
And this is purely for the front end. This website is built entirely with blocks.
It's a block theme, and the transitions are instant, even searching is instant.
But all of these things are real WordPress templates. It's not just done in the clip, like the Permalinks when you go to a single movie and so forth are real, all real WordPress permalinks.
We want to bring this to the tool set of blogs so that anyone creating a site with blocks is going to be able to get this sort of experience.
And if you saw in the demo, there was also a trailer playing while navigating. So you'll be able to get-- Like, again, if you're building a website with a podcast, you can sort of toggle this on and you don't need to do any sort of headless setup or anything.
It's just normal WordPress running in the browser like this. You can check this one on...
If you go to wpmovies.dev, you can see it in action and play with it a bit.
So last but certainly not least, we're looking at the admin design, and we're going to start expanding the design that started to develop around the site editor, focusing a bit on list views.
So this is showing, I'm going to resume the video so that you can see it again. So we're transitioning from the, are we fine? Yes.
So list views are really powerful, so we want to allow as much customizability and extensibility as possible to them.
So you can see pages as a list view or as grid items and so forth. This is going to be highly extensible.
And the idea is that everyone will be able to shape WordPress to their specific needs.
If you have a commerce, if you run a plugin with a newsletter, that all the elements in the admin are relevant to each use case.
So the idea is that each WordPress can be unique yet familiar to everyone. That's sort of the direction that we're going with these design improvements.
A lot of these elements will need a ton of feedback, a ton of your ideas.
Suggestions are invaluable. So if you can engage, if you can give that wherever, in all the places that these are at, either in GitHub or on social media, wherever you want to reach out, we'll be hearing about this.
So that's it from me. I'm sending it back to Matt, so thank you very much. Muchas gracias.
Matthias mentioned it. But I do want to encourage you to go to that wpmovies.dev site. As you might have noticed, there's been some controversy recently on people faking or speeding up demo videos.
That was real. And you can verify yourself in the browser; the pages load instantly.
It is so cool to see sort of a more native, headless implementation around WordPress.
So check it out. Verify. Trust, but verify.
Last year in Porto at WordCamp Europe, I asked you all to learn AI deeply.
This was actually before chat GBT came out or anything else. And this year, the year of 2023, I think we can very safely say was a year of AI.
It's been incredible to see the growth of generative AI. The amazing models GPT-4V, Gemini, MidJourney.
There's so much exciting stuff happening out there. I want to show you just a little experiment of something we've been playing around with in WordPress itself.
So this is combining Playground and a little bit of AI to use natural language to instantiate and interact with Playground blueprints.
So as you can see, what it typed there was make a Woo site for the shoe shop, Hola Madrid, and give it SEO, give it some e-commerce, and call it this.
And it responded yes, and it created a Playground blueprint. What Playground blueprints are is almost just like you might have files for Kubernetes or something else that tell you exactly how to configure the site.
It says how to set it up with plugins, extensions, version of WordPress, everything that you just saw earlier.
So this is pretty fun. I'm excited to see. I feel like generative AI so far has already given superpowers to everyday people and users.
If you're a developer, please check out Copilot and other things. If you're a user who wants to be more creative, play with these things. It's kind of like, I love the democratization of technology where this is very much the vision of WordPress to democratize publishing.
What does that mean? It means we take things that used to require developers or advanced technical knowledge to do and try to make it accessible to everyone.
And I feel like that's what these tools are really doing.
I'm very excited now to see if, because WordPress is still a power tool, if we can create more conversational interfaces to some of the things that we do.
And I'm particularly excited for this when it doesn't just do the thing, but actually shows you how it did it.
We don't have quite all of that yet, but the old saying, if you give someone a fish, they eat for a day. If you teach them how to fish, they can eat for the rest of their lives, or they have a hobby.
Now, I don't know. When I go fishing, it's more fishing, not as much catching, but very much so.
I would love for future versions of this, whether it's developed on WordPress.org or by anyone else, to not just do the thing, not just make the site, but actually maybe walk people through what they're doing.
Hey, I'm loading the settings page. I'm putting this in. Here's how I'm creating blocks. I think there's very, very exciting things you can do.
The thing that, if I had to say what I'm most excited about with AI is that we will all have access to, essentially, a personalized tutor available 24/7.
Imagine that throughout history, that's been inaccessible. But now in any language, 24 hours a day, we can have a very, very smart assistant, if you will, to teach us whatever we want.
It means that our growth and development will only be limited by our curiosity. And I think that's been one of the most amazing things about the Internet so far.
And I cannot wait to see where this goes next. So please keep learning AI deeply and also have AI teach you stuff.
So that's our AI stuff. Can't have a presentation in '23 without AI. Right? But the next thing I'm going to show you is actually what I'm most excited about.
And this is a little bit of a new direction in 2024 that we're going to be taking. So for a long time, six, seven years now, we've been on this Gutenberg roadmap, the four phases that I talked about earlier.
And so plans are great, but you shouldn't just blindly follow a plan that you made seven years ago.
You should feel free to modify it or change it based on changing market conditions or whatever else is going on.
So what I'm excited to announce for 2024 as a focus area that we will be doing in parallel to phase three of Gutenberg is what we're calling data liberation.
So if you notice a common thread in all of our projects, it's around-- Everything we do with open source is around data ownership and freedom.
In 2024, we want to unlock the web through a dedicated focus on migration tools.
Whether you're switching from a different WordPress, a different CMS, like Wix or Squarespace. By the way, Wix does not even offer export right now.
Or if you're just moving between WordPresses, which is a lot harder than it should be, right? We offer an export format, WXR, but it doesn't bring over plugins or images.
And moving WordPress, migrating from a staging site to a main or migrating between hosts is very, very difficult today.
So we want to make sort of first party community plugins, tools and workflows available on WordPress.org that are going to assist with this.
I want it to be seamless, straightforward, and as zero friction as possible. So what we want to do is unlock the digital barriers.
I think what has happened in mobile, we've seen this since 2008. The advent of the iPhone is mobile platforms were a lot more locked down than desktop or the web were. The same thing is that the new breed of CMS, particularly the ones that have become popular in the past ten years, really do a lot to lock you in, whether that's through the payment providers, not allowing you to export your subscribers.
They create this sort of subtle friction, which again I think decreases the amount of freedom on the web.
So we're going to work on one-click migrations between all of these. We're going to do a lot to focus on the export format for WordPress.
Finally, we're gonna keep working on copy and paste. You may have noticed this, but Gutenberg is actually one of the best places to copy and paste from.
Super nerds in the audience will know that when you have rich text, when you copy and paste from certain other web pages or applications, it goes very wrong.
So we've been doing a lot of work doing even things side loading images on demand to bring that in. These solutions are going to be available WordPress.org/and whatever the thing is
So as these projects boot up, there might be a Shopify or whatever, it could be page builders, it could be anything.
And we're going to create great migration tools from that to the first party things for WordPress.
But the data deliberation is not just about building the tools, it's about cultivating a community ethos.
So we're setting up streamlined moderation frameworks. So every one of these sort of migration paths or projects-- Well, one that's really exciting is they can be done in parallel.
I've been thinking a lot, especially around Five for the Future. How do we make it easier to contribute to WordPress? So 20 of these projects can happen at once.
They don't need to happen one at a time. We're going to give every one of these projects a dedicated Slack channel and they're going to get GitHub repositories on the official WordPress.org GitHub.
So they will have the best in class tools, very similar to what we do to develop WordPress itself, are going to be available to every one of these communities.
You might have noticed as well that there's a little bit of a backlog for registering new plugins. I believe right now we have a 79 day delay to add things to the directory.
So we are also ensuring that for every new one of these projects, if you apply to start one of these, it's going to be reviewed in about one business day.
So these will be able to start almost immediately. So again, if you're thinking about getting involved with WordPress and you've probably done migrations before written tools for this,
come join one of these projects. I think it'll be a really exciting way to get involved.
Thanks. This would not be possible without the amazing work of the Plugins Team and the Community Team. We have seen a huge growth in sort of sponsoring companies and things around this, but as I mentioned, we are right now very behind with reviewing plugins.
The Plugins Team is now accepting applications for new members. So if you would to be part of that group that keeps the plugin directory healthy, thriving, and representing the very best that WordPress and its community has to offer, you can now apply to join the Plugin Review Team.
All right. It wouldn't be a WordCamp without a little bit of a reveal. So I am happy to announce that WordCamp US is going to be in Portland, Oregon this year.
If you haven't been, Portland is a lot of fun. We're actually excited that this is actually going to be-- You know, with WordCamp US,
we try to do it in the same city two years in a row, and we are locked in for Portland now for the next two years.
Also, if you've never been to that part, the west coast of America is beautiful and Portland is super weird in amazing ways.
So I'm looking forward to the WordPress community getting to explore and experience it. All right, so we're going to do a little Q&A, but we also have a little bit of an AI twist.
So we got to have a little announcement here. You might recognize the speaker.
[Using AI, Josepha appears to speak multiple languages]
WordCamp us in Portland, Oregon join us this year for WordCampus in Portland, Oregon.
Josepha is amazing.
And you do speak more than one language, yes or no? Working on it, but that was all actually AI.
That wasn't her reading a script or anything. So there's some really cool AI tools for translations.
Now, if you spoke those languages literally, you know that it might be kind of a literal translation. So it's not perfect yet.
But one thing we're going to do with the State of the Word is we're going to run the whole presentation through these online tools.
So you'll be able to hear me in my voice and with my lips moving like I can speak another language, which is going to be kind of fun to experiment with.
It's imperfect, it's early versions, but I like that we're embracing these new tools and having fun with it. So keep an eye out for-- Do you know how many languages we're going to translate.
this into? We're going to translate this into four languages, and so it'll be posted in the next couple of days. So see you all soon in a new language.
Thank you
It's all right. Again, my name is Matt Mullenweg. You can see my blog at ma.tt.
I am @photomatt, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T on Instagram, Twitter/X, or whatever we're calling it.
And the hashtag for this event has been SotW. And now we're going to open it up for some questions from the audience.