- I'm gonna stand by the boot. (laughing)
This is a poem I wrote about WordPress.
Now I like to code and I like to rhyme.
Neither is perfect, butI've still got time.
Code is poetry so the saying goes
and in my mind, it's the bomb of credos.
Now don't you be thinkingof young men with Fritos
with nowhere to go whocan't touch their toes,
because I am a coder of the first degree.
If they gave out belts,midnight black mine would be.
Still my gender is rare, minorities, too.
We're flecks of black pepperin an all white guy stew.
Times are changing and the need is great;
computers are in everythingand more coming, just wait.
But where am I going?
How'd I get so off track?
It's poetry, (beep),end code, let's go back.
One's from the heartand one's from the mind,
one fueled by caffeine, the other by wine;
though when I've had bothis when I truly shine.
See, the two aren't sodifferent as you might believe.
Both go from point A to pointB, though one may weave.
Lines of code have afunction, several in fact.
The goal of poetry, more subtle,while keeping form intact.
But the best of my codehas a grace all its own.
You would see perfect indentsif the lines you were shown.
Now it's not just the spacingthat fills me with glee,
it's pure elegance, woven with efficiency.
Code's not just a straightline, at least rarely for me.
It's a journey you takewhile staying bug-free.
You do it with style andyou do it with smarts,
if you're doing it right,it should rival most arts.
It's likely a beautyonly true geeks can see,
but you're still listening,so I think you get me.
What I'm trying to sayis the code fills a need,
for my soul to expressitself artistically.
So while poetry isn't always my rap,
I can't turn it on like I do with a tap.
Every day I write code of beauty untold,
hopefully by now on that you are sold.
But I don't do it forglory, money or fame,
for code is poetry and that is my game.
(applause)
Thank you very much.
You guys are the best audienceI could ever hope for,
for that poem.
And it is now my greathonor and pleasure to get
to introduce the manyou're really came to hear.
He really needs no introduction,Mr. Matt Mullenweg.
(applause)
- That's beautiful, thank you.
Thank you so much.
Wow, wow, wow.
Hey, can we give anotherround of applause to Amanda.
That was so cool,
to actually open up withsome real live poetry.
They're doing some research.
They think that Code is Poetry,
actually came from WordPress.
They're having trouble findingearlier references to it,
so we might have originated that one.
Hello everyone.
This is the State of the Word.
As Amanda said, my name is Matt Mullenweg.
I'm available at matt.blog,ma.tt and Photomatt,
on major social networks.
Before we get started I did want
to do a quick thank you to our sponsors.
This year the top sponsors are Bluehost,
SiteLock, Jetpack; sporting a new logo,
and Woo Commerce.
Have you all been having fun in Nashville?
(cheers and claps)
Got some hot chicken?
Got some ... (laughing)
We can't say bingo yet.
(laughter)
Barely started.
We got the poetry and the hot chicken
but you need at least five to get bingo.
(laughter)
There's a bingo game goingon right now apparently,
so someone's going to yellit out relatively soon.
I'm really, really excited.
Nashville, I've been heresince Monday or Tuesday,
and I'm really, reallyimpressed with the city.
There's so much soul toit, so much amazing music,
barbecue even a Texan can love.
I had some not hot chicken
before I finally gotthe right hot chicken,
but I've been enjoying it quite a bit.
But really, number one the music.
It's just everywhere.
At lunch we've had great music.
Has anyone gone out dancingyet or had some fun out there?
(soft applause and cheers)
Cool.
I'm so excited we've gotthe dancers over there.
(laughter)
I'm so excited that we're going to be able
to come back here next year.
I definitely have alreadybeen making some lists
of places I want to return to
and some places I haven't made it to yet
that I really want to check out.
So we should thank thepeople who brought us here,
that helped bring us here to Nashville.
So if you're an organizer for CampUS,
could you please stand up really quickly?
(applause and cheering)
As you might have seen,
there were many cities vying
to host WordCamp United States this year.
In fact, I saw we had somein the booths earlier.
By the way, the sponsor areaand all the booths were packed.
That was a really good--
Thank you all forsupporting all the people
who helped make this happen.
But yeah, Nashville hadjust an amazing application.
So thank you all very, very much
for bringing it together.
This has been a really fun WordCamp.
I love the art and the venue.
I love the music, I love the food.
Looking forward to the party.
So, one more round ofapplause for the organizers.
That has been really cool.
(applause)
This is actually the 128th WordCamp
we've had so far this year,
one of our fastest pacesever, across 48 countries.
Just under a hair of 40,000 tickets sold,
39 something, something.
And who makes this happen?
So it looked like there wereabout 15 organizers here.
1000 organizers totalacross all the WordCamps
that happened this year.
So about eight organizers per WordCamp.
Raise your hand if you'veorganized a WordCamp
somewhere in the world.
That's a good quarter ofthe audience (laughing).
Raise your hand if you'vespoken at a WordCamp.
That's actually the quarter,
first maybe 10%, so that lines up.
Got 2,300 speakers andover 1,000 unique sponsors
that kind of make this allhappen, and able to happen
at such an accessible price for everyone.
But one of the more exciting things
that's been happening thisyear, you know WordCamps,
that is they happen once a year in a city.
They feature local speakers,
but I feel like a lot ofthe community in WordPress
comes from these more frequent events,
and we've had a huge up-kickwith over 4,300 Meetups
now happening in 73 countries.
You might have seen that Meetup
actually just sold as a company.
They sold to WeWork.
Usually I get worried whenacquisitions like this happen,
but I think that WeWork isgoing to be an excellent partner
for Meetup, and we hope tocontinue working with them
and growing it.
We are just a hair under100,000 (laughing).
That's kind of like, howmany Meetups can we do
before the State of the Word (laughter).
And it's been growing quite a bit.
Some of you might have noticedin version 4.8 of WordPress,
we added this new Events Widget.
The idea was it would show you,in addition to just the news
it would show you theevents, Meetups and WordCamps
happening near you.
So as a result of that widget launching,
monthly attendance to Meetups are up 31%.
(applause)
As you might know, we split out WordCamp
and the WordPressFoundation a few years ago,
so now all the Meetups and WordCamps
are running throughthis WordCamp subsidiary
of the foundation.
And we announced last yearthat we would be taking
some of the foundation tosupport educational endeavors,
which I'm going to update you on now.
The first being, that we wanted
to support three organizations.
We were hoping to do abouta 10 grand donation each.
We actually were ableto donate $15,000 each,
to Hack the Hood, InternetArchive and Black Girls Code.
So we're very excited about that.
(applause)
Also all over the world
in Johannesburg, Beirut,Cape Town and Montreal,
we had these do_action events.
If you've never been to one of these,
they're very, very exciting.
The idea is that non-profits can come
and in sort of like a week in Hackathon,
WordPress volunteers.
People volunteering will helpget them a great website,
or get updated, or anything like that.
We had four that we supported this year.
These are one of the coolest things
I've seen happen around theWordPress community in a while,
and I love the name, (laughing) right?
It's such a good kind of geek joke.
So we're hoping to seemore of these coming up.
One of the things I'mexcited to announce today
is that supporting the educational work
of the WordPress Foundationis now easier than ever.
We have a donate button (laughing),
which we never really had(laughing) working well before.
So, what is going on is that,
now that all the WordCamp stuff is outside
of the actual foundation,
the foundation needsmore diversity of donors
for its non-profit status.
So we've set up where youcan do a yearly donation,
I think starting at,was it, 30 bucks a year?
$10 a year, from $10 a year,
and the max is $1,000 a year,
so if you're a fancy businessor something like that.
It is coming up on the end of the year,
so this is all fully tax deductible,
since we're going to continuepaying taxes in the future,
I don't know.
(laughter)
But you can kind of get intoyour end-of-year giving,
and it's a yearly thing.
So we want to develop differentregular contributions,
and basically, as you know,the WordPress Foundation
has no employees, noexecutive pay, no anything,
so this all goes backout into the community.
We're hoping to do more of the grants
that we're able to do thisyear for organizations,
like the ones I just talked about.
So check that out.
Another update for next year,
is in May of this yearwe launched HackerOne.
HackerOne is a way forbasically a bug bounty system.
So people can, all over the world,
do security research for WordPress.
Now have a completelyorganized way they can say,
"Hey, I found an issue,"
and we can check out that issue,
and if it is valid then provide a bounty.
So we had 52 security issuesthat were resolved this way
this year reported that were valid,
From 46 different people,
and 39 of them got kind of a real reward,
so they were serious.
Something I just want tohighlight, S-Kansing, Skansing,
not sure how to pronounce it,but had nine valid reports.
So this has been a really,really great program.
Its allowed us to makeWordPress a lot more secure,
and as we get better at doing it,
we want to roll this out totop plugins and themes as well.
As I said before, not allof the plugins and themes,
or we would run out of money (laughing),
but for the top ones,having your WordPress
be as secure as possibleis a big, big priority,
and as HackerOne programsare really great.
So, if you ever hear someone say,
"Hey, I know a WordPressproblem," or anything like that,
point them here, becauseit is where we triage them,
where we look at themand everything happens.
Wordpress.org has also had somepretty cool stuff this year.
The one I want to highlight the most
is that this time last year,this is what es.wordpress.org
looked like, which is a Spanishversion of wordpress.org.
This doesn't look too, too bad,
but if you would scroll down on this page,
there was actually likeseveral thousand pixels
dedicated to editing a WP config file
and talking about whenWordPress 2.5 comes out
you'd have to change this and that.
It's a little bit old school.
2.5 was a long, long time ago.
So I'm excited to say that,
we're able to launch the newhomepage that we launched
at wordpress.org, for over26 different languages.
So they now have a very stylish, cool way
to introduce people all over the world
to what we're doing with WordPress.
We have now over 47,000 plugins
getting a bazillion downloads,
actually, a bazillion100-million downloads.
I talked a little bit aboutlanguage packs last year
and how that was going to enable
more and more plugins andthemes to be localized,
the same way that WordPress is.
I can now say that we nowhave over 1,100 themes
and 2,000 plugins for the language pack.
I'm so glad that's not like19,990 or something (laughing).
Of the top 10 plugins, All In One SEO
is actually 56 fullytranslated language packs,
but you can see in these top plugins,
we're getting really, really good coverage
all over the world, andthe local communities
are doing translationdays and everything else,
have done just a fantasticjob making this happen.
Plugin and theme directorsare really important part
of what I want to focus on next year,
and related to that youmight have heard a little bit
about a new program we'relaunching called Tide.
Think of it like a risingtide lifts all boats.
Not a way to clean things,although it actually will
cleanup the plugin theme directories,
so it works on multiple levels.
Kudos to whoever--
I think XWP came up with that.
Was that you Weston?
It was a group-ment.
He's a very modest guy.
So, what Tide is, is basicallya series of automated tests,
that run against every pluginand theme in the directory.
So here's how to imagine this.
Some of you might know Unitestor Continuous Integration.
Imagine if we were ableto run a set of tests
against the entire plugin directory,
basically in real timeas things get updated.
And now you as consumers,there's a page on the plugin,
a tab on the plugin pagethat allows you to see
the status of all those tests.
Some of the tests we might consider
like really, really important,
like saying, if this does notwork with the minimum version
of WordPress's PHP compatibility,
we might actually use a test to say,
"Okay, this plugin willbe temporarily de-listed,
"until that it fixes this thing."
But basically the idea is
to give developers muchbetter tools and information
for how to improve and knowhow their plugins are doing.
And then for users, to givethem a bit more information
on choosing things, butover time, of course,
we hope that every plugin has 100% here.
This is just getting started.
Each test that will showyou the kind of pass/fail,
will also have what the results are,
so it'll tell you what linesare being talked about,
and it'll have a linkto the test on GitHub
so that anyone can update it.
So there's a problem with the test,
someone could say, "Hey, this has a bug.
"It caught something it shouldn't,"
or submit new tests.
And then of course we will add a way,
because automatedtesting and code sniffing
isn't 100% perfect,
so we'll have a way forplugin authors to say,
"Hey, now I really didn't mean this line.
"I know it looks likethis is unescape variable
"being written directly to thetheme, but it's not really."
So they can leave a commentthat can override things.
Those will be visibleon the plugin page too
so you can see how this is all going.
I'm very, very excited about this.
It is with the support ofsome great organizations,
including XWP.
So, keep an eye out forTide stuff coming at WP--
There is a make site for Tide already,
and a slot channel, at #tide.
So I'm very much lookingforward to raising the quality
of every single plugin andtheme in the entire directory.
So, thank you.
Nice.
(applause)
I like when y'all clapbecause I can drink.
(laughter)
It's water, (laughing).
But watermelon water, which I like.
One of the other thingsI talked about last year
was the Growth Council.
This has been a little bit slower,
in which I'll takecomplete responsibility for
in getting started.
But I'm proud to saythat the first meeting
of the Growth Council is goingto be next week (laughing).
No, it's actually a scheduled--
(laughter)
Not like, "Oh."
Set a deadline for myself.
The idea behind the Growth Council is that
all across the WordPressecosystem community
there are dozens, nowhundreds of organizations
that are helping grow WordPress,
and sort of bringing to bearwhether that's advertising,
whether there's advocacy,creating documentation,
creating websites, allsorts of different things,
that writing books, that arepart of the kind of flywheel
that really helps WordPress grow.
So we wanted to bring thesedifferent folks together,
including a different commercial company,
so that they can talkabout what they're doing
and share best practices,
and also raise anythingthat maybe they're learning,
like perhaps that, you know,we find that in this country
that the lack of plugins being translated
is really hampering growth,
or our advertisementsaren't working as well,
or whatever it might be.
So bringing folks together.
And we got hundreds andhundreds of applications
and we decided to break itinto two different councils,
so there will be an enterprise council.
The way I describe this is people ...
The enterprise side of WordPress,there's lots of agencies
and people working on things,that the typical customer--
It's going to be a very, very large site,
and often investing over $100,000
into making it an amazing site.
So think of that likebig enterprise-y things.
And then the consumer side,which is often very much inline
with the idea of democratizingpublishing for WordPress,
which is bringing people who might
never had, had a websitebefore, or might have a website
on a closed-sourceplatform, liberating them,
and helping them find thecoolest opensource way
to publish online.
So that will be meeting next week.
I'm looking forward to getting some notes
and some agenda and everything posted,
and next year having a bit more
to talk about what's happened there
versus just saying,"Sorry y'all, (laughing)
"that didn't happen yet, but it is now."
One final thing I wantedto chat about was,
last year we talked aboutLet's Encrypt and sites
that were starting to go over SSL,
and WordPress, theproject, different host,
everyone had been doing a fantastic job
getting more sites on SSL.
And I'm happy to say thatwe've more than doubled.
We're now 36% of all thesites, that we know about,
all the WordPresses aboutin the world are over HTTPS,
which is again, more thandouble what it was last year.
So thank you all for makethe web a more secure place.
(applause)
So the big shift this year
was that we moved to afeature-driven release schedule,
versus saying we were going to
do a release every four months,
like we had in many years past.
I'm glad there's a fan of that,and that was a good whistle.
I don't know where it came from,
but it was a really good whistle.
When I was on stage I said,
"Hey, I don't know howthis is going to go.
"We might not have any releases this year,
"because we are going towork on things that we think
"are great and then releasethem when they're ready
"and the version numberswill follow that."
Well, in spite of that sort of warning,
we actually had two reallyfantastic releases (laughing),
around the three focuses.
And the releases, I talkedabout the three focuses being
Editing, Customization, REST API.
So around the customizationfocus we were able
to do some really, really cool stuff,
and that was in releases 4.8 and 4.9,
and led by Weston, Mel and Jeff,
who did a really, really fantastic job
getting some stuff out there.
(applause)
To talk about this I would actually love
to invite Mel and Weston up to the stage.
Would you all like to hear direct from
the awesome people behind this?
(applause)
Hello, hello.
So, Mel and Weston are goingto talk about what's going on
in 4.8 and 4.9.
- There are a lot of people in this room.
- [Matt] (laughing)
- Cool, yeah.
While Gutenberg has beenunderway for the entire year,
we've been trying to makea lot of improvements
still to WordPress, as it is now,
and to make all of yourlives a little bit easier.
So in 4.8 and 4.9 we tackledsome long-term pain points
and introduced alsosome great new workflows
for building WordPress websites.
So if you visit any popularcooking blog or news website
you're usually going tofind some sort of media
in their sidebar, usually an image.
So, actually adding thatimage to your sidebar
is a disaster (laughing).
You need to upload theimage in your media library.
You need to hunt for the URL, copy it,
open the Customizer or the widget panel,
and then manually actuallywrite the image tag
in a text widget.
It's super complicated,and it's just way more
than we should ever ask people to do.
So now you can actually justdo everything in one place.
Pop an image widget into your sidebar,
click to open your media library
and then just upload it directly there.
You could do the same for audio and video
and than also, as of 4.9,
you could now do it for galleries as well.
- Yeah, and the same way thatit was painful to add images
to your sidebar, it was alsopainful to add formatting
to text in your textwidgets, and so in 4.8
we added the visualeditor to the text widget,
and to do basic formattingand also to be able to now
with 4.9, add things,
like images into your text widget as well.
The post editor has hadvisual editing forever,
and even before that
it had those quick edit HML helper buttons
that you can use if youhave the text have focus,
but the text widget didn'thave either of those,
and so finally now, youdon't have to mess with HTML
unless you really want to.
And this was kind of a cringemoment for the 4.7 release
when they made the video,
because we had this startercontent that allowed you to
populate a blog with your business hours,
but on the release video,
when we added the starter content widget
that had the business hours,there on the release video
it's showing an HTML, and that'snot something we can expect
for users now to be able tohave to do unless they want to.
So now in 4.8, 4.9, youonly have to mess with HTML
if you want to.
(applause)
- In the past year or so WordPress
has made some really coolimprovements to links.
In a previous release,you can now paste a URL
on top of some text to create a link,
which is actually myfavorite feature ever,
and I find myself using itin Gmail, it doesn't work,
and Google Docs, doesn'twork, really frustrating.
So we've actually takenthat a step further.
I've personally run into tons of problems,
where I'm trying to updatesome text that's linked,
and so I'll like, click at the end,
it adds the text afterthe link, not in the link.
So I'll do this hack whereI just click on the link
and then type it, and thendelete the rest of it.
It's a mess, but now weactually have this background
that appears when you'reclicked into a link.
Yeah, it's awesome.
You can double-arrowinto and out of a link,
so it's easy to know
whether you're actually editingthe text in it or around it.
It's awesome.
And also as Matt previously mentioned,
we introduced this new dashboard widget,
showcasing WordPress events near you.
Since launching the widgetwe've seen meetup attendance
go up almost a third.
So 4.9, just released before Thanksgiving
here in the States, and itended up being a bigger release
than I think any of us were expecting.
We had a total of 443 contributors,
many of whom I'm sure are in this room,
or watching the livestream,
so give yourself a round of applause.
(applause)
And 185 of them areactually new contributors,
so this is the first timethat they contributed
to a WordPress release andgot props, so pretty huge.
(applause)
- One of the features that I am personally
really the most excitedabout with this release,
is something that we've been working on,
building up to for solong now, and that is
being able to draft and schedule changes
within the Customizer.
Now, the Customizer is reallylike a staging environment
in your live site, andso now you can go in
and start making changes,
and instead of just havingto decide whether you want
to publish them or not, now you can just
open that little gearicon, and change the status
to Save a Draft, and thenyou can leave the Customizer,
come back again, make some more changes,
leave, come back again, andthen you can schedule them
to go live when you want to,
or you can publish them right away.
- Yeah, so imagine youhave an ecommerce site,
and you're like, "Oh great.
"It's the holidays, I want to have a sale.
"I want to push it live at midnight
"but I don't want to stay up that late."
You can now schedulethat change to go live
while you're sleeping.
It'll get pushed up to all your customers,
and then later that weekwhen you want to end it
you could schedule it to end
maybe midnight the following week,
and that's all now native to WordPress.
(applause)
- Part of that newfunctionality is the ability
to have front-end previewlinks for those changes
that you've drafted or scheduled.
Now, if you make changes,you can save a draft,
and then this little linkat the bottom in the panel
will give you a URL thatyou can share with a client,
a stakeholder to review thosechanges that you've made,
and then they can reviewthem on the front end
of the site, without evergoing into the Customizer,
without even having to givethem a WordPress user account.
So this gives you the abilityas an agency or a freelancer,
to be able to give toyour client the ability
to see what you're going to dobefore those changes go live
so that there's not the rushof, "Oh, this is broken.
"Please fix this right away."
Now there's more time that you can have
to iterate on those changes.
(applause)
- So a couple months agoI attended a hackathon
where a bunch of teamsmade WordPress websites
for non-profits.
And since we were working in groups
we kept running intoissues where teammates
would accidentally overrideeach other's changes
in the Customizer.
And about a week later,after this hackathon,
of course, Weston came to me and was like,
"What if we added post and page locking
"but to the Customizer?"
So now if you're collaboratingon a site with other people,
you can't override each other's changes.
If you see somebodyacross the room chatting,
and the Customizer saysthey're working on it,
you can take over, likeyou can with Posts & Pages,
and then their changes will be auto-saved.
So if there is somethingthat they didn't save,
they won't lose them either.
- Yeah, and speaking of auto-saving,
now when you're makingchanges in the Customizer,
and say, your computer crashes
or you close a tab accidentally,
and you want to restorethose changes you made,
now it's much easier topick up where you left off
and restore those changes
to not lose the work that you've done,
just like when you'reediting Posts & Pages,
that's the same kind ofauto-saving functionality.
The auto-draft is part of the Customizer.
(applause)
- WordPress has longbeen a really great tool
for learning how to code.
I'm sure many of us in thisroom started out tinkering
with WordPress websites.
That tinkering became ajob, which became a career,
which has brought us all to this room,
and this city with reallydelicious hot chicken.
(laughter)
- Yeah, in 4.9 we focus onmaking code editing faster
and easier and much safer,so that you can make changes
with confidence, even thoughyou may not be a coding expert
and without requiring youto have your IDE open.
So, we added syntax highlightingand auto-complete features
to the code editors in WordPress,including the CSS editor
in the Customizer, the HTML widget,
and also the theme and plugin editors.
(applause)
- However, editing code live on your site
can be very dangerous.
I've personally white-screenedmore than one site in my day,
just trying to make somequick edits to my theme.
And yeah, that didn't turn outso quick, did it (laughing)?
- Yeah, so in addition toimproving the usability
of code editing withthe syntax highlighting
and the auto-completion,we've also integrated linters
into the code editingto do error checking.
So now if you have a syntaxerror in your HTML widget,
now it'll tell you thatyou forgot to close
that nested div, and so if youpublish that widget change,
it's going to stop you from doing that
so that you don't break thewhole layout of your site.
And the same way ifyou're editing PHP files,
and you're in a custom theme or plugin,
now if you try saving a syntax error,
instead of white-screening yoursite, now it will stop you.
It will tell you that this is an error
and it will give you an opportunity
to fix the change you made.
(applause)
- So yeah, we just want
to give one final shout out and thanks
to everybody who contributedto WordPress 4.8 and 4.9,
especially Jeff Paul.
Jeff, where are you?
Stand up.
- There in the back.
- Yeah, there in the back.
(applause)
Jeff has been totallyinstrumental with these releases.
(applause)
He's kept us on track.
Awesome, thank you all.
- Yeah, thank you.
Nice, great job.
- Thank you.
So Mel, West and Jeffhave not just been doing
amazing at that presentation,
they've been doing really anamazing job, really all year.
So, thank you again.
Part of the idea was changing how,
traditionally we've only hadlike a lead developer role
in WordPress, and that's really
kind of the hierarchy that we've had.
And one of the things we tryto do with the three focuses
was say that, like peanutbutter and chocolate
you pair a designer and a developer,
and I think some of the work
that's happened aroundthe Customizer this year,
in particular, all the thingsthey just talked about,
really shows when you takea design-first approach
to some of these problems,that you can really find
sometimes some things thatactually aren't that hard,
and there are some thingsthat were hard in there too,
but some things that like,I'm so glad that we did that,
because we're going to make alot of people's lives easier
and better, without taking a year or two
to have to implement it,so I thank you very much.
Now what were we talking about?
(laughter)
Sorry, (laughing) just had to.
Even though we've been doinga lot more design this year,
we decide not to do a default theme.
This was because we wanted tokeep the focus on the focuses.
This is the first time since 2010,
there will be no20-something theme, no 2017.
That just means we're going to have
extra cool stuff for next year.
The second of the threefocuses was the REST API.
The big update here is thatthere's still room to improve.
We've done some greatwork around Gutenberg
and the posting, content APIs.
We found that there were some areas
where it didn't fullydeal with capabilities
or maybe have some fields that we needed.
So we've done some improvements there
but we have a lot to do still
to really make the rest ofthe API a first-class citizen
in the WordPress world, and the goal
which is in the future,to have the vast majority
if not all, of WP adminactually go through our own API.
So that way by using ourown API we'd make sure
that it's fully great for everything
that we possible want to do.
But we did pick up abonus focus this year,
which you may have noticed,that the Word Process, CLI,
WP-CLI project became anofficial WordPress project.
(applause)
This is very cool.
When it became official
we did some sort of fundraising for it.
So we've had four releasesthere, four major releases
with some awesome features.
124 contributors andthere have been 46 talks
on WP-CLI at different WordCamps,
that's unique different talks.
If you haven't used the CLI before,
it's official, check it out.
It's basically a way tointeract with your WordPresses
via the command line.
It's ultra fast and youcan do really cool stuff,
like the trunk version actually has a way
to do scaffolding forGutenberg, which is pretty cool.
So, I want to get to what you all
are probably curious most to hear about,
which is the third focus,Editor with Gutenberg.
I don't know why we're laughing.
(laughter)
Gutenberg has been thelongest-running major feature
development that we've ever had.
Typically we work on thingsfor anywhere from two to,
really the longest Ican remember is maybe,
it spans two releasesto better of six months
in our previous releaseapproach, but with Gutenberg,
we've now been workingon it much, much more.
For those of you who don'tknow what Gutenberg is yet,
it's basically an effort to simplify
all the different things wehave going on in WordPress,
short codes, widgets,menus, and the random stuff
that people put in TinyMCE,and the one elegant concept,
which is a block, which we demonstrate
with this non-trademarkcopy-written Lego block there.
(laughter)
It's been about 11months since the kickoff,
posts from Johan, Matias and I,
talking about what thefocuses were going to be
and how to do it.
In that time, in just those 11 months,
it's already had over 4,300 commits
from over 100 contributors,almost 1,800 issues
of which 1,377 havebeen closed (laughing).
So don't think those are all open issues.
Most of them have been closed.
So it's really drawn together
the community in a very cool way.
We've been doing almost weekly releases
since the first beta that came out.
It's had 18 major iterationsover just those 11 months.
These are plugins thatpeople have been testing.
They've done all sorts of cool stuff.
In fact I heard that, someof you might have seen--
Did anyone do the Gutenbergtesting down at the booth area?
So we actually ran 90 user teststoday, which is incredible.
So 90 different user tests,all recorded, all ready to go.
But anyway, to talk alittle about Gutenberg,
I wanted to bring upmy good friend Matias.
A round of applause for Matias.
(applause)
Matias, alongside Johan, whostarted as your design pair
at the beginning, and lately Tammy,
along with, of course, many, many others
have been working diligentlyat Gutenberg all year.
And we're going to trysomething that we have not done
in maybe the history ofthe State of the Words,
which is a a live demo, are you ready?
- Yeah, yeah.
- All right, take it away.
- Thanks Matt.
- I'll be right here if you need me.
- I'll need to do this delicateoperation first, let me see.
- Little tech?
- Let's see.
- Lull again.
I'll narrate what's going on here.
Can you make it so it shows your password?
Okay, there we go.
(laughter)
All right, we're in.
I'll let you take it away.
- Since I'll be followingMartin's footsteps
in attempting the lead demo,
however this version is not even trying.
It's a mix-match of branches,
so happy accidents might happen.
I apologize in advance if things break.
I will start by...
So start by, so following the Spanish vibe
of the wordpress.org redesign,
I'll start by copying thepiece of the beginning of the
Don Quixote, by Cervantes,and I'm going to--
I copied it from GoogleDocs and I'm going to paste
into the editor, to start working on this.
So the first thing is that nothing should
really look unfamiliar,like it's just some text
on an editor.
You can go through theparagraphs and the elements.
But as soon as you start interacting
you'll see that you get
this contextual toolbars and elements.
So this allows you to, say,focus on this paragraph,
and let's make it a bit bigger.
Let's switch it to be center-aligned.
Let's select it all, put some italics.
So let's move to--
If you focus one thing with--
So when everything is a block,
like you get this little plusbuttons here between blocks
so you can add other kinds of blocks.
Now this opens the blockinserter, which is what Matt
referred to as trying to simplify
all the ways you can insertdifferent kinds of content.
So in this case I want toadd, and I can search here,
and it shows me the things that are there.
I can navigate all thiswith keywords, most of it.
A lot of work still remainsto be done in there,
but I can still accessthis, insert the separator.
I'm going to add another onehere, just for repetition.
Okay, now the other nice thing is,
you can access the inserterfrom multiple places
but you can also--
And we show a littlehint here when you're--
I don't know if it's toovisible on the screen.
But it says that you canuse the slash command,
which is writing a slash,to insert any block.
So I'm going to add animage here, scroll a bit.
I'm going to drag an image.
When you drag an imageit immediately shows,
even while it's uploadingit shows you the results
so you can start continue building that.
Let's add another kind of block.
I went to the bottom here andI'm going to add cover image.
Cover image is very similarto image in its current state.
It allows you to select animage from the media library,
and then write some text,
like in this case it's Gigantes Sancho.
Okay, and then we can bump it like this,
and we start to get somerhythm to this little story.
I'm going to add the finalblock here, text columns.
Let me get some more text.
This is a long paragraph.
I like these long paragraphs.
So one column, and this for the other one.
Okay, so this looks a bit tight,
but we can expand it a bit here, okay.
Let's add a final separator, okay.
Let's close this.
Actually, let's add one more thing,
the little drop-cap ofcourse, and a title.
So, this shows kindof, how you can quickly
get to an interesting lookingpost with more variation.
Basically the idea is that the block
is there when you need it andit disappears when you don't.
It's not a trivial balance to accomplish,
but I think it's gettingbetter with each release.
So if you just use the arrow keys,
you can navigate through the whole post.
You don't see the UI,but once you start moving
you can get these additional tools.
I'm going to move to ademo that we have prepared.
So when you install Gutenbergyou get this menu item
on the sidebar, that has afew utilities, one is a demo.
You also have feedback on documentation.
If you load the demo, this is meant to be
like an already put uppost so you can play
with some of the settings.
If you load this in the plugin
you can just check how someof these blocks behave.
This is a longer post
that has more of the variety of blocks.
You can check the different styles
that a specific block can give you.
One nice thing in this kind of long post,
is that we have this utilitycalled Table of Contents,
that allow you to basicallybrowse all your headings.
If you change the headingsto be like an incorrect size,
incorrect in the documentoutline hierarchy,
we also warn you about that, so that we--
(applause)
That should be a niceway to still let users
do whatever they want, butstill inform them about
the best practices ofwhat really work for us
for all these years,
which is a semantic and accessible way.
So, I'm going to show a bit the gallery,
which I really like the gallery blog,
because I don't know ifyou have seen other people
try to do this kind of mock-site layouts,
but very often I havefriends that would just
create this in Photoshopand upload a single image,
with all the mock-site.
So I think it's good that weoffer something that can be--
And you can play with itand just change the columns,
change the width if you want three images.
Go back to single one.
Play with differentlayouts and see what works,
while still making sure that the markup
is the best we can produce,
and that everything remains semantic.
You can also just remove someimages and play with this.
I think this allows a lotof layout possibilities.
It's quite nice.
Let me move back--
Oh, the other thing is embeds.
Now, if we go back to the inserter,
like you can search herfor YouTube or whatever--
It exposes all of the embedsthat WordPress already has,
but sometimes users don't know that exist.
The embeds, of course, can beplayed directly on the post.
We also have things likebuttons and little emojis
that you can also increase in size.
And let me show you--
So this is just working with the blocks
that came with WordPress,but you can also--
Like sometimes you willneed to write your own HTML
for somethings, so we have ablock, a custom HTML block.
I'm going to add everyone'sfavorite HTML element.
(laughter)
And you can keep this HTMLbetween all your blocks
and it will just work,
but you can also preview it in place.
So we can see our nice...
We can also move them like that.
(applause)
Let me add one more.
So this is a fun little tag.
But you can imagine thekind of custom HTML things
that people might need in their site.
And without having toswitch the whole editor
to the HTML mode, you canadd these little snippets,
which will be more powerful
when we introduce the reusable blocks.
Let me show you another--
a more interesting example of a block,
which is the latest post.
This is a dynamic block.
It means that it's renderingposts that already exist
so I cannot edit this text.
But it allows you to configure things
like how many posts to show.
And it allows all of this in real time.
You can enable the postsdate, switch it to a grid,
and you get like a nicething with your latest post.
You can add this to whatever post page.
And you could imagine allthe kind of dynamic blogs
that you could have like this.
So, let me go here.
I'm going to stop this video
so that it doesn't slow things down.
So this Code is Poetry code.
So this is something thathas come up a few times
that we were working on reusable blocks.
That's one of the reasons why I'm running
this mix of branches and trunk
so that I can show youhow it actually works.
So we have this Code is Poetry
that we want to use in some other posts.
So we're going to convertit to our reusable work.
And we're going to give ita name, and we'll save it.
And now we're going toswitch to a new post.
Still saving, okay.
And here, if I go to the...
Let me see, save blocks,Code is Poetry, okay.
So, you can reuse this--
(applause)
You can see how this couldbe a very convenient tool
for especially when you need--
when you think that youmight need a custom post type
for something, but reallywhat you just want is,
I don't know, like to reuse a testimonial
in some other page.
But these kind of things,it's basically a way
to create blocks on the fly
without having to write any code.
And if you consider,we could have nesting.
I think Morton showed ablog with an autobiography,
like all these kinds ofthings, you can combine them,
save them on the fly, andthen just have them all here
and insert, if you see--
There's a save.
Here I have a bunch of weird blocks,
but you can just have differentkinds of blocks saved,
that's just output to the thing.
So, I want to show you now someintegration with some code.
So in the last version of Gutenberg 1.8,
we added support for templates.
Templates are reallyjust a list of blocks.
And I hope this is kind of readable.
This is just a register book type.
It's adding a post tag called Books.
It has the show in (mumbles)
because we use it with the API.
And the interesting thingis this template attribute,
which defines in a waydifferent types of blocks,
in this case an imagewhich has some attributes,
a heading and a PowerGraph.
If I come to my editor and I go to Books
and add a new book, insteadof seeing a blank page,
now I get an already setup thing here,
so I can do somethinglike drag an image here
so I get my cover.
I'm going to grab the full title
because I don't want to type it.
And I'm going to add a little description.
This is like, very quickly Ican get the intended display
that the author, the developer,
the theme-er intended for this post,
while still given theuser a very intuitive way
to input that information quickly.
So I think templates, andif you expand templates
right now they work with custom post tag,
but they can also work on the fly.
You can see a lot of interesting mixture,
especially when we add nesting.
All of those things together
I think will give a lot of flexibility
to creating these kinds of layouts.
One last thing before Iextend too much, is...
Let me go to the...
It's just a new post.
So the other thing is how thingscan extend certain blocks,
or even general Gutenberg functionality.
One thing that we haveon the paragraph block
is that you can add certain colors,
and just have like...
So what happens if the theme was
to have a different set ofcolors, like we'd support.
We allow things to specify inanother theme support color.
You can press an array of color values.
Then we save.
So if we reload, now thecolors of this software
are the colors offered by the theme.
And it's also nice, another thing we show,
is if your contrast ratio fails
we warn the user thatthis is not very legible.
(applause)
And once you get into thelegibility it fades away.
The other thing that themes can do,
let me add some filler text here.
So the other interesting thing is,
this looks like-
and especially if I collapse this.
This is a very wide, clean layout,
but your theme might be different.
In this case I'm going to enable my theme
to modify the editors styles.
And my theme is mostly modifying--
Let me add heading.
Heading One, some more text.
So this is saved.
I'm going to reload the page
and now this is applying mytheme styles to the editor.
So the heading's changed
because the theme's set, so I have the...
Like this remains, but I can remove it.
And so something like latestpost, which we saw before,
come with their own liketheme-specific styles,
so it looks like the themewants it to look like,
but the functionality is thesame, if I enable these things
like all the functionalityremains the same.
Okay, one more thing is that you can--
Let me disable this theme,going to load them again.
You can also, since everything is a blog,
you can also select multiple blocks
and move them alltogether, if you need to.
This also allowsdifferent transformations,
like to make a list outof multiple paragraphs.
If you have multiple images
you can convert it intoa gallery or a slideshow,
or things that plugins can hook into.
Yeah, so that's about it.
I would I would like to--
If all the people that have contributed
so far to Gutenberg,
like before and even through the WordCamp
if you can stand up
and have a round of applause for everyone.
(applause)
Hand it over back to Matt.
- (mumbles) plugin.
- Let's do that thing again.
- I'll let you...
You got it?
My favorite part of that
is actually where the themestyles came into the editor.
It was easy to miss.
Thank You Matias.
- Thank you.
Flew in all the way just for this.
(applause and cheering)
That was front-end editing.
That was WYSIWYG, likein the real sense of it.
If you would like to see some more awesome
kind of Gutenberg introduction,
actually check out Morton'spresentation yesterday.
Morton, where are you?
Somewhere.
Oh, right there.
Stand up.
It was funny (laughing)--
(applause)
He got some questions,
and he kept getting all these questions.
He's like, "I'm not actuallyon the Gutenberg team."
(laugher)
But now I'll crown you anhonorary Gutenberg team member
because your presentation was so great,
and we will get it onlinevery soon, so thank you.
(applause)
So you saw all that cool stuff.
I know what you're wondering,
how long will it be?
Well, to that we did somenon-traditional measurements.
(laughter)
So you might not know--
- [Man In Audience] Bingo!
- (laughing) We got a bingo,but haven't said it yet.
This thing on my faceis because of Gutenberg.
So I'm calling it the Gutenbeard.
Like when Facebook changed the re--
It didn't change the React license,
it was like, "Another inch."
So we think that this is akind of a before and after
how long we think it's going to be,
and that's Mark Uraine,
who also helped design allthis modeling over there.
And really, I think it needsabout 12 more iterations.
So we've done 18 so far, orabout four months, so cool.
Yeah, so that puts us into around April,
for when I think that this will be ready
for the widest audience, evenwider than is seeing it now.
In the meantime, we're going
to keep doing a lot of 4.9 releases.
So we've already added asecurity release with 4.91,
but we'll push other stuffout there in the meantime,
including perhaps some enhancements,
if some really good ones come in,
certainly anything else with security.
And then at some point,
as part of the path to Gutenberg
there will be sort of a plug for it,
where people install and test the plugin.
What needs to happen first?
Well, we need to get
some really greatdocumentation for Gutenberg,
which is not there yet.
We need to you continue theconversations around it.
There've been 77 Meetup events
and 20 WordCamp sessions so far.
And we need plugin developers,
so really start to reimagine
what their plugins and their functionality
will look like in a Gutenberg world.
It's actually interesting.
So, WordPress introducedWYSIWYG in version 2.0.
That was 12 years ago, outside of some
relatively incremental updates,
including link boundaries and other stuff,
that experience has remained
pretty much the same for about 12 years.
Gutenberg is what we want to build on
for the next 12 years.
So think of it as the thing
that will be around for a while.
We're going to keep working on it.
There's many, many more--
much more to come after the main release,
but this is the basis
for so much of what's goingbe happening in WordPress
is going to be Gutenberg base.
And finally, it needs you.
I love these Waupoos (laughing).
I thought they were extra cool.
(cheering)
Thank you.
(applause)
(laughing) Thank you, Ithought that was so cool.
Sally the Riveter and everything.
You can contribute to Gutenberg.
We have sort of a sitethat talks all about it,
wordpress.org/gutenberg.
We've got it to Github,
and also of coursemake.wordpress.org/editor, is where--
Right, editor?
Is where all the Gutenberg stuff is.
As I like to think about it,
forget about 280 characters,
let's have 280 blocks, all right?
How can we make it sothat we can build things
that people never even imagined before,
things to do, like some ofthe stuff Matias just showed
which isn't even the final version
that we're going to ship.
You would have needed lots of plugins,
or basically to be a developer
to get even close to that,
and now we're making it available
to a much, much much wider audience,
very much inline with our mission
of democratizing publishing.
Now, I realize that forsome people in the room,
a lot of people are obviouslyvery excited about that.
Some people saw that andwe're terrified (laughing),
thinking about everythingthat was going to break,
everything that isn't going to work,
all the clients that aregoing to need retraining,
everything.
So actually, the Gutenbergteam has created a plugin
called Classic Editor.
It is on the plugin directory today.
(laughter)
You can install it.
This isn't a joke, this is real.
(laughter)
If you think April, the plugins you use
or whatever is not going to be ready,
install this plugin now.
It will make sure that when 5.0 comes out,
the editor, that will be default on,
kind of when you click Edit in WordPress,
will still be the classic editor.
It also allows us togather usage data there
and make sure that we can let people know
that as Gutenberg evolves,
that maybe where theythought it wouldn't work,
with say a plugin that they have,
it might now be 100% compatible.
So if you checkout theClassic Editor plugin
if any of that terrified you.
This will work for atleast a little while.
(laughter)
We've taken a very differentapproach this year,
and it didn't end.
The world did not end, atleast in the WordPress world.
We've had some great releases
around the customization focus.
The Gutenberg focus hasreally kind of taken over.
We've been doing--
It's also reinvigorated howJavaScript works in WordPress.
It's been so much coolstuff happening there.
And during all that, wegrew about another 2%.
This is actually out of date.
We're now at 29.1% at thetop 10 million websites.
(applause)
(laughing) I'm really proud--
My sister got bingo.
I'm really proud of whateveryone contributing WordPress
has been able to accomplish this year.
This is kind of a lagging indicator,
but it's nice to be able to see
that our continued adoptionamong this this cohort,
shows that we're makingsomething that people want.
I will be keeping on mylead hat through 2018.
Originally I planned it through 2017,
but I want to see Gutenbergall the way through.
The next step, what comesafter what you just saw,
when we finish the editing experience,
is Gutenberg-based site customization.
So if you imagine, like those blocks,
including some of thedynamic blocks that you saw,
some reusable blocks.
Well, what's the ultimate reusable block?
Everything else that goesaround the post or page.
So you could imagine aheader, or a site title,
social icons, related posts, all of this,
as different blocks, thatcould be put in a post or page
if you want to, as dynamic blocks,
but also be really, really cool to do,
just laying out the whole site.
This is a powerful enough concept,
that I think it warrantsdoing a new default theme.
So we will start working on that in 2018.
Now, I think that thiscustomization part of Gutenberg
can actually happen a lotfaster than phase one.
So I want to announce as the three focuses
for the coming year.
There will be Gutenberg Editing,Gutenberg Customization,
and a Gutenberg Theme.
I think, that most of the hard stuff
is out of the way already,
but these might be my famous last words.
(laugher)
So, depending on how the year goes,
next year let's maybeforget about this slide.
(laughter)
Or if it goes well, I'mreally looking forward
to sharing with all of you,
when we return to Nashville,
all the cool stuff that's happened
with Gutenberg customizationand new 2018 theme,
and what the next 12 yearsfor WordPress will look like.
So, thank you very, very much.
(applause)
Woo, man, a live demo (laughing).
I don't know if we'veever done that before
and might not do it ever again.
I actually went on the audienceso I could see everything.
So, now you've heard theidea, what we're looking at.
This is where we ask questions answers.
So if any of y'all have something--
I see you're starting toline up the mics already.
I will do my best to answer it,
or pass it to one ofthe very capable people,
WordPress contributors that are nearby.
Oh, we got a spotlight, wow.
This is mad fancy.
I also, just before we get into QA,
wanted to take thisopportunity to say, hello Mom.
This is the first year we'vegotten the livestream working,
for CampUS.
So, I believe that mymom is watching this,
and so I want to say,I love you, thank you.
(applause)
All right let's kickoff with the questions.
To the right here.
Say your name, whereyou're from or something,
and then question.
- Hello Matt, this is Fahad from Pakistan.
So I'm here to attend the WordCamp.
With the Gutenberg, just aquestion came into my mind.
I apologize if you findit a little critical.
- [Matt] It's okay.
- So actually, there are a lot of plugins.
There are a dozen of pluginwho are already capitalizing
on this idea of different page builders.
I don't want to name all those plugins.
But with the growth of those plugins,
they always kept on capitalizingand branding WordPress.
So, don't you think that it's more like,
you can say like it's a serious trouble
for them with theGutenberg and WordPress is,
in fact demoralizingthose plugins to grow.
- That's a good question.
I think that the very manypage-builder plugins out there,
show that there's a demand for this,
but even the largest of them,
only have in the hundreds of thousands,
a couple-hundred thousand users,
and what we want to dois bring this to everyone
and for free in Core.
The other thing that thebalkanization of this approach
among the different plugins has created,
is it makes it reallyhard for other plugins
to interact with that.
Like Yoast for example, basically
because everyone presentsthe content differently,
any plugin that wantsto look at the content
has to build support for,well, 20 different things.
Any theme that want tosupports the plugins
really natively has tosupport 20 different things,
so by standardizing someof that core functionality
into the core of WordPress.
I think it will actuallycreate a huge opportunity
for all of the peoplewe just talked about,
other plugins, the pagebuilders and themes.
You saw some of the cool stuffthat can happen with themes.
This has been a common concern
anytime we've brought anything into Core,
or into Jetpack.
So, for example, when Contactforms went into Jetpack,
people very, very concerned
that it would hurt all oftheir Contact form plugins.
Well, it looks like they'redoing great (laughing).
So I think that it'll allow
that the plugin pagebuilder's premium whatever,
to focus on what's different about them,
than focus on sort ofreinventing the wheel,
and we can standardize the wheels,
so that everyone candrive on the same car.
Will that work? (laughing)
- All right, during your speech
somewhere I came to know, like you said
there won't be any 2018theme or something,
but in the end you said that
we are going to build a 2018 theme.
- There will be no 2017 theme,there will be a 2018 theme.
I apologize if I misspoke that.
- All right, thank you very much.
- Oh, man.
(laughter)
These lights are bright.
There will be no 2017,there will be a 2018.
All right, thank you for your questions.
All right, over here.
- Hi, I am Scott, from Dallas, Texas.
And I have a question.
I find it pretty important,
but I think Gutenberg kindof changes the game there.
Do you think that a potential Fields API
could be just as importantas the REST API to developers
needing to manipulate Fields
throughout the six plusscreens inside of WordPress,
or do you think thatGutenberg will negate the need
for a Fields API in most of the areas?
- Hmm...
That's a good question.
I think a Fields API will still be needed.
It's not one of the focuses for 2018,
so I wouldn't bet thatit happens that year.
But Gutenberg willcover a lot of use cases
but not all of them, I think a Fields API
would still be really useful.
- [Scott] Thank you.
- Thank you, and thankyou for your work on pods.
All right, let's goover here to the right.
- [Phil] Hello, I'm Phil from the UK.
You mentioned--
- Not enough UK love in here, come on.
(cheering)
(mumbles) Beeping UK a lot.
- Don't mention (mumbles).
You've mentioned about thecustomization stuff in Gutenberg,
and that's really exciting,
kind of more excited aboutthat than Gutenberg itself now.
- [Matt] I'm having a littlebit of trouble hearing.
Go closer to the mic.
- Oh, sorry.
I'm kind of excited
about the customizationstuff in Gutenberg,
How do you think--
Do you have a vision for how you think
that might pan out with the Customizer?
So, how do you see thetwo working together
or will one be substituted into the other,
or do you have an idea ofhow that might pan out?
- Yes, well I mean, yes thatthey will work together.
Weston's actually sent me a mock-up,
just like a day or two ago.
When you look at it--
I mean one of the coolestparts of Gutenberg
is we can take this arbitrary HTML
and create a rich semanticstructured version of it,
and doing that for a widertheme and allowing themes
to perhaps even provide styles
that look just like the front end will.
Either we could move customizationtotally to the front end,
so you're actually rearranging things,
or maybe we create something
much like we just showed in Gutenberg
where in WP Admin is like acool way to move things around.
And that would also be nice,
because then there couldbe toggles for like,
show me what it's goingto look like on mobile.
Show me what it will look like on AMP.
Show me what it willlook like on a tablet.
You can kind of do some coolthings for for testing it out.
But a lot of what's in the Customizer--
Like I said, we wantto replace short-codes,
widgets, menus all that.
So all that stuff that's currently there
all turns into blocks.
So some of that interface moves out
of trying to squeeze into the Customizer,
or sometimes it canfeel a little bit tight.
I'm reminded of--
Have you all see Aladdin,
where it's like ginormousintergalactic powers,
itty-bitty space?
(laughter)
Sometimes the Customizer feels like that,
amazing powers but in a small space.
And so, it allows to breaksome of that functionality out
so there'll be like a full block interface
that can really be bothresponsive and full screen,
for like editing menusand things like that.
So that is the plan forhow it's going to happen,
however, like everything we've been doing
that's really been design-led.
I imagine that will start with how
this is going to look and work,
and do lots and lots of tests
and innovations along the way,
Although I think thatcustomization can happen faster
because we've done a lot ofthe technical underpinnings,
with the editor part of Gutenberg.
It doesn't mean that we don't need just
as much testing and things like that.
So, we'll definitely want totest the Customizer at meetups
and do all the same stuffthat we've been doing
with Gutenberg Editor so far.
Cool, thank you.
All right, over here to the left.
- Hi Matt, thank you.
I really loved the Gutenberg demo.
I saw Morton's yesterday and yours today
and I'm really getting excited.
So I really appreciate you guys.
I kind of wanted to ask youabout some vocabulary you used.
Right at the end of theGutenberg demo, you said,
"This is true front-end editing."
And we never saw the front end.
The front end is the thing theuser sees, we never saw it.
So my definition of front-end editing
is editing that happens on the front end,
which we never saw.
So, I just want to make sure
that there's not kind of likea move the goalpost thing
going on here, especiallybecause I think one of the
advantages that somethinglike Beaver Builder has,
is that it literally is on the front end
the same way that Squarespace is.
So my question to you is,
what does front-end editing mean to you?
- So I talked about it a littlebit in this last question,
where there is the version of front-end A,
that literally meansyou're on the front end,
so that we're serving adynamic version of it to you,
that actually isn't what your users see.
We're adding a bunch of like controls
that allow you to like move things around.
And by the way, it's reallyhard to do that multimodally,
which is how all thiscontent is being consumed.
People are looking at it onlots of different devices;
different DPIs, differentshapes, different everything,
and that will only grow.
Like if we saw Morton's,he's really excited about VR.
(laughing) It's like,"Wow, this is a lot of VR."
Gutenberg and VR wasnot even imagined to me
until that presentation.
The way that the contentneeds responsive and display
different ways, does not lend itself well
to pure front-end approach.
But when you talk to users, so--
Although, like as developers
we might have a technical definition
of like what's the front and the backend?
A lot of users that talk about it,
really want a better WYSIWYG,
because our WYSIWYG, as Morton said
in his cool presentation,like isn't actually a WYSIWYG.
It's like kind of a visual editor,
but actually how thatturns into your theme,
often can be very, very, very different
than how it displays in the backend.
So, maybe we can't callit front-end editing,
because people won't like it,
but I do want to bring that distance
between what you're seeing
when you're in the editing interface
and what your users are going to see,
as small as humanly possible.
- [Audience Member] Thank you.
- Thank you.
How about to the right here?
- [Kevin] Hi, I'm Kevin from Give WP.
I'm a plugin developer.
- Come a little closer.
- I'm a plugin developer,
and I have not contributedthrough code to Gutenberg,
but I have been followingvery closely testing
and involved in GitHub issues.
And I just want to say as oneof the more vocal critics,
I think throughout the pastyear what we saw today,
is really impressive.
So hats off to the folks whoare actually contributing
to the code, first off.
Second off, I remain really concerned
about the extensibility of WordPress
from a plugin developer's
or a theme developer's perspective.
I've witnessed the needle shift
from one end of the spectrum to the other
over the past year, whereour first look at Gutenberg
was meta boxes did not exist at all,
to this past week, where acommit was entered that said
a single meta box couldundeclare support for Gutenberg
which would cause the entire editor
to shift back to classic mode.
Hearing you suggest theClassic Editor plugin
and different ways toundeclare support for Gutenberg
leads me to this idea that
we are headed towards asplit-admin interface,
with no finality to to the transition.
Meaning that, I don'tsee a time in the future
where everyone will be on Gutenberg.
We will always have thesepeople in Classic mode
and as plugin and themedevelopers, we will always have
to support two different types of users.
So my question to youbased on that, (laughing)
is how do we reach thatpoint where we are past
the transition however long it might take,
where we can not have thisbox of chocolates effect,
where you click Edit Post Type
and you never know whatyou're going to get?
- [Audience] Aww.
- Aww.
(applause)
That's a good question,
and it really gets intomore of the human side of it
than necessarily technical side.
So like you mentioned,
technically we've takendifferent approaches.
We have some meta boxeswe can put at the bottom.
We have some ideas that maybe we should
just turn off Gutenbergtotally, those meta boxes.
There's different ideas.
Think of that as likedifferent things we'll try,
and we'll pick whicheverone seems least hard.
But you bring up the much bigger issue,
which is, there's 40-somethingthousand plugins and themes.
At what points do the support
for Gutenbergs out there matter or not?
My hope and my expectation,based on how this has worked out
with new interfaces in the past,
like for example, whenthe Customizer came out,
many themes had their own kindof customization interface
and that was somethingeach one did its own way.
Much like we have different page builders
or different ways that plugins interact,
by stuffing things in the meta boxes.
Over time, once this greatkind of unified interface
that had this front-end preview was added,
that has basically shifted,
and it's very hard-pressed to find a theme
that has its own customization,
doing the stuff that's easy
that can be done in the Customizer,
doing it in their own way anymore,
because people expect in the Customizer.
The truth is, if you're aplugin or a theme developer
people are going to expectthings in Gutenberg,
so you really need todevelop for Gutenberg.
And then, at some point, I'm totally okay
if you drop your supportfor the classic, all right?
And so there will bethemes and plugins that say
you need to have Gutenbergor newer, 5.0 or newer,
if you want to use this.
We already have that existing now,
like plugins only support sofar back in PHP and WordPress.
There will be plugins
that don't support under WordPress 5.0.
Say a plugin author wantsto do different things,
as you know, that's not goingto be that much different
supporting different WordPress versions,
where people choose sometimesto go way, way, way back,
sometimes a year or more, several years,
and support like WordPress 3.8 or 3.9,
and some don't bother anymore.
There's lots of APIs and other things
have changed in that time.
At some point you just have to make a
cost-benefit analysis, and do things,
maybe like Yoast isdoing for upgrading PHP,
and say, "Hey, if you really want the
"best of this, check out this new thing."
- If I could quickly respond.
- Sure.
- I think this is a different situation,
because from what I'veseen in undeclaring support
for Gutenberg, it's notup to the plugin developer
or the the team who'sdeveloping a single plugin.
Literally if you have 10 plugins installed
in that 11th undeclared support,
they are going to affect the other 10
that have modernized inadopted support for Gutenberg,
and that's where I'm concerned mostly.
- Sure, sure. And so we'llwant to highlight that, right?
Nine out of 10 of your plugins
are totally Gutenberg compatible,
this one isn't.
Is there an update available?
Can we work with a plugin developer
to help them get up-to-date?
Yeah, you're completely rightthat one can throw it off.
- [Kevin] As of this week itreverts to the classic editor
when that happens.
- Don't worry too muchabout what it's doing today.
Think more about howwe're going to navigate
into this future, and what we want
is every single plugin, every single team
to support Gutenberg.
So, it's basically,
how do we get from A toB as quickly as possible?
And through talks, throughdocumentation, through support
through maybe going in thereand actually helping people
code up the Gutenberg versionof what they're doing.
This is an open-source community
and we're all working together on it.
It will take a lot ofwork, but that's because
this is the new interface.
When WYSIWYG was first introduced,
there were a ton of plugins
that didn't work with WYSIWYG.
We forget it because it was 12 years ago.
So everything workswith WYSIWYG right now.
It'd be kind of weird to have a plugin
that didn't work with WYSIWYG.
This will be the same way.
12 years from now we'll be like,
"Wow, there was a timewhen things didn't work
"for Gutenberg."
- [Kevin] Thanks Matt.
- Thank you,
All right, to the left here.
- [Mitch] Hello, my name is Mitch Cantor,
and I live here in Nashville.
So, welcome to Nashville first of all.
- Thank you.
- So, there's an old adage about opinions
and that everybody has one.
That's only part of the adage.
- [Matt] (laughing).
- I'm sure, but we'redevelopers, a lot of us are,
and developers are apretty opinionated bunch.
With what you've showntoday with Gutenberg,
first of all it looks fantastic--
- [Matt] Cool.
- But how do you howand how does your team
plan to navigate through all of the noise
that comes from all of theopinions that we all have
about what Gutenberg is, what it isn't,
what it should be?
Like do you have any--
You talked about it beinglike on the human side
of things in the last question.
I'd love for you totalk a little bit about
more of that and what you see as--
How do we as the community,how can we help you best,
and how do you sort through all the noise
to find what is thebest direction for that?
- That's really the art and science
of software development.
My personal philosophy there,
is that even in theharshest toughest feedback,
there's a nugget of something really
that you can learn from it,
and so any feedback youall want to contribute,
even if it's critical--
Someone apologized forbeing critical earlier,
that's all right.
As a Gutenberg team, asWordPress leads, everything,
we'll try to pick outwhat is going on there,
and the better we can understand it,
the better we'll look at it.
If you notice, some people
are giving Gutenberg one-star reviews,
but every single one ofthose one-star reviews
actually has a response, often from Tammy.
I think I responded to one or two.
Some were really good.
Someone wrote this amazing poem,
like the Night Before Christmas,
this the Night BeforeGutenberg, or something.
I forget, it was a really good poem.
I wanted to give the review five stars.
(laughter)
And there's some Ifundamentally disagree with.
There was one I almostput in the presentation
but I didn't want to call him out.
I guess I'm doing now.
(laughter)
So there was a review that said that,
people used to work on their cars,
now everyone uses a mechanic.
Just like people used todesign their own websites,
everyone's going to have a professional.
We shouldn't be doingthings that enable people
to design more of their own sites.
I get that, and I want to have the ability
to empathize and understandwith what that person
is bringing to the table,and until I understand it
I can't necessarily disagree with it,
because I might just be misunderstanding,
but once I understand it, thenyou can make the decision.
We can say, well fundamentallyWordPress' mission
is to marketize publishing.
We want to open it up for 7.4billion people in the world
who don't have a website yet, and to do so
we're going to need to make--
making it customizable and doing
what WordPress doesdifferently than every other
publishing platformthe world, a lot better
and more accessible.
So we're going to decideto work on Gutenberg
regardless of this one-star review.
Thought about stoppingafter I read it but...
(laughter)
So that's really all there is,
whether it's through the test,
through the reviews, through the whatever,
however people submit feedback,
the team will do its very,very best to learn from it,
and understand it, and thenmake whatever we discern
to be the best decision to move forward.
- [Mitch] That sounds great, thank you.
- Oh, thank you.
We got a few more left.
All right, right over here.
- Hi, my name is Cheryl,
and I'm from Charleston, South Carolina.
- [Matt] Cool, I'm about to go there
for the first time ever.
I've never been.
- Please come.
- [Matt] Few cities I've never been to.
- We'll be glad to show you the city.
- [Matt] Cool.
- We've got a good WordPressusers group down there.
- [Matt] We should do a meetup there.
- Yeah, cool.
My question is about, whoultimately do you think
is going to benefit themost from Gutenberg?
I heard what you said in the last answer,
and it's interesting tome, because in some ways
it seems that the average user
may actually have a harder time with this
visualizing how to use the blocks.
Those of us who do this every day,
and we understand a little bit more about
information architecture.
We understand how things fit,
and maybe what usability is best.
I want to understand thataverage user's experience,
and are you building for them,
or are you building for us?
- We are definitely buildingfor people brand new
to publishing and brand new to WordPress.
It's kind of a user corethat we're doing a lot
of testing with, a lot of learning from.
And what we want todo, is create something
that's really powerful.
Like you said, there'slots of things you can do,
that is intuitive.
You think of some of thetechnology that you love the most,
maybe it's your phone,maybe it's something else,
it actually has a ton ofreally deep functionality,
and you can mess it up tooif you get the wrong way,
but because it's intuitive,it provides a path for you
to go from like, this ismy first time picking up,
say a touch device, to like,"Oh, here's how I unlock.
"Here's how I take a photo.
"Here's I do every differentthing," that you do
even though there's like literally,
on an average mobile phone,probably 100 different things
that you can do, noteven counting the apps
that all have their own interfaces.
So we really work on making it intuitive.
That said, I think thatdevelopers will benefit a ton too.
And when I think--
One of the personas we'vebeen thinking about is like,
clients, someone built the site for them,
and they're just trying to update it,
and not mess it up, like the ability
for Gutenberg blocks, to basically preload
different templates for different pages
or blocks or custom post types,
the ability for a theme to suggest colors
and to keep it so thelegibility of the text--
Like we're trying to providesome guardrails as well.
So I want to get people a ton of power,
but also make it easyto do the right thing.
Another great example of that
is the ID features we'vebeen putting in 4.9.
We're letting you actuallygo in to edit the code.
So this is more of on the developer's side
of the spectrum of features.
But if you make a mistake, we're going
to tell you about that,and we're going to try
to keep you from doingsomething that's irreversible.
A beautiful thing about everythingthat's going on here is--
Matias didn't show it, butGutenberg has a unified undo.
And I actually think that the structure
that we're showing,although it seems like more,
will be more intuitive over time,
because before we showedsomething that looked
like a document, but when youtried to move around embeds,
or do certain things with images--
Did you ever have ourimage that's right-floated,
and then you're moving itaround and it ends inside a link
or doesn't and you couldget so mixed up there?
And that's what we really saw,
and we're trying to make it
so that as much as you're movingthings around in Gutenberg
there's never anything you can't undo,
and it never doesanything you don't expect.
- [Cheryl] Thanks.
- Thank you.
All right, to the left.
And then if you aren't standing up
we'll end questions after these four
that we got on each side, so bring it in.
- Hi, I'm Johnny from the UK.
- [Matt] Woo-hoo UK.
- Woo!
The work on the Customizer and Editor
is obviously amazing,
but WordPress isn't just those parts.
There's lots of different components.
You've got feeds, users--
Have you got a plan onhow to keep those parts
not getting stale and people contributing
to those parts, because I contribute a lot
to the less glamorous parts of call.
- [Matt] (laughing).
- And those parts shouldn't get stale
and not get contributionsjust because we are focused
on these these main focuses.
- It's true.
It was actually one of the things
I was really worried about this year,
because I didn't know what was going to
happen with the focuses,and basically with
that star of things like Multisite.
As you know if youcontribute, there've been
some really cool Multisiteimprovements this year.
- [Johnny] I know, they're mine.
- Thank you.
(applause)
- So I think the answer is,we keep doing what you did.
We're definitely saying no to like
features outside of the focuses,
but that still leaves a lotof room for improving things.
And in fact, coding styleimprovements that just came in--
I see Gary is looking a littleguilty there (laughing).
A lot that we can do to cleanup things that WordPress does,
improve like to bringourselves to our own standards,
or like you said, make some kind of,
catch some low-hanging fruit
from different areas ofWordPress, like Multisite.
So, the only thing that I askas people work on these things
is that they really try to make it
as user-centric as possible.
I love it when we do back endimprovements to Multisite.
I would love to see someof those admin screens
become more intuitive.
And I bet there's somedesigners in this room
that would love to help with that.
- Yeah, we're working onthe APIs at the moment,
so once those APIs are in
we can do a lot of really cool stuff.
- [Matt] Cool!
- The main stuff for meis performance stuff.
That's not really glamorous at all,
but it does actually affect users,
like shaving milliseconds off here.
29% the web is kind of a big deal,
and that's not what the focus is at all.
- It depends on how theperformance improvement
is going to look, and this is the thing.
There's a lot of tickets on Core Trac
that we're saying we're notgoing to work on this year,
because they're a distraction.
But if there was somethingthat shaves 10 milliseconds
off every single page load, yeah,
that would of course be worthwhile,
depending on how muchit affects otherwise.
I would say that the doors aren't closed
to WordPress development.
In fact, one of things I'vebeen excited about this year
is that we had, even an increasein number of contributors,
and what was that, 140 new contributors
to WordPress entirely in 4.9?
Yeah, something like that.
So we're still gettingnew people contributing
to areas outside of the focuses.
Gutenberg is not countedin that at all by the way.
That's all completely separate,
and I think we can keep it going.
And thank you for yourown contributions there.
- [Johnny] Thank you.
- Thank you.
[Applause]
All right, I think a question from Morton
is on the bingo table, so...
- Hello, I'm working from virtual reality.
(laughter)
Can I talk about something
other than Gutenberg for a second?
- [Matt] Yeah, just get alittle closer to the mic.
- Closer to the mic, sorry.
Last year I asked the question by proxy
about WordPress usingits power to influence
how the web evolves, byhaving representation
in the bodies that make updecisions about the web,
and I think your answerwas something along the
lines of just do it.
I'd like to continue that conversation--
- [Matt] (laughing).
Because, we have greatpeople in our community
that are working on accessibility,
that should representWordPress in the fora that make
decisions about accessibility.
We have great people whowork on GDRP in Europe
that should represent WordPress
in the fora that make these decisions.
We have people in the US that work on
political decision around that,
but we don't have a methodology for making
decisions about what WordPress stands for,
so no one can actually represent
WordPress in any of these groups.
So we have all the power and none of the
ability to do something about it.
So, how do we, as acommunity, make decisions
about what WordPress stands for, and then
find representatives to front those
decisions into the bodies that make
decisions that impact us and our users
so that we can truly help democratize
publishing and do other great things,
like just bring democracy to the world?
(applause)
- Yeah.
First, thank you for the question.
I think you're highlighting, that there's
kind of two issues embedded in there.
One, how do we know that we're aligned
so that the person doing the
representation is actually aligned with
something that we can call WordPress,
whether that's the--
It could be the communityat large although,
but we're more of arepresentative democracy,
so with perhaps alignedwith other leaders.
And then two, we don't really
have a way to recognize or give autonomy
or authority outside of developer roles,
and like leading releases, and we just
kind of just introducedthat for designers.
We don't have that yet foraccessibility, and in fact--
or many of the otherareas that we work on,
and in fact, sometimes wemight roll something back,
because the committee--
Typically how these groups operate,
is by committee, and the committee
might agree on something, and then
someone else, like alead developer might say,
"Oh, that's not actuallywhat we want to do,
"what we want to happen."
What I would love, love, love, love, love
is for more of this tonot be as committee-driven
as it is today, because whatI've seen happen personally--
I'm not going to callthe name of the groups,
but sometimes the lowestcommon denominator
of what can be done, and that's not
necessarily going to move us forward.
So, to the sense--
But a lot of people I think
have been hesitant tostep up, and say like,
"Okay, I'm the head of XYZ for WordPress."
If there were, I couldmeet with them regularly.
We could have a, everymonth or two meeting
and these sort of things could come up,
or we could make surewe could put something
to some sort of quorum, to say like,
"Okay, so-and-so isgonna go to this meeting
"in Brussels," I guess whereall these things happen,
or whatever it is forwhatever kind of area
that you're talking about.
I would love that.
It's been like pulling teeth sometimes
to even get some of thecommittees to elect a lead.
So to the extent we can have more of that,
I think that would enable
exactly what you're talking about.
So I think there is abit of a vacuum there
and it can be filled by people who step up
and I would love for it to be.
So, what are you going tolead, besides virtual reality?
(laughter)
- I'm not touching that.
- [Matt] I'm going to put you on the spot.
- Make it accessible
- Thank you for the question.
(applause)
- All right, last couple.
I'll try to do these a bitfaster so we can get out.
- I'm George from Pennsylvania,also from actual reality.
And with last year's threefocuses being Customization,
Editor and the REST API,customization shipped two releases,
the editor is going to be themain focuses for this release,
or for this coming year,
that just leaves the REST API behind.
The REST API will be gettingsome ancillary benefits
as Gutenberg developsand starts using it more,
but there's one big gapingvoid in the REST API,
and that's authentication, and there is no
real good way in Core currently.
And my doomsday scenario,that keeps me awake at night
and leaves me scared, isthat some app is going
to start building a cookie jar
to ask for username and password and
just do cookie-based authentication
to grab nonces and then fake the REST API
as though it was a browser.
What are your feelings onthe possibilities of OAuth,
potentially with AppBroker, versus Basic Auth,
versus application passwords,versus something custom,
and actually getting something shipped?
- Well first, I want tosay that I love cookies.
So just full stop there.
I want that to be on the record.
In terms of--
You nailed it, and in your question
you kind of had to answer that
I expect there to be a lot of improvements
for the REST API this year,
as we start to use it ourselves.
I don't know if that will be--
I don't know if authenticationis necessarily the
highest priority, simply because I don't
think that our APIs are good enough
that they can really be fully used
outside of WordPress, because they're not
able to be used insideof WordPress either.
And then two, some ofthe predicted sort of--
We talked about a Cambrianexplosion of things
built on the REST API once it was in Core,
and it's fair to say thathasn't really happened,
like some of the post people did,
even something like--
Example apps, don't evenwork anymore even though
the API is now on Core.
And we haven't seen as much built on it.
Again, outside of what I would call
the agency enterprise usage of the API,
which has been really super awesome.
All the things I had on slides and stage
in previous years, was allkind of enterprise-y stuff.
If there were to be an app built on--
Like let's say I'm making a SuperPress
and I'm going to use theAPI to post a WordPress
or whatever, that I could have a plugin,
and in fact there's currentAPIs that would make it easier
to install plugins,like that would kind of
enable some authentication
that would be right for my app,
and it could be secret.
It could be something like OAuth,
it could be lots of other things.
I guess this is long way of saying that
we're probably not gonna work on in 2018.
It is not outside of the realm of
possibilities, and more and more sites
being on an SSL, does open up some things
that weren't previously there.
But I just, based on the usage,
it doesn't look like this is a huge need.
Like something with the page builders,
there's 20 of them out there,
and some of them were really big,
and some of them are full companies.
Like we know this is something
that there's a huge need for.
Plugins are often agood indicator for that.
Based on the plugin useand plugins built on top
of the REST API, and doingauth and everything like that,
it doesn't look like there'sa huge need for this in the
community right now, so it's probably
best for it to remain plugin territory,
for enterprises and agenciesand other people to use,
Thank you.
All right, we got the last couple.
- Hi, I'm SJ also from the UK.
(cheering)
- UK representing on the questions.
- Yeah, we're here in numbers.
I've kind of buried my head in the
sand with Gutenberg a little bit,
and then coming to this,the presentation was great,
so thank you.
And I was 90% scared, 10% excited before,
and now I'm 90% excited, 10% scared.
- [Matt] Awesome.
- One of the things that scares me,
is when we look at how the block array
is added into custom post types,
which is brilliant, userscan still just add to that.
So if I'm creating sites for clients,
I'm now giving themthe onus on the design,
whereas what would be greatwas a way to limit that,
so I can create blocksthat are in a content
in a custom post type, andthen say, and that's it.
Is there going to be a way to do that?
- Yeah, Matias is nodding.
There'll be a way to lock it down.
- [SJ] Ok cool, thank you.
- Thank you.
That was a quick one.(laughing).
- Hi, my name is Ian, I'mfrom Jacksonville, Florida.
And as a front-end personI look at the improvements
to the Gutenberg Editor andsome of its really exciting,
but it seems like there's inevitably
going to be a few shortfall areas,
for example, determining visibility
based on breakpoints, or say typography
that changes sizes, so youknow your 80-pixel font
is not 80 pixels on aniPhone or something.
But, then getting into the just,
providing a billion options,
that's kind of a slippery slope too,
because now you just have this huge thing
and you have to be opinionatedsome places and not others,
but how do you guys
envision you're going to draw the line
between this is something you need to
customize versus this is really
something that you'rejust going to have to
figure out your own solution for,
for front-end responsive styles?
- That's a tough one.
We're probably going error a
little bit more onlinepeople that do stuff,
including perhaps mess it up.
But give themes and plugins the ability to
bring in the guardrails even more.
So, we'll see.
This is part of the reason that
I think we'll learn alot, developing 2018,
the theme 2018.
For people outside ofWordPress that we call
the themes of the year is very confusing.
They're like, "Wait,you're working on 2015?
"What's going on?"
So, I think we'll learna lot through that,
and that's one, we'll probablyget the most polished there,
both by other themes adoptingit and by our own usage,
particularly around thecustomization of Gutenberg.
- [Ian] Thank you.
- Hi Matt, I'm Mariafrom Lawrence, Kansas.
And I was hoping you could talk a
little bit more about our philosophy of
forcing a change on our WordPress
customers as big as Gutenberg is,
making them, instead of opting in,
having them download aplugin to disable that
functionality, knowing that we have so
many themes and plugins that yet to
build any support in for Gutenberg in
four months time.
I'm wondering if you just talk
a little bit more about that decision?
- Well, we'll have to figure out.
Some of this is stillto be determined, right?
Today there's a completely opt-in plugin,
and we want to get that used more
widely and widely and widely.
So there's that kind of thread happening.
At some point--
And that also means that
people can start to develop support for
it in the plugins and themes.
Plugins and themes canalso update before then to
say like, turn Gutenberg off.
And then finally, we'regiving this kind of
explicit opt-out, that'll turn it off
even once it's in Core.
So what we're trying to do,
is basically provide like a
gradual ramp on a few different axis
to bring people along with it.
Now, of course, it's a big change,
and this is one of the things
that I hope that we learn from Gutenberg,
because we're going to need to
make more big changes in the future,
like to the extent WordPress is still
successful today, and when I look at
other CMS's that have stagnated--
I'm talking about stagnating growth,
but it's because they're auser-experience stagnated.
So, we need a way to evolve that.
And this is kind of ourlatest, best practice
for how it is, and kind of where we're--
This is the idea for how it's
going to happen, and ofcourse we'll tweak it
as we go along, to givethe gradual ramp-ons
to lots of different people.
And there's also a communityaspect to it as well.
It's the meetups, it's the WordCamps,
it's the developer outreach.
It's everything thatwe're doing, the videos.
It's being online and tens of thousands
of people watching it later.
All of this is going to be part of like
bring the community along
for what's gonna happen with Gutenberg.
Not unlike when a new iOScomes out or something,
like they present it first,
and some people watch the video
and then blogs write articles about it,
and it might be in the news.
Hopefully we're not in the news,
with this update.
That would probably be a bad thing,
based on how WordPress gets covered
in the mainstream press.
But I hope that, with theefforts of everyone here,
that by the time thatGutenberg ships in Core,
it'll actually feel alittle bit anti-climatic,
because for many people thefuture was already there,
and now it's just going to be the default-
- I feel like there's a little bit of a
difference when you compare something to
like an iOS update, I opt-in to that,
versus right now we have automatic updates
within WordPress, and there's a majority
of WordPress customers out there that
don't follow along with the community,
or even know that their theme
is retired and that there's no more
support for that theme.
So I just have a little bit of concern
that was echoed a lotin the usability tests
we did in the last two days.
- Yeah, and we don't doautomatic updates from major
versions, and Gutenberg will come out in
a major version, so people--
For those who don't have itconfigured to auto update,
they'll need to click a button for it.
But yeah, this is some other struggles,
and that's why where we're trying
to provide all these different levers to
people in Customize, and giving as much
heads-up as possible.
We first started talkingabout this in January.
So, by the time it comesout, we'll have been
kind of beating this drumfor well over a year,
and I think we'll have reached--
It doesn't mean it'llbe perfect, but we'll
have made our best darn effort to reach
as many people as possible and then be
on hand to help folkswho maybe are surprised.
We'll definitely make sure that the forums
are well attended during then, and we'll
maybe even open up a chat or something
where people can ask questions.
Whatever we can do tohelp people, we want to.
That's WordPress's way.
- [Maria] Thank you.
- Thank you,
All right, clap.
(applause)
You've got the very,very, very last question.
- Thank you.
I'd like to start by saying I'm not that
worried about Gutenberg, and years ago
we didn't have custom post types.
Now they're the norm,
And I think if there's aneed to polyfill anything
between old and new, that our community
will take care of that.
I am a little bit worried about React.
And I know there was some
talk about having a JavaScript
framework agnostic approach.
I'm just wondering, if thatcould happen, and do we
need to worry about the folks at
Facebook pulling the plug?
- Yeah, I was reallyworried about that too
earlier in the year.
As you all know, weannounced we were going
to move away from Reactand within like a week
Facebook changed, took out that patents
clause from the license,which allowed us--
Which is really smart of them, because
WordPress then said, "Okay, well, we've
"been doing react for a while.
"There's all thisawesome stuff in React 16
"that we've built into Gutenberg that
"actually makes it more performance and
"make all these sorts of things."
But at the same time, asa result of that kind of
what is going to happen, we got some
of the lead developers of different
JavaScript frameworks, from View.
We got some of the lead Google folks,
like all came in, and at the weekly
JavaScript chats, that happened in Slack.
And that was really amazing,
because we went from where like the
state-of-the-art andWordPress was like, Backs--
What was the thing called, back--
Backbone, yes, thank you.
So long, I forgot the name.
To now where we're
generally regarded as like one of the
more modern open-sourceJavaScript code bases
with a Gutenberg project, and we're
getting the lead developers to actually
check it out and offer their help.
So right now Gutenberg is still on React,
and so think of that as the
de-facto to continue, and all the
licensing concerns that I and many
others had are gone.
Facebook could of course say that React 20
is going to add something bad back in,
but the advantage isnow that the GPL version
is out there, then we canbranch from that point.
So, it wasn't like before where with the
clause applied to every--
It's a much, much better situation
than it was in the past.
And we definitely would fork it if
Facebook did anything like that, and we
would have a ton of support it turns out.
Because as you saw with the patents thing,
like it turns out most of the open
web agrees with us for how this should
be licensed, so I imagine that we
wouldn't be alone andcontinuing React forth deck.
Perhaps even existing rackdevelopers would move over.
So that's kind of the defacto
We still though, want to dokind of the bridges between
some other frameworks and Gutenberg.
That's nothing to announce now, but you
probably saw some of the chats and some
of the demos, that showed that you could
write something of View and then compile
it to Gutenberg, or write something in a
different framework andcompile it to Gutenberg.
That sort of cross compiling,
I think could beinteresting, especially if
it opens up the Gutenberg framework
to other JavaScript developers that
might not be interested in it, as it's
currently written, or the fact, which is
already happening, that other open source
projects might adopt Gutenberg
and allow them to integrateit with a better--
without having to use React for their
whole kit and caboodle,like it looks like we might.
So, I don't have any like huge
announcement there, but that's kind of
the defacto and the waywill probably continue.
What I will say, and what I hope
you've learned over the past 14 years of
WordPress, is that we take these
principles very, very seriously, and we
will fight for them and we'll stay true
to them, as long as we're alive and
kicking, as long as I'malive and kicking certainly.
So, don't worry too much, and I'm looking
forward to what's coming.
- [Man In Audience] Thanks kindly.
- Thank you, and with that we're all done.
So thank you all.
(applause)
(laughing)