(upbeat bluesy guitar and percussion)
(audience applauds)
- Good afternoon, everybody!
- Good afternoon.(audience whoops)
- How you all doing?(light applause from audience)
We've got a lot to talk about today.
But I would just like to recognize
the amazing city ofPhiladelphia one more time.
(audience applauds and cheers)
It was a bit of an experiment.
We thought about doingit how Europe does it
where they switch cities very year.
But I thought that returningto a city so it kind of gets,
it decreases some of the logistics,
and then we get thefamiliarity of coming back
to a cool place.
And who was here last year?
(audience members whoop)
Can we agree that this has beenthe smoothest WordCamp ever?
(audience applauds and cheers)
Very, very impressed.
So I would like to repeat the thank yous.
To the sponsors that make this all happen.
SiteLock, which is security,
Woo Commerce, which is ecommerce,
.blog, like matt.blog, and JetPack.
And a round of applausefor the organizers,
please stand up if you area volunteer here today.
(audience applauds and cheers)
How many volunteers total did we have
in addition to the on site, as well?
- [Staff Member] 200.
- About 200, that's what I thought.
So, just as a momentbefore we get started.
So, WordCamp to get you all paid $40.
So about $20 a day.
The actual cost of the per person cost
is actually closer to $516.
So I would like everyone to picture $470
and close your eyes, withwhat you're gonna do with it.
(chuckles) Extra gifts andpresents, extra dinner tonight.
That's possible because of thesponsors and the volunteers.
You can not do this without both of them.
(audience applauds)So, thank you again very much.
(audience applauding)
And now next year I don'tknow if you all heard, wait!
Actually before we go any further,
someone came up to me last year and said,
"I love to talk, butwho are you?" (laughs)
(audience laughs)
I'm not my like...(laughs)
I was the co-founder of WordPress
about 13 or 14 years ago with Mike Little.
And also the CEO of Automatic.
And I've been, I'm luckyto be doing this now for
I think the 10th State of the Word.
We've got hashtag here,and that is my user name
on Instagram, and Twittersand all that stuff.
And next year, I don't know if you heard,
but we're going to Nashville.
(audience applauds and cheers)Yeah!
I think we have some of theNashville team here, as well.
I've never been to Nashville, hello.
I hear you have somethingcalled hot chicken.
(audience members whoop)
I don't know what that is.
I'm very excited for it. (laughs)
(audience laughs)
We could even make anexception to the barbecue
at lunch rule for Lola's hot chicken.
I will allow it to counts.
It has been a very, very, very good year
for WordCamps and meetups.
This is a map of all theWordCamps and meetups
that have happened in the past year.
(audience applauds)
My only question when I see this is,
what's up Russia?
(audience laughs)
Seriously. (laughs)
So hopefully they'll be adot in Russia next year.
If there are any Russian WordPress family
watching us in the live stream.
We actually had 115 total WordCamps.
So it was the first year webroke 100, that was up from 89.
And 41 unique countries hostingWordCamps, which is amazing.
There were 36,000 tickets sold.
So 36,000 people who attended WordCamps.
And that was put togetherby 750 unique organizers,
1,036 sponsors, that's a lot of sponsors.
And over 2,000 speakers.
Who's ever spoken at a WordCamp?
Yeah, it's a littlestressful, isn't it? (laughs)
I'm glad that you can relate with what
I'm going through right now. (laughs)
(audience laughs)
Especially if you have to tie a tie.
Let me tell you, that addsa whole nother level for it.
I was gonna ask if anyonehere could tie a tie,
but then I remembered where I was.
(audience laughs)
- (laughs) But is, it is one time a year
I get to dress up for you all.
All of that stuff withWordCamps is actually
over shadowed by meetups,which of course as we know
are sort of the pre-WordCamps.
So we had 3,193 meetup events,
with 58 countries hosting!
So that means, again,meetups are a leading
indicator for WordCamps.
That means there willhopefully be 50 plus countries
hosting WordCamps next year.
And they were attended by 62,566 people.
The red dots are the new people.
So that is the improvement over next year.
This is a real testamentto the entire WordCamp
and WordPress foundation organization.
Because this is thefastest growth we've had
in any of these events in
five, six years, so it'svery, very impressive.
You all paid $20 per day.
It's kind of amazing,
because the first ever WordCamp was free.
But, it turns out whenit's free a lot of people
say they'll show up and don't.
So this had an upside anda downside that were both,
that we had orderedbarbecue for 500 people,
and only about 350 showed up.
So I ate barbecue forseveral months afterwards.
(everyone laughs)
Whatever what fit in my freezer.
Not quite, I was justafter being a broke student
at the time, so it was much appreciated.
But as inflation hascompounded every single year,
so the next year we charged $20.
There's been, I think, a 24% inflation
since the first WordCamp.
But WordCamp tickets are actually
the only thing getting cheaper.
So the average price per person per day,
global, is $15.79
Again, testament to thesponsors, which cover about
over 85% or 90% of the costs.
WordCamp US, we haveincreased our numbers,
a little bit in person.
So we got up to just under 1,900,
probably just over with some walk ins.
The live stream went way, way, way up.
Now, the thing to note here though
is that we made it freethis year. (laughs)
As everyone who uses WordPress knows,
free attracts a lot of people.
But I will say as impressive as this is,
we must still tilt ourhats and bow down to Europe
which beat us this year. (laughs)
(audience applauds and cheers)
My hope was that wecould kind of leapfrog.
So, Europe wins 2016, hands down.
For those who don't know WordCamp will be
in Paris next year, whichI'm almost as excited
about as Nashville.
Does Paris have hot chicken?
(audience laughs)
Okay, I'll take some duck confit instead.
My hope is that, as we move to Nashville
we'll actually be able to expand the reach
of working up US and then wecan go back to leapfrogging.
'Cause we can't let theEuropeans win every time.
This has translated into an increase.
I don't know if all of you know this,
but if you miss a talk, ifthere's something you didn't see
it will be on WordPress TV later.
In fact we had a 26% increasein the number of videos
uploaded to WordPress TV.
And something that is anannouncement for many of you,
is that there's now aWordPress YouTube channel.
So you can go to, yes.(audience applauds)
I know you were thinking
there's not enough videos on YouTube.
(audience laughs)
We have solved that.
There are now over 150videos from WordCamp US,
WordCamp Europe and theprior State of the Words.
So if you would like tosee my hair get shorter
and longer throughout the years,
you can go all the way backto like 2006, I believe.
A lot of people know, andactually haven't talked a ton
about the foundation inprior State of the Words.
But I wanted to talk about it this year,
because it very muchdovetails with the success
of what has happened with the WordCamps,
and is also going tobe changing next year.
So, in 2016 we're estimatingabout 4.3 million dollars
coming into the foundation.
Which is up from 2.8 last year.
It sounds like a lot.
It is 99.999% WordCamps. (laughs)
So that's all the sponsors, all the costs,
all the sponsorships, all the tickets,
everything runs through there.
As some of you who havesponsored before know
that because the WordPress Foundation
is a 501c3 non-profit,there's certain rules
that people sponsoring have to follow.
Which are a little bit arbitrary,
especially since this,we're not really doing
any non-profit stuff.
There's no tax-deductiblestuff around with WordCamps.
So something we're goingto be doing next year
is actually switching WordCampsto its own company called
the WordPress Community
- Support.- Support, yes.
Which is an normal company,but its what's called a PBC,
or public benefit corporation.
It will be fully owned by the foundation,
so it's just like a subsidiary.
So this allows thefoundation to still get all
the benefits, and for that still to be
the father organization, ormother organization, the WPCS.
But then
actual WordCamps can havea bit more flexibility
in how they do things.
This is also importantbecause the important thing,
the most important thing thatthe foundation has right now
is holding the trademark.
The foundation has zero employees,
zero costs besides legal andaccounting stuff and taxes.
So it's basically all volunteers.
It's meant to be as low load as possible,
but to hold on to that trademark.
Which was donated to it in 2010.
Now, if certain thingshad happened at WordCamps,
or at events that were official events,
that could have endangeredthe overall foundation.
So that's another reason toput this subsidiary structure.
So that is going to leave a foundation
without any WordCamps.
And so it needs something to do.
What do you think we should do? (laughs)
Well, I'll tell you what we're gonna do
in 2017 to warm it up.
Is first we're gonna supportsome like-minded profits.
And so this is the firstplace I'm announcing
that we'll be doing major to us grants
to Hack the Hood, InternetArchive and Black Girls Code.
- Whoo!(audience applauds and cheers)
- These are organizationsvery much aligned
with WordCamps, or WordPress Foundation's
overall education mission.
Second, is we're going to runsome educational workshops
in developing countries.
And then finally, we'regonna promote hack-a-thons,
to help build websitesfor non-profits and NGOs.
Who's ever been--
(audience applauds)Yeah.
So who's ever been to aDo Action hack-a-thon?
They are really awesome andit's that idea, exactly.
(laughs) So, the ideais that any non-profit
or NGO can come, coordinate alittle bit beforehand and say,
"I would like a newwebsite, or I would like
"a website just to start."
And then volunteers come together.
You know, designers,developers, project managers,
copywriters, whatever youcan do you can help out.
The idea is that thenon-profit leaves the weekend
with a beautiful websitethat they can update
and maintain forever and ever.
So, pretty excited about that.
(audience applauds)
Since I'm talking about the foundation
I also want to talk a littlebit about the extended family,
or what we call the cousinsof WordPress, sometimes.
They're not red-headed though.
(audience laughs)
Although the Jay Trib is.
And this is a picture of Jay Trib.
On the homepage of BuddyPress.org.
It's a huge coincidence I know,
it just must be a random rotation.
There's been a lot goingon with BuddyPress.
It's went from 2.4.4 release, to a 2.7.2.
We've got a new API, tighter security,
theme and template changes,drag and drop avatar load,
which is pretty cool.
And then finally easier management
of user generated media.
So, for those of you whodon't know BuddyPress
is kind of like a sociallayer on top of WordPress.
It can transform WordPress,
doing things like the profiles pages
on a WordPress.org, ifany of you have seen that.
So, if you are working onsomething that you think
might need a bit of a social layer,
check out BuddyPress.
Second, and every near and dear my heart,
because it was the first thing,
actually I think the first thing
I ever worked on from scratch.
Because WordPress was ofcourse from Cafelog/B2,
which is called bbPress.
BbPress is what we usefor all of our forums.
And bbPress has now a WordPress plugin.
So it used to use somethinginteresting called BackPress.
That was the idea that it'dextract parts of WordPress
and put it in there.
It's now a native plugin.
So the plugin tables,everything is just built into
custom post types.
The WordPress.org communityhas been migrated,
so all of the forms and everything.
And in fact as we've donethis, we've open sourced this.
So, WordPress.org itself is becoming
more and more open source.
So if you see somethingon the site that you like,
you'll be able to go to GitHub,
and already can in many placesand say how does that work?
How does this theme work?
Can I use it myself?
The answer is yes to all of those things.
And finally, I wanted to talka little bit about security.
We started using a systemlast year called HackerOne.
HackerOne is basically a bounty system.
In the past year 65hackers have contributed.
What does this mean?
So basically in HackerOneyou can report a bug,
privately to the developers.
This prior was Automatic and now there's
a WordPress one that'll beopening up relatively soon.
And say, hey I found this bug.
It can be verified.
And it's much like anyother security communities,
depending on how severe,and it might spread,
and everything the bug is,what the implications are
you actually get a bounty.
So you essentially get like a cash reward
for finding the security issue.
This has been
great at attracting morepeople to do security research
around WordPress and our key properties.
We'd like to expand it to more plugins,
be we don't want to go bankrupt.
(audience laughs)
Just kidding. (chuckles)
We are looking to expandthis more and more,
because this sort of system,
especially the way it attractsthings, is very smooth.
And look for this to openup in the coming months.
Right now we have a dedicated .org one.
It's not yet open to the public,
because we're catchingup with some back log.
And then finally, GlotPress.
Who knows what GlotPress is?
A couple people.
Who's ever translatedsomething on GlotPress?
I'm gonna talk about you all in a minute,
you are awesome.
What language do you speak?
- [Audience Member] English.
- Oh, English? Okay. (laughs)(audience laughs)
It is true that there are,
you can get an Australian translation.
You can get a Britishtranslation of WordPress.
I don't know, I think theyjust changed to howdy.
(audience laughs)
Hello Dolly, becomes GodSave the Queen, I don't know.
(audience laughs)
GlotPress has had a huge year.
It's gone from versionone to version 2.2.2,
which I love for itsrailroad like symmetry.
And now powers thetranslation of WordPress,
BuddyPress, bbPress, WordPress plugins,
the default themes andall of the Rosetta sites.
It is was rescued from BackPress,
and we upgraded the security quite a bit.
And the results of this I willtalk about in a little bit.
WordPress.org was something else
that got a love this year.
This is our community hub.
It's where all the development happens,
a lot of the communicationhappens, a lot of the support,
where you find plugins, everything.
So support was one of thefirst things we focused on.
There are hundreds and hundreds,and hundreds of thousands
of messages here every single year.
And the folks whovolunteer on this, actually
it's not well known, butI actually got my start
on support forums.
Literally how I got involved with Cafelog
and bb, sorry, B2, priorto WordPress existing.
Was just they had a forum,
and I was there to ask a question.
And I saw someone askingsomething I'd already figured out,
so I thought, well okay I'llanswer this while I'm here.
And look where we are now. (laughs)
(audience laughs)
So participating in forumsis not just a great way
to help other people, but agreat way to learn, as well.
It's all responsive,reviewed on how it looks.
We've also brought all the Rosetta sites
onto the new version of P2, called O2.
So, all the team P2s are now O2s,
we've migrated a lot of that,
and open sourced much of O2.
For those who don't know, P2 is the system
that in turn that Automaticuses instead of email.
Many don't believe this,but inside of automatic
there's basically no email.
Who feels like they would like
to get more email in their life?
(audience laughs)
One person.
(chuckles) I've got some mailing lists
you can sign up for. (laughs)
(audience laughs)
Or I'll just forward yousome of mine. (laughs)
So we use this to communicate,
it's really taken offon all the make sites,
that's probably where you've seen it,
MakeCore, MakeAccessibility,et cetera on WordPress.org.
O2 is the next version, O2.
We say communication is oxygen, O2.
Ha-ha.(light laughter from audience)
(chuckles) I love elemental puns.
(audience laughs)
It's been working pretty well.
And then finally, not quite launched yet,
is the new plugins directory.
So you might have noticed when you visit
the existing plugins directory
there's a little banner at the top
and link wordpress.org/plugins-wp/.
It has a new design.
It is running WordPress.
That is a big deal. (laughs)
It was not before.
One of the things I'mpersonally most excited about
is the search has been totally revamped.
So, you will start to noticeboth in your dashboard,
and on WordPress.org,
much, much more relevant search results.
And I'm sure that you'll still tell us
how to tweak that in the future.
(laughs) We'll look at what he's doing
and then try tocompensate, no I'm kidding.
There's been a 20% increasein active plugin usage.
I think partially drivenby some of the improvements
we made to the plugin directory,
our own reviews, our owngraphics, things like that.
And in fact the downloadsare up to 1.48 billion,
which is a 34% increasein just the past year.
So that means we went fromabout a billion to 1.48
in just one year, whichhas been kind of crazy.
What I think is driving thisis internationalization.
We went from 5,000translation contributors
in April 2005, to now 17,000.
On a translation day,which is November 12th,
actually just about a month ago.
In one day we had 780 peopletranslate 60,000 strings.
Now I did not know this,
but apparently about 2/3 of the world
speaks at a native fluency,one of these 12 languages.
English, Chinese, Portuguese,Arabic, et cetera, et cetera.
WordPress covers all of these,
along with many, many, many others.
In fact on Release Day of 4.6,
which is our most recent release,
we were available onRelease Day in 50 languages.
- Whoo!- I'm amazed at that.
(audience applauds)
And Language Packs launched.
Now the top 10 pluginsthey're now 82% complete
in those top 12 languages.
So what you see in thebars there is actually
the number of languages thateach of those top plugins
is 90% or above in.
So you can see some of themstart to get above 40 languages
that they're natively available in.
This is important becauseWordPress is great,
but WordPress with pluginsis magical. (laughs)
Who uses no plugins on their WordPress?
Wow, fewer people than want more email.
(everyone laughs)
We have this new system where we decoupled
the translation of pluginsfrom the plugin itself.
So this allows translationeditors and people who,
well frankly can speak the language,
as opposed to the plugindeveloper, to manage this.
We're up now to almost 1,600 plugins
that have active Language Packs.
And 1,224 themes with Language Packs.
And that is from 300 and641 respectively last year.
So there's been a huge growth in this.
And basically what this means is that
in other parts of the world where,
let's say Spanish is the native language,
WordPress is starting to light up.
Like it was like a Christmas tree that was
a little sad before.
Now the lights are coming on one by one,
those are the plugins.
And people are startingto come and enjoy it.
That kind of works. (laughs)
I'll think of a better metaphoras I walk off the stage.
(audience laughs)
One of the things Italked about last year was
the admonishment and request for you all
to learn JavaScript deeply.
How did that go?
Yeah?- Yeah, whoo!
- I have good news, 28% ofWordPress is now JavaScript.
Yeah.
It was about 28% lastyear, though. (laughs)
(audience laughs)
I think we need tolearn JavaScript deeper.
And I wanted to give a special shout out
to WordCamp Miami.
David Bisset and theWordCamp Miami organizers.
- Whoo!(audience applauds)
- Who actually had to learnJavaScript Deeply Track,
which I thought was super cooland something I think that
WordCamps, including Europeand US should emulate
in the future.
Because this is a area where we don't have
as much expertise or experience yet.
I also promised you last year,
that I would learn JavaScript deeply.
How did that go, you might ask?
(audience laughs)
We're very proud to announcethat 364 days into the
(laughs) request, I submittedmy first pull request
to Calypso yesterday.
(audience laughs)
(audience applauds)
It was pretty exciting.
I had actually of coursewritten JavaScript before,
but never worked in React.
It was surprisingly easy.
If you see a followers account show up
in the top right of your stats page,
sometime, if I make itpast the code review,
which has been prettytough so far. (laugh)
(audience laughs)
That was some code I wrote.
Which always gives me kind of a thrill.
Learning JavaScript- Whoo!
- and really becoming as need have
at JavaScript as we are PHP,
I think is a major key asthey could say this day.
So as we move from a document-based system
to being a true application,which means that,
those who have used Clipswill know that it feels
much faster, things can change instantly,
we can move data aroundinstead of the whole page.
And it is very clear,especially with the API
coming into WordPress, this is the future
of how WordPress WP-Admin is going to be.
One of the other funprojects we started this year
is actually a blog called design.blog.
Who's been to this sofar and checked it out?
Highly recommend, oh cool.
Highly recommend checking it out.
There's been over 40 different folks
who have contributed essays or studies,
writing about design and inclusion,
sometimes with or without tech.
This is, I think one of the areas.
You might have noticed that this year's
programming at WordCamp US
had some more of the human side
in addition to just thetechnical that we've had before.
I think that a lot ofour opportunities to grow
over the coming yearare on the human side,
and understanding the humanityof an open source project
and working together,and creating the code
that's going to touch humanity, as well.
I want to call out two particular essays
I think you all should check out on there.
The first is from KatHolmes, some quotes from her.
"Inclusive design is forthose who want to make
"great products for thegreatest number of people."
"Inclusive design putspeople in the center
"at the very start of the process."
And, "Exclusion happenswhen we solve problems
"using our own biases."
Her story is amazing.
She works at Microsoft,
I believe she's the headof inclusive design there.
It actually is a story about playgrounds
and playground design.
And she talks about howplayground designers
who think about this,designing for inclusion
starts with recognizingexclusion and the process.
And there is so much thatwe have to learn there.
And so please read thisessay and check it out.
The other one I want tohighlight is from Hajj Flemings.
And I believe Hajj is in the audience.
Hi!
Round of applause, thank you for writing.
(audience applauds and cheers)
Did I pronounce that right?
Close enough, okay.
Some quotes from there.
"Detroit's future, requires connecting
"the worlds of design, technology
"and innovation to neighborhoods."
"53% of small businesses in Detroit
"operate without a website."
"81% of people research a business online
"before making a purchase."
Hajj through John
had an amazing story that made me
sort of wake up to some of my own
learnings in this area.
Which is when you talked about that,
there's a lot of these businesses
that aren't even on Google Maps.
And I realize that in my life,
I don't know if I haveever tried to go somewhere
that wasn't on Google Maps.
Apple Maps, absolutely. (laughs)
But I feel like GoogleMaps has everything.
There's entire swaths ofcommunities and businesses
that are not there.
And so WordPress, along with other tools,
to helping them online is literally like
those Christmas tree lights lighting up.
It is they are coming onlineand now are discoverable.
And hopefully that can lead to flourishing
in those businesses andcommunities in the future.
And so, the project he'sworking on is actually creating,
correct me if I'm wrong, but100 small business websites.
100 websites for businessesthat don't them yet.
I'm gonna repeat that.
He said, "That's the start.
"And then we're gonna turnthe 100 becomes getting
"100% of them online."
Which is amazing.
Can we give a round of applause for that?
(audience applauds)
The urban revival in Detroit is
forever interesting,it's a community that,
I learned from your essay,is 84% African American.
And as a community representssome of the biggest
opportunities and biggest challenges
that we have across citiesall over the world, actually.
Some of this relates tobeing more accessible.
And every WordPress releasehas become much more accessible
thanks to the hard workof the accessibility team
that I highlighted lastyear and just want to give
a continuing kudos to this year.
Because they've been lookingat the WCAG standards
for every single release.
And the link there for whenyou look at the slides later
is actually, it shows theaccessibility coding standards.
So if you are a plugin developer,
or any sort of developeryou can learn this,
and check it out!
And see how you can make your code
available to more people.
It's interesting whenyou think about it that
an interface or an application
that works well for someone with one arm,
also works well for amother holding a baby.
It works well for someone checking Twitter
with one hand, while typingwith the other. (laughs)
As you make things more accessible,
you're addressing widerand wider audiences
and bringing more and more people in,
far beyond the folks whoyou might have imagined
when targeting a particular improvement.
Or thinking of it from aaccessibility point of view.
The other things thathappened in the past day
is the announcement of aWordPress Growth Council.
So I wanted to give you a heads up here.
You can see on my blog, those white dots
are not artifacts,those are actually snow.
It's a time of the yearwhere many WordPress.com
and JetPack sites start snowing.
One of my favorite features.
So what the growthcouncil is is basically,
we talked a bit about this last year.
I said that in the coming year
an unprecedented amountsof advertising dollars
are gonna be spent essentiallyfor proprietary CMSs.
And some ways actuallydirectly against WordPress.
So, you would do a search for WordPress
and it would say, hey WordPress wah, wah.
Check out X-Y-Z!
That number is actuallygonna wind up around
320 million dollars this year.
A lot.
Advertising does work.
Even though I believewe have a better product
and infinitely better community,
we're starting to see incertain markets these tools,
which are typically proprietary actually,
all proprietary the ones I'm referring to,
start to pick up different shares.
I think that in the past WordPress got by
on a lot of marketing by happen stance.
And very powerful.
Who used WordPress because a friend
recommended it to them, right?
Honestly, that's thebest thing in the world,
if someone who you likerecommends software.
What better introduction to it?
And they probably taughtyou how to use it, too.
And helped you get past some of the bumps.
And maybe when you downloaded a zip file
and they were like, what arethese files on my desktop?
What do I do with them?
So getting over those humps,that is an amazing form
of spreading an organic.
But I think that wehave a real opportunity
especially as thebusinesses around WordPress
grow larger and larger, toactually coordinate a bit.
And what I talked about was that there's
no one company in the WordPress ecosystem
that's large enough to match300 million dollars in spend
on selling people the WordPress story.
But, no one companyneeds to be large enough,
because we're a community.
And I feel like we can becomea lot more sophisticated,
particularly with ourmessaging and our presentation
on WordPress.org to bring people in,
and really tell a story about
what makes WordPress different.
The things the brought everyonein this room here today.
Because I do think that we'refairly unique in that regard.
And, as I'll talk about later,
there's some cool stuffcoming in the software, too.
The other announcementthat you might have seen
on WordPress.org was, HTTPS.
So starting next yearWordPress is going to start
to have progressiveenhancements, so certain features
which are only availableif your site is encrypted.
Last year, this is againa followup to last year
I said, "Let's Encrypt and PHP7
"are gonna be pretty big."
Turns out Let's Encrypt is huge! (laughs)
We are now tracking,and this the first time
we're gonna report this number.
And I hope to report itgoing up every single year.
11.45% of active WordPresswebsites are now on HTTPS.
Let's Encrypt is a freecertificate authority.
So it's a way to get, youknow before certificates
used to cost, excuse me, $50, $100, $300.
They were very much apain in the butt to get.
They would like want a phone number,
or they'd want to look youup in the Yellow Pages,
it was really bizarre. (laughs)
Now you can on programmatically issued
instantly for free on Let's Encrypt.
And mini-hosts arestarting to include this.
And we said that starting next year
we are only going torecommend and point to hosts
that give their customers, new customers
access to a certificate by default.
So, we're hoping tobring more and more on.
(audience applauds)
We want to bring more andmore of the web to be secure.
And I think, I said, thisis especially important
in a post-Snowden era.
I think the more andmore encrypted traffic
there can be on the web, the better.
The other thing I talked about was PHP7.
WordPress.com is now 100% on PHP7.
It was a monumental task.
You want to imagine a codebase of WordPress.com,
think of WordPress plus like 500 plugins.
This is, I think, absolutelybeautiful. (laughs)
For those of you who do server stuff,
this is a graph before andafter or PHP7 being implemented.
And you can see basicallywhat happened was that
performance doubled andCPU load fell in half.
For any of you who watch server graphs,
this is a work of art. (laughs)
It is like the Michelangelo'sDavid, of CPU graphs.
Our friends at Tumblr,who switched to PHP,
also found a similar thing.
Right now in WordPress,WordPress World PHP7
is not that widely adopted.
Our only tracking ofthe sites that ping us,
only about 4% are on PHP7 or above.
But if you look at the rest of this graph
it's actually starting to get pretty good
with the largest chunkthere now on PHP, 5.6%.
You might not have noticedbut secretly in the night,
we did a quiet update to theWordPress recommendations page.
And if you look now, theofficial recommendation
of WordPress is now PHPversion seven or greater,
and HTTPS support.
On the page with a copy and paste note
you can send to your host. (laughs)
This is a big deal. (laughs)
And I'm very excited about it.
So, these technologies,well one when you upgrade
to PHP7 you essentially for free
get a doubling in performance.
But as hosts start to adoptmore of these technologies
I think that it allowsus to push the needle
on some of the things that we want
to do on Core as well.
WordPress is stillbackwards compatible to,
I forget exactly, PHP 5.4,
but we are now recommendingand encouraging
all of our partners to getthe latest and greatest.
And hopefully we can seethat 4% go much higher,
just like we are hoping tosee the 11% on HTPPS move up.
Last year I talked to you about Calypso.
For those of you who don't know,
Calypso was a from scratchre-write of WP-Admin,
using Node and React,talking purely to APIs.
So it exists as a desktop app.
It is what you see whenyou visit WordPress.com.
It's actually 100% open source.
It launched about two weeksbefore WordCamp last year,
maybe three,
and it was a big deal.
Because I believe that this is the future
of what the WordPress interface will be.
I have some updated stats for you here.
In the past month on WordPress.com
a full 68% of all theposts that were posted
were actually throughthe Calypso interface,
17% through mobile,and only 15% were still
being posted through WP-Admin.
This is in just about 55 weeks.
A huge shift to this new interface.
Which I'm excited about becauseit shows that it can happen.
Where we had wondered before,
do people just want to keepthe old interface forever,
will anyone move over?
These are people whohave a choice of both,
and they are using thenew Calypso interface,
which bodes well.
I also pulled some pretty cool stats.
So this is a complicated graphic.
It is a multi-view Venn diagram.
So what you have on thetop is desktop users.
The bottom left is mobile app users,
and the bottom right ismobile browser users.
So what you see, this isbasically out of 1,000 people,
how you can read this,out of 1,000 people.
129 of them use the mobile app.
18 of them use the mobileapp and the mobile browser,
but not the desktop.
So, the trends for thisover the past year,
so that everything associatedwith desktop going down,
and everything associatedwith mobile browser
and the mobile app going up.
So, you might have heardabout this smartphone thing
it's gonna be big.
It is happening.
So this shift is now officially happening.
The desktop has peakedin the WordPress world.
We have reached peakdesktop and we now need
to start thinking about mobile devices
as the primary way thatpeople are gonna interact
with WordPress in the future.
The whole Calypso process,it's kind of like changing
the engine of a plane while it's flying.
Because it's catching up to 13 or 14 years
of WordPress developmentin about two years.
And it's honestly been a big part
of where I've been spending
a big portion of my past two years.
As we've reached this pointwhere the Calypso base
is a lot stronger now, anda super majority of users
are now using the post,
we started to think about what comes next.
And the obvious thing is,certainly for Automatic's plugins
to start to bring them in.
Woo Commerce, JetPack,Kismet, Vol Press, et cetera,
these plugins to get tothe admin interface still,
if you're on a site that has them active,
you still have to go back to WP-Admin.
So users are bouncing between two
completely different interfaces.
So what we started to do was,
and a big focus of 2017,
we're gonna be makingCalypso plugin aware.
Basically saying so if you'reusing Calypso on a site
that has one of these plugins,let's say Woo Commerce,
all of a sudden in the interface,
there'll be all the Woo Commerce stuff.
And, it'll talk to the API,
it'll run on the desktop justlike the rest of Calypso.
And it'll only be loadedif the plugin is active.
So, this pretty cool.
I went to the team and said, "Well,
"can we do that for everyone?"
So announcement numbereight or whatever, (laughs)
Calypso now is plugin aware.
This PR was merged today.
And as a way to bootstrap this,
if we're opening up forwhat I just described
for plugins to create Calypso interfaces
for what they're doingthat any plugin to start
with over 1 million active users.
That's about 22, 25 plugins.
Some of them have been emailed already,
and have already begun working on this.
The purpose of this thoughis just to figure out
what the plugins need to do,
how that's gonna work, howthe loadings gonna work,
how the security model's gonna work.
And basically open this up soon
to every single plugin to the world.
This is a really important step,
because in our JavaScriptfirst application interface,
we haven't figure outyet how to do plugins.
And as we know the 47,000plugins in WordPress,
are one of the most interesting things.
So, please check thisout if you're a developer
and you can see that pullrequest getting merged.
And you can see mine not getting merged.
Again, for those who don'tknow GitHub, or sorry,
Calypso's 100% open source, GPL,
fully compatible with WordPress' license,
and on GitHub.
And the hope is that oneday it actually becomes,
or something like it becomes
what drives the primaryWordPress interface.
Oh, good for catch up from last year.
I had a lot of requeststo cover the things
that we covered last year.
Because often I just talk about something,
and then hope that youall forget about it.
We've had a cool year ofcore releases as well.
And, I just want tocelebrate some of these.
Version 4.4 Clifford, launchedwith responsive images.
Also WordPress embeds, it wasalso the first to bring in
the scaffolding for the new REST Api.
4.5 named for Coleman Hawkins,
include inline links, aresponsive previews, custom logos.
And finally 4.6 named for Art Pepper,
include inline plugin and theme deletes,
and in browser content back up.
And this is very much a yearabout doing things differently.
And for the first timeever in WordPress history
we're going to preannounce the jazzer
that will be honored in the next release.
Never happened before.
But we're very excited about this.
And so I'm proud toannounce WordPress 4.7,
Vaughan, named for Sarah Vaughan.
And to talk about it,(audience applauds and cheers)
I would like to invite tothe stage, the amazing Helen.
(audience applauds).
- Everybody.
I'm shorter than what it turns out.
My name is Helen, Helen Ho Sadiff.
I am the release lead for WordPress 4.7.
And I'm really excitedto get to talk to you
a little bit about it today.
There is a lot happening in this release,
thanks to a lot of people here,
and a lot of people who aren't here.
So I'm not gonna get tocover every single thing
that's happened in 4.7,but I'll talk a bit
about the things that Ithink are going to impact
a lot of people.
The first is we have a brandnew default theme for 2017.
It is a beautiful theme.
I am extremely excited about it.
It has a multi section frontpage that you can set up,
and I'll talk more aboutsetting it up in a few minutes.
You can have a beautifullarge header video,
something that we'vestarted to see more and more
across the web.
You have widget areas, nav menus,
all the sorts of thingsthat you've come to expect
from a WordPress theme.
And this one in particular I think
really targets businesses.
So let's think about a coffee shop,
I think that's a pretty typical example.
But also like a doctor's office,
or you know your local candystore or something like that.
So I'm really excitedabout it and I hope to see
more and more people usingit over the next year.
Oh, and I meant to mention, WordPress 4.7
will be coming out onTuesday, promise. (laughs)
(audience applauds and cheers)
So, I'd also like to recognizethe people behind WordPress.
So behind Twenty Seventeen,
we have over 100 contributorsto Twenty Seventeen.
Which is really amazing.
Themes are a place where a lotof people start contributing,
right, because that's what a lot of us do
when we get started with WordPress
is we starting tinkering with themes.
And that's a really greatplace to kind of learn
how to contribute to a piece of software.
So that's very exciting.
So these feature, you know we have this
multi section homepage.
I think it's just gonna scroll.
What this scrolling doesn't quite show you
is that those big imagesactually stay fixed
when you're scrollingand the stuff kind of
scrolls over it and it'sa really cool effect.
And that'll show up again later.
So to support this theme inparticular this time around,
but also to kind of set us up
for better theme set up in general,
that's been the central focus,
for this release of WordPress,
is how do you get your site set up?
Especially for the first time.
Those of you who
follow me on Twitter forbasketball gifts I assume,
(laughs) watched me tweetlike a 60 part tweet storm,
about what it was like to change the theme
on my site, which is Helen.blog.
And it's a pretty simple site.
But trying to change my own theme was this
really complicated process.
And I'm supposed to know what I'm doing.
So I thought a lot aboutthat and what can we do
to make this theme set up process better?
So in 4.7 we've done a lot of work
toward making this better.
So this is a feature,the video's gonna play
in the background while I talk about it.
But we have two featureshere that we're looking at
that kind of work together.
They're called StarterContent and Edit Shortcuts.
And what this means is that themes,
and Twenty Seventeen will ship with this,
can sort of define some content
that will better showcase them
when you first go to customize them.
So that could be a nav menu set up.
So, social nav menus are pretty common
where you have thoselittle icons for like Yelp
and Instagram and that sort of thing.
But it's sort of magical how those icons
are made to appear in the first place.
So we sort of pre-populate that for you
and give you and ideathat this is something
that would work really well in this area.
So for example with these edit links,
in this example it's editing the tag line.
But think about having a widget.
So when you set up atheme for the first time
you have widget areas and they're labeled,
but you have no idea whatcorresponds to which.
So, themes now can kindof pre-populate them,
kind of say this theme isreally good for businesses.
And so in the footer hereyou can have a widget
for your business location and hours.
And not only will it show that widget,
it doesn't make it live on your site.
But it shows it to youwhen you're customizing
for the first time.
And then you get a little edit icon
and you can go and you canedit it right from there,
and kind of really get started
with this good, solid basefor setting up your site
for the first time.
Also, along with that, wehave better menu building.
Which means that when you're setting up
a nav menu for your site you can actually
add new pages right from there,
the same way that you can make categories
when you're writing a post,now you can add pages.
So you don't necessarily have to be ready
to write your grand about page,
but you know that youwant it in your menu,
when you're setting up your site.
So now you can just add that.
And also we have customCSS, additional CSS,
which a lot of you have probably seen.
It's very common in themes,
definitely a lot of commercial themes.
And it's also a feature in JetPack.
Although not with live previews.
So what's really cool in4.7 is that we will have
live previewing custom CSS,
so you can make tweaks for those of you
who are comfortable with it.
And it'll work with JetPack, I promise,
'cause I'm a heavyJetPack custom CSS user.
This is one of the features,
this is stepping a littleoutside of the set up process.
But we have these big,beautiful video headers.
And Twenty Seventeen showcases them.
And I know that there area lot themes out there
that have started to do this.
And so I'm really excitedthat we have a uniform way
of handling this for our users,
and that you can havethese big, beautiful videos
to check out on your site.
We also have some cool features.
I think as these as like sleeper hits,
I really like this one.
We have PDF thumbnail previews.
For those of you who have to do
a lot of document management in WordPress,
something higher ed, I used to do that.
You get thumbnails previews now
of the first page of yourPDF, so that you know.
You can tell yourselfapart and you know like,
my upload worked, youcan feel a little better.
We have user admin, oruser dashboard languages.
What this means is that whenyou have multiple languages
installed on your site,
your individual users canactually choose which language
they prefer their dashboard in.
So you may operate a Spanish use site.
But you have like an English writer who,
you know is good with Spanish,
but maybe prefers to usertheir interface in English.
Or even a Spanish speaker who prefers
their interfaces in English.
Which happens, actually myhusband is one of those people.
And finally, I think thisis finally for developers,
I think this is the thing that
a lot of you are really excited about,
WordPress 4.7 includesthe Content Endpoints
for the REST API.
(audience applauds and cheers)
So really, it's thanksto this team over here,
and I think spread out a little bit.
I'm really excited aboutthis, I'm really excited
about taking this enthusiasmand building stuff with it.
(audience laughs)That's what I really like
to see, and that's what made me feel
like this really, trulyhas been a successful thing
that we've chosen to do.
So finally, two finalies,
I would like to give a special thanks to,
these are people we call release deputies.
Jeff Paul, who is a team lead at XWP,
and Aaron Jorbin, whosejob title I don't know.
(audience laughs)But he's here somewhere
you can ask him.
So they've been incredibly helpful to me
through this release.
There's a lot of management,people wrangling.
And like I'm a developerand occasional designer.
But my strengths are notneccessarily in project management
and that sort of thing.
And so having peoplewho've been able to help me
in those areas, has beenincredibly valuable.
And I deeply appreciate you and I'd like
a round of applause for this year.
(audience applauds and cheers)
So, we also ran some quick numbers.
We have more than 475 contributors,
yeah, to 4.7 which is significantly more
than some other past releases.
And I think when, I actually led 4.0.
And I think we have maybe 300 then.
So this is huge growth in that area.
And of those 475 plus contributors,
just over 200 of those arefirst time contributors.
And that's extremely exciting to me.
(audience applauds and cheers)
So now I get to leaveyou with one final thing.
And that is you get a nicepreview of the release video
for the release that's coming on Tuesday.
A thanks to Rami Abraham for producing
and narrating this video.- Whoo!
- He's local to the area.(audience applauds)
You get to watch it.
And I want you to pay special attention to
the jazzer Sarah Vaughan,
I'd like you to payattention to her middle name.
- [Rami] WordPress 4.7 Vaughan,
named after jazz legend,Sarah "Sassy" Vaughan.
Makes it easier than everto set up your website
the way you want it.
♪ Why not take all of me ♪
- [Rami] Meet Carly.
Carly operates a petstore and needs a website.
♪ I'm no good without you ♪
- [Rami] Carly looks at her options
and discovers WordPress.
With WordPress Carly canchoose from thousands
of free themes to fit her needs.
Carly's decided on Twenty Seventeen,
a brand new theme for WordPress
built from the ground up for businesses.
Twenty Seventeen includes a sleek design
with large images throughout,
perfect for both smallbusinesses like a pet store,
and larger businesses.
Because this is a brand new(everyone laughs)
site Twenty Seventeen willshow some starter content
to help Carly visualize howit can work for her store,
and get started withcustomizing it to fit.
New visual edit shortcutsshow what aspects
of her site can be changed, right there
within the live preview.
As she customizes her theme,Carly notices that she
can add a video to her heading.
She chooses a video she shot of her niece
with a puppy and adds thevideo header to her site,
directly from her tablet.
Because you can createpages while editing menus
in the customizer in WordPress 4.7,
Carly can continuebuilding her site structure
without breaking her current workflow.
Carly wants to make one more change
before she's ready to share her site,
make the name of herstore more noticeable.
The new CSS panel makes this easy,
and shows your changes live as you build.
- [Male Voiceover] I canwatch that puppy all night.
- [Announcer] And with that she publishes
the brand new website for her pet store.
Carly's happy.
WordPress 4.7 includes allof these features and more.
Along with exciting developer features
like REST API content endpoints.
WordPress 4.7 Vaughan,helping you set up your site
the way you want it.
(everyone applauds)
- Can we get one more roundof applause for Helen?
(audience applauds and cheers)Stand up, stand up.
- Whoo!(audience applauds)
- It is incredibly humblingand one of my favorite parts
of the work I do to beable to work with folks
like Helen and othercontributors, so thank you.
We're gonna talk a little bit about,
by the way that video was pretty funny.
I like how it was consumer,consumer, consumer,
and REST Content Endpoint API.
(everyone laughs)
Someone was probably like, "Oh I get this,
"I get this, what?" (laughs)
When everything'scapital letters you know.
But I'm gonna talk a little about
the REST Content Endpoint APIs. (laughs)
Because we like to showsome of the examples
that are starting to use it.
And we have two cool newones to highlight this year.
The first is the Guggenheim museum.
Beautiful, amazing museum in New York.
If you go to guggenheim.organd click around,
notice how fast it is.
And then view the sourceand see the amazing-ness
that is happening.
Because it is actually fully powered by
the new Content Endpoint APIs.
The second site that youcan see this on is Vocativ.
Which is stories from the deep web.
I don't know what that means,
a deep web, or dark web, I forget.
I guess those would be very different.
But it's safe to visit,don't worry I checked it out.
(everyone laughs)
They have an entirely100% React front end,
that I thought was pretty cool.
Ah, we have USTWO with human mates help
built their site completely in React,
and are using the newContent Endpoint APIs.
What's especially coolabout USTWO is it's actually
fully open source.
If you go toustwo.com/blog/opensourcingawebsite,
much like WordPress.org and Calypso,
and everything like that, theyare open sourcing as well.
So, some cool stuffhappening with the APIs,
round of applause for that.
There's been some good things.
(audience applauds)
Whoo!
It's been a busy year.
But I actually want torewind just a little bit.
Talk about
kind of a longer termview towards the past,
and marry that to a longerterm view towards the future.
We have had 14 releases, major releases,
in the past five years.
So 14 times we've done whatHelen just talked about,
what I talked about for the releases
that happened in the past year.
They've been led by 10different release leads.
Helen is joining the small crew,
which has done two or more.
Congratulations.
If you notice, 14 over fiveyears, it's very steady,
almost exactly three per year.
Which is what we startedto do about five years ago.
We've had a very, verypredictable release cycle.
Which has definitely, we'vecleaned up I would say,
quite a bit our releasemanagement side of things.
Even though it's stilla struggle every time,
but the project management,they're getting things
in on time, the testthing, the all of that,
is so much smoother thanit used to be. (chuckles)
For those of you whowere around pre-like 3.0,
you know what I'm talking about.
Also in the past fiveyears we've managed to grow
WordPress' market share from 13 to 27.2%.
It more than doubled.
(audience applauds)
This is not market shareof people running a CMS,
this is market share of all websites.
And this, both the size and the growth,
is completely unprecedented.
The number two is around 3.3%,
and the number three is 2.2%.
That's true in Drupal.
So, just in the past five years,
we've grown the equivalent of what Drupal
has done over 16 years, six times over.
So it's a real testamentto how the community
has come together and really thought about
the user first, and thought about
how the experience is gonna be, and
how it affects everyday folks.
Not just developers,not just whatever it is
that we might be ourselves.
We're really thinkingabout the larger community.
We've also had a new default theme
every year since 2010.
I will say that Twenty Seventeenis one of my favorites.
Because you haven't seena theme like that before.
And you haven't seen that done
with WordPress this way before.
So it kind of brings us, we'vebeen doing it this way for
about five years now.
We've had a success that hasbrought us to this point.
But what can we try next?
I'm gonna kick this off withone of my favorite writers,
named Krista Tippett.
She says,
"We only learn to walkwhen we risk falling down,
"and this equationholds-," I love end dashes,
"with commensuratelymore complex dynamics-
"our whole lives long," ah.
Check out Krista Tippett,amazing podcaster and writer.
So, I'd like to switch some things up
for the coming year,because I think that the,
we're at a point, at ajuncture for WordPress.
But what got us here won't get us there.
Meaning that the things that we've done
over the past five years,our three releases a year,
et cetera, et cetera,
I don't think are gonnabe what we need the most.
The structure that'sgonna bring us the things
that WordPress needs the most.
So, I'm proposing a newstructure for WordPress releases.
We're trying to balance a very interesting
set of dynamics, which isthat for users we're trying
to make things simpler and faster.
WordPress is oftenknown for its usability,
and its accessibility topeople who are brand new to it.
But at the same time we want to make it
more powerful for developers.
Many systems have one or the other.
We're trying to do themboth simultaneously.
And I think that theycan support each other.
What I want to do a little bit differently
is have design leading the way,
for our coming releases.
Meaning that, before weeven write a line of code,
we're gonna start doinga lot more user research,
a lot more mock ups,
a lot more showing things to each other,
and throwing things back and forth.
Versus talking about it and debating it.
I think we're gonna need todo a lot more video chats,
versus just, I love Slack.
Slack has been amazing to come in.
But sometimes it feels like we're
dancing about architecture.
There's some mismatch betweenwhat we're coordinating on
and what the actual product's gonna be.
For Twenty Seventeen,I'm gonna be putting my
product lead hat back on for the year.
It is that cowboy hat specifically.
I will wear it in at leastone of the Zoom meetings,
or video meetings we have.
And we're shifting to aslightly different approach
than we've had really for avery long time in WordPress.
Which is there's gonna be no set releases.
We are not planning to dothree major releases in 2017
on the schedule that we have maintained
for the past five years.
What does this mean?
So there's still what'sgoing on in Core, right?
And I think that actually Core can focus
to be very much focused on performance,
and fixes to existing functionality.
So really making the core of what we do,
hence the name Core,as smooth as possible,
as efficient as possible.
As maintenance free andbug free as possible.
But for the rest of WordPress development
what previously might havegone every four months
and then trying to shipthe next 0.1 release,
it's gonna go into three main focuses.
The idea of shifting frombeing time-based releases,
which were a reaction towhat didn't work well before,
and what has served us fairlywell over the past few years,
to really being focus led.
So saying that there are certain things
that are so crucial theyhave to happen in WordPress.
They have not yet happened inour previous release schedule.
And so we're gonna work on these.
And it's gonna be all we work on,
and we're not gonnarelease until it's ready.
What are those three areas?
I was thinking hotchicken, brisket and ribs.
(audience laughs)
But I consulted with the team (chuckles)
and we decided to make them alittle more online friendly.
The first is one we've been talking about,
which is the REST API.
We got the scaffoldingin earlier this year,
and as of Tuesday we'llhave the Content Endpoints
available on millions, and millions,
and millions, and millions of sites.
As I said actually in theCore REST API channel earlier,
I think that as thisbecomes one of the three
major focuses for the year,
we need to shift fromthinking about the input.
So thinking about wejust need to create these
things to get them into Core,
to really thinking aboutthe results of this.
So how can we measure thesuccess of these REST APIs?
To be candid, thereweren't as many examples
as I would have likedto be able to highlight.
When we talked about some cool things
built on the REST API.
We're still talking aboutthings that are in the thousands
of sites being built choosingthis way, maybe less.
When WordPress is at thescale of tens of millions.
So how do we get these API effective
for more and more people?
A big part of that isgonna be starting to have
WP-Admin use the REST API.
The REST API will be in 4.7,
but it's actually hugely controversial.
There's a very big debate for whether
it should be in or not.
And one of the thingswe talked a lot about.
And we decided to startworking on immediately
after the release was getting WP-Admin
having first priorityusage of the REST API.
So taking things thatmaybe use Admin AJAX now,
or maybe don't use an API at all,
and rewriting them touse the existing API.
The reason for this is that right now
for external applications,for those of you not familiar
with REST API, external authentication
is a little bit tricky, andthere are plugins for it.
But there's essentially,
there's not an out ofbox, out of the box way
you could for example,have an app on your phone
connect to the new REST API.
Basically 'cause it's better. (laughs)
When you connect to the XML-RPC API,
it's essentially sendingyour username and password
with every single request,which is not ideal.
So because it's better it's not there.
But, there's cookie-based authentication,
so meaning when you arelogged into WordPress
and you have your cookies,
you can do authenticatedaccess to the API,
meaning operations that read, write,
modify, update, delete,through the cookies.
Which means that immediately,
when you're logged into WP-Admin,
we can start using the API.
I believe that we will learn quite a bit,
as we start to do firstpriority usage of the API.
And that it will help evolve it,
being an API that we can trulyhave for the next decade.
If it turns out we can't use it,
I think we'd have to consider also
bringing it back into a plugin.
Because it might besomething that's more for
advanced developers of WordPress.
So then it's gonna be mainstream
for all people who use WordPress.
Second area of focus.
The Editor.
One thing you may have noticed
is that a lot of thefeatures, user facing features
of the last few releases,are Editor-based. (chuckles)
So it's really been major kudos
to IMEC folks, Andrew and Ella
who are really rockingevery single release
in getting things that eachof you can use every day
in the daily posting, andediting and page editing
experience of WordPress.
This fact has not been lost on me.
All the cool stuff, wellone, that's all JavaScript.
Another reason to learn JavaScript deeply.
But, it still feels like our editor
isn't yet to the pointwhere it represents,
if the core of whatWordPress does is about
publishing and writing,
I think that we shouldhave the best interface
in the world for doing that.
There was actually aslide a few years ago,
where I showed a blockbased editor. (laughs)
Almost identical to whatI'm talking about now.
This is like my white whale.
I will keep working on making an editor
until I die. (laughs)
Until we see this, orwe see this thing that
I think we could imagine,which is this idea
that you don't have to think about widgets
and short codes, and sidebars, and menus,
and all these as separate things.
Creating something like Twenty Seventeen,
that beautiful theme you saw,
actually requires a lot of steps
doing the current, customization editing
framework of WordPress.
So while it is possible toget to that beautiful thing
you saw on the screen,
you got to click a lot ofbuttons to make it happen,
and have some persistence.
When we are candid about our shortcomings
it allows us to be bettertowards growing to the future.
So, with The Editor,and I'll talk about this
a little bit more soon,
I think it is gonna be the basis,
really many featureinteractions in WordPress.
Which brings us to numberthree, The Customizer.
So The Customizer is a single page
JavaScript application within WordPress.
And some of the stuff yousaw there that's so cool,
and a kudos to The Customizer team,
like instant editing, as you're editing
it's updating the page right away,
is absolutely what weneed as the customization
interface in core WordPress.
Because that is the standard now.
You want to be able to editand see it immediately.
Preferably on multiple devices.
Although we've had a lotof improvements there
it is still not yet fast enough,
or to the point where it's flexible enough
to do some of thingsthat we want it to do.
Now that said, I believe that The Editor
is a good starting point.
And this is the aforementionedAndrew and Ella,
that's Ella in the middle,
who have done amazing Editor work.
I'm also happy to announce that Ephox,
which is the company behind TinyMCE,
has agreed to also work with us on this.
My, was it Napoleon invading Russia
that always messed him up?
Like, rewriting TinyMCEhas been my downfall
several times in life.
So now I've learned to embrace it (laughs)
and love TinyMCE.
Because it does so much.
I have an entirely newfound respect for it,
having tried to replace itat least twice. (laughs)
I think that when you start to understand
at the level of browser compatibility,
and random HTML and everything like that
that TinyMCE handles, is actually I think
the best starting placefor what we're gonna do.
Now there's still somekey technical questions
that we need to resolve around this.
So for example, do wetry to do all of this
inside of TinyMCE, kind oflike WPView's works right now?
Or do we try to have to create something
that's just outside of TinyMCE,
have lots of TinyMCE blocksfor the text editing parts.
These type of technical decisions
we're gonna resolve aswe start to work on it.
Each of these focus areas,we're gonna identify
a tech lead and a design lead
to be the heads of each one.
And then as the overall product lead
I'll be working with all of them,
talking to them regularly.
And when the feature, one ofthese areas gets to a point
where it has a significantuser facing improvement,
something that we can doanother whole video about
like we just did about Twenty Seventeen.
That's when we'll stop.
I don't know when that'll be.
Hopefully before next WordCamp.
Maybe not, these are big areas.
But we're at the point now when the steps
that WordPress needs to take to thrive
with the other 73% of theweb that doesn't use it yet,
is more significant.
And the state of the art putforward by amazing competitors
like Weebly, Wix,Squarespace and many others,
has raised how people expect to be able
to edit and publish their sites.
The Editor is also a good starting point,
because it works with arbitrary HTML.
Which means whateverwe figure out for that
we'll be able to apply tosome of the theme stuff.
But if went vice versa it might not work.
So, imagine the REST andThe Editor part of this
kicking off pretty much immediately.
Taking a core first approach to this.
As I said earlier, alot of my past two years
has been focused on Calypso,
because that was a very monumental task,
and it wasn't gonna,
going from zero to oneis very, very difficult.
And we're going from one to 10 is actually
in some ways easier.
So both with leading thesecoming releases in 2017,
and taking a core first approachto all these improvements,
some folks who I'veworked with on Calypso,
who are JavaScript gurus,are gonna be coming over.
Some designers in JavaScript are wranglers
to contribute for the Core.
And we'll see this in WP-Admin first.
How's that sound?
Yeah?(audience applauds)
We've actually neverdone this intentionally.
We used to have releasesthat would take a year,
but it was unintentional.
This is the first time we're trying
to do this intentionally.
And it's a unknown.
But like the quote thatI launched things with
you don't know necessarily,you can not learn to walk
unless you are prepared to fall.
So I'm certain that wewill fall a few times
over the coming yearas we think about this.
And I'm looking forwardto talking about it
at the town hall, I work CampEurope in about six months.
But I probably haven't been more excited
ever in the history of WordPress
about the direction that things are going.
And I thought back to ouroriginal kind of motto,
which is code as poetry.
And I feel like it'stime to get back in touch
with our poetic side.
This is also a year for meof being more vulnerable.
So I'm gonna do somethingI have never, ever done,
which is read poetry publicly.
Don't worry it's not mine.
And it's tangentially relatedto what we're talking about
what we've done, butinspired by Philadelphia,
inspired by the love sign on the stage.
I would like to read you apoem from Elizabeth Alexander.
Which is called "Praise Song for the Day."
Please forgive me.
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catchingeach other's eyes or not,
about to speak or speaking.
And all about us is noise.
All about us is noise andbramble, thorn and din,
each one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Someone is stitching up a hem,
darning a hole in auniform, patching a tie,
or repairing things they need to repair.
Somebody's trying to make music somewhere
with a pair of woodenspoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boombox, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, "Takeout your pencils, begin."
We encounter each other in words,
words spiny or smooth,whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of someone and then others,
who said, "I need to seewhat's on that other side."
I know there's somethingbetter down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that whichwe can not yet see.
Say it plain, that manyhave died for this day.
Sing the names of thedead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks,raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce.
Built brick by brick,the glittering edifices
that would then keepclean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle,praise song for the day.
Raise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out kitchen tables.
Some live by love thyneighbor as thy self.
Others by first do no harm,
or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national.
Love that casts a widening pool of light.
Love with no need to pre-empt grievance.
In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
anything can be made any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walkingforward in that light.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
Again that was Elizabeth Alexander.
I apologize for messing itup, listen to her version,
it's way better.
But with that, we've got the Q&A.
So, how this normally worksis if you have any questions
we've got mics that you can walk up to.
You want to say yourname, where you're from,
especially if you're fromsomeplace cool like Philadelphia.
And we'll talk about, for a few minutes,
anything you want to know
about this new direction forWordPress, or something else.
And thank you for kicking this off.
- How's it going, Matt?
It's great to hear that you'renot gonna be doing things
in the usual way.
So I'll be excited to seewhat you guys bring forth
with the new schedule.
I'm very happy to hear about The Editor
being focused on.
So, speaking of The Editor,
I'm one of these folks who still
uses the HTML side of The Editor.
Everyone I work with uses the visual.
And so I guess I'm justmore or less asking
if there's (laughs) Iknow I'm not the only,
but all right.
Focusing on, I don't it,basically I just don't want
that to get lost.(Matt laughs)
I work with a lot of peoplewho go straight to visual
and there have been a lot ofimprovements made on visual.
Maybe it'd be great to see
a color coding, or something like that.
Any sort of these
developer side things to TheEditor that might be good.
Is there gonna be some of that?
- Well now that you asked for it, yeah!
(everyone laughs)
- All right, all right.(audience applauds)
- I think that's a wonderful idea.
What would be a greatway to come into that
is actually, we're thinkingabout syntax highlighting
for some of the new code editing.
- [Audience Member] That'sthe term I was looking for,
syntax I was like color coding. (laughs)
- Syntax for not onlyfor the new CSS editor
and everything like that.
So there's no reason whywe couldn't apply that
to the code view of The Editor, as well.
The thing I want to be careful,
because I'll tell you when Iuse the code editor the most.
It's when the whizziewhig messes something up.
(audience member laughs)
And so I almost want someplugin that lets you opt in
that every time you switch the code editor
to fix something, it likereports that as a bug.
Because that's essentially what it is.
If we do our job right,
you shouldn't ever need to go to that.
But of course WordPresshas code at its heart,
and you will always be able toaccess that, so don't worry.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Hello, good afternoon.
My name is Pachem Kung, I'mcoming from Cancun, Mexico.
- Whoo!- Thank you.
And I wanted to ask you,
there's a lot of greatof information about
where WordPress is going.
But I kind of
was hoping to get a little bit of sense
of where Woo Commerce is going, too.
(audience applauds)
- So the question is whereWoo Commerce is going?
So that has its own conference, too.
(both laughing)
So check out Woo Con,
and the online stuff theydo and everything like that.
But essentially I wouldsay the biggest thing
ties into what I talked about.
Which is Woo Commerce likemany of the top plugins is
going to create aninterface inside of Calypso.
So that there is a fully API driven way
to interact with it.
Either for other developers,or through this new interface.
And in doing this new interface
is an opportunity to reimagine
from the functionalities and the screens
that haven't been looked at in awhile,
just like we did withWordPress in Calypso.
And hopefully create an experience
that people find exciting.
What will be interestingabout that as well
is that by building it in Calypso first,
they will be able toextract out that interface.
So I believe they'regonna be able to run it
in WP-Admin, as well.
Which is pretty interestingfor all plugins.
Because we all have WP-Admin users,
we will for many years to come.
But if you can write theJavaScript interface once
and it can either run in Calypso
talking to a remote API, or in WP-Admin
talking to the local API,that's kind of amazing.
So, you'll start to see more of that.
- [Audience Member]Thank you that was great.
- No problem, thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Hi I'm Jonathon from Montreal, Canada.
And I'd like to thankyou for the new direction
that we're going with theleadership in WordPress
and the release cycles.
I'm asking this questionfor Morton Rand Hendrickson
who's pretty vocal in the community.
He can't be here today,so that's why I'm--
- [Matt] He's here in spirit.
- He's here in spirit, exactly.
So considering it's 27%of the web, its footprint,
WordPress is in a position of influence
in how the web worksand how the web evolves.
It begs the question, ifWordPress as an entity
with its new leadership now,
should play an active role
in the bodies that govern the web.
As an example, what are yourthoughts on WordPress taking
an active role in W3C?
And how with the community formed policies
to govern the new web?
(audience applauds)
- Some people seem to like that.
So if you would like to beour representative to W3C,
(laughs) come on by!
I'm too old for that now.
You're right though that these
entities do have a huge influence.
And we've seen, actually
what is that Unicode Consortiumget really cool recently,
'cause of Emoji.
I had a friend who actuallylobbied for the Dumpling Emoji
to be in the Unicode.
And it is now there,it's on everyone's phone.
You have a DumplingEmoji, how cool is that?
Definitely these standards institution
can have a large influence.
W3C, which was very, very, very important
at the beginning of WordPress,
that's one of our bigdifferentiators was we validated,
and we produced valid code,
which very few CMSs did at the time.
To be honest it hasdrifted in the background
a little bit for me.
Even as we've kept withsome things like WCAG
and other standards.
But yeah, if that's somethingyou're interested in
I would say there is an opening, (laughs)
for people who want to work on that.
Yeah, that would be greatto have representation.
- [Jonathon] Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
(audience applauds)
What's your shirt say?
- Hello, my name's Rami.
I am from a small town two hours
to the west called Lancaster.
- [Audience Member] Whoo!
- Lancaster in the house.(audience applauds)
- You noted that anyplugin that has one million
active users or more
would have received an email about getting
access to the JavascriptCalypso fun time business.
Hypothetically if,
if there's a company thatdid not get that email,
(Matt laughs)but does that many
active users, what do we do?
(audience applauds)
- Sorry you're out of luck.
It's probably just 'cause AndyPeeling sent out the emails.
You maybe just couldn't find it.
This is all public,what's the ticket number?
9270 I think, issue number?
So all of the plugin stuff I talked about
is actually completely out there.
And you can just go on GitHuband get all the information.
'Cause the email was morejust go check this out,
it wasn't any secret information.
So, this has merged intoCalypso actually this morning.
And you can check it out.
And also to clarify,the one million or above
is just to start working it out.
Because with the current structure,
you can't have 40,000 of these.
So, with the top pluginswe want to figure out
how it's gonna best work.
So we can then generalizethat plugin infrastructure
for the rest of WordPress.
- [Rami] That is the eventual goal?
- Absolutely.
- What?- For those of you
who are old school.
(laughs) You'll remember,
you want to remember the My Hacks file.
Who knows when support for it was removed?
Trick question, it wasn't!
So, the big early sometimesyou have to take baby steps.
So, at the time when WordPress started,
or Cafelog, kind of around that time,
the way that you didplugins, or modified things
was there would be a webpage that said,
open this file, go toline 44, paste this code.
Go line 82, paste this code.
Like you were literallymanually patching things.
Cafelog and then WordPress'big innovation was
putting all thosepatches in a single file,
called My Hacks, whereyou put all your hacks
to the core software.
And then from there we took the step to,
I thought was a good one, tomake these self contained.
(laughs) So they are the plugin interface
that we know and love today.
There's gonna be some equivalent for that.
But right now we're kind ofstill in the My Hack space.
So that's why, that's wherewe are in the timeline.
So we're kind of like 2005 again.
Thank you.
How about over here?
- [Paul] My name's Paul andI'm a WordPress-a-holic.
- Hi Paul.
- Actually the first thingI want to do is thank you
for working with the BlackGirls Code initiative.
That is an amazing initiative.
I can't thank you enough for doing that.
(audience applauds)
So I'm with the University of Missouri.
We lead the WordPressdevelopment on campus there,
as well as secure the WordPress sites.
And unfortunately dealwith remediation triage
of compromised sites.
One of the things those ofus in the higher ed space
face all the time is fightingagainst the misconception
that WordPress is insecureand can never be secured.
So, this is my first WordCamp ever.
- Whoo!- Whoo!
- And so I was a littlesurprised when I got here
and discovered that therewas an absence of talks
related to security andsecuring WordPress sites.
So I was wondering if youcould speak to that absence,
as well as, as far as protectingWordPress' adoption rate.
If you have any plans to help educate
the WordPress community on securing sites
to help fight thatmisconception I mentioned?
- [Matt] I'm guessing you like security
'cause you're wearing the shirt. (laughs)
- I do with secure quite a bit.
- Cool.
You know I would to love thatthere were no security talks
because everyone's already 100% secure.
But we all know that's not 100% true.
I think it was just an oversight
in the programming for this year.
Where as balancing all the 20 or 30 things
for the amazing site of speakers we had.
By the way, who liked the talks this year?
Good ones?
(audience applauds)
I saw some incredible ones.
We just missed security, sowe will fix that next year.
- [Paul] All right definitely please.
- And we're not happening it just,
on the checklist ofthings it got forgotten.
In terms of people who say that WordPress
can never be secure.
I guess in some likeglobal, philosophical sense
where no software can ever be secure,
I agree that no softwarecan ever be secure.
Because it is written by humans, for now,
and humans are fallibleand we make mistakes.
And so by definition, allsoftware will have bugs,
and some of those bugs mighthave security implications.
I do think though it'sinteresting to think in systems.
So, I think WordPressas a system can actually
be incredibly secure.
And that testament tothat is the extremely
high end websites that run it.
So for example, Facebook.
Which has one of the bettersecurity organizations
in the world, cybersecurity.
WordPress is certified for them.
And if you look atanything that's on WP.com,
like, I'm sorry, FP.com,
they also have a cool two letter.
Newsroom.fp.com, internet.org,
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, all of that is
actually hosted by WordPress, VIP.
It runs securely, lotsof newspapers, et cetera.
So, while the software itself is fallible,
you can build things around it,
which I'm sure you'refamiliar with, can check that
and restore if something goes wrong.
And have multiple layers of security.
And we just need to continue to do that.
'Cause security is always a process,
never a destination.- Absolutely.
- I will never be ableto get on stage and say
we're now 100% secure.
Because I know there'ssomeone waiting to release
a bug until I say that, (laughs) you know?
And so, that's justkind of the recognition.
I do believe that our update system
is relatively unique among our peers,
in terms of being able topush out security updates
quickly to a large number of sites.
We've used that.
Also the fact that we workvery closely with WebPost.
And that basically every major WebPost now
takes the security ofWordPress as seriously
as they take the broadersecurity of their accounts.
And as, who's evercleaned you a hacked site?
Isn't that the worst thing in the world?
Imagine doing that if youdon't know command line.
So really, if you imagine you're signed up
on a three or $5.00 a month web host
with the one click install of WordPress,
you have no chance.
You really need yourhost to fix that for you.
Otherwise there'll be some files somewhere
that just keeps re-infectingyou over, and over and over
that we've all heard about.
So the responsibility of the folks
with the technical capacityto really address these issues
when they do go wrong, asit will inevitably go wrong
sometime in the future, is important.
And that's what's been great
about our closer partnershipswith hosts as well.
Is that they have trainedall their support people
on WordPress, on plugins.
They have done a lot of proactive work
that I talked about last year
in getting people on this latest version.
And I think we'll continue to see
the results of that.
My personal goal is to have 80% or more
of WordPresses in theworld in the latest version
within a week of the release.
We're not there yet.
We get the tens of percents.
But not ever to 80%.
So we both need to improveour core auto update
and work with hosts to get as many sites
on the latest version as possible.
I think then when we do that for Core
that'll also apply to plugins and deeps.
- [Paul] Perfect, thank you very much.
- Thank you!
- [Estrus] Hey Matt,this is really quickly
and it's strictly a very selfish question.
My name is Estrus, I'm with Million Eyes.
What's up with that @photomatt?
I want to know the story behind it.
'Cause I'm all about photography.
- Yeah.
So my URL used to be photomatt.net.
And photo Matt like manythings in my life, is a pun.
Many of you might not remember,
but you used to get pictures printed,
like at a store. (laughs)- Oh yeah.
- And it was often called the Fotomat,
the F-o-t-o-m-a-t.
- [Estrus] You're selling that right?
- Yeah also a lot people don't know
Automatic is also a pun.
I try to work my name in everything.
I actually own about,
I own about 40 differentnames with Matt in them.
- With Matt?- Like diplomatic,
semiautomatic, like there'sa ton of different ones.
- [Estrus] Okay I'll start collecting
and I'll let you know if I find some more.
Thanks man, appreciate it.
- No problem, thank you.
I've also registered all the Matt TLDs.
And I've been getting hatemail from other Matts.
They're like, "Why doyou need matt.lawyer,
"and matt.club, and matt dot?'
I don't know I have a domain issue.
- Oh thank you good evening, Matt.
This is from Fahad Shakeel from Pakistan.
I came here to attend the WordCamp.
- Whoo!(audience applauds)
- So far I want to paymy gratitude to you on
adding the REST API with the WordPress.
It's a new vision forI think a lot of people
that we have been developing the rowboats.
And I'm going to planto utilize the dashboard
for the ROS and utilizingthe rowboats, Baxter Rowboat
with the WordPress.
So thanks for that.
- [Matt] That credit goesto a lot of the people
sitting over there.
They did amazing work!
- So that's what we have been doing.
But my question is, sincewe have been investing a lot
on the WordPress and other things,
definitely a future of an entrepreneur
is all this dependent on it's (mumbles).
But since we have been using WordPress
in your vision, where you see the future
of a WP entrepreneur?
- The future of a WordPress entrepreneur.
A lot of what we're gonna be focusing on
I think could change thegrowth curve of WordPress.
Which means that there would be,
even though we've been growing faster
than everyone else in the market
from a market share point of view,
I think that we willbe able to, excuse me,
accelerate that and reach audiences
that we're not reaching right now.
'Cause if we're honest about it,
WordPress, even with oneof the great web host,
like that sponsor that was in the thing,
there's still a lot ofsteps to getting it going.
And I think that we couldstreamline that quite a bit.
And make it more accessibleto really fulfill
our mission and our dream whichis democratize publishing.
Now as we grow that market
that lifts the boats of everyone.
One of the reasons why I think WordPress
has such a collaborative community,
when you see competitorshanging out with each other
and getting drinks andessentially friendly,
is that it's a growing pie.
So everyone slicing thatpie can grow alongside.
If it were shrinking, or a static pie
the only way to growwould be taking some pie
from someone else.
So, it's really all about pie.
(laughs)- All right.
- 3.1425, no.- That's your vision.
- So, that's my hope is that,
like as WordPress becomesmore accessible to new users,
has more inclusive design,
that you'll start to get morepeople all over the world,
including in Pakistan,
come to you and say Iwant, not just a website
but a WordPress.
And then that creates allsorts of opportunities
for people to create consultings,
to create local plugins,to great local services,
local hosts, local everything.
So everything that yousee around WordPress
should be able to be biggerand more interesting.
- Thank you very much.
And before I leave I would like to invite
all of you for the WordCampPakinstan, WordCamp Lahore.
We are running fordefinitely in February 2017.
This if Fahad from PressTigers.
(audience applauds)
- That is an acceptablepop up ad in the questions.
(everyone laughs)
It's your WordCamp it's okay.
- Hey Matt, my name is Dan.
I'm a developer at J2, I workabout two blocks from here.
So this was a pretty easy trip for me.
- [Matt] Thank you for your hardship.
- Yeah.
So the new standard is PHP7,that's the recommended version.
But does that apply tothe coding standards
that we write, the next version of Core?
Also, what about the legacy coding?
Things that aren't compatible with PHP7?
- Sure, so that's what we're recommending.
So meaning that we onlywant you to host your sites,
your WordPress and we'reonly gonna try to send you
to people that support HTTPS and PHP7.
Now as it says on that page,
we work all the way backto 5.2.4 I think right now?
- [Dan] Yeah.
- So, that is because
the people who are onthose older versions,
probably don't have asmuch control over it.
And we don't want to leave them behind
when we do, for example a security update.
So, for right now, especially in Core,
I don't see any huge reasonsto adopt a different syntax
or some module or somethingthat changes that.
We can continue as we already have,
to progressively enhance WordPress,
as it's own newer versions.
Just like we're saying there'sgonna be certain things
that get lit up with you're on HTTPS.
That doesn't mean thatWordPress won't work
on HTTPS on HTTP, non-secure.
It just means thatit'll be better on this.
And I can (audio fades) certain features.
Like let's say somethingnew in Module seven
or something we could use.
But in reality we're probablynot gonna take advantage
of a lot of the syntactical stuff,
because it would createbackwards incompatibility.
- Do you think inclusionis definitely something
that you want to consider,but it's been a long time.
(Matt laughs)Do you think that there's
an end of life date thatwe could look forward to?
Even like a year from now, just a thought.
- Sure I mean someday.
And we have bumped it in the past.
We'll bump it in the future.
That's driven by the users, notby what we want necessarily.
- [Dan] Yeah, exactly.
- You will see us bump these versions,
I see Gary like ready to go.
He's ready to do it right now.
So we'll do it as the numbers support it.
And the most effective thingwe can do as a community
is help the people who are onolder versions get upgraded.
In fact I know a number of plugins.
I think Eustis gonna startcalling people on older versions
hey contact your host.
'Cause a lot of these folks,
I think the host supports it,
there's just some flag or some,
not they need to move them out.
- [Dan] So it's a PSA.
- Yup, thank you.
All right we'll do two over here.
And yeah, we're wrapping up soon.
- [Participant] Hi boss.
I'm George Famus.
I also live about two hourswest of here in Lancaster.
I know crazy right?
Rami's my core organizerat WordCamp Lancaster.
So, with the new release schedule,
one of the things thathas served us very well
over the last three years, 12 releases,
ever since the extended 3.5 release cycle,
was that both futureplugins and the idea that
if you don't get into thisrelease, not a big deal,
'cause the next release isright around the corner.
With this change now,
if the next release 3.8 istaking an extended period
of time to get out, is theregoing to be some consideration
to shipping a, making that3.9 and shipping 3.8 sooner,
with just the incremental releases?
Or is it, we have to holdoff for the big three,
The Editor, Customizer and API?
- No so, any one of those,
when it has somethingready, could push a release.
And if one is ready in September
and the next is ready is October,
we'll do a major release in September
and a major release in October.
It's all about the readinessof that part of it.
It's also very possiblethat we'll make some
improvements to the Core stuff on the way.
And maybe at some point we'll package that
and push it out.
We're just not committing to a deadline.
So it's a lack of schedule.
It's driven more by the quality,
the functionality and thestability of these key things.
And you're right tomention future plugins.
That's been something we've done well
and poorly in the past.
And I hope that this can be some examples
of us doing it super well.
Thank you.
All right one more on this side.
- My name's Andrew,I'm from Dallas, Texas,
so plus one to barbecue.
- [Matt] Texas.
- I actually contacted the organizers here
and wanted to do a workshoparound The Customizer
for WordCamp US.
And you see that at a lot of WordCamps
and other conferences and things.
Do you think there's a spotfor that in the future,
especially as these new releases come out
with a large change to be doing?
You know one day let'sget everybody up to speed
on all this new stuff that'scome out in this new one.
- Yeah I think that'd be awesome.
(audience applauds)
They're nodding, so I thinkthat means it could happen.
Yeah, I love when WordCampsdo workshops beforehand.
It's kind of amazing,to your hundred project,
bringing people whohave never had the power
of being able to updatetheir own website before,
it's so fun.
That's why I'm excitedabout these hack-a-thons.
Yeah, we could definitelyhave a workshop next year.
I'll see how Nashville brings the game.
All right let's wrap up these three,
and then we're done.
- Hey Matt, as a fellow tie wearer,
I will tie your tie for you any time,
just let me know.
- Thank you.- Yeah.
Okay so with the new release cycle,
how dow we avoid stagnation?
So let's say being a services
business, we realize thatthe longer a project goes on
the less interested everybody is in it.
And how do we keep everybodyengaged, the developers,
without them feeling burnt out?
And without them notwanting to be in that part
of the project anymore?
- That's a good question.
I think
we're trying to counter stagnation.
Because I think even thoughwe've had lots of releases,
certain parts of WordPress have stagnated.
They haven't made the leaps
that we could.
And so this is giving us some more time
to really work on those things.
I think that having a pluginis a great way to do that.
Having this being ableto be pushed in a plugin
asynchronously from more releases,
can be very engaging.
You can get both the thrill of releasing
and the oxygen of gettingimmediate feedback
on whatever the new things are.
So I would say for a lot of these,
look for sort of and officialplugin that we'll promote
that let's you get this new stuff
ahead of the Core release.
I think for each one we'd want probably
40 or 50,000 testers at least.
- As a followup to that,
do we have any sort ofstatistics right now about
how many actual users are user testing our
future plugins before weintroduce them into Core?
- Not now.
That's why, remember it's design led.
A key part of design is that user testing.
I think we need to start with it,
we need to do it in the middle,
and we need to do it at the ends.
And by the way there'sequivalence for that
for like the REST API.
We can do developer testing.
Let's go to some randomagency and sit down with them
and say, hey make a HelloWorld using the REST API,
and see what they struggle with.
See where in thedocumentation they get stuck.
Everything can be designed better.
by approaching that mindset.
And by the way, it doesn'thappen just from designers,
but bringing more of that DNA
into our every day conversations,
I think will help usbecome more user centric,
and more iterative in our approach.
- Thanks.- Thank you.
- Hello, my name is Asin Bawani,
I'm from Karachi, Pakistan.
- [Matt] Cool, two people from Pakistan!
(audience applauds)
- Before I get to my question,
I just want to say thankyou for WordPress it
literally changed my life.
It was my gateway intodevelopment in software.
My question is about WordPress Foundation.
One of the things you saidit will focus on in 2017
is education in underdevelopedcountries for WordPress,
so that publishing and information
can be democratized further.
I just want to know whatthat would look like
on the ground, whatexactly do you have in mind
in terms of dispersing that education?
- Yeah, so.
We're gonna figure that out.
But if I had to lay out a general area,
it would be curriculum that's open source,
that then gets localized.
And someone local, perhaps like yourself
would essentially run a class
with some support from the foundation.
Maybe helping getting a venue,
or getting it all set up,whatever the advertising it,
so people know to come to it.
And the idea of just reaching out.
Much like a workshop that wetalked about pre-WordCamp.
Essentially that, but in a place where
it might start evenfrom a more basic level.
- Okay, thank you.- Thank you.
And if you have ideas orwant to get involved there,
hop on in!
- Hi, your last one.- All right last question.
I hope it's a good one.
- (laughs) Wow, no pressure.
- No pressure.- I'm okay with that.
I wanted to talk a little bit about
the Five for the Future where the thing
was a really cool concept youbrought up a couple years ago.
And we've seen the impactof that as you know,
some developers and some designers,
and even community membersare being dedicated
by companies to do that full time.
As someone who's led the .org marketing,
like Contributor Days forthe past couple years,
we see some people showingup and having energy.
But then in between, nothing.
And I think part ofthat is related to maybe
companies not thinking that's something
they could dedicate time or energy to.
Is that something that the growth council
that might be part of that?
Is that something that, Idon't know what do you think
in terms of like extendingthis time donation
to other kinds of roles thatmaybe don't seem obvious
where development and design
and other things are very core to that?
- That is amazing,
because you surgically identified
the one part of the presentationthat didn't make it in.
- [Audience Member] I didnot see anything. (laughs)
- I would like to recognize Mark Urain.
And everyone else whomade a slide or helped out
with that State of the Word.
As cool as that, everythinggood in there came from them,
so thank you.(audience applauds)
But one of the things I didn'tget to was reaching out,
following up with some of theFive for the Future companies.
Either people who, alreadyannounced and I was aware
they were doing Five for the Future,
or I'm sure the manythat I don't know about
that are doing it.
So, I anecdotally have seen their growth
in the Five for the Future.
Certainly I've had more people tell me
that this is something their compony does
like every other Friday,or something like that.
Again, if you don't get the 5% even 1%
is better than nothing.
And it has a real impact as we've seen
in the development so far.
Look for that next year. (laughs)
I'll talk for about itmore, or in the interim
that it'll grow.
But I completely agree thatit is a area that we need
to highlight more.
I don't think it needs tocome from the growth council.
It can come from anyonewho wants to take it on.
Because what I would loveto do is on WordPress.org,
actually highlight the companies
that are making the publiccommitment to do this.
And kind of celebrate them,either maybe with badges
on the profiles, or something like that.
Because it is a big investment.
But is the thing that will allow us to be
around 50 years from now.
Because we are a commons based system.
And what comes out ofWordPress is a multiple
of what goes in.
If we all just kind of use it and take,
and don't leave a penny, take a penny,
none of us leave a penny,it kind of dries up.
WordCamps always really inspire me,
in terms of because, andtomorrow a Contributor Day.
Who's going to Contributor Day?
Yeah, think about it if you're not going
as like something to check out.
Because it is the coolestthing in the world
to fix something. (laughs)
I know it sounds silly,but then you can then like
tell all your friends.
Like, "See that part of WordPress.
"I made that not ugly, or Ifixed this documentation page."
Or like your face ends up ona future State of the Word,
like it's a really cool experience
to have your work used bymillions and millions of people.
And WordPress is one of theplaces where you can do that.
You can work alongside amazing folks,
like some of the oneswe've highlighted today.
I don't know, it beats watching Netflix.
WordPress and chill, noI'm kidding. (laughs)
So on that note. (laughs)
I wanted to give a very,very sincere thanks
for all of you all for being part of this,
for coming out, for bringing your energy.
People who spoke, people who volunteered,
let's just give ourselvesa big round of applause.
(audience applauds)
And with that, let's getthe music going again,
and we can go check out the after party.
I will see you all there,
or at the Contributor tomorrow.
So thank you very much.
(bright digital music)♪ Oh ♪