And so, without further ado, let's go ahead andhop into the questions and answers. Or at least
the questions, I can't promise answers. But y'allcan bring the questions. So, yeah, make your way
over here if you got a question. And it looks likewe have someone amazing and brave to kick us off.
So, introduce yourself and we'll all say hi.
>> Hi, my name is Milana Cap, I'm from Serbia.
I'm here on behalf of Make Teams.
I'm from the Documentation Team. We started
collaborating together with other teams like Learn andTraining teams because we have -- yeah -- we
have needs for the same infrastructure.But there is no infrastructure. And we also
started collaborating with Hosting Team on newhandbook that will help in the administration.
And we really want to collaborate withCore Team to have dedicated documentarian
for every developer so we document everythingwhile it's being developed. So, we don't ever
again ship code that is not fully documented. Now,my question is: Because we are doing this all in
private messages and that's not the way foropen source. Can we have some, you know,
support from the Meta Team or something to makethis -- to create the infrastructure for
collaborating between teams?
MATT: So, would that be like a channel inthe Slack? Or a new P2?
AUDIENCE: Not just that. You know, when you start
with just a release, there are changes and nowwe from the documentation, we document that. But
there has to be some waterfallthat the information goes to
Learn Team and Support Team and Training.So, if we could have some system where it
kind of expects us to work together. Not tobe just separate team. I mean, we can discuss
this tomorrow at Contributor Day to see how wecan do it. We just know that we need to do it.
MATT: Yeah, the good news. All the changesare happening in source control.
And so, everything is there.AUDIENCE: Yeah, yeah.
MATT: Maybe what could be a good roleis someone to keep an eye on that
and do like a notification. So, that couldbe even more than a new forum, it might
just be a new way for people to contribute.AUDIENCE: Yeah, that would be also great.
MATT: That's the way that I try to keepup with things as well. Is keep an eye on
the GitHub issues and the change sets. Used toread every single one. But not so much anymore.
But if you want to know what's coming, reading thechange sets. And we have good commit messages now
is by far and away the best way to do it. Butif that might be too technical for someone else
who wants to contribute otherwise, someoneto translate that could be helpful.
Cool. Thank you for the suggestion.AUDIENCE: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
AUDIENCE: So, non-serious questionfollowed up by a serious question.
MATT: Sure.AUDIENCE: So, welcome back.
In honor of you being back in San Diego,are you gonna do Irish car bombs again tonight?
MATT: I don't remember the last timedoing them, so, they must have worked.
AUDIENCE: That was at our firstWordCamp here in San Diego, 2011.
There was photographic evidence of that. I seemto recall taking photos of you behind the bar.
MATT: You know, as I enter my late 30s, hangoversseem to last a lot longer so I drink a lot less.
AUDIENCE: A little bit more serious of aquestion, recently as a developer I was working
on a project on WordPress.com. And theydidn't want to move, despite my urging.
And I ended up really to have to go through theprocess of working on there and seeing some real,
like struggling to work through being on dot comand the limitation on there. It was not a great
experience as a developer. And like -- I've usedsome very strong language about it before. But
like it was very poor experience as a developer.Like working on the platform. And getting anything
done. Like as -- I was created as an admin asa user. I couldn't install plugins or themes.
You know, they had their -- their main accountwhich I guess was what was paying for their
premium service. I had to be logged in as them tobe able to install or edit plugins, that sort of
thing. So, my question is, what are we doing aboutdot com? This is the thing that really drives,
you know, the -- this -- what we'redoing here, right? This really pays
for all that. You know? Like --MATT: Some of it, not most of it.
AUDIENCE: Yeah. But I mean, that's --I mean, the majority of like, you know,
the user base that we have as WordPress,right, comes from the dot com. So --
MATT: Yeah. Probably it would be good to talkabout a little bit the history and what's some of
the latest stuff that maybe you haven't seen yet.AUDIENCE: Yeah, I feel like we're being overlapped
by Squarespace and Wix these days. Onboarding,user experience is taking significant leaps above
and beyond what WordPress.com I think has now. AndI'm kind of concerned that some of the dip in user
base that we've experienced in the last year orso is kind of a direct result that have. These
public companies that have the money, that havethe background throw all kinds of stuff at that.
Like we have almost an infinite supply of likecontributors as being an open source platform. And
I think that what's missing is a little bit is thevision. And maybe you can talk a little bit about
maybe there is some upcoming vision to that.MATT: Yeah, originally WordPress.com started
as you said, as a way to onboard new people. Itwas a multi-site instance. There were a lot of
plugins built in. But you couldn't modify thecode or install your own and things like that.
What changed, on the business plan and above, it'sa full essentially like a VPS-type site. So you do
get control from the bottom, including being able to install plugins and themes.
It sounds like this customer may not have been on the business plan?
AUDIENCE: They were. I had to be logged inas him to actually do any of that.
Even as an admin user, I couldn't do that. Which is --
MATT: They might have set you as the wrong role. Because you should be able to.
And the thing they launched, I want to saylast week, is now full SSH and WP-CLI access.
It is something... a lot of people don't know about this yet.But definitely we have been hearing from
our developers and we want to make it adeveloper-friendly place. We also launched
a pricing change that we ended up rolling backthat brought the full hosting access to basically
every plan and lowered the price and that endedup being a huge disaster for some reason.
So, we reverted back to the old plans.AUDIENCE: Sure.
MATT: Yeah, there's new things launching there.I would say developer focus is a big part of it.
And particularly if you haven't, check outthe SSH and WP-CLI access. And, of course,
what's happening on the backend that'sunusual there is multi-data center failover,
and super high performance. High frequency CPUsand everything like that. You can run advanced LMS or
WooCommerce sites on it. If you haven't checkedit out recently, check it out.
And in fact the platform behind it is WP.cloud
which now being used by a few other folks like Pressable,GridPane, some other hosts signed a license as well.
AUDIENCE: I was talking to Patrick this afternoon.
MATT: Yeah. Sorry you had a bad experience there.I would say definitely write in on the admin thing.
Maybe that's a bug. But the other thing isthe SSH objects just launched. So, check that out
again. And thank you for the question.AUDIENCE: Yeah. Good to see you again.
[ Applause ]
AUDIENCE: Hey, my name is James, I'm withPMC. My question is, if you could
wave a magic wand and make a WordPress problemthat seems otherwise insurmountable just
disappear overnight, what would you choose?
MATT: hmmm... I'll pick two.
One really drives me crazy. You all knowthe capital IDs in the database tables.
Oh, my goodness. What were we thinking? I thinkthat goes all the way back to the b2 days.
That would be one I would change. And weprobably can change at some point. We need
to migrate some things. I think not a lot of peopleactually directly create a database, we could do that.
I'm gonna wave this magic wand three times.[ Laughter ]
AUDIENCE: You're the boss, you're in charge.MATT: The second one, and I think there is some
solutions for this. But yeah, I have been thinkinga lot about projects that really build for
the long-term. And think not just in years, butdecades. And, of course, open source has some of
the best ones of these. One I have been enamoredwith is SQLite. They try to think of their data
formats being accessible for decades to come. Likea really safe data storage format for rich data.
So, something a little more native in supportingSQLite I think would pair well with WordPress'
thoughts on longevity and permalinks andthings like that we try to support.
And third thing I would say, which came upin a lot of questions,
particularly in Europe and other places,is if we could help people onboard
better to get involved with the Community. AndI think particularly with the loss of a lot of
Meetups during COVID. They're now starting tocatch back up. And I know there's going to be some
focus on that at Contributor Day tomorrow. By theway, who is sticking around for Contributor Day?
Wow. That's great. Was it -- I think it was in Porto?
We ran out of food and chairs and stuff, becausewe had so many people at Contributor Day.
So I think the best way to get involved withthe WordPress community is typically
sitting down at a laptop with somebody elsewho is involved and walking through it and
learning and learning together. And so, Meetups,Contributor Days coming back and everything
is fantastic. I would love to get better at doingthat in a distributed fashion. So, I think we're
pretty good at it if you're in-person or ableto come to a Contributor Day. But as you know,
we had to cap the tickets quite lower. This is Ithink the smallest WordCamp US for a while. I kind
of love it, it feels like the old days not quite2002. That one would have been a lot smaller.
A lot of people don't know, but the very first everWordCamp was organized with a few weeks notice
and we did it at the Swedish American Music Hall inSan Francisco. And I just saw a documentary as well
called... We are as Gods, about Stewart Brand,
who was this an amazing character who found theWhole Earth Catalog that inspired Steve Jobs.
And he organized the first ever hacker conferencearound the Homebrew Computer Club and everything
like that. In the documentary, they had picturesof the first conference. If you are going to believe it,
it was at the Swedish American Music Hall. I was like,"Wait, I recognize that weird place." So the in-person
is helping. But whether that's online pairingor online meeting times in different time zones
or things to make it easy for folks who are forwhatever reason and can't get to the WordCamp
get involved. That's the part of the power of the community. [Alarm goes off]
Time to wake up! Thank you.AUDIENCE: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
MATT: Help them with the mic there?
>> Got it. Michelle Frechette with StellerWP atLiquid Web, and Post Status.
MATT: Oh!AUDIENCE: Yes.
MATT: Busiest woman in WordPress.AUDIENCE: Maybe. You've met Josepha, right?
Mergers and acquisitions have beena hot topic in the last few years.
What are your thoughts about this for theWordPress ecosystem? Do you think it's a
good thing or bad thing? Why? Or why not?MATT: Hm... I think mergers and acquisitions
are value-neutral in and of themselves. Andit's more about what happens afterwards.
So, I think it's natural that particularly when weenter moments of economic uncertainty
which we've certainly had a lot of in the pastfew years, and might be going into more of now.
Or when the markets are super-hotlike they were a year ago.
For there to be some consolidation, or peoplewho have equity in the stock to use that to
join up. And I also say that having done like over25 of those, been on both sides of a lot of those,
including as an investor, they're tough todo right. And one thing that I actually see
helping the WordPress Community versusacquisitions that happen in more general
technology is there's so much philosophicalalignment across a lot of the organizations
in the WordPress Community. Including very manyof them being distributed or having a strong like
distributed aspect to them. And so, of course,having the open source ethos. So, I feel like the
WordPress organizations are really good influenceson each other. And certainly at Automattic,
we've had a lot of inspiration from, you know,some of the cool things that other organizations
do. Including around Contributor Days or howthey give back, all sorts of things. And because
there's so much sharing and blogging about it,there's a lot of cross-pollination, which I like.
Where they're tough is integrating differentcultures are hard. Sometimes founders might
leave after an acquisition. Or just theremight be sort of like an organ rejection.
The culture of an old organization and anew organization. One way we think about it
is that when we buy a company, we're hoping toboth influence them and be influenced by them.
So, Automattic itself is like a different organismwhen the cultures merge. And depending on the size
of what's joining, that might both take a whileor be a really big change opinion for one of us,
the largest ones in terms of people was Tumblr,which was about 200 people, 180 people when we
bought it. That has been an interesting process.I would encourage folks who work on acquisitions
or do them in a space to think about the -- theday the deal is signed as the halfway point,
not the finish point. Because however much workyou did getting to that and working together is
I think you need at least that much on theother side to really intentionally integrate
the cultures and onboard people well. And alsojust make sure there's not something, you know,
kind of lost in the bureaucracy that's happeningaround like expense policies or vacation resetting
or just all the kind of logistics that sometimeswe can forget about when those things happen.
AUDIENCE: I would love to have you onPost Status. We can talk about it more.
MATT: Always happy to join the podcastsof the different WordPress publications.
And thank you for the question.AUDIENCE: My pleasure.
[ Applause ]
MATT: That's fine!
AUDIENCE: Hi. Matt, I'm MattGraham from Whitby, Ontario, Canada.
MATT: I love Whitby, Whitby Island. Oh no, is Whitby --I was thinking Whitby Island. I haven't been to Whitby, Ontario.
AUDIENCE: It's okay. It's very small, I wouldn't expectmany people in this room to even know about it.
So it's all good.
Much has been said, discussed and arguedabout accessibility in the block editor.
Though the block editor is technicallyaccessible, efficiency is hindered for those
who are blind, low-vision, and keyboard users.Any plans to move from being technically
accessible to functionally accessible?
MATT: And what would make it morefunctionally accessible?
Because I know we put a tremendousamount of work to make it more keyboard navigable,
and simplify some of the navigation.AUDIENCE: Right. From
my accessibility expert actually sent melike a really long message and I tried to
slam it into like a paragraph. This might notbe the same, but back when it first launched was
like having to hit tab or, you know, back buttonsto like -- 20 times just to bold something.
MATT: Yeah.AUDIENCE: Something like to
reduce that somehow. And even moving blocks upor down in the hierarchy seems to be very --
MATT: Which is why we created the navigator.AUDIENCE: Exactly. So, like moving more towards
that. Like I definitely agree that there's beena lot more done recently with that. But is there
more plans coming up? To make it even more so?MATT: So, very much so. So, I would say that
especially if you were to compare -- well, onething that's tough is that the block editor is
giving exponentially more functionality.AUDIENCE: Right.
MATT: Than more of a traditionaldocument editor or different things.
We do put a lot of work into creating keyboardshortcuts for everything. And a good amount of
testing, including creating some entirelynew interfaces to allow sort of faster,
particularly keyboard-based navigation.But accessibility is more than just that.
Particularly if there's feedback from users orit sounds like this person who sent you the long
couple paragraphs, one, if they haven't checkedout recently, check it out. WordPress 6.1 is
including 11 releases of Gutenberg. We'restill releasing at a large pace. It's the
part of WordPress that's having the most commitactivity and the most growth in the last year.
And feedback particularly from users whoare using different assistive technologies
is really invaluable. Because even the standardsand other things, what we might do technically,
might not reflect how a certain client or acertain use case. So, that real world usage
is really, really helpful. Particularly becausefor user testing, it can be difficult to find
enough users that access the technology indifferent ways. The final thing that I'll
say is that the WordPress both has API andmultiple ways to do things. So, for example,
if someone were primarily just writing blogposts, for example, didn't really need the
advanced layout capabilities of the site editoror the block editor, I would actually encourage
using a different method of hosting. There's lotsof desktop clients that talk to the REST API.
And I have given thought actually for theentire interface of WordPress, that would be
an interesting, to create a parallel API projectthat would designed to perhaps -- like hide some
that have more advanced functionality for theeveryday use case. Particularly if you were
doing something more like blogging on it versusthe full layout stuff. You could access that more
complex interface if you needed to do that moreparticular task. But for the everyday, use the
simpler one. That's already possible with theAPIs. But I think actually a pretty interesting
approach for like the accessibilityteam or something. Because we now have
APIs pretty much for everything. So, you couldactually create a completely parallel WP Admin
with not that much overhead. That couldbe a much similar markup or something.
AUDIENCE: All right. Thank you.MATT: Thank you!
[ Applause ]
AUDIENCE: Hello, bonjour, konnichiwa,Megan from Canada here.
MATT: Howdy.AUDIENCE: Howdy.
Multilingual in WordPress. It's alwaysbeen the last priority, unfortunately.
MATT: Not the last.AUDIENCE: In the Gutenberg
roadmap that we know, it's actuallynumber four, and that's last on the list.
Over 60% of people --MATT: That's because
we haven't announced 5 or 6 yet.AUDIENCE: I'm patient, I'll wait.
Over 60% of people in the world speak more thanone language. Over 25% speak three or more.
MATT: Wow.AUDIENCE: I'm curious as to why
it's always been a lower priority. And what wecan do specifically, what you think personally,
this has not been a higher priority. What barrierscan you see that we can start working towards?
And what can we do in the next three releases tofinally let WordPress democratize language?
MATT: Yeah, this one comes out --[ Applause ]
Although I think this is one of the firsttimes I've gotten it at WordCamp US.
Usually I get this question at WordCamp Europe.
AUDIENCE: I took a long flight to get here to ask you that.[ Applause ]
MATT: Where did you come in from by the way?AUDIENCE: Ottawa, Canada. WordCamp 2023, also,
we're gonna plan a 20th year birthday partyfor WordPress. I think everyone else should too.
MATT: Who came the furthest. I met someone fromPakistan earlier. Who came in the furthest?
How about over there? Australia? Whoa. I thinkon flight time, you said 30 hours. Travel.
That will do it. And in the back? Where from?Karachi, Pakistan. That's a long one.
Thank you, by the way.[ Applause ]
So, there's a few questions in there. One,multilingual and WordPress today. And two,
why is it further down in the Gutenberg roadmap.So, I'll try to address those separately.
Multilingual today is obviously not in core, but thereare a number of good plugins for it.
Many, many WordPress sites run a multilingual in fact.
Who here runs WordPress in more than one language?
That's pretty good. Yeah. That looked likeabout a 5 or 10%. And we're in WordCamp US.
I'm sure it would be much higher if we asked thatin WordCamp Europe or one of the International
WordCamps. These plugins are pretty good.AUDIENCE: I used to work at one. I can guarantee that.
But they still cost money and that'snot the democracy we're trying to build.
MATT: And most of them have free versionsand some have paid upgrades and other things.
It is tricky. Particularly the data modelfor it. So, that brings us to why it is
later in the Gutenberg roadmap and just do a quickrefresher. Version -- sort of phase 1 of Gutenberg
is blocks. So that's the post editor. Phase 2,which we're in right now, is taking those blocks
and allowing you to edit the whole site.That's what we're calling the side editor.
Move away from the full site editing term, andprobably call it site editor.
Phase 3 is workflow and collaboration, which --there's a little bit of tension earlier
because there's a lot of folks who want to start thatright now. I'm actually trying to pump the brakes a little bit
Because I want to get the site editing to the pointof excellence in accessibility before we move on.
And fourth is the multilingual. And that's the onlyfour of the phases that we've announced so far.
One of the reasons I really wanted tocreate the building blocks, sometimes literally,
before we got to multilingual is because to me,one of the big parts of creating a really great
multilingual experience is that collaborationand workflow. So, when content is created in one
language, how does that then flow to the otherlanguages? What does that look like? And so,
having some ability to have some different rolesand workflows built into WordPress, I think is
gonna be really key for doing that well. The otherthing, and why multilingual is going to be I think
tricky to address in Core, if you notice, a lotof the WordPress plugins actually use different
models of the data. Some use the tables, some usethe post table. But regardless of how they work,
it's very tricky because you move to a kindof a one-to-one relationship between a page
and a post or the content there. To almost like amany-to-many. And different workflows. Some sites
want every single page translated, some might wanta subset. And some might of want how switching
works, URL-based, sub domain-based, cookie-based.There's different ways to address it. Do you want
the same slugs? In the URL for all of them. Like/contact and then the content is translated? Or do
you want to a way to map, it's contact in English,and someone tell me that in a different language.
A different word, right, would be theURL. That kind of many-to-many approach is
going to honestly add a tremendous amount ofcomplexity to WordPress. And I'm actually still
not 100% sure whether we should do a Core pluginfor it, that's officially supported and created
by folks. But maybe not actually distributed withCore WordPress. Kind of like Gutenberg was in the
beginning. Or whether it should actually be inCore because it creates that. But the number one
thing I want to figure out is the data model. Likepage plugins can all use Core WordPress blocks.
That's a new standard versus having a differentway to do blocks in page builders, Beaver Builder
or Divi or whatever. If we could make it so allthe multilingual plugins were using common data
structure, that would be easier for other pluginsto integrate with them. But I don't know what
that data structure is yet, and I don't think wehave enough folks to work on that simultaneously
with these other phases. It is really kindof a matter of focus. And it drives me crazy
because I get this question every single time.AUDIENCE: It seems natural that we want to grow
our market share and this is the way. Othersoftwares make it a little easier. Thank you.
MATT: I don't know if they -- it's possible. Ihaven't seen also an implementation that does it
in a super-great user way either. So, that wouldalso be something like if any of you have -- you
know, whether it's another CMS or a plugin forWordPress that you think really nails the user
experience, I would like to spend time with thatbecause the complexity of the many-to-many and how
the URLs and workflows work, it appears I haven'tseen a perfect implementation. It's more of a
series of tradeoffs or a subset that have.AUDIENCE: I will follow-up with you
on that. thank you.MATT: Gracias. Arigato.
AUDIENCE: Hello, my name is Polly, and tomorrow isthe Contributor Day. If you stay, and I don't know
if you do, but what will be the most favoritething for you at Contributor Day to work on?
MATT: I believe -- by the way, is that we have17 of the 21 make teams represented as well?
>> [ Away from microphone ]
MATT: Oh, cool. I'll repeat that. She said there will besome representatives online as well there. There
will be 20 of the 21 teams. Which team didn't makeit? Plugins. Oh. That's okay.
Plugins aren't that important, right?[ Laughter ]
We've got a lot of them already. Oh, where did yougo? Oh, there you are. You know, something that
I've actually really enjoyed at previous ones isthere's so much on WordPress.org that I think is,
you know, we just redesigned the home pageand a few other things. It feels like there
is a lot of lift from relatively simple changes.Whether that's more CSS or just copy-paste that
could really improve both the Core main WordPress.orgsite. And I think a lot about the Rosetta sites
being relatively monolingual, at least for naturallanguages. I don't know. Perhaps a lot of people
could say on es.WordPress.org, and these otherones, how good a job are we doing? Synced up with
what we learned to be best on the main site. It'srelated to the last question, what's the workflow?
Or is there more to do, especially on the Rosettasites, our international sub domains. That would
probably be my pick.AUDIENCE: Thank you.
MATT: Thank you. And looking forward toseeing lots of y'all there tomorrow as well.
[ Applause ]
AUDIENCE: Hi, Matt, Philipp from south Florida web advisers. I've got a quick question, many of the people in
the room use block editor, that's the directionthings are going in. But a lot of folks still
using classic editor, still using page builders.Whenever I do a new install, it's a pain to
remember to install classic editor and widgets.Could there be a toggle to say install in classic
node and throw the plugins in automaticallyand you're not having to do it every time?
MATT: There could be, but... no.AUDIENCE: Okay. Thank you.
MATT: No, it's okay.[ Applause ]
Let me give a slightly longer answer there.Which is that, you know, we definitely are gonna,
you know, we actually I think it's -- how longwe're supporting the classic editor, the plugin
and everything like that. Technically, it's nottoo hard to keep that going for a while because
we still need to have kind of TinyMCE supportembedded within Gutenberg. We have a classic
block in Gutenberg as one example that providesthe legacy support. If you open a post before
Gutenberg existed, you can edit it and convertit to blocks simply and easily. But very much so,
the preponderance of new development in WordPressis really focused on the block editor. And so, any
effort towards editing the toggle, we would rathermake it so you don't want the toggle anymore.
And someday -- it sounds like that day is not yet-- that won't be the first plugin you install in
things. And more and more, we want the users tobe demanding that. They want the functionality
of a blog or integration with a plugin thatautomatically is through the blocks. It allows a
more common user interface to what couldbe very, very advanced functionality.
So, all the new developments going into that.And think of classic as just like a stopgap.
So, if you're still building sites with classicin 2022, I see how you can maybe minimize that, or
migrate the users, spend an hour withthem to teach them how the new stuff
works. Because it's really the future ofWordPress. So, thank you for the question.
[ Applause ]AUDIENCE:
Hello, sir. How are you doing?MATT: Okay.
AUDIENCE: It's a quick question, maybenot a quick answer. I'm William Jackson,
representing my wife, and we havebeen teaching about the Metaverse
and onboarding people and applying it tobusiness aspect as well. We wanted to get your
idea of how the Metaverse and its growthin immersive communities and societies
have you taken that into account of how you canfight or work with WordPress in some fashion?
MATT: That's a good question.AUDIENCE: Thank you. So, we're teachers,
we always try to ask good questions.MATT:
It's interesting. Because, you know, operatingand developing connections online has really been
my entire adult life. Even before I was an adult.And it was so powerful to me from a very young age
to be able to be part of online communities.Going back to BBSs and IRC and everything like
that where my physical identity or age orappearance or anything wasn't a barrier to
connecting with folks. Particularly I was prettyyoung. My voice was like three octaves higher.
I would walk into a Best Buy, they wouldn't talkto me. But before that, usernames, photomatt,
before that illusion, hacker names. It was fun tobe on the forums and learn about whatever it was
from BBSs to phone phreaking, whatever that wasthat I got into in my youth. And then, of course,
a lot of participation in forums and gettinginvolved in open source, which is still one of
the things I was gladdest to have stayed. ThingsI was so glad to stumble across in my life and
something I hope to be the rest of my life. Theelement of what's now called the Metaverse of
being able to put on and off online identitiesand participate more in the basis of your
contributions or your avatar, however youchoose to present yourself online I think is
one of the best things about the Internet.And very cool that the WordPress Community
is so good at translating that into person.I'm sure you have experienced this already,
very much a Community where people don'tjudge a book by its cover. It's great. You'll
see people from tons of different ages,backgrounds, whatever. Doesn't matter. We're here
combined by a love of open source, WordPress andwhatever. That's a great thing about open source.
A lot of the conversation around Metaverseis centered by Facebook, now Meta, and their
investments in VR. Which is not insignificant. Ithink they're spending like 5, $10 billion a year.
And the hardware is getting better, much faster.And, you know, in theory like Apple is gonna come
out with a new headset or there might be someAR-type things. And if that technology was to
follow a similar curve that cell phones haveover the past what's now, 15 years, since the
iPhone was introduced. And I guess even priorto that with devices and hand springs and stuff.
I could see 5 or 10 years from now maybe a lotof us wearing these things in the audience. I
would certainly like something that would remindme of someone's name when I met them. Some sort
of scanner. And a lot of you are wearing glassesalready. Where if the technology got to the point
to be embedded in a mask. And hopefully we won'thave to wear mask then so it won't fog up so much.
My personal experience is screens are still reallygood. I have used the VR headsets for gaming
or having fun. But it would be hard toimagine wearing one of these for the amount
that I'm on a computer. Having a screen that youcan put in your pocket, take out, look at, share
pretty easily. It's still pretty great. I'm notactually convinced that the sort of VR use cases
are going to be as ubiquitous as the more screenones. Unless there was some sort of breakthrough
in technology that is impossible for me to imagineyet. I'm sure in the depths of Apple or Meta,
they have prototypes that are neat. And games andothers are fulfills what Meta says could happen.
If that is appealing, I encourage them to spendtime with the communities. Including the Roblox
and Minecrafts that are really rich worlds.AUDIENCE: Thank you. We're seeing more and
more conferences reaching out about ideasand appearances and how to have people in
conversations like this in the Metaverse andpeople coming in as avatars. We want to get
your perspective of where it's gonna go toguide what we're teaching. Appreciate it.
MATT: Thank you.[ Applause ]
And just to follow-up there, maybe that couldbe a fun WordCamp. I definitely, you know,
now that we can come in-person, it wasn'tas -- not as interesting. but during COVID,
I went to online conferences. It advancedquickly. There was an online Burning Man one year.
There were multiple ones that you could accessthrough different platforms. It was interesting.
Not as good as the real verse. But -- comingup. But still pretty -- so, was that --
sorry, I couldn't hear that.>> [ Away from microphone ]
MATT: Okay. Cool. How about lightning rounds?Should I get through the rest? Oh, hard stop
at what time? Okay. So, I'll try to answer shortanswers. But we'll try to get through these five.
And if not, we have to stop right at the 5:45.AUDIENCE: Sure. Clarifying on a question,
hi, Courtney Robertson from GoDaddy pro. AtWordCamp Europe I asked about the translation on
learn.WordPress.org. I would like to clarify.That question was more around courses. We have
ways of storing some of the other languages, butcourses are using sensei pro. I'm not sure on the
time frame of multilingual and I would like tosee an alternative before we wait that long.
MATT: Yeah.AUDIENCE: To make languages more available.
And if that means a plugin or a Rosetta siteor something to maintain that, I would like to
see that get unblocked and then related to that,you and I had a conversation in Slack around the
data of how many views or what the access is onLearn. And as we know on dot org, gathering data
is a little bit tricky. People don't like databeing gathered, especially on an open source site.
It would be helpful. Those are areas that I'm notsure we could get unblocked, but I would like to.
MATT: I think we could. We can continue thaton the site. I know we run Google Analytics and
shared that with different contributors. Thatshouldn't be too hard. And I think we have
other language course on learn. It isa manual process, but it is happening.
AUDIENCE: And do you have an ETA onoverhauling the main make.WordPress.org page?
MATT: Not on the roadmap. Perhaps people can lookat that tomorrow. All right, lightning round.
As you can tell, I can be loquacious.I'll try to keep it short.
AUDIENCE: I'm a weird person who got intoWordPress for blogging and still does it today.
If you remember way back in the day, WP Mads.I wrote for them. I fell in love with WordPress
for blogging, and it has been my profession for12 or 15 years now. I especially was surprised
at WordCamp for publishers, that it wasn't forblogging, it was for news organizations. You
seem to be at a very interesting position rightnow as like the company that acquired Tumblr,
that reinvented the editor within WordPressfor Gutenberg. We are kind of seeing a
potential for new ways to revolutionize blogsitself as a medium and what's possible there.
As someone although the Nexus of all that, whatdo you see as the future of blog something
MATT: Short answer, so, a quick stat, halfthe people coming to WordCamp.com are blogging
and bloggers. We're seeing a ton of activitythere. Things I'm excited to work on, we're
switching Tumblr to be WordPress-powered.I think that could be a really nice
Gateway into the WordPress world. I hope it'sfuture WordCamps -- Tumblr is a younger audience,
people at WordCamps writing plugins, that wouldbe really cool. Things we're working on right now,
there's teams focused on the reader. I think sinceGoogle Reader has been gone, there hasn't been a
good way to follow other blogs. And commenting.I feel like commenting is -- there's not good
interactions for follow-up. So, I think both ofthose can help reinvigorate. Because, of course,
comments are the best part of blogging . So, keepan eye on improvement there is, both in Jetpack
and WordPress.com. On its way.AUDIENCE: Okay. Thanks.
[ Applause ]AUDIENCE: Hello, David from Orlando.
MATT: Howdy.AUDIENCE: First,
I want to thank you for the awesome photo you tookof me and John at a random obscure Meetup where I
was more nervous than anything else. And you saidpeople, thank you for having us speakers here who
are challenged by the attendee to be better anddo more cool stuff. My question is, after talking
through a few people here, it kind of seemsthat WordPress has a marketing problem. Where
it is an amazing platform, we know the powerof it. But really and truly, only developers
are kind of like welcome at the table. So, asdesigners, as UX people, as brand strategists,
yeah, WordPress is great. You should get it.And then hopefully pass you off into the hands
of a great developer. Or if you're lucky and youfind someone that is kind of like that unicorn,
then so be it. No pun intended. Oh, snap. So, howdo we -- or what would you see as the best way for
designers in the field, content people, to kindof come together to collaborate around those more
and not make it so technical, so to speak?MATT: That is why we started Gutenberg. It is
to try to open up the -- the flexibility and powerof how people are able to customize if they knew
code in the past. Or just got good at buildingthemes and stuff. So much about our audience. We
also -- there's gonna be a design table tomorrow.Maybe you're already at it, I bet you are.
I will say that one thing I hope to develop isa more culture of open source participation from
designers. And part of that is showing the impactof like user research, design, everything. And
I think at least what I hear developers inWordPress, is they're really hungry for it.
Because we -- we might do a first version of adesign. But like -- or the developer might do it
themselves. But the feedback from like a user testor something else I find incredibly influential.
I would love to see more that have, actually,as a way, and if we could publish it and
do it in public, I think it could actually teachpeople design skills, even though they might not
identify as a designer.AUDIENCE: Thank you.
MATT: We might get through these by the timethey cut us off. I don't know in the lights
go off or cut the mic. We'll see.AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Cassandra,
this is my first WordCamp.MATT: welcome!
You picked a good one.AUDIENCE: Yeah, I only
understand half the development conversation.I come from the nonprofit world and have
learned from the presenters around some of theefforts around diversity, equity and inclusion.
But I wanted to hear your thoughts about how ourcommunity, everyone, not just the Community team,
could actively and strategically create avenuesfor disadvantaged communities. I have helped build
between local companies and schools, for example.But this community is brilliant, it's loving.
It's so focused on connecting and I justfeel like we need to be intentional about
fighting for access and combating poverty.MATT:
Yeah. Thank you.[ Applause ]
With the time, I'm definitely only going tobe able to scratch the surface of this one. I
apologize in advance. For a longer depth of this,if you didn't see earlier, there was a great talk
by Cami Kaos. Somewhere? That's already onlineon the livestream. I caught a bit and caught
David Bisset's Tweets and everything. I thinkthat's a much more in-depth. Like you said,
there's so many didn't avenues and places to tryto be more belonging as a Community. I will also
point as well just to some of the work of theWordPress Foundation. The different programs
being run like workshops in other countries,the do action-time things that actually build
websites for nonprofits. Both teaching people howto do it and helping a nonprofit in a different
field have a better online presence, as being veryhigh-impact. I know some of the work Automattic as
a team, that builds websites for folks just for-- basically friends or influencers or stuff like
that. And we found it being very high impact. Evenmore than just giving money to an organization,
if we were able to help them convert more visitorsto their website to be donators, that had a
big multiplier effect. That's one of the big waysthat we -- it's one of the giving back that I have
been most proud of that we have been able to do.Think of that as a way to support not only people
learning WordPress, but other nonprofits in thespace. Helping their online presence can be very,
very powerful. And most nonprofits, can you helpwith the website, they'll be like, ah, thank you.
Thank you for the question. That's brief.But hopefully some pointers to some deeper
discussion.[ Applause ]
All right. Bring us home.AUDIENCE: All right. Hi, Matt,
it's Christina. And one of the things I love aboutWordPress, I have been working with it since 2008,
is the flexibility and the choices people haveand the commitment to diversity, accessibility,
and inclusion. Many of my clients are older.And they have been using the classic editor
and classic widgets for a long time. And whenyou say just teach them the new Gutenberg,
that puts a hardship on older people who havebeen using it for many years and are very happy
with the classic editor. So, I'm here to urgeyou to keep it around much longer than what
you suggested. So, that the older community isnot put in a hardship that they have to learn
something that's new and technical.So, please do consider those folks.
[ Applause ]
MATT: I think that represents one of the mostdifficult things about products in general.
Because, for example, iOS 16 is about to comeout. So, constantly operating systems, everything,
we need to update if we're going to be both notjust update versions for security and everything
like that. But also to expand our missionof democratizing publishing. And so,
one thing I do worry is the longer people stayon the old thing, the bigger the delta is from
what they were using before and learning the newone. It's easier to if you're learning the latest
thing, keep rolling with the update, insteadof waiting another 5 years, and learn whatever.
Gutenberg 48 going from classic editor. I willgo back and encourage them to make the leap now.
That will give them the forward compatibility withwhere things are going. And I believe we were kind
of early-ish to this. But if you look althoughevery CMS now, they're using some form of block
editor. Even Google Docs is moving to have somericher blocks. I think the concepts that you use
in block editing is the future of publishing onthe web. And how everything is going to work. Not
just Gutenberg. Maybe if they run Gutenberg, we'rere-licensing the mobile version of Gutenberg to be
more embeddable, even in mobile apps, I think itcould be a wider web standard. It won't just apply
to WordPress, but even other applications. I wouldlove it if Mailchimp, or even Squarespace or Wix
would use Gutenberg. I think Gutenberg could bebigger than WordPress itself than being in apps.
AUDIENCE: Gutenberg is still changing. So,if you could make the transition longer,
that would help. Because it's hard for themto learn and now it's changed and they got to
learn it again. So, I'm eager to teach them,but I'd rather wait and so, if you could
make the transition longer that would be great.MATT: Well, we've already extended it a few years.
But Gutenberg started in, what? 2016? So, it'sbeen a while already. And when classic editor
was our main editor, it would change a lot everysingle release as well. So, there is -- I know
it's a -- I know it's hard to learn new things.But I can't recommend anything else in good faith.
So, it's -- I think it's hard but worth it.AUDIENCE: Well, just consider
the hardship on them. That's all.MATT: We do. Yeah. Thank you. And we are now over
time a lint. So, thank you all for coming.[ Applause ]