(audience applauding)
- Wow, wow, this is,
this is a pretty good room.
I'll post the picture later but actually,
in the green room
they had like this incredible array
of musicians and performers
and things that have been
in this very room on this very stage,
so it's a huge honor to be here.
Yeah, a little bit of introduction,
my name is Matt Mullenweg.
You can find me,
my main blog at ma.tt,
my photo block at matt.blog,
and if you wanna tweet
anything during these events,
@photomatt on the important
and other major platforms.
Being in Europe, this is actually,
the first time, as you know,
this is I think
the sixth WordCamp Europe, is that right?
And every previous time,I've done primarily
a town hall Q and A,or an interview style.
But there is so much going on this year
that we have a bit of a presentation.
I just have a lot to share with y'all.
And being in Europe, I wanted to highlight
one thing in particular.
The eagle eyed among you will have noticed
that there is a new link in the footer
of the wordpress.organd foundation websites.
That is a link to somethingcalled public code.
There we go.
Anyone heard of this before?
We have a couple.
I want everyone to be aware of it,
because this is somethingI've been pushing for
in the US at the local,state, and federal level,
and this is the European version.
Basically what it's saying is that
when public taxpayer money
is used to buy software
or create software,shouldn't that belong to us?
Right?
(audience cheering)
Also, when you thinkof the amount of money
that goes into opensource development now,
and the scope of whatthat's been able to affect
with WordPress certainly, if you imagine
even just a small fraction
of the national budgets
going into open source software,
being directed there,
I think we could havelike a Cambrian explosion
of kinda open source solutions.
In addition to all the other reasons
that y'all know why open source is great.
If two cities in differentparts of the world,
or different parts of Europe,
are doing the same thing,
there's no reason they should create
two completely separatesolutions for things.
So, allowing them to share their code
and maybe search from a place, you know,
Paris with Belgrade, whouse the same software,
it would be really handy.
So check this out.
It's now being linked.
I think this is very very important
for the world today.
Second thing I wantedto announce for y'all is
as you know, in the US versus in Europe,
we change the location every two years.
So, I'm very proud to announce
that the host for WordCamp Europe
in 2019 and 2020
will be the lovely city of St. Louis.
(audience cheering)
This follows Nashville in that
I've never been to St. Louis (laughs).
So, I'm looking forward to checking it out
and learning and exploring
a new part of the country
that I haven't been to.
And of course, hope tosee many of you there
if you're able to make it over to the US.
Okay, let's get over to core.
There have been,
since the WordCamp US in December,
six core releases,
so things have been going along.
I wanted to update you
on the four major focus areas as well,
since that's how we've
been orienting development.
If you remember at the beginning of 2017,
we shifted from being kind of
a release lead model
to kind of a focus area model.
First of these is customization.
Exciting things going on here
as we figured out a way
to basically turn widgetsinto Gutenberg blocks,
side bars into post contents
and have done some mockups and some explorations
for selecting page layouts.
As you know, the editor part of Gutenberg
is gonna be phase one.
Phase two is customization and moving
to editing the entire website,
so that has alreadykicked off under progress
and there's some exciting things coming.
The WordPress CLI, who uses WP CLI here?
Just out of curiosity, nice, yeah.
So a variant side of thisbecame a core kind of
officially adoptive project.
Had two major releases
and version 2.0 which changes
some of the packaging
to be easier for distribution
and dependencies is coming out in July.
So keep an eye out for that.
The rest API, in addition to
a little bit of security work,
we've expanded a lot because as you know
Gutenberg is builtentirely on the rest API,
so every part of it is working,
so we did some work aroundsearch and autosaves
to make sure, basically is spans the APIs
to support our first party usage.
The nice thing about thisis that when we're able
to use them ourselves
it also means that other third parties
are probably likely
able to use them better as well.
And then finally,
I wanted to talk about the mobile apps
a little bit.
That team's been making a huge investment
into right to leftsupport, and accessibility,
including supporting native OS things
like voiceover and someof the other things
that Android and iOS provide.
They've made it so when you make a post,
you don't have to wait and watch it.
It uploads in the background.
I just wanna highlightthat 1.3 million posts
and 3.7 million photos
have been posted via the mobile apps
in just the past month.
So they're starting to become
a very major part of how people
interact with WordPress.
And the accessibility front as well,
I think it's worth noting because
I consider based on all
the assistive technologies available
on PCs and Macs, iOS and Android,
these to actually bethe most accessible ways
to interact with WordPress today,
and I think that willcontinue in the future.
It's just the tools are better
around making things accessible
via these apps than the tools like JAWS
and other things that are kind of
trying to hack into web browsers.
I know you all wanna hearabout Gutenberg, right?
(laughs) Just to review a little bit,
we've accomplished a lotwith Gutenberg thus far.
The major features that are in it so far,
we have a block based writing experience,
with over 20 blocks built in.
Gutenberg is full adaptive,
meaning that when you're looking at it
on a small screen, a medium screen,
a large screen, a huge screen (laughs),
the design and functionality adapts
to be fluid and easyto use on any of those.
There is (makes thinking sounds)
ah, there we go,
optimized for directmanipulation of content.
So we're bringing it closer
to where what you're editing
looks a lot more like what you're seeing
on the front page.
We have a block API with support
for static and dynamic blocks.
This is one of my favorites.
The universal API,which is copy and paste.
Who's ever tried to copy and paste things
into the WordPress editor
or anyplace else and it just
goes kind of sideways?
Gutenberg already has support
for fully supported copy and paste
from Google Docs, Apple Pages,
everyone's favorite Microsoft Word,
Office 365, Evernote, Legacy WordPress,
random webpages, and then finally
something I know will be very popular
with this audience is Markdown,
and that's actually what you're seeing
in this little gif there,
is copy and paste from a Markdown source,
whether that's a note editor
or wherever you want,
you paste into Gutenberg.
It translates it just instantly
into Gutenberg blocks.
It's very, very slick.
If you haven't tried this yet,
highly recommend trying it.
It's one of my favorite hidden features,
alongside, I'll tell you
my other favorite hidden feature,
which is that when you copy and paste
a URL onto some text, it autolinks it.
Saves a ton of time.
There's templates with pre defined blocks,
so this is starting to go into where
you can see hints ofwhere we're gonna end up
with full site customization with this,
which basically allows you to create
for your users or for yourself
pre built layouts, where you can say,
okay, a title goes here,an image goes here,
some text goes here, a map goes here,
that can be reused over and over again,
or assigned to entire pages.
There's shared blocks, so if you do wanna
reuse things across the entire site,
that can be a shared unified resource,
so when you edit it once,it shows up everywhere.
And finally, very excited about
that we have nestedblocks and child blocks.
So these are blocks within blocks,
like it's turtles andblocks all the way down,
and child blocks which only work
if a parent block is there.
Perhaps like your children.
Media drag and drop.
Extensions where you can add extra things
to the sidebar.
We have this beautiful
Hello Belgrade extension here.
Overall there have been30 Gutenberg releases
since we started,
and 12 just at WordCamp US in December.
As you can see, this iskind of running through
all of the different releases.
There have been over 1,700 issues opened,
and 1,100 closed
in the Gutenberg project thus far.
And from development point of view,
I'm very proud of it.
We have open development,design led testing,
iterative releases,
presentations across
pretty much every WordCampnow, including here.
That's developed a wide awareness.
Support and awareness from every single
page builder out there.
You know the names.
We already have peopleextending Gutenberg.
Through plugins they're starting
to get some good pickup for the directory,
and major sites, so agencies and others
have been building
and launching things with Gutenberg,
because to be honest it works (laughs).
It's not perfect yet.
We're not ready to release it yet,
but for the things itdoes, it does them well,
and you can actually,there's tons of sites
using this in production already.
There are now 14,000 sites
actively using Gutenberg,
so this isn't just installed.
This is actually active,
and just released this week
are tools for enterprises.
There's one called Gutenberg Ramp,
which is a plugin from VIP
which basically allowsyou to turn Gutenberg on
for certain post IDs, pageIDs, or content types.
So that way you can start to phase in,
say you have a reallycomplex setup of WordPress,
and maybe certain post types or things
have extra customizations,
you can start to turn Gutenberg on
for parts of it and not for others.
To get to the point whereyou have everything on
and fully done.
But the question I'm gonna preempt
so you don't need to ask it
is what's coming next
in the world of Gutenbergification?
Which is kind of fun to say.
It sounds almost likea German word, right?
Here's the roadmap,
so these are things happening in June,
which means they are highly imminent.
First we're gonna freeze new features
coming into Gutenberg.
We've reached a point where
there is a functionality that matches
and in fact in many areas exceeds
what we accomplish with the Legacy editor.
We're gonna encourage host agencies
and teachers to start opting in folks
that they have influence over
to start using Gutenberg,
very much especially if it's someone
who you're working with closely.
So that you can start to gather feedback
from third party users of it,
and people who aren't involved
with the development every day,
and pass that back of course
to the developers.
This is the complementto the user testing,
since the user testingwe've already been doing.
One of the hosts that's gonna be
sort of contributing to this is
www.wordpress.com, so there is
several hundred thousand,
in the high hundreds of thousands
folks on www.wordpress.com
that actually use
the WP admin interface primarily,
so we're gonna be offering them
a call to action and an opt in
so they can start using it very soon.
One of the key metricswe'll be tracking there
are the number of sitesand the number of hosts
that are using this.
And then finally the mobile apps
which I said are gettingmore and more popular.
Right now if you move between
editing things in the mobile apps
and Gutenberg it breaks
in a pretty spectacular fashion (laughs).
So within the next few weeks
that will be all fixed up
across both iOS and Android.
Coming up in July, there's gonna be
a 4.9. something release,
that has a stronginvitation in the dashboard,
the first time we've done this,
to either install Gutenberg
or the classic editor plugin.
So basically we'll be encouraging people
to get on the train early,
or if when 5.0 comes out,
and your site's not gonna be ready for it,
install the classic editor plugin
for those who don't know,
it basically locks in your site
to use how the WordPress wizzywig
and editor works today.
So it kind of opts you out of Gutenberg.
We're of course gonna be tracking
the use of both of those (laughs).
We're gonna switch to opt in
for the WP admin on .com to be opt out.
And then tracking who opts out
and trying to gather as much data
from them as why,
because there's gonna be
a lot of information there,
especially from people who might be using
third party plugins, in www.wordpress.com.
Heavy, heavy triage and bug gardening,
getting all the blockers to zero,
and then finally we're gonna actually
kick off and maybe even branch off
the customization leads to start the work
for what we wanna launchhopefully this year
which is more of the full site editing
experience of Gutenberg.
So in August and beyond,
we'll have all critical issues resolved.
It'll be integrated withthe Calypso interface
on www.wordpress.com,
which is where themajority of people use it.
I wanna have 100,000 sites,
250,000 posts that have been made,
so 100,000 sites active with Gutenberg,
so over 10x where it is today,
or about 10x where it is today,
and with a quarter million posts,
I think we'll be able to say that
a lot of the bugs will be worked out.
We're gonna merge into core,
and then the 5.0 release cycle,
so beta releases, translations,
and then finally we are planning,
there's work undergoing,it's not ready yet,
but there will be full mobile versions
of Gutenberg by the end of the year
in the iOS and Android app.
So by August it won't break
when you move between them,
and of course Gutenberg is done in a way
that makes the content
and the markup backwards compatible.
But we're actually gonna have
the blocks supported in the mobile apps,
so that as you drag and drop blocks,
move them around, have different sort of
fun things you can do,that'll all be there.
We could have a 5.0 as soon as August.
Some of these things that I put up there
I'm very, very sure about.
A big thing that we're not sure about
is as we vastly increase kind of aperture,
the usage of Gutenberg across
hopefully over 100,000 sites,
what's gonna come in?
And the non deterministic nature
of fixing bugs means that
I don't know exactly
of the issues that get raised
whether they're gonna be small tweaks,
or whether they might be
sort of huge things
that are gonna require
a few weeks of development.
That is why I can't promise you a date.
But we've done a lot of testing thus far,
so the nature of bugs that we find,
if there's no black swans in there,
of bugs, I do think that5.0 is gonna be ready
within a relatively short time frame.
And that's all I got (laughs).
So thank you very much.
This is the (laughs).
(audience applauding)
- [Moderator] We dohave time for questions.
If you're up for it.
- Excellent.
- [Moderator] We've got a mike over here.
We've got a mike on this side.
Please queue up
and come bring your questions for Matt.
- Okay, so I think if you, yeah,
if you walk over,
there's one there and there.
- [Moderator] Yeah, you gotta stand up.
We don't have mike runners today,
so you'll see one on this side of the room
and one on this side of the room.
Please come on down.
- I hope after all that,y'all are as excited
about Gutenberg coming as I am (laughs).
- [Audience Member]Hello, I was wondering,
if WordPress is getting acquired
by Google as what happened
with GitHub and Microsoft,
and what the (mumbles) tracking company
like Google is doing at this event,
because also I heard today
that the only default browser
for Gutenberg is goingto be Google Chrome,
and the second question is
wordpress.org is not opensource anymore.
Yesterday on contributors day
I wanted to commit solid MBC standard
supporting camel case at plugin names,
and by the WordPress method team lead,
I was told that this part of wordpress.org
is closed source
and will never be open source,
and will not be able to commit
suggestions like camel casing.
Thank you.
- Wow, okay don't go away,
'cause I'm going to ask you something
about your first question,
'cause I didn't fully understand it.
So, nothing on wordpress.org
has ever gone from opento closed (laughs).
It started off as fully closed,
and then we've been opening it up
as we kind of go through
and clean up code, remove passwords,
get rid of all theIlluminati conspiracy stuff.
And that's why, I don't know
about this particular area,
you said there was something
around camel case, and?
- [Audience Member] Yes, camel case
is not supported,
and that the solid MBCPSR 4 autoloader standard
says that we should support
camel case plugin names,
and this is not supported.
I suggested it, and that was rejected
because this is closed source,
and I cannot commit a suggestion
to this part, like Iwas like fully rejected,
because I cannot suggest.
- (laughs) Well, I think,
I don't know whether that suggestion
was rejected because they disagreed
with camel case, as I do (laughs).
I don't know if it felt like that.
- [Audience Member] Theylove it, they love it.
They said it's not a priority,
and that I cannot put in the priority list
because I cannot suggest.
Like, you cannot suggest,
and you cannot get upvotes on this.
- Ah, well drop it
in the meta bug tracker anyway,
even though the codeisn't directly exampled.
There's no reason not to have it
in the meta tracker,
and there it can be discussed,
debated, and the code'll happen
if it's agreed on.
On the first part, I didn't get,
there was something around tracking
and Google that I didn't understand.
- [Audience Member]Yes, the Google company
is tracking everybody,
like now this time in Serbia
I was not even...
- Right now?
- [Audience Member] Yes, in Serbia
I was not able to log in
to my Gmail with Outlook.
I was asked to log in to Google website,
so this is a new thing.
Google is pushing me like Facebook
to read the messages on Gmail,
so that's a bad thing,
and I was wondering itwill happen the same
as what happened with GitHub.
I trusted in GitHub,
and they are sold to Microsoft.
What will happen with WordPress?
It'll be sold to Google or not?
- Yeah (laughs).
(audience applauding)
That's an amazing way
to thank our sponsors (laughs).
(audience laughing)
Yeah, there's a lot embedded in there.
So where to start.
Well the good news is that Google
can't buy WordPress like it bought GitHub
because WordPress is not a company
or a thing that can be bought.
It is, there's wordpress.org,
there's the WordPress Foundation,
there's all the code that's open.
I don't think the codebehind GitHub is open.
So even if let's say,
let's not say Google,
let's say some sort of evil corporation
somehow bought something, I don't know,
Automatic, something that is buyable,
anyone here in this roomcould download WordPress
and rename it not Not EvilCode Press,
and move on, and in fact that's how
WordPress itself started.
It was a fork of anexisting open source project
called b2 cafelog.
That forked because it had been abandoned,
not because there was
any sort of philosophical difference,
but that's one of the great
beauties of open source is that
when you build something
on an open source foundation,
it can never really bepulled out from you.
Because the fundamental rights
embedded into the open source license,
the GPL that we all hold near and dear,
prevent that, so regardless
of whatever corporate machinations
or tracking or whatever goes on
open source code belongs to you
as much as it belongs to me
or anyone else here in this room,
and you have control over it.
So, thank you very much for your question.
(audience applauding)
- [Moderator] Before Josefa hops on,
let me just put it out there
to our live streamers,
if you have questions from abroad,
please send them to us over Twitter,
and we can probably get one or two in.
- [Matt] Awesome.
- [Audience Member] Should the use
the hashtag for that?
- [Moderator] They should probably use
the hashtag for that, #WCEU.
- [Matt] Very cool.
- [Josefa] My name is Josefa,
and I actually have aquestion about Gutenberg.
It sounds like you've made
a whole lot of progress,
and have a lot of features in it.
Is there a particular feature
that you are excited about?
Or one that you wish were in there
that's not in there yet?
- Hmm, I kinda gave itaway already (laughs).
Which is the copy and paste.
It is, I find myself
enjoying different writing environments
for almost different states of mind
or different tasks,
so sometimes I'm coming from Simplenotes,
where I'm writing more plain text,
or sometimes I'm writing Markdown.
I use kind of every place.
There is Scrivener.
There's all sorts of different places
where I enjoy writing sometimes,
even Google Docs,
and so the experience now
of bringing those over into Gutenberg
without really needing any sort
of API integrations.
www.wordpress.com has aGoogle Docs integration,
but honestly it's a little clunky
to move between things,
and so it's one of my favorite things.
Do you have any favorites?
The Don Quixote feature?
(background noise drowns out other sound)
Templates.
And why do you like templates?
(background noise drowns out other sound)
Yeah, templates are great.
Matías just said how
it kick starts things for users.
So basically you don't just give someone
a blank canvas.
It turns what might be
just a purely blank canvas,
which can be very challenging,
to almost more like a color by numbers.
You can express a lot of creativity
within certain lines
and create something really great.
Which is one of the things
WordPress has alwaysbeen really fantastic at,
so all right, thank you very much.
To the left, and it lookslike there's no one,
oh, there is someoneon the right (laughs).
- [Audience Member] Hi.
- You just popped up there.
- [Audience Member] Yeah (laughs).
I waited.
- Pop up question (laughs).
- [Audience Member] I just wanted to hear
your opinion about the future
of combining the web circuits technology
with web apps and the way to use
I'm gonna invent a term,
multi hybrid app and a web app
that is functioning as a complete app
for the app store andfor the Android app store
and also managed in the same platform
and on your site, on the WordPress.
- [Matt] Yeah, that's a good question.
- [Audience Member]We're going in that idea
theoretically trying to develop something,
so we're trying to hear your opinion
about the future of this development.
- I mean, it's very exciting technologies
coming out of two big corporations,
one of which is a sponsorof WordCamp Europe.
Thank you, Google.
Facebook has React Native,
which is more and more,
Gutenberg is completely built on React.
As you know, there was a question
about us switching licenses,
and moving away from it.
They changed the license of React
to be GPL compatible,
and removed the patents clause,
and we decided to stick with it.
It's been really great,
and there's some other things and tooling
built around it that we might be able
to leverage a lot more in the future.
I've definitely seen somereally cool experiments
going on with React Native,
and it's of course what powers for example
the Calypso desktop app.
The other thing coming from Google
which is very, very exciting
since they also contribute
to the largest open source browser,
which is Chrome, progressive web apps,
so there's lots oftechnologies around there
that I think could drastically speed up
how WP admin works, in a way that makes it
a much more applied experience
without it actually needing to be
completely rewritten from the ground up.
So I feel like there is an opportunity
to get almost like a JavaScript
app like performance increases
from WP admin in a mostly
backwards compatible way
with progressive web app technology,
so that's very, very exciting.
It's also open standard.
So they're being supported by many places,
so I feel like there was a time there
when it looked pretty dark,
to be honest, for the web,
particularly around performance.
Things were just going slower,
and of course we know users start to tend,
they tend their usage towards things
that are faster,
so the in app things were winning,
but between AMP, progressive web apps,
and just all the improvements
and optimizations that we're making,
including things coming under the hood,
like PHP7 basically doubling performance
of WordPress overnight.
- [Audience Member] It saved me
more than 70% on the servers expenses.
- Wow.
I don't know why any host
is not moving everyone to PHP7.
'Cause they'll save
hundreds of millions of dollars (laughs).
Like it's ridiculoushow much faster it is,
so these things are making it
so we can have a reallycompetitive experience,
and I'm excited aboutthe future of the web.
- [Audience Member] I have a dream
of managing a website and an app,
cross app, hybrid app,on the same platform.
Could it be possible?
- [Matt] There's gonna be, I don't think
it's possible today, to be honest.
- [Audience Member] Today no.
- But there is, for example,
as we do Gutenberg on mobile,
we're gonna want blocks
that are registered by plugins
that work both on theweb and within the apps.
It's not clear how or if
that will be able to work today,
but we'll use WordPress' influence
and our best of our knowledge
and coding abilities
to try to get something there
where we can actually
have some commonality,so being about to have
plugins for the app
that you're using on your phone,
again that's not something
that you really see with other apps.
- [Audience Member] Okay, thanks.
- No problem.
How about over here?
- [Audience Member] Hi,my question is about
the timing for 5.0.
At least in Europe, August is typically
a very slow month for companies.
- [Matt] Plenty of time to upgrade.
- [Audience Member] So it would be
kind of difficult to actually get
the decision makers in the companies
to set up an appointment, discuss,
update plans and so on and so forth.
Wouldn't that risk of giving
skewed statistics about how many people
actually switch to the Gutenberg
versus classic editor?
Because many peoplewill just play it safe,
in the nice summer,
and deal with it afterward?
- I think a summer with Gutenberg
is way better than a summer without it.
I don't know what y'all's idea
of a vacation is, but (laughs).
I suppose that could be something.
There's a lot, rest of the world.
There's a whole southern hemisphere
that'll be in winter during August.
There's America, wherewe never take vacation.
There's places all over, and so I guess
we'll keep an eye for thataffecting the numbers,
but like I said,
I don't actually thinkit's the worst thing
in the world if you installed
classic editor for August,came back in September
and did a tans installation
of the latest Gutenberg and 5.0.
I think that'd be totally okay.
So, I'm not trying to rush y'all (laughs).
It just, we wanna get the improvements
out there as soon as possible,
because, and one of the points
I've tried to make in that previous slide,
which I think I didn't really
articulate fully which is that
even though 5.0 is coming out,
hopefully in August, that there's gonna be
hundreds and hundredsof thousands of sites
using Gutenberg actively before then,
so if you're a plugin developer,
a theme developer, and you have things
that aren't yet compatible with Gutenberg,
get on that right away.
That should be basicallyyour highest priority,
because you're gonna start to see
the early adopters of Gutenberg plugin
are gonna be kind of
the best and brightest customers,
maybe the ones spendingthe most money with you,
so you wanna make sure that that is
fully up to date as we move into that.
Cool.
Thank you.
- [Moderator] I've got a question
from our live stream if you will, Matt.
- [Matt] Sure.
- [Moderator] This iscoming from Erin Jorbin,
who asks, how long do you expect
the Gutenberg API to be frozen
before the final release?
And is a stable API necessary
to build developer trust?
- I expect the API July-ish,
so when we do that,
when we start to branch off
the customizer, one of the things
that allow us to build some
of the customization stuff
is a stable API in Gutenberg,
so maybe a little afterthe feature freeze,
but way before the release.
Cool, thank you Erin.
We miss your bow tiehere in WordCamp Europe.
All right, let's go over here.
- [Audience Member] All right, hi Matt.
Greetings from Munich.
I wanted to ask about GitHub,
which is probably evil now.
I think most of the last features,
big features like the rest API,
WCLI, and now Gutenberg,
were developed on GitHubwith the issue tracker
and (mumbles) and stuff like that.
So when do you plan to abandon Track?
(audience applauding)
- [Audience Member] Yeah, thank you.
- Wow, we have a range here.
We have Microsoft is evil.
We need to move.
We have Microsoft is good.
Let's switch to GitHub.
You know, I actually don't have
any issues with any of the companies
that have been mentioned thus far.
I think things are often
a lot more nuanced.
In terms of GitHub, I think it's been
a really fantastic place,
and one of the advantages
of keeping Gutenberg a plugin
as long as possible, like I'm in no hurry
to do the core merge,
is that the things on it
have allowed for a really
rapid pace of iteration.
I mean, the features I just talked about
is kind of equivalent
to what we did the past
five or six years in core.
We've really been able to move
really fast with this.
That's not only because of GitHub, though.
It's a function of the technologies
we're building on, doingsomething from scratch,
the fact it's a plugin,
so we wanna release frequently
and get feedback.
The people working on it,
the amazing contributions
that have come from people in this room
and not in this room.
I'm also interested, it's public
that I'm on the board of GitLab,
which is an open source
not just competitor to GitHub
but that does a lot of other things
including dev opps integrations
and so we're keeping an eye on that.
I would say that we're evaluating tools.
Track has stagnated a bit,
but there's lots ofothers in the marketplace.
I think Gitea is another one,
if anyone's come across that.
It's used by Go, or it's written in Go,
and used by the Free Software Foundation
of Europe and others,
that I think are worth evaluating,
but I put all that inthe bucket of metawork,
like things that we don't really need
to ship Gutenberg and things
that aren't necessarilygonna help our users
into getting this out as soon as possible,
and not even gonna help plugin developers
and other people who are already
developing on their place of choice,
so it's on the list.
It's just further towards the bottom.
- [Audience Member] Okay, thank you.
- No problem.
- [Audience Member] Hi Matt.
I'm one of the co organizers
of the (mumbles) workers meet up,
and one of the questions that I get asked
the most by attendees is
what was the problem that you were
wanting to solve with Gutenberg?
- Ah, well.
Almost everything that we showed there
is something that'sshowed up in user testing
or in personal frustrations
of developers and folks in this room,
so the beauty of Gutenberg is,
no, okay, here's the problem.
That the foundation of WordPress
that has now served us well for 15 years,
will not last the next 15 years.
I don't think there's anyone
that disagrees with that.
When WordPress started, there was barely
any JavaScript in the entire application.
In fact, I think we called it DHTML.
If anyone remembers back in those days.
Gutenberg not onlyprovides a modern interface
that leap frogs the best
of what all the modern web builders
and website creators are doing out there.
It provides a development framework
and foundation that I think
will become the basis for everything
we do in WordPress.
If you notice, Gutenberg is JavaScript
talking to APIs.
You all might remember in 2015,
I stood in front of you at WordCamp US
and said, learn JavaScript deeply.
Who's been doing that?
A few people (laughs).
Okay, I'll repeat it.
Please learn JavaScript deeply.
JavaScript is the future
of WordPress development.
Particularly on WP admin and plugin side,
and so Gutenberg brings in
a way to do that as we've shown
that we can move really fast.
So that's the fundamental problem.
We're solving lots of user issues
along the way, and if you watch,
if the team posts some of these videos
where they do user tests,
to the P2s and things,
they're really fascinatingand eye opening,
or if you don't wanna watch one of those,
just sit someone
who's never used WordPress before,
or someone who is veryfamiliar with WordPress,
and ask them to do something
like create two columns (laughs), right?
Ouch.
If you don't know HTML, and a bit of CSS,
you're stuck.
That is so basic.
Much less being able to customize
your site the way that people imagine.
Outside of taking a theme
but them going beyond that,
and so our mission of WordPress
is to democratize publishing.
That's a problem I've been working on
for 15 years.
I hope to work on for the rest of my life.
Gutenberg opens this up
to an entirely new audience,
and continues along this mission.
- [Audience Member] Thank you.
- [Matt] Thanks.
(audience applauding)
All right, over here.
- [Audience Member] Yes, Mr. Mullenweg,
hi from Amsterdam, Sebastian.
I have two short questions
about world domination.
- [Matt] (laughs) Sure.
- [Sebastian] Number one is
what can we do according to you
as the community to get Gutenberg
adopted by every, yeah,
memorable CMS in the world?
That's number one.
And number two, how can we after that
get all the people to WordPress?
- So first we switch
the other CMS's to Gutenberg,
and then we switch them to WordPress?
Okay, that's sneaky.
It's like the Trojan horse.
(audience laughing)
- [Sebastian] In a way.
- Other CMS's adopting Gutenberg
is up to them,
but it's been cool tosee some explorations
there thus far.
I've just seen discussions.
I don't know if it's gone beyond that,
but I know the Drupal community
has taken a look at Gutenberg.
Also there's others
that are building their own things
inspired by Gutenberg,
which I think is pretty cool as well,
because for a long time
I've felt like this block based approach
is the best way to edit the web,
because it really takes advantage
of the web as a native medium,
of something that can bring in elements
from many different places,
and we've been stuck for far too long
on this document based editing,
so I think the best thing we could do
to get other people adopted
is just make it as awesome as possible.
WordPress' market share
is already pretty commanding,
in the open source CMS space,
or the CMS space in general,
so they're watchingeverything we do already.
To make this transition be successful,
which is kind of the otherpart of your question,
is gonna be the best reason
to get more people adopting Gutenberg,
which we made open source
because we want everyone to adopt it.
Meet ups, WordCamps, friends and family,
whoever you can show Gutenberg,
and as I said, I believe it's ready
to start installing
the Gutenberg plugin for them.
Walking them through it,
showing them some of the cool features
that I just showed you up here.
Finding out your favorite parts of it,
just like I got that question,
like figure out what your favorite
part of it is,
because that enthusiasm is infectious
and that's how WordPressitself spread largely.
There really wasn't anysignificant advertising
in the WordPress space till last year,
so everything prior to that
was basically word of mouth.
It was people like you here in this room
telling your friends, family, clients,
developers, anyone who will listen,
whether they wanted to hear it or not,
about how cool this WordPress thing is,
so use Gutenberg Ramp.
Use the Gutenberg plugin.
Try to get as many peoplerunning it as possible.
Like I said, as a community,
we have this goal
of 100,000 sites, 250,000 posts.
The sooner we get there,
the sooner we'll identify all the things
that'll make the next version
of Gutenberg better.
And you had a part two, right?
- [Sebastian] Yeah,
how do we make sure
that the people go to WordPress after?
Like they switch to Gutenberg?
- You know, to me fundamentally
I want people on an open source CMS.
So if they're on open source,
to me that makes the web a better place,
and so if they're adopting
any of the open source,
us or the compatriots,
I think that is good for the web,
and good for the world.
To adopting WordPress in general,
one thing I think wecan start to do more of
is think about the entire
user experience around WordPress.
Not just the things that happen
when you log in to WP admin.
Think about all the steps
that might lead people there.
From the moment they might google a term
to signing up with wherever
they're gonna host it,
the onboarding process,
the unboxing process of WordPress
is something that we often forget about,
'cause we all did it
three, five, ten, some 15 years ago.
It's been that long since we were
a brand new user, and so putting ourselves
in the shoes of those new users,
which again might be google around,
might be seeing lots of ads
on the TV for Wix and Squarespace,
to really understand whyWordPress is different.
Why it's gonna be around
longer than any of those other ones,
and then how it can solve their needs,
which is probably not,
they didn't wake up in the morning saying,
I want a CMS.
They probably said, I want people
to be able to find me online.
I want people to make reservations
for my restaurant.
I want to tell people or show people
my work, my photography, my creativity.
I wanna write and reach an audience.
These are all, WordPress is a means
to an end there.
And so we need to show everyone
how it can help themaccomplish those things.
- [Sebastian] Exciting times ahead.
Thank you.
- Thank you.
(audience applauding)
All right, we've got fouror five minutes left.
- [Moderator] More like, yeah, four, four.
We could probably do oneor two more questions,
and then I've got one for ya.
- [Matt] A closer, or?
- [Moderator] I'll save mine for last.
No, it's not necessarily a closer,
but I'd like to get one in.
- Okay, okay.
Let's go there and thenthere, the last two.
- [Audience Member] Hey Matt,
my question was actually given
how abstract Gutenberg is,
when it might become back end diagnostic,
but curse you Amsterdam,
you stole my question.
So my new question is
what is 6.0 gonna be focused on?
- (laughs) Well I guess if we
get back on our three releases a year,
6.0 comes out in,
yeah, like 2021, 2022,
so 2021, hmm.
I don't know.
To be honest, my hope is that 6.0,
Gutenberg lining up with 5.0
is a little bit of an accident,
like it's, and it's alittle bit frustrating.
Like if it were 5.1 or 5.3,
that would be a little easier,
in terms of getting things out beforehand.
As you know, we'reputting some enhancements
in 4.9 just to close the gap
between when Gutenberg's ready
and this 5.0 number.
But the changes that'll come
in 5.1, 5.2 are gonna be
just as significant as Gutenberg,
because we'll be moving outside
of just the editor and the page,
page and post editing.
To really allow people to customize
their entire site using Gutenberg blocks.
We're gonna take things that
have been in WordPress for 12, 13 years,
like widgets, and eliminate them, menus.
These are all gonna flatten,
and all be different types of blocks,
that you can use anywhere in a post, page,
or throughout the site layout.
I consider this as significant
as the original introduction of themes,
which came in WordPress 1.5, I think.
The idea that there's now a new way
to build and design something,
that people are gonna bring
their creativity to changing.
When you can move aroundeverything on the page,
that's a different wayof building a theme,
and I'm really curiouswhat kind of creativity
and approach people are gonna bring to it.
So I would say that thereleases to watch out for
are 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3,'cause they're gonna be
just as significant as5.0, for what's coming.
It's the next phases of Gutenberg.
- [Audience Member] Hello, I'm Morton.
So, the latest version of WordPress
rolled out the GDPR compliance features.
- [Matt] I thought we were gonna
make it the whole time.
- [Morton] Which just the team
that worked on this should get
all the applause they can get
for actually getting that rolled out.
(audience applauding)
I think you might knowwhere this is headed.
So we as a community hadto make WordPress work
with this new legislation.
And it's one of many legislations
that are happening around the world.
We were not part of that conversation.
At all.
Yesterday there were meetings
at Downing Street that had people in it
that were representatives of people
in the web community,
but we were not represented.
There are meetings in Washington.
There's meetings in Germany.
There are meetings in France.
There are meetings everywhere
where we, 30% of the web,
were not represented in any way.
We had a conversation about this
six months ago, and I asked,
how do we make a structure to communicate
our intent to the people
who make decisions?
And you said, just do it.
Can I have a different,
more structured answer than that?
(audience applauding)
- I was prepared for this,
and I've been informed by my legal counsel
and lawyers that I needyou to accept this cookie
before I can answer this question.
(audience applauding)
(laughs) Okay, now that you've
accepted the cookie, we can get on.
(audience laughing)
(laughs) I knew (mumbles)was gonna come up.
I would say it's not entirely fair
to say that we're not represented at all.
What I, folks thatadvocate for the open web
and for WordPress are insome of these meetings,
and they are meetingwith folks from Brussels,
with folks in DC, all over the world,
and doing the best to make the case
for the open web.
What I will agree should be happening more
is some documentation of that.
However, that can be difficult,
because sometimes theseare closed door meetings.
Sometimes they're kind of off,
it's kind of background meetings,
where legislators are saying,
hey, what do you think of,
we're considering X, Y, Z?
Or X, Y, Z is gonna happen.
So, do know that thereis some work happening.
In terms of officialWordPress representation
at these things, I don't have that much
of a better answer for you, to be honest.
I've been focused reallyhard on Gutenberg,
and I have had the luxury
of almost completely ignoring
everything with the letters
G, D, P, and R in it.
So I apologize.
I know that's not the most
popular answer in Europe.
Let me know what happened,
what you tried in the past six months.
We'll meet up afterwards,
and what didn't work.
Why it hasn't happened
over the last six months.
There's, I think even more powerful
than having people at the meetings
is having a policy that's published
on our website that we say
what we actually want.
I think that's the hard part.
I mean, part of why
we don't have the person at the meeting
is 'cause I don't know
what the WordPress community
wants that person to represent.
And so let's work on the policy,
and then either that can affect us,
impact it without there being a meeting,
or we can have someone that goes
and wears a WordPress shirt,
and yells about the openweb at these things.
Cool, thank you very much.
- [Morton] I'll allow it.
- And hope you enjoy the cookie.
(audience applauding)
- [Moderator] I knew I should've let
Morton go last, because that was epic.
But let me squeeze one last one in.
We'll close with a Gutenberg question.
- [Matt] Sure.
- [Moderator] I was curious,
'cause you talked about getting feedback
from agencies, from teachers,
and having us be a partof that iterative process
getting actual use cases into this process
to make sure we're not missing anything,
there's nothing else to be done.
I'm wondering if you have in mind
some kind of a formalized process
around that besides just
raising tickets, conversation,
meetings, a web forum,
I don't know, something?
- We have some testing plans, right?
Maybe pass the mike to Tammy.
(laughs) This is Tammy Lister.
You want to introduce yourself real quick?
- [Tammy] Hi, I'm.- [Matt] Stand up.
- [Tammy] Oh, sorry.
Hi, a lot of people.
So at the moment we have
a feedback form, and we will
as we get more people
that we want to kind of get feedback for,
we can expand that to have
lots of multiple different ways
that you can give feedback.
At the moment we have the support forums.
We also have Slack.
We also have the feedback form,
but then we can kind of expand that
so there will be ways,
and there will be obvious ways
that you can get feedback.
- [Matt] What's probably the best place
for people to go to see that?
Like make/gutenberg?
Make/editor?
- [Tammy] So yeah,
we've just changed what was flow
to the core test channel,
so we're gonna try andrejuvenate that channel
a lot so core/test is probably
the best place to go for that,
but there is a feedback form
also if you have theGutenberg plugin still.
- And how about,
this is like a request.
Do you think,
since we're entering this phase now,
at .org/gutenberg
we could put a little link to that
for people who wanna do testing?
- [Tammy] Absolutely.
- Awesome.
That'll be awesome.
So we'll have a little feedback form,
and a link to the Slackchannel right there.
And you will be interacting
with real live Gutenberg developers
and designers andcontributors and everything,
seeing things get made.
Well, that's all the time we have.
I really, really appreciate,
thank you Serbia.
Thank you Belgrade.
Thank you Europe.
(audience applauding)
- [Moderator] Thanks Matt.
(audience applauding)