Did everone enjoy lunch?
yea? It's not bad right?
You've got a little barbeque, a little jazz...
um , we'll actually have a little more jazz up here
every slide is actually based on a blue note record album.
so, for those of you more hazz inclined in the audience you might enjoy some.
have we already done the scoot in thing?
Yea, there's just acouple of seats
someone raise your hand if there's an open seat next to you
There are a couple over here, a couple over there, alright
well, ahaha, I'm so excited
my name is Matt Mullenweg, and about 8 years agao
uh, I started working, I started blogging actually
I graduated from high school, I was in college, and started using some software
for publihishing called p2. ps was pretty exciting for because it was actually
my first experience with open source software
I didn't know very muhc about code or anything at the time
but I was really into typogrhaphy and I created some code
to actually regular expressions for b2 which turned
hashmarks and things liek that into the right propper type of graphic entities
I rwote this code, I blogged about it, the leader of b2 at
michelle, reached out to me and said "hey, this is pretty cool, you shouldsubmit it on our bug tracker", and after I figured out what that meant
haha, I did. And uh, it was the first time I had code accepted in a public project
and I was totally overwhelmed with this rush that literally dozens of people around the world
were running code that I had written
then we had a tragic turn, b2 actually.. it stopped. The project eventually died.
For while, it wasn't very, it wasn't
like the biggest blogging software, in fact the market at the time was utterly dominated by
Movable Type, and Blogger and everything else
but b2 was
pretty neat, it was starting to get a little bit of a pickup
but it basically only had one main developer, Michelle
and he kind of disapeared from the scene
and no one knew what happened, so the project, the domain
was coming up for renewal, we weren't sure what was going to happen for the site
the source forge that a couple people had access to
but we weren't sure what to do
and I blogged about this
well, as bloggers tend to do,
I'm not sure what's going to happen, but wouldn't it be awesome if
there was something that could continue on this project
and b2 was actually under the GNU public license
which I imagine we'll hear quite a bit after this, so I won't go into it too much
but basically what it said was even thought the code of the project was stopping
the project was not going to die, because
Mike little, who I'd never met, but had commented on my blog
and I were able to pick up the code, and basically fork it
and start right from where b2 left off, and start working on WordPress
something that look ed a little like this. This is actually not
the first version of WordPress, the first version of wordpress
uh, it was before we got any design sense
so the logo didn't have blue in it. That was sort of
the extent of our colorizing back then
but as you can see, it started
to grow, who was at Scott Berkun's talk earlier?
Yea, ok good number. I loved what he was talking about, in terms of the
growing complexity of WordPress.
If you like here there are actually, we have an advanced editing
button, so there were two seperate edit screens. There was this one, and there was a simple editor
which if you wanted it had a bunch of boxes and options and things liek that
it's grown a lot. And from WordPress
It actually, how it's grown, bares little resemblance
to how it strated, although the basic parts are still the same
as Scott showed, it's basically changed completely
and it's been re-wrritten several times over
not because we stopped from scratch
but just because, over time we end up refactoring
the code, bits of code. I wanted to tie everything back to jazz
um, so, for the State of the Word we're going to talk about four themes
and the first one is going to be improvization
Are there any jazz musicians or fans in the room? Whoa!
That is a higher percentage than the higher American population
I should know that. Just out of curiosity, who since we're in survey time, who came from out of town?
Wow, that is more than half.
Um, who doesn't have a blog yet? Anyone brand new to WordPress?
I got a few folks. Who's got just one blog?
Just one?
Ok, who's got more than ten?
Whoa!
Nice.
More than 20?
More than 100?
Whoa!
Are you a spammer?
More than 10 million? No.
So Jazz is a uniquely American art form.
It is, in my opion, one of the first American, purely American,
forms of mnusic, and the beatuful thing, one of the reason I love performing,
is very much a common reponse. In a band, everyone is very much equal
Um, you have sort of this structure, this overriding core changes
generally have a song, often called a jazz standard that everyone knows
and so you'll call a song, say a key, and everyone just kind of knows what to do
and so you have this shared section, which is a melody, and then typically, this is the sort of standard
jazz song we we're listening to
on the speakers earlier
It was actually Art Blakeley's Jazz measure in C, one of my favorites
and then you have solos, where each person sort of gets the chance to interpret
work over the shared framework of chords, but go to solos
Now there's an itneresting thing about chords, although melodies and songs can be copyrighted,
chords cannot, so chord changes are sort of
like open sourced in the music world, which I always thought was kind of cool
but you get, each soloist gets the chance to interpret and innovate, and I think
of plugins being like solos in the WordPress world.
So plugins are solos, virtuoso performances built on the chords of core.
Can you say that five times fast?
As Scott talked about, we have this amazing
funcitonality, I mean
theres a 10 percent
rule, which was talked about for office
for some reason we have a lot of Microsoft here today
uh, evryone only uses 10 percent of the features you have
but everyone has a different 10 percent, so
generally as software evovles it becomes more and more and more bloated
until it collapses under it's own weight, and is generally
everyone ends up moving to someone that disrupts the market
which is generally a new comer
that doesn't have the burdon of existing customers
and you just start from scratch, like start with a clean slate
and do something radically simpler, and easier.
That's typically what happens
now, plugins, kinda turn this around, uh,
all mature open source platforms evolve to have plugins
or some sort of module system. Now, all mature web services are evolving to have
something liek that. On facebook you have apps, for example.
everyone is APIs, or sort of, the proprietary
way of doing open source, and every single major web resource out there
is enhancing
WordPress had a very first plugin in the very beginning, it was called "Hello Dolly".
Oh, we got some people... who runs hello dolly? Who has it active?
Oh cool. It's actually, it's activated by default.
I believe it's the number 11 most activated plugina cross all WordPress blogs
, 10s of millions.
It's more popular than like Google Adsense, and stuff like that, so
I use that stat whenever people want to remove it
Interesting thing about Hello Dolly, is
It was created to be the simplest possible plugin in the world, and the idea
was that people would sort of take it, and adapt it, and see how easy
it was to write a plugin for Wordpress. So we went from Hello Dolly to Never Gonna Give you Up
Don't worry, no Rick Rolling here
but I believe there's over, what was it, there's Hello Pal plugin, there;s
Bible quotes, there was Cat quotes, there was people who have quotes from
you know Never Gonna Give you up all over. I think there's over 90 of these on the plugin directory
um, so when I say the plugin number you have to subtract 90
to see the usful plugin number
but the idea is that you have th ability for developers to take this and adapt it
and work with it in a lot of exciting ways, interpret it in their own way.
Now for suers, lets say your not a developer, how doe sthat work? For users,
customization is the improvisation. With 2.7 when we
release dit, with the resdeisng UI, thank you Jane
and the whole team there. The announcement
deal, talked about this very fact. that you can customize
it to be however you like, for example, you know how you can make the menu
just the icons only, then it has the popup? Who runs their icon only
menu, ere?
Not that many people. I like it because you can get
to any submenu really quickly
uh, you can rearrange things, you can make it single column, you can
go double column with the right area, you can go fullscreen on the right, you can basically
have it however you like, and not that many people customize
but the beautiful thing is that everyone has the ability to create their own
sort of unique version of WordPress. I've talked
about this, I think I first talked about this last year,
but with the long tail distribution of plugins
even with all the people in this room, it's unlikely that any two of us
are running the exact same version of WordPress.org
'cause once you throw in themes, and plugin
and all sorts of things, you have, you know, 10 thousand, 15 thousand
factorial possible combinations, which is really exciting.
Inlcuding that one guy who runs all 10,000 plugins
He is somewhere in the world
But what you guys want to know about is what's coming next, right?
WordPress 3.0. Does anyone know what album this is from?
We should have a giveaway. We should give an iPad to people who can call this out
No, that's mine.
So, WordPress 3.0 has a lot of really exciting features, the one in which I'm so happy
happened, because I announced it on stage, and usually when I announce a thing on stage
it's a, it means it's not going to happen that year, but we actually did it
but we merged MU and core WordPress.
Roughly one year ago...
I stood here in front of you, and talked about how sad it was that MU was sort of like the red-headed step cousin
of WordPress. The releases were always later, the uh
sometimes the code wasn't as reviewed by as many people, so we spent
a really good chunk, probably 4 or 5 months, merging those two code bases
basically briging MU up to par with WordPress, and sort of adapting
Wordpress to be more flexible, so you can now run one blog with Wordpress you can
you can run 10 million, like we do.
It's the exact same package of software
that you download from WordPress.org. You can do both.
What I am personally most excited about in WordPress 3.0 is that we have a new theme.
hahaha.
I didn't realize this, but it has been 5 years since we introduced Kubric to the world.
And it delighted us with it's rounded corners, and it excited us with it's blue gradients
but it's tired.
And so we want to give it a little bit of a break
it's no longer going to be the default in WordPress.
We have a new one called twenty ten.
Which I think is absolutely beautiful.
The work of Matt Thomas, Ian Stewart, it's really really exciting
I took the photos.
The twenty ten theme is named as such, because I never want us to go 5 years again
without doing a new theme
so by calling it twenty ten, hopefully by twenty elevent we're really embarrased
and we do another one. And that's the idea, we want to do a new default theme
every year, because I think one of the reason we avoided a new theme before
was because we said, "ok, it's been four years now
we want to do something new", so
as we want to replace Kubrick, we want to create the most perfect theme
in the world. it had to be a theme CMS and a theme framework for child
themes, and slice and dice and all these sort of things,
and it would just collapse under it's own weight
and with twenty ten, we sort of through all that out and said we just want something beautiful
first. usable, and easy and that people would be proud of
to have as sort of their default, and uh
that simplifciation made it much easier to go through with it.
We also wanted to be customizable in a pretty big way.
So obviously, you've all seen before the custom headers.
Old school feature in Wordpress.
This is actually the kitten that delayed WordPress 3.0.
Just so you know.
But, we've got this new feature, some of you guys know in 2.9
we added post thumbnail functionality
so what we did in twenty ten is we actually adapted the post thumbnail functionality, so
this will be a little video that plays, so you can actually do a per post or per page custom header
so what's going to happen here is that we're selecting an image from there
pretty
use this featured image
boom!
So, Oh... it keeps going...so basically
the idea is that, at a very simple level, a lot of sites what they do
is they'll customize, let's say on the about page, you want sometihng there, or on
your home page you want something, and you can now do this on every single page
If you wanted to you could have a different deisgn, so every post on your blog is completely unique
like a beautiful snowflake, and that's possible now
well we said, well, we wanted, you know, a mullet
sometiems the party is in front, sometimes it's in the back, so we also added background customization
hahah, for example you can do tile backgrounds
like this beatiful grass thing.
you can do centered, and just colored backgrounds
and this was actually sort of inspired by the incredible amount of customization
poeple were able to do with very limited background functionality it Twitter.
I was impressed by that, I thought
well why not just build that into a theme
and so, with basically a couple clicks you can make your twenty ten look really custom
in fact, it's what we've been using for the Wordpress Foundation website
because the idea behind twenty ten is that it kinda dissapears
and it, your images, your photos, whatever become sort of the highlight
Twenty Ten also has drop down menus
which is inda cool
The number one most requested feature for a CMS to do.
But once we started doing the drop down menus, we thought, well isn't that cool, all your pages are there
but what if you really want to cusotmize it, so
the biggest feature, most exciting fetaure in WordPress 3.0 is the menu admin.
As you can see, you can add anything to the menu,
you can create any number of menus on any post, save it,
add links to either pages, categories, or entirely seperate web pages
let's say you had like a, you wanted a twitte rlink in your menu, it could link to it
and you can drag and drop it and customize it just like widgets
uh, which is pretty exciting, so now, how many people
have made a site for someone, and they can edit everything on the site,
but to edit the menu they have to change the code, right?
And that's the blocker. right?
We all feel it. Now, that is no longer needed.
And this is, in my opinion, a very important step.
Just like pages were, just like post revisions, everything like that.
So WordPress's long evolution into becoming a full fledged CMS.
Part of this... oh thank you... haha
I introduced custom taxonomies last year. Who uses custom taxonomies?
We got a handful of folks.
Look around, those are the guys to hire.
hahaha
Basically the idea behind custom taxonomies is that
with one line of code, you can add things that are like
categories or tags, so as you can what I'm doing here is
I just have a category listing
or I've got 9 photos of Evan, uh 1,160 photos of myself, wow that's a alot
photos of myself, and baically you just put this one line of code in, and it
adds a, you know sort of drop down selector, it adds all the fields
basically you don't need to write any interface code
you just have to write the register code
and it creates urls
so the urls for one of these would be slash person slash, you know, evan roth.
So you have clean urls with great search optimization, everything is perfect.
Well, with 3.0 we're taking that to the next level with Custom Post Types.
Even more awesome than the custom taxonomies.
So, with the databse structure of Wordpress
Alot of people don't appreciate this, but it was kinda created to never be modified
'cause when we modify the scheme, it's a real pain in the neck.
So when you look at it you have the post table, which is
essentially, you can store pretty much anything you want there
we store, posts, pages, revisions, now custom post ypes
Attached to that you have taxonomies, so you can have
arbitrary categorizations of anything in the post table.
You have comments, right, you have comment meta
so you can have meta data on the comments
meta data about meta data, and what else is there?
I guess users, I'm forgettingt something
Basically you have this data structure
which is designed to be able to handle almost anything in the world.
In fact, I heard the WP Ecommerce guys are here right? Somewhere? Where are you?
So they're going from how many tables? I forget how many.
Do you remember how many tables were in the old verion? Like 24 or something?
So it's going from 24 tables, and they're re-writing it
so it's gonna be using just WordPress's tables
so basically 0 additional tables to run the plugin
and in my opinion, any plugin should be able to run
with the built in data structures of WordPress.
Well know, with one line of code, that happens to be 12 lines,
you can do this with posts.
as you check out that bitly link, and this presentation will be published
there's actually an amazing tutorial written by a guy
named Kovshenin, it's sort of went through this
so, you register this line, and all of a sudden
magical stuff happens
in the sidebar, automatically things appear
where you can edit, add new, for every type of post type
You can customize the write screen to have different types of things
So let's say you're making the site for a client or for a friend
and they want to have events
You can create a custom event type that's registered in the post table
and gets all the cool WordPress stuff for free like
cateogrization, and tags, and taxonomies, and comments,
and all that sort of jazz, good urls,
that has a custom interface where they can just pick a date and things like that.
You don't have to hack around with custom fields anymore
or anything like that... it should be pretty cool.
Yea, thank you.
Um, and allow people to make beaitufl, beautiful sites
with CMS capabilities.
I decided to do a poll, um, just a
yesterday I did a poll, and tweeted it out and everything like that
to see how people were using WordPress.
We could take over unders here
Um, and this, we can do it here
Who's using WordPress as just a CMS? So CMS no blog.
Who's using it just as a blog? That's actually kinda me.
Who's using it as both? Phew.
So that's roughly what happened. Basically we had
essentially 74% of all Wordpress installs
being used for at the very least a CMS and a blog.
This is up from probably 40% last year.
This is the fastest growing segment of WordPress.
And it's not that people aren't using blogs anymore.
It's that your blog is just one aspect of your site.
I was talking to a consultatn the other day
and he was telling me, "I love using WordPress for clients
because, you know, generally what happens
is three quarters of the way through the project
being done they say 'oh and we need a blog'
and you're like 'I got that'."
hahahahaa
It's right there.
Some other itneresting facts about the people in this room
besides being you know, more attractive, and smarter than the general population
about 80% of you are making money from WordPress
right now, which is kind of incredible.
The top 3 are: some of you, 22%
so 1/5 of you in this room
WordPress is your day job, which blows my mind
Because, yea, oh yea, good, I was like
uh oh, question.. I'm not ready
for those yet.
That's, you know, we hvae what
600 people in this room right now
so that means 1/5th of you all
are doing it.
Custom development 18%, and then hosting 12%.
And, I've been totally blown away
by the breadth and depth of the sites
being created. This is a beautiful one
called Hmag that just launched
a few days ago.
Boston University Admissions
Nivea Soares, an awsome artist.
This is 100% WordPress. It looks beaitufl.
Leader of the British Empire.
And what's interesting is that each of these folks
you konw, we're now, it's not just blogs anymore
it's all about social media, right?
And so each of these folks also has a
social media profile other places
so for example, this is the Hmag website
built with WordPress
this is their facebook page.
this is their twitter.
You can look at Boston University
Beautiful, beautiful site.
But, on Facebook, what does it look like?
and with Nivea, it was espeically rough.
She had a pretty good looking Twitter page
but when you click the facebook link right down there
See in the corner, facebook, twitter, Orcut, Myspace?
It doesn't even link to a page.
It links to a search.
For someone's name, that's not even her
I think that's not her, right?
This girl, does not look like this girl.
Well actually, sort of.
Huh.
hahaha.
Man, photoshop.
hahaha.
It gets even worse when you click
on her Orcut.
All you get is a login screen.
I mean this is,think of the user experience of this.
This is terrible.
Think of the user experience of this,
which is pretty rough versus that the beautiful
beautiful site she has.
Number 10's the same way.
I mean, really dull twitter.
So, I mean, the beautiful thing about WordPress
and one of my favorite things that ties back to jazz
is it's an independant thing.
You can run it on WordPress.com
you can host it yourself
it's all about you.
It enables you to do whatever you like.
And most important: owning your data.
Now, even if we wanted to,
is, you hear all the stories lately
about a change of terms of service.
You know one line in a contract
that now is stopping people from using
certain tools to write code for a platform,
or, you know, privacy applications,
or people who built entire businesses
on something that then is, sort of
obsoleted because, uh the business they
were built on top of decided that they wanted
to do something diffrent.
WordPress couldn't do that even if we wanted to
we're under the GPL.
It belongs to all of us.
And so, even if we wanted to
we couldn't change the license
more over, not only is it on the GPL
we have completely open APIs
through XML-RPC, Atom, the XML import and export
We hvae 20-30 different ways to get in and out
of Wordpress, which is why, much like Jazz
it is very inclusive.
But, I really wanted, I was thinking of a word
to describe this, that we're both global
we have to think locally, act globally
how does it work? And I decided
to combine them.
Did you guys see Up In The Air?
Ok, that's your assignment.
Go see this movie, Up In The Air.
It was amazing.
I felt like it was about me though.
I'm not sure that was a good thing
or bad thing, or...
so we got to think Glocal, act local.
Some conferences, you know...
some platforms what they'll do is they'll do like
once a year a giant conference, Oracle style
you know rent out the Moscone center,
fly everyone in from all around the world,
last year we had 48 WordCamps.
All around the world.
That's almost 1 every... I went to like 20
something of these, and it was pretty busy.
We already have 45 so far schedule in 2010
and it's only May.
Each one of these conferences is
as unique and beautiful as the place
that's hosting it.
I mean I've been to perhaps more tahn anyone else
and I'm constantly blow away
by just how unique and different they are.
And particularly in places and countries
where there's not what you think of as a traditional
embrace of the freedoms we have here.
I saw recently where Global Voices
published a whole guide to
mirroring a censored WordPress blog.
Basically the idea being that
you can take, let's say, your in China
and your blog is blocked 'cause you're talking about
something that the censors there
arent' crazy about, the idea is that
people can make mirrors of your blog
all around the world, and all of a sudden
although this url is blocked, maybe
you're available at this other url
or this ip. And it happens in real time
and people are even doing this now with translation
both in and out.
China is another good example.
There's a team that translates the entire Economist Magazine
which is hefty, every single week for that audience.
It's pretty exciting.
So WordPress can take anything in
it can put almost anything out,
it can be beautiful,
you own all the data,
and we also want it to be, sort of, everywhere you are.
Including, space.
I don't know if you know this but the first
Anousheh Ansari, when she went to, she
was one of these people with billions,
and she paid the Russians to go up to the
International Space Station, and actually
had a WordPress.com blog in space.
It was one of the first ever big blogs
we had on WordPress.com, and it
just got rediculous traffic. It went from Yahoo,
everything like that. It was an interesting test.
We've now got applications for everything.
Last year I said, mobile's going to be important.
But all we had at the time was a pretty crappy
iPhone app. Now we've got a less crappy
iPhone and iPad app.
hahaha
Android App, we've got blackberry,
and we've got more coming.
For every platform out there, I want there to be
a really great WordPress platform application
and just like WordPress all these application
are 100% open source, and anyone
can be involved, including anyone in this room.
We haven't gotten too many people participating
in the open source side of it yet,
I think it's because, well my personal opinion
with iPhone for example, is that it's hard
to build a thriving, open source product
on a closed source platoform.
When you have to pay $100 to get that SDK
you're just not going to get as many
of the type of people who participate in WordPress,
for example, contributing.
But we're thinking about other things,
for example,
something we've done that's been really popular
has been posts by email.
We launched this as a feature on WordPress.com
we've gotten over 600,000 posts already.
Just the idea that if you're really comfortable...
who lives in email all day long? Yea...
I do too.
Thunderbird is like my favorite and most hated
application in the world.
We're turning this into a canonical plugin
so basically ripping out hte post by email featur
built into Wordpress, which is really terrbile,
and adding all the code we've written for the one we wrote
to be open, and Peter Westwood and everyone is working
on this. It's going to pretty cool because
it supports attachments, you can do galleries
through it, you can post to the future,
you can do all sorts of cool stuff.
By the way, if anyone can write this feaure,
I would love a Thunderbird extensiosn that
allows you to send an email to the future.
Well not like, to the future, by maybe like,
you know how you can schedule a post in WordPress? right?
I want something that does that for email,
like send this emial on monday. So, if anyone
can do that, I'd be down.
Like I said, when a Jazz quartet plays,
although everyone is soloing and has their time
in front and everything like that, they really
all have ownership of the whole song.
Becuase it's really a lot of call and response.
When the piano player does a certain riff,
the drummer might pick up on that,
or the soloist, or things like that.
With WordPress, the same type of thing happens.
Your blog, your code.
I ended the keynote last year talking about
how people can get invovled.
We need writers to document, we need
artists, connectors, orgnizers, code poets, leaders.
This has actually been really awesome
over the past year, how this has grown,
and this is kinda what I wanted to talk about
on the way out, because the state of engagement
with WordPress I think is indicitive of where the
platform is going.
Who saw the presentation downstairs on Office Ribbon, er Ribbon Hero?
That one was amazing. Is the presenter here?
That was awesome. You said exactly what I said
when I invited you, which is if they can make a game
out of office, you can make a game out of anything.
I've been thinking about this a lot for WordPress.
Some of you guys know that we've got a number
of things that seep out. One of the things
I worry about is at what point do we lose our soul?
And his happened in bbPress once.
Where bbPress used to have these awesome error messages
which were essentailly quotes from Ghost Busters,
hahaha, Michael knows what I'm talking about.
And, somehow at one point they got removed
because they didn't localize well.
Apparently, Ghost Busters is not the international
phenomenon that we all hoped it would be.
And so that was gone.
There's fun things in WordPress like, remember
the first time.. this actually came from b2,
you know you opened the template, and
there's the loop, and at the end of the loop
there's the closing brace and it says if you
delete this the sky will fall on your head?
Stuff like that, I think actually, makes it
a lot more human.
And when I think of WordPress
and it's evolution, I don't think of it as a software
project, I think of it as an act of art.
Things that people are shaping and customizing to
fit exactly how they are.
A few weeks ago I ended up in new York at an event
called Seven on Seven, paired with this troublemaker,
named Evan Roth. He was the
artist mentor.
I loved it when you showed earlier
when someone aligned an image correctly
and then it showed a big box
congratulations
you did it, you get some points, and it's pinging your
friends that you aligned an image correctly
and things like that. I actually
really liked that.
So we started to think
basically we had 24 hours to currate something at the new museum
and we started to think well, what is the most...
we kept coming back, we we're talking about data
and maybe we could do like an art piece out of spam
but then we couldn't show it to our parents...
all these sorts of different things
and eventually what we came back to
was the act of publishing. Actually what Evan called
the sacred act of publishing
that, there's sort of a huge gulf there
you know some people can spend their entire lives
working on something, and never hit that publish button
and so when you actually hit that publish button
it's very special
particularly if you're a writer, or a creator. That
putting it out there is very special
but it can be a very lonely activity
in fact, we created this video
to show, what perhaps the average WordPress
blogger looks like
and so we thought, what if
(laughter)
what if something happened
after you clicked that blog post
let's make sure we got volume here...
(clapping in the video)
(video audio: alright!)
(video audio: let's go!)
(video audio: let me hear it!)
(video audio: go go go go!)
(video audio: cheering)
So, how can we sneak this into the interface
(laughter)
So what we did is we created an option.
You know I hate options, so that's a meta joke
We put this little checkbox on the settings page
on WordPress.com
all it said was "surprise me", and we told people
they could check this box. It's actually
blown me away
64,000 people have checked this box so far
which is kinda insane, cause all we've really done is a
blog post about it
and basically what this does, is it, sort of, right now it just
does two and a half things.
It adds a box next to the publish button that says
this post is super awesome
and that actually influences what video you're going to see
you don't see a video every time
I won't say exactly what algorythm it is
but, lets say a random amount you'll see videos of
varying length and epicness.
after you do a post.
and the cool thing about it is, once you see
one of these videos
and I think we have 48 of them or something liek that
you will never see the same thing again
it tracks what you've seen
so it's actually a very unique experience
it also shows a button, and this is where we're
the most behind on it
it takes you to a button that says how does this make
you feel, because you know feelings
are important.
And asks people to suggest something
and we've gotten like 800 suggestions
of other things we should show
which is amazing because we've only shown like 14,000
of these, so you know 1 in 14 roughly
of the people who see this, want to participate in it
so the eventual idea is for people to be able to
record their own
like, "good job", or something like that
or maybe different languages, we can localize this,
do different things. I've been really excited
about it.
This is just... what if we had a surprise me button...
the first request we always got was
"could you make this a plugin for WordPress"?
But, I thought back to, I had this really traumatic
experience when I was younger.
I used to be really into video games
and this was like the DOS games and everything like that
and I was sort of snooping around
the directories that the game was, and somehow
came across this video
and played it, and it was like the ending video
like after you made it through like 50 levels
and killed the bad boss monster, this is what is showed you.
and I just accidentaly played it
and then once you start playing it, you watch it,
and it really sort of killed the game for me
Because this was the end point, this is what I was working
towards, and now I've seen it, so what's the point
of really... it must not have been that
good a game.
It kinda messed it up.
So, if it was an open source plugin, what I imagine people
would do is just open it up, look at the array of all the videos
and like copy and paste, copy, paste, copy, paste,
that's what I would do at least.
So, but maybe we could do it as a web service.
Someone had the idea of SASS, Surprise as a Service.
(laughter)
but what if... we've had 64,000 people sort of
opt in to serendipity
so what are other things we could do.
One of the things we added in there
was, we added a humanize things on the stats
so when you visited it it would say,
you got 160 hits today, which just like your stats
always say
but it would take that number, and basically
search the Wikipedia for it
and find a town that had the same number of people
so that is the same number of people of
Dakota, Wyoming or something.
There was a mistake though for a while,
there was a bug where sometimes because we
were just using google
sometimes other things than towns would rank highest
so we started showing disasters, accidentally
So, you got 1,000 hits today, that's the same
number of people.... it was bad.
(laughter)
You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette.
That was the bad thing, and the other things was,
we tried to get videos of people dancing, and got this
it was like the second email that came in, and
this lady was like
there was like a rap video and there was cursing in the
background, this guy's grabbing his crotch
and jumping around...
and like, we were just looking at like the hip hop
dancing in the background
and we didn't realize that we basically
flashed this lady
(laughter)
I was like, well you can uncheck the box... surprise!
(laughter)
What else could we do here?
Who's seen the WordPress easter egg?
The big one.
We actually have, I think a couple, a couple hundred
people a day see it. The stats we check on WordPress.com
I'm not going to tell you where it is, or what it is,
but everything single one of your WordPresses in
this room has a really awesome like Matrix
animation easter egg built into it
that you never even knew was there
So, if we can sneak these things into WordPress
make blogging more fun, make you know
getting a comment more fun,
make moderation more fun,
this is my, the biggest thing I want with the mobile
application. If you're on the road, you only
have a few seconds. You're either waiting inline
, you know, waiting for anything
I don't want to know where people use these things
You want to moderate comments, you want
to check your stats
you want to see what's going on
All these types of things can be
a lot more fun than they currently are. I want o
find a way to balance
the increasing power of WordPress
the flexibility of WordPress,
With sort of this... Scott talked about
simplicity. I don't necesarilly think it's about simplicity
I think it's about entertainment.
and enjoyment
I blog because, well actually because of comments.
I blog because, I enjoy writing, but more than that
I love the comments that I get on my blog
because they make me smarter.
If I'm wrong on a blog post, the first two comments
are telling me how much of an idiot I am.
If there's a typo, someone tells me that. I use after
the deadline now so there's not as much of that
but, that interaction with people from all over the web
is really special.
In fact, it's how WordPress itself got started.
7-8 years ago.
Other things going on this year:
We finally got the WordPress Foundation set up, I'm
very glad about that
and, wierdly yesterday, we had three major
announcements from three major companies
We had Google release it's first WordPress plugin
we had Salesforce do a, some sort of
Salesforc-y plugin.
I think they called it "Consumer-prise"?
I don't even think those two words can be together.
But then the weirdest...
This is an actual screenshot.
(laughter)
This is not photoshoppped.
(laughter)
You can't make these things up.
So basically what's going on here...
Microsoft is seeing a ton of people using Wordpress
they want them using it on IAS, and
Sql Server and all this other stuff
as an alternative to Linux and Apache
and PHP, and... I guess it's all PHP.
But you're getting, you know, a lot of involvement
in it. WordPress has grown a huge, huge ammount
So, I think it's time.. on some ways, we're setting
the agenda for next year.
We're going to do something, I'm just going to talk
about this breifly, we're going to do a WordPress.org
redesign.
We're going to come back to that.
This is my favorite slide.
These are the current, 4 main committers in WordPress.
The "Hardcore 4".
These are the four people involved with WordPress.
For the longest time, for years actually, we only
had four committers.
In the past 6months, we've started to add more folks
and I wanted to call them out because some of them
are here today.
Do we have... oh my Goodness, that's a typo!
Andrew, holla. Round of applause for Andrew.
(applause)
Where'd you fly from?
D.C., all the way out from D.C.
he's going to be participating in the developer day tomorrow
and then the .org sprint on Monday.
So Andrew is now a part of the core team.
We have Austin making core patches.
Ben Dunkle is the fellow who made all the amazing
icons in WordPress.
Ron Rennick, who is also here, round of applause for Ron.
(applause)
...has ben helping with the MU merge.
We've got Jane Wells, who most of you have
probably met or heard.
helping on the UI.
and finally dd32, now a part of the core team. Dion!
(applause)
These are the people, every time we do a
WordPress release we try to run the stat of how many
people actually contributed code to that release.
and, it's actually, in some ways it's amazing how many
people contribute, and in some ways
it's amazing how many tens of millions of users
we have with just 100-150 people being active.
We have a brand new stat that we're revealing today
which is actually the numeber of trac contributors.
So these are the people who are active in commenting,
patches, posts, bug reporting, things on trac.
Any guesses for how many folks we have on there?
150 people contribute.
two? two people? two hundred? Oh ok.
We have two people on trac... Ryan and Andrew (chuckle)
So the actual number came out, correct me, it's on the slide.... 1400.
Was roughly the number of people
who contributed on trac
in the last year
which is almost double what it was the year prior
So that's moving really fast.
And so, we've got a lot more poeple involved
with WordPress
the frequency of WordPress releases is increasing
except when those pesky kittens get involved
and slow the whole thing down
So we didn't have 3.0 ready in time for y'all.
But we're going to do something a little bit different
this year. We're actually going to take
a complete release cycle out.
So we, aspired to do a major release of WordPress about every 3-4 months
So aiming for about 3 major releases a year.
The reason for this is actually historical.
Between, what was it, I think it was 1.5 to 2.0, was that the big one?
Yea, that was the painful one.
Basically there was 13 months
between a major release.
and what happended was sort of the classic
project management thing, was that we were like
Let's just get this one more feature in, let's get this one
more feature, one more feature, and that
sort of elongated the cycle and so it had been
13 months, which is like 9 years in internet time
between a release
and like, ajax had been invented in the mean time
the world was crazy
so we were like, we're never going do that again
so we aim for 3 a eyar
this year we're going to try something different
so we're actually going to take a release cycle out
We're going to do a 3-4 month cycle
just like we're devleoping a new cycle of WordPress,
but we're going to just work on plugins, the website,
and the API. So, a completely dedicated release
this is going to be an interesting experiment.
bless you (to someone in the audience)
Who's heard about canonical plugins?
I hope so since we announced them last year.
We're renaming them core plugins 'cause
canonical apparently
is not a good word.
So core plugins are basically the idea
that there are certain things in WordPress that
should be in a plugin
maybe not appropriate for being in the core
software, which we want to keep light, and fast, and fun
but, you also want it to be officially supported
because it's just so darn popular
that a lot of people want to do this.
So what we're trying to do is to replicate
the WordPress model. You know, dozens of people
working together from all over the world
with fantastic development tools, mailing lists,
support forums, everything like that, for all the different
plugins, the top plgins.
Because when you look at it it's actually sort of, there's
a long tail distribution, there's a power law
distribution of plugins. So if we were juts able to do this
for the top ten or fifteen plugins, you actually would
cover a lot of WordPress blogs who could
not worry about every time they upgraded.
Or know that their plugin has been audited
has no security problems, it's going to be compatible
with the next release of WordPress, and everything
like that.
To bootstrap this, has been hard, because the same
people want to write these things
but also working on WordPress 3.0.
So we're going to take a release out,
and work on this.
The experimentation of this is really
important, and it has paid off in spades.
We did 21 million downloads of WordPress last year
which blows my mind.
That was basically doubling from the year prior.
As impressive as that number is, the plugin number
blows it away.
We had seventy million plugins and themes downloaded.
So, I mean, just the distribution mechanisms
through the plugin directory, and this is only from the
plugin and theme directories, so 3rd party
stuff is not counted in this, has blown us away.
35 billion pageviews in the past year.
That's across WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
Actually more on WordPress.org than WordPress.com
And the stat that actually floored me was from
Drees Drupal Keynote.
He wrote a crawler to crawl millions of sites across
the web and see what they were running.
He sort of looked at the different platforms and everything
like that, and that stat that he found was 8.5%
of the websites he found were running WordPress.
Which is a lot of the interweb.
(chuckles)
This isn't enough.
This is an abject failure.
I would be happy, because the goal of WordPress
was to democratize publishing.
To get the majority of the web running on
completely 100% open source, free software, GPL
systems.
So we got about 42% to go.
But, regardless, the state of the word is strong.
And that's all I got.
(applause)
We've got a little time for questions
Actually, a little more time for questions, so
what we're going to do is have two mic runners
Where are the mic runners?
Right there
and where's the other one, right there.
So, find people
and basically we'll hand you a mic, you can ask
whatever you like about anything
in the world
including jazz
and I'll do my best to answer it for the next half hour
Audience member: Hi Matt, my name is James from Santa Cruz
I wanted to ask you a question about the plugins
cause I don't know how many times I've had clients
email me or call me all frantically saying
hey, I saw I can update my plugin, I went ahead and
updated it and it overwrit all the data and the
customization is changed, back to the default.
Fail. (chuckles)
That's bad.
That's odd that a plugin update would do that.
A theme update, if you modify a theme and do
the update it's not smart enough yet. It will be,
but it's not yet.
A plugin, generally what you see plugins do is store
things in the database or in the wp-content folder
outside of the plugin directory.
So, if it's a well written plugin, that shouldn't happen
at all.
This sort of, lends itself, to the broader view...
I talked about the WordPress.org redesign, the
thing I forgot to mention was actually a big part of
that is going to be a developers portal.
Where, the problem now is not necesarilly
that we don't have enough developers
I mean, there's a huge number of developers
creating a huge number of things, being distributed
tens of millions of times,
but it's more that, we need more eduction.
So basically, all of really 2010 we're focusing a ton
on education.
Be it through learning through documentation, videos
like WordPress.tv, through new things
like game like methods.
I just want there to be ways for basically every
WordPress developer to be the best WordPress
developer they could possibly be.
Thank you.
How about... there.
Audience member: I have a question and
a comment.
My questions is...
Matt: What's your name?
Audience Member: Oh, I'm Francine. I'm buppy the Puppy.
I'm Francine Hardaway.
(laughter)
My dog...
Matt: It's ok, puppies don't slow down
WordPress releases.
Audience Member: My dog has a WordPress blog.
Now I'm nervous.
How much attention is being paid to making
the iPhone app and the iPad app better?
Matt: a lot.
Audience Member: Ok, becuase as you know they
are not entirely where we would like them to be. Ok.
And my comment is that my Dad used to manage
all these Jazz musicians that you talk about
so if you ever want to talk Jazz, call me.
(applause)
Matt: that is pretty neat.
So, I'll say more than one word.
Did you see the cartoon about the alot animal.
So I'll do more than alot.
Um, the mobile apps drive me crazy right now
because I feel like we've spent years
8 years now
over thirteen major releases of a really refined way
to moderate comments and publish
quickpress, and press this, and lots of ins and outs
and right now for example, when I post a photo
from my phone, or a video like I did earlier,
I'm more likely to email it in than use the application
but we can fix this.
I mean, we know, we 've done it once already
we just need to figure out how it works on a small screen
what's the most elegant methods of interaction there.
How that small screen app interacts with plugins
and things that it's stingier interface.
and then this new thing like tablets.
I am gag over the iPad. I love it.
Actually, it's more pleasant, it's pretty pleasant
using the WordPress interface in it. Except for a few
things that we're fixing up in 3.0 around CSS around
hover and stuff.
It's actually pretty nice to use, and I wonder if
there's something, if there's a hybrid we can do
between a local application that has access
to the camera and everythingliek that
but tie it in to, you know, the interface that we
maintain and build with WordPress every time.
For now, it's that we're just having a lot of developers
work on a lot of different things, for every
single one of these platofrms
it's almost like before, when you'd have a site
for netscape and a site for Internet Explorer,
and a site for every single platform and every
single app store.
And it, kinda sucks.
But, the good news is that the web
usully wins these things.
And I hope in the future it will be just one web
WordPress again that works elegantly no matter
what type of device you're on, whether you're online,
offline, big screen, small screen... puppy screen.
(laughter)
Alright, next question.
Over there.
Audience member: hey Matt, I'm Rick.
Would you comment on the future of WordPress
security?
Matt: sure.
Hopefully good.
(laughter)
You know we... the most important thing, basically
if you, sort of, the first principle is that all bug
will always have code.
Always have... all bug will always have codes? Wow.
(laughter)
That sentence has a code.
All code will always have bugs.
No matter what you do.
If you could write, you know, if you could spend
money to have bug free code Microsoft would
have no bugs. No blue screens.
So if you take the assumption that all code
will always have bugs, and some percentage
of those are going to have security implications
the most important things is making it as easy
as possible for poeple to get updates, safe upgrades
essentially.
Notifications and upgrades.
We've been trying our darndest for this in WordPress.
Where now there's the... first we did the notifications,
then we did the core update, then we did the
plugin updates, then we did the plugins and themes
updates, and now got in 3.0 we actually have a bulk
updater, so you know when there's that thing and it
says there'slike 14 updates available and you gotta
click through on each one? No more, now
you can do them all at once.
I'm really happy about that.
(applause)
It's one of the many improvements in 3.0.
To try and encourage people to update more.
In the coming year there's going to be two things
that happen that I think could make security even
better for WordPress.
One, I tihnk a lot more hosts
are focusing on how they can keep their customers
more secure at a server level. Which they can actually do
a lot more than we can at the application level.
For example, I know one host that is actually doing
kernel level file modification detection.
So, they know the MD5 of every file in WordPress,
so they can compare that to what's running on someone's
site, and notify them if something's wrong.
Google Webmaster Tools is now notifying you
if there's something wrong with your site.
And also Automattic is working on a product
called VaultPress which will actually put
live, zero-day hotfixes to your blog just as soon
as something is found.
So, all these sorts of different things I hope
are going to be, sort of, solidify, people... make them feel
safer and more secure.
How about over... there.
Sure.
Audience Member: Can you talk about BuddyPress?
I'm sorry. Could you talk a little bit about BuddyPress
in 3.0 and what's happening?
Matt: Sure.
So, BuddyPress, has been rocking along.
I believe, where's Andy? Is Andy here?
Hey Andy! Everyone say Hi Andy.
Andy, what's up with BuddyPress?
(Andy says something inaudible)
Yea, so there's another release coming next month.
The cool thing about it now is before BuddyPress
ran on MU, which was the redheaded step cousin
and now, BuddyPress runs on WordPress
So you can run BuddyPress with a single blog
or with a complete MU install
and it's a lot smoother experience cause
BuddyPress has gotten a lot better, and because
WordPress has gotten a lot better
It's still, cranking along. Going pretty well.
In fact one of the things we might do in the WordPress.org
redesign is enable BuddyPress across all of WordPress.org
Which, I would be pretty excited about.
Does that answer your question?
Cool.
Audience Member: Hey Matt, Justin Watt, justinsomnia.org
Um, how does html5 factor into your future plans
given that WordPress has always been a strong
xhtml component.
Matt: yea, well remember what I said about
someday I hope we don't need all these different applications
and just have one web version?
Hopefully by twenty ten when html5 is done
or twenty twenty.. we can do that.
I'm really excited about the multi upload, native
multi upload functionality, and all these sorts of things
We were early adoptive gears in WordPress, that
unfortunately got killed by Google in a rather
unceremonious way, and we were kinda left hanging.
But luckily they've refocused that in html5
and browsers are exciting again.
Like, Chrome is kicking butt, and Firefox is kicking
butt back, and IE is over here like Hey, we're over here!
(laughter)
but it's, it's heating up
And if you have good people on all of these teams
making really fantastic browsing experiences
and we win in that.
The approach we take with WordPress is usually
prgoressive enhancement. Or basically
if your browse supports a feature, you get a slightly
more awesome experience.
If it doesn't, it just works like it did before.
And I feel like that's a way we can be true to our web standards roots.
But also, you know, take advantage of every single
iota of functionality that the browsers are providing.
How about back there.
Audience member: Hi Matt.
My name is Mary. I represent one of the twelve
percent of web hosting companies here at your
conference today.
Matt: cool.
One of our issues right now is that last year
we had about 2 requests for WordPress sites
this year our phone is ringing off the hook.
Matt: that sounds like a big problem.
(laughter)
Audience Member: it actually is for us, because we
are a web hosting provider and so what we need to do
is assure security and understand the system workings
of WordPress. Our problem is we haven't been ablet
to connect yet with a user group that is a hosting
user group that can help us with some of these issues.
And we were wondering if you know of any group like that.
Matt: So, almost like a web hosting consortium.
Where you can all talk about the best stuff to do
and not do and stuff like that.
That's a pretty good... who's the 12% of web hosts here?
We got a couple others here?
Something that might be cool is maybe on WordPress.org
we could power up a mailing list. That's the
open source answer to everything.
(laughter)
We can start a mailing list and just see what happens
out of that. I'd love to have sort of a list of best practices
and things like that, and also
through WordPress.org we can use our influence
to encourage more hosts to do what we consider
the best practices.
For example we're going to be doing an audit of
all the hosts we recommend and seeing whether they're
using something like PHPsuEXEC,which is
keeping the different users on the same server
so they can't use each others files and mess around
with it.
Cause a huge number of the worms that have been going
around lately is what will happen is that they'll get
into one site
on the server, and then they'll just scan the whole
server, and they'll just scan the whole thing
and modify every file they can write to.
So, your WordPress, which you kept up to date,
and you updated all the plugins, and was
compeltely fantastic, gets poned through no
fault of your own.
It's really a fault of the Web host.
And we want to encourage that knowledge, because
that knowledge because the technology has been out
there for like 5 years, we just need peple to use it.
Right back there.
Audience Member: Hi thanks, my name is Mary
and I'm from Monteray, and I thank you for making
something that non-techie people can figure
out how to use,
with the help of some good coaches.
I'm wondering
about if there is an upper limit, word count
that is, at some point some intention of as a cut off
for WordPress.
What I've found is...
Matt: like we only allow you to press so many words..
Audience member: Well they, that I get locked out of post
because I have a like fifty to seventy five thousand
word post which I know is unusual. And when
I figured out what I had to do in order to not get
locked out of...
Matt: are you a contributor to the codex? No I'm kidding.
Audience member: I am, I do community service
projects through WordPress.
BicycleMonteray.com and Her Helmet Thursdays
Project. So um, what I've done is I have a little
window on WordPress that I stick a url in and it directs
them somewhere else to a custom database that
I have created... had someone create. So, but I'm...
Matt: So, there should be no upper limit.
The database field that we use is actually longtext,
in MySQL, which I believe has a 4 gigabyte limit
or something, for that one field.
So that's a lot of text...
So there should be no data limitation to it.
Perhaps there's something, some hosts limit post size.
Audience Member: I have Network Solutions as my host,
and I know when they got hacked last year they
were able to restore my WordPress, so that was a
good thing.
Matt: What you might want to try is to try a trial
account some place else and try posting your 75,000
word thing... do you copy and paste that?
(laughter)
My mind is kinda boggled right now, but however you
get it in there, try it it. 'Cause that's probably an environment
type thing, and not a WordPress thing.
It should be able to handle anything you can throw
at us, hopefully.
Audience Member: Ok, that's good to know.
And what is does before it locks out is it usually
doesn't let you use the visual tab, first.
Only html... then it completely shuts down.
Matt: Oh yea, yea yea... well that, so your browser
is probably going to cry, and die, if you try
to use the visual editor with that much stuff.
Just the way it works it'll just crunch and crunch and
crunch, cause it will try and keep it all in memory
multiple times
and that will... so, use the html version if you're
going to work with something that big.
How about in the back?
All the people on the laptops there.
There's like a glow in the back.
(laughter)
Oh, right up here.
(laughter)
I'll wait for the mic.
Oh sorry, did someone have it?
Oh we have a mic right up here, and we'll queue one up
So, you can go first, and you, come this way.
Sorry.
Audience Member: Hi, I'm Toni, and someone
asked the BuddyPress question. I thought I'd ask
the bbPress question.
Matt: ooooooo
bbPress is interesting. I have a confession there.
Um, so I dove back in to bbPress and I was sort of...
we were doing the weekly development meetings
Version 1.1 is basically ready. It's been coded, had
some great code contributions from Austin
and some other WordPress developers
Um, I kinda got a little burnt out on it.
There was something... we were going back in forth in the forums.
Basically the future of bbPress is going to be... just
more closely tied to WordPress. Because what's killed
bbPress before is that we were trying to duplicate
everything in WordPress
and basically have a copy of it in bbPress.
So, as WordPress is having a hundred commits a week.
All that was having to be ported back into bbPress.
And we thought about making a backpress
project so that they use the same backend
but that didn't really work.
And at some point is was like we're doing all this duplicate
effort, why can't we just make bbPress a really amazing
plugin, bcause we could just throw away all this code.
We don't need a user system, we don't need a
url system, and we don't need a rewrite system, we don't
need a database class, we don't need any of this stuff.
We just inherit that all from WordPress.
Which is the best way to do it. In fact
right now, if you want a forum in WordPress, you're
probably better off using one of the plugins
out there, that's not bbPress.
This was controversial to say the least.
And I was in there, and on the forums, and everything like that, and
just one night, I was pretty bad, and
I was just like, my goodness I just can't take this
anymore I just closed the window, and that was
about a month and a half ago, and I haven't really
looked at it since.
(laughter)
So, I need just a little bit more time, to recover.
From that flame war.
and then I'll dive back in, and start working on bbPress again.
It's kind of close to my heart, because bbPress
was, I guess, written about a year and a half after WordPress
and it was written from scratch.
Where WordPress had been a fork.
So it actually did a lot of awesome things I thought, that
if I could start over again, I would have done.
So, it's near and dear to my heart.
But, uh, the community can be a little rougher
than normal WordPress.
In Wordpress we have a little bit more in terms of
community morays an interaction and everything like that.
Cool.
We had something up, right here.
Audience Member: So let's say I've got a pretty
large multi-network blog that I want to move to
WordPress.
Should I use WPMU right now and hope that the transition
path to 3 is smooth? or is 3 coming out really soon? Or...
Matt: 3 is coming out really soon.
So, what I would do is start building on the 3 beta,
which will be release candidate soon. And then
by the time you're ready to launch, we'll have launched.
Cool.
Hopefully.
Audience Member: No dates?
Matt: No. No dates.
(laughter)
I've been doing this too long.
(laughter)
Right over there. Keep your hand up.
yea, right there.
Put your hands in the air, wave 'em like you just don't care.
Audience Member: Hi I'm Shava from San Francisco,
I just wanted to quickly mention I had the same
problem with the word count
and it's not a WordPress issue, I have, my friend has
a basketball blog where he writes long posts
on Saturdays, and it turns out it's a memory limitation
on the server side setting on PHP
so, the host changed the limit to a higher memory
and it was resolved, so, I think that's what they should do.
Matt: there you go... people helping people.
(laughter)
Here's one more. We'll do two more and then...
So one more, do you want to be the last one?
Ok, last one... anything else?
Ok, we'll queue it up.
So, one, two three.
And, yours has to be the most amazing question ever
just so you know.
No pressure.
(laughter)
Audience Member: Hi Matt, this is going to be
a really simple one for you, but it's from people who
are one Twitter
and they want to know the kitten story.
People don't know the kitten story, and you keep
referencing this kitten that delayed 3.0.
Matt: is Jane here?
Jane?
So basically Jane got the cutest kitten you've ever seen
in your life, and uh, they started, she started posting
pictures of it to everything, and then someone put
on the lol cat builder, the Cheezburger
lol cot builder, so then there's be the picture of this
cat on a keyboard like, sorry I'll go back to working on
3.0 now.
I almost put it in... but I was like, I'm going to do the first ever
presentatio without an lol cat in it.
And it just sort of became the thing, the kitten that delayed 3.0
Our scape goat?
(laughter)
Scape kitten?
How about up here. Yea, right here.
Audience Member: Um I guess I just had the question
BuddyPress, another BuddyPress question. Do you
think it's like, I guess, stable, robust, up to snuff
enough where it can be a solution on an enterprise...
I'm talking like real big, like, blue chip level companies
Matt: yea, absolutely.
The beauty of BuddyPress is that it's written how I wanted to do bbPress
Where it inherits all the big enterprise-y stuff
it's WordPress under the hood.
And BuddyPress is actually a set of plugins on top of WordPress.
Why we call it a social layer. So you can pick and choose
these plugins and they add these amazing social features
but they still work within the WordPress way, if you will.
And in fact they're fantastic examples, if any of you
are getting in to code, the code in BuddyPress is
really well done.
Like it's written completely to the WordPress standards,
it uses the WordPress database intelligently
all these sorts of things
So you can build something small, or something
really huge on it.
We're actually seeing a lot of people... I don't know if
we can ask this yet.
There's going to be a major hip hop artist switching to
BuddyPress soon. So that'll be cool.
He's like bringing over a bunch of users from Ning
and going to BuddyPress.
Should be neat.
Audience Member: Hi
Matt: You aren't number three...
Audience Member: This will be a good one.
A WordCamp question actually. My name's Johnny
I run an events website using WordPress so I
appreciate that.
There are a lot of people like me who are bloggers
who are desperately looking for developers or
plugin devlopers
and I know there are developers and plugin developers
looking for people like me who want to pay them.
Or hire them, or whatever.
Is there a way, or a function, or something at WordCamp
where, like a singles mixer,
except it's a I need you and you need my, thing?
Matt: Just the thought of that
is really funny... like...
Hey baby, you know how to code?
(laughter)
Ok, everyone turn around, he's got something that
says "need freelance work"
This is like a human popup, like spam... no I'm kidding
(laughter)
I'm just giving you a hard time.
Last year we had a whiteboard.
Where people could sort of write what they needed
and wanted. Do we have that this year?
Do we have a whiteboard?
Sweet. So let's use that, just for today.
Um, the other thing.
A good place to come would be the developer day
tomorrow.
And while, you mentioned it, you're an event organizer.
Who here has ever organized a WordCamp? or a blogging event?
We've got like a handful here. There's only... you know
there were only 40 something in the world last year
so the fact that there's 12 people here
means we have about a quarter of all WordCamp organizers in the world
You guys should really get together.
So we were thinking at the developer day, we could
have all the WordCamp organizers get together and
just talk about what works, what doesn't
what to do when the sponsors are late, all these sort
of things that happen with putting on an event like this.
This is actually, I'm amazed at how well it's gone this year.
It's been a... the very first WordCamp. I think we
had the idea about 3 weeks before we did it.
We were like, let's just do a WordCamp.. how hard can it be?
(laughter)
And it worked!
We found a venue, it didn't have internet, so we
actually had to bring in our own internet.
The whole thing
it was actually pretty big.
We had like 150-200 people. The whole thing costed
$6,000, including barbeque. It was a really awesome
event. But just as it gets bigger and bigger
logistcally, it just got moved.
And actually the reason it's no longer at the Swedish
American hall, is because of you guys.
The number one complaint about the Swedish
American Hall besides it was hot or cold was the seats.
You're like these seats are so uncomfortable.
We thought, where are we going to get better seats?
How are these seats working out for you guys?
We kept the barbeque going.
Ok, I'm ready for the most epic question in the history of WordCamp questions.
Right there.
She's up there, to the right.
Is that a Firefly shirt?
Ok, survey time. Who here's a brown coat?
(cheers)
Hahaaa... nice.
Audience Member: Ok, so, I'm actually a journalism student
and you actually came to by Journalism school
for Reno WordCamp
and, so since then we've actually integrated learning
WordPress into our journalism program, so it's a required
part of our journalism program.
(cheers and applause)
It takes a turn kinda right here...
So the response that we've gotten from some of
the students is kinda like...
Ugh, now I have to make a website sort of thing.
And, how can we bring sort of this kind of positive
community spirit to students who actually have
to do it for homework?
(laughter)
Is that epic enough?
(cheers)
Matt: that's a tough one too. I must say,
I was not the best student in the world.
The part of the story I skipped over was
dropping out of school, and moving to San Francisco
um, actually, funny enough, this is the first ever
WordCamp where my Dad is here.
So, right over there, the guy who got me started
on computers.
(applause)
Thank you dad.
You see how I redirected while I was thinking of the answer.
(laughter)
So I think part of it, is if you can find something in...
a way to make the posting more fun.
So for example, what I've had good luck with my
friends for example..
they, the biggest complaint is like, I have the blog
but I can't get any comments.
Or I don't get enough page views.
And what you find is that you can get more people
more conversation and more page views, they enjoy blogging a lot more.
'Cause they have the idea that they have an audience.
Who checks their stats more than once a day?
Ok, let's be honest here. I know for a fact
that it's like 80% of you.
There's nothing wrong with checking your own stats.
So, what we see things, for example, plugins that
send your posts to twitter, plugins that send your
posts to facebook, and all these sorts of things,
are fantastic distribution methods.
The point I was trying to make earlier,
showing the different, someone's WordPress page vs.
their Facebook page. All these different platforms
are undeniably, incredibly powerful,
for distribution, for having conversations.
But ultimately, you want to redirect that energy,
to some place where you can actually do something
meaningful with it. Your own site, your own data,
your own mailing list, your own code, your own domain,
fundamentally.
And, that's where I think, I feel like, sort of the
social networking wave that has happened
has been one of the best things
for blogging.
We now see where twitter and Facebook are going
to actually pass up, some day, you can see them passing
up google as far as the number of referrers to WordPress.
That's a really big deal.
And when you think about it, your social network
is the most powerful, sort of, proxy you have
to filter the web. I think that's a good direction
to go. So that's one thing. Do you have a better idea?
Surprise me... I mean, if I posted and saw that
video, I'd be pretty happy.
So, Surprise Me.
Any other ideas?
(audience member talking inaudibly)
But they're journalists...
(laughter)
Sorry. Hahaa.
(audience member talking inaudibly)
It's true. And, oh, another thing is Photography.
Everyone has a digital camera now.
Wokring with photos, although it's not as elegant as it could be in WordPress,
it gets better in every release.
And, having photos in there, are a lot more fun.
That's actually, how my blog started, was only photos.
And the captions... I was using a gallery software called Gallery.
And the captions got longer and longer
and eventually I was like, maybe I should have a blog
with photos, instead of photos with blogs.
Any other ideas for the journalism students?
(Audience member talking inaudibly)
Ah yea, and this is a good point. Sort of what
you said. Blogging is a means to an end.
Actually in this room there's some people who get
really jazzed about WordPress, but in most of the
world, now the 20 some odd million users of WordPress
they're using it as a point A to point B. It's a tool
it's a canvas, and they're sort of painting on to it
whatever they're really passionate about.
Last one.
Audience Member: My answer to that question
would be, something semi-controversial. What
do I mean by that?
If you say controversial, people just get mad.
If you're talking about something that's kind of boring,
nobody cares.
Matt: Why did he point at me when he said that.
(laugher)
Audience Member: If you come in in the middle of
the road, and you're taking a stand, where some people
want to say, you're the dumbest person I've
ever met in my life, and somebody else says
this is the greatest thing since swiss cheese,
the person writing that blog is going to get involved
and interested in responding to those things.
(Audience Member shouts out)
Start them on Drupal first!
(laughter)
And he did the sign again.
This is my contact information.
It's a little small, I've got the number, website, twitter
facebook
WordCamps are sort of my favortite time of the year.
Cause really, meeting you guys is the most exciting
thing. Every single person has their own unique story
about how WordPress has influenced them
how they're using it, how they're doing it,
how it's changed their life in some way, how it
hasn't changed their life,
there's nothing I love more than hearing that.
If I can't meet all of you today, just logistically,
although the party later is going to be really good.
Drop me a note.
I'd love to chat.
I get to all email, eventually.
I actually have a 2007 folder that I'm still replying to.
Every single one of those people will get a response.
(laughter)
So I'll get there eventually.
And, thank you very much.
(Applause)