Ladies and gentlemen,
welcome to the main event.
He is the cofounder of WordPress and the founder of Automattic.
[ Gourgeous latin sound ]
[ Audience Laugh ]
He loves jazz the office might have
aged him a little bit.
But he remains extraordinary passionate about open source
to share with us the state of the word,
Please welcome Matt Mullenweg.
(Applause)
With him on the stage,
I would like to invite Philadelphia councilman David Oh.
He is a strong advocate for the technology and creative economy sectors,
he's got a killer smile and he loves to shake hands.
Please welcome, councilman Oh.
[Matt] I think we have the three people with jackets now.
[David] Yes. Only three of us, right?
[Matt] I think we have to close to this for them to hear us.
[Matt] The three people with jackets are up here.
They're all the ones we found in the whole place. Go ahead.
[David] Wonderful.
My name is David Oh a councilman at large here in Philladelphia,
So I represent the whole city.
but more importantly I chair our city's committee
on global opportunities in the creative and innovative economy.
So if you don't want to have those in your hometown, make sure you talk to your city council.
I'm so pleased to present today,
a resolution recognizing December 5th as WordPress Day here in Philadelphia.
[Cheers and applause]
Good reaction!
Alright,
So if you'll give me a minute,
I'm gonna present this officially to Matt Mullenburg,
I'm sorry, Mullenweg,
and give me one minute, There we go.
It's tough seeing up here, so bear with me.
It is resolution so was passed in our city council,
And it recognizes and commemorates December 5, 2015,
as WordPress Day in Philadelphia.
Whereas WordPress is an opensource software program used to build websites.
And whereas WordPress is simple enough for creating personal blogs
yet powerful enough for building large multi-faceted corporate sites.
It is estimated that 25% of the websites on the internet
are powered by WordPress.
And whereas Philladelphia will host the inaugural host WordCamp US
the premier WordPress conference of the year on December 4-6 2015
and whereas WordCamp US is the largest gathering of people
who develop, use, and support WordPress.
This conference will welcome more than 2,000 people
from all across the nation and the world
for these days of learning, community, and contribution to WordPress.
And whereas WordCamp US will draw a diverse mix of people,
designers, developers, content creators, and strategists,
marketers, writers, SEO practitioners, educators,
project managers, business owners, and non profit owners.
All attendees will enable a rich mix of skills and experience
and whereas throughout the conference
sponsors from top, local, national and international businesses will be available
to help attendees learn about and access their WordPress focus business solutions.
And whereas the local WordPress team worked diligently
to ensure Philadelphia was chosen to host WordCamp US
The team consists of Alx Block,
Liam Dempsey, Tracy Levesque,
Jodie Riccelli, Drew Jaynes,
Ingrid Miller, Cami Kaos,
Brad Williams, Doug Stewart,
Reed Gustow, and Kevin Cristiano.
And whereas as a cultural hub with an active and innovative tech creative community,
Philadelphia is honored to welcome WordPress and WordCamp US to our city.
Now therefore be it resolved by the city council of the city Philadelphia
that it hereby recognizes and commemorates December 5, 2015,
as WordPress Day in Philadelphia,
further resolve that a copy of this resolution be presented to Matt Mullenweg,
co-founder of WordPress and one of the top 10 most influential people online
by changing the face of the Internet by business insider
evidencing the sincere adminiration
and respect of this legislative body.
[Matt] Thank you!
[ Cheers and applause ]
Whereas, that was pretty dandy.
[Laugh]
Look at that.
Gee golly, we're getting fancy here,
Let me give this to someone.
[Laugh]
Don't fold it.
[ Laughter ]
Well, howdy, everybody.
I knew I got dressed up for a reason.
That was very fancy and we're very excited here
to present the 10th ever State of the Word.
So welcome.
[Applause]
My name is Matt Mullenberg. And...
[Laugh]
You can tweet me @photomatt
and our hashtag today you probably all know is #WCUS.
I love that WordCamp this year falls after Thanksgiving.
Because I think it's a wonderful place to start,
sort of this touch cornerstone this year
from a place of gratitude and thanks.
The first thanks I want to give are of course the sponsors that made it possible.
Jetpack, Suruci, WooCommerce, bluehost,
collectively between them, donated 275,000 dollars
to make this happen.
[ Applause ]
Of course all the other great folks.
I hope you've been checking out some of
the booths and sponsors.
Actually you know, most conferences, the sponsor area is dead, and here it's been hopping.
I don't know that's because coffee is over there, or...
[Laugh]
Also I want all of these folks to stand up.
You just heard their names but everyone who's involved in volunteering
or putting together this event.
Can you please stand up really quick?
Let's give around of applause for those folks.
[ Applause ]
Look around.
You know, some people did not want it to be in Philadelphia.
Can you believe that? But they promised jazz,
and promised barbecue,
they promised no snow.
[Laugh]
All of these things have been true.
Actually the weather has been amazing, hasn't it?
The rain stopped before we got here.
It was like the brightness of all of your smiles.
cheered it up and drove away the clouds.
It's been a really beautiful couple of days.
You said it would be chilly and not snowy.
And that was actually exactly what it's been.
Plus those beanies. Who's got one of those hats?
Those are the coolest hats. It's definitely
some of the cooler WordPress swag I've gotten.
Also in terms of coming from a place of gratitude and thanks,
I want to take a moment to recognize two members of the WordPress community
both of whom who have either been on stage
or highlighted on stage, who passed this year.
And that is Alex King who was a lead developer of WordPress
and Kim Parsell who was a key community member.
I would like you all to join me for a moment
to take a moment of silence to reflect on their contributions,
their part of the community, what they brought to the world.
Also anyone else you have in your thoughts
So just a moment.
[ Silence ]
Thank you.
That would mean a lot to them.
In terms of looking back, like I said, the past few WordCamps.
This is our 10th one.
Actually I don't know if you all know this,
but this is the largest WordCamp ever in the world.
[ Applause ]
You are part of history here and I think it will be the largest until we break it next year, right?
How much was final ticket? about 1700 sold?
1801?
Did you buy like 10 at the end just to get an 01?
[ Laugh ]
And the last I saw, how many livestreams?
There were at least 700 there. Pulling out the phone..
Hundreds and hundreds
of people watching on livestream.
WordCamp started very modestly.
This was the very first one at the Swedish American music hall.
It did have barbecue and jazz.
It was put together with a month's notice and ended up 500 registrations.
So it was very kind of last minute that it came together.
I thought I would juxtapasoze, juxtapasoze? juxtapoze?
each of the WordCamps
with the version of WordPress at the time.
When we did the first WordCamp, this is what WordPress looked like.
If you all remember that,
Navigation at the top. That was WordPress 2.0
The next one also there,
WordPress 2.1 looked exactly the same.
2008 we moved for the first time to Mission Bay.
Where WordCamp San Francisco has been for the past 6 years now.
So we really started to fill it out
And WordPress,? Who remembers this redesign?
It's amazing how far WordPress has come. 2.9
This was - if you look closely, you might see yourself -
That was before the Crazy Horse, which came next, 2.7.
this was the sixth, seventh, WordCamp. We did the big redesign.
I think in 2012 we did some sort of jam there.
Not sure what's going on
We also brought the guide into the core WordPress,
3.6 we brought in the mobile redesign, and finally with last year the mp6.
Each WordCamp had something special about it
that ah...
that it cured that year or was introduced to the world
from the first time we started talking about WordPress as an app platform
or WordPress APIs
or even the first time we started to show people using WordPress as a CMS, not just as a blog.
All these stories and more have been collected and
What I want to make as the first announcement today.
We actually have a ton of stuff to announce today.
You might have heard we were working on a book on WordPress,
I'm proud to announce that this Friday, so, December 11th,
the book "Milestones: The Story of WordPress" will be released officially. So.
[ Applause ]
It's a work of a lot of people together.
Also Siobhan did an incredible number of interviews,
over 53 hours of interviews with people in the WordPress community including Alex King.
that are all online.
So you can go directly to some of the interviews and read the transcriptions
and we've got the summary of this book.
Now we're approaching this book a lot like we do WordPress.
Much like you saw WordPress change over the years.
This is the first iteration.
It ends little bit abruptly right around mp6.
So, think of this as version .5 of the book.
and we hope to release many versions in the future as we continue to write it together.
I said this was the largest WordCamp, but,
and since this the 10th anniversary of WordCamp,
I wanted to highlight a few of different stats around it.
This year in 2015, it will be 89 camps,
with 21,000 attendees across 34 countries.
Yeah.
[ Applause ]
You know these don't happen just by themselves.
There are actually 601 unique organizers across all of those 89 Camps,
of which 60% were doing it for the very first time.
I don't know if that means once you do it once you never want to do it again? or...
[ Laughter ]
I'm not sure exactly what that stat means.
But I think it's awesome that we're getting a lot, maybe even next year
will be the first year we break 100 WordCamps in a year, about 2 week.
There are also, we ran some stats and found
1,600 unique speakers across all those Camps, and 2,100 sessions.
So these stats were kind of amazing, but actually what blew me away were that Meetups beat it.
So Meetups. In the past year we've had 40,000 people attend 2,000 Meetups.
Almost double the number that have attended the WordCamps in the world in the past year.
So Meetups have really been blowing up.
And if there's not one yet in wherever you traveled from.
Give it some thought. Actually, who traveled the furthest here today?
Can't say New York, that was like an hour train ride.
[ Laughter ]
Anyone come super far?
Back there, what do you think?
[Audience member] Bangkok.
[Matt Mullemweg] Bangkok
That's pretty far.
[Laughter]
Anyone further than Thailand?
[Audience] Romania.
[Matt Mullemweg] Romania!
I don't know if that's further.
[Audience] Costa Rica
[Matt Mullemweg] What's that?
[Audience] Costa Rica
[Matt Mullemweg] Costa Rica. That's like...
that's way too nice. [laughter]
What you're doing here?
I think you went the wrong direction.
We should have all gone to you.
[Laughter]
You can put in a proposal for 2017.
I've always said that technology is at its very best when it brings people together.
And I think the WordCamp program and now
Meetups happening on a more monthly cadence
have really started to show and introduce people to the amazing community around WordPress.
Because when you break it down, yes, the total numbers are very large,
but really what makes WordPress run is a surprisingly few number of people,
some of whom we're going to highlight today.
A lot of the improvements over the past year we want to celebrate
Actually are a combination.
Both of the core of WordPress and WordPress.org our favorite community website that brings us all together
and has lots of improvements over the last year.
One thing, an update from last year that we talked about,
and we actually did.
As opposed to the update we talked about didn't do, which I'll skip over.
Is we moved to more activity based metrics in all of our directories
for example the theme directory and the plugin directory now.
instead of telling you how many download something has,
Which is a little bit of a *** it doesn't actually mean something,
It shows you how many active installs.
So these are actually active systems of WordPress
coming through our update system so we can show that now.
So this one has over 1 million. We adopted slack.
This was sort of a surprise from last year and it's been kind of amazing.
There has been over 2 million messages sent on our slack last year.
And in fact I believe, there's no official thing,
but I think we're one of the largest Slack instances in the entire world,
in terms of number of members.
So I know this adoption of Slack has been to the detriment of many people's productivity
but we have been able to use it quite a bit, it's been meetings
WordCamp US had some organization there
It's been really cool to see people brought together by sort of a richer too than the IRC in the past. .
Who has had a little bit of ***
because they've missed some sessions in
the past two days? Right?
That's the worst thing about WordCamps is when there's two things you want to see going on at once.
They will all be on WordCamp.tv, I mean WordPress.tv. sorry.
Though I think if you type in WordCamp.tv we also have that, I hope. If not someone register it really quick.
Someone who's not a spammer.
We ended up open sourcing, all the code behind WordPress tv.
This is a step along what we hope to do with all of the WordPress.org sites.
Putting it up on public repositories and we're initiating a redesign.
Not only will the community be able to particpate in
but actually change some of the code.
If you find a browser bug, you can patch the CSS
and put it right up there.
And one of the most important things is that we
localized the plugin and theme directories.
Those of you in the back, who might not
be able to see,
this is the Spanish Rosetta site.
So, es.WordPress.org
In this case buddypress and jet pack it's jet pack 4 WordPress.com
I'm not even going to try to read the rest.
This is really important because as we've talked about before,
last year was the year that non-English downloads
of WordPress passed up the English downloads for the first time.
Which I said was an important milestone
in our history because as you probably know
billions of more people speak not English than English in the world
and if we're going to democratize publishing all around the world
it's very important for us to reach them.
But without the plugin and theme experience in there, you think about your WordPress experience.
You probably run at least hello dolly, right?
At least one plugin.
And in fact many people have anywhere from 5 to 15 plugins.
So, but in another language if you're start only spoke Spanish, for example,
you would load up and you would see a bunch of plugins and themes in English.
Which is not a great experience.
And in fact, a little mini announcement.
is that all themes and plugins now support language packs.
We've loaded in every single theme and if you're a plugin developer
on the next commit it will get loaded
into translate.wordpress.org to be available to be translated for the entire world.
[ Applause ]
You all are switching out, that's kind of cool.
This is a marathon, not a sprint.
Also a very exciting announcement is that the plugin directory crossed 1 billion downloads.
And in the past year we added 9,000 new plugins
to the repository, which is actually a pretty significant amount of growth.
As I've said we're moving away from downloads,
but this does show just the activity that's going on
and how vibrant the plugin ecosystem is for WordPress, and one of the key things.
Final big milestone, you all probably heard that
we've passed 25% of websites. [ Applause ]
This is not a chance to rest on our laurels
but, I think a demonstration that the web, and the world
wants an open source, an open, free solution
for the web and as WordPress evolves more and more,
from being just an application to being almost
more like an operating system for the web
I think it's been a very exciting year.
Driven in fact by some pretty cool releases.
So you all know WordPress 4.1 named for Dinah Washington,
in honor of Dinah Washington
included the 2015 theme, cool note about 2015, it's actually
the most popular WordPress theme of all time with 1.6 million active sites.
So good job on 2015.
It dwarfs all the other 20s even.
We have distraction free writing and of course language selection
going on our mission and goal of trying to internationalize WordPress,
to make it available in more countries.
4.2 is named in honor of Bud Powell which included
brand-new Press This, themes in customizer.
And my personal favorite, can we give it up for emoji? [ Applause ]
Of course the emoji was just a cover for supporting multi byte languages
that the majority of the world speaks and writes in, so we brought that in there as well.
But the emoji are pretty fun.
And oh, finally 4.2 named for Billie Holiday.
Menus in customizer, site icons and formatting shortcuts.
Each of these releases were led by a different person,
our new rotating leads and I believe they're all here,
if John, Konstantin and Drew can all stand up.
Give you a round of applause for your hard work. [ Applause ]
Leading a release is not easy, as any of these folks who have done it can attest.
You definitely get a few gray hairs.
Didn't see you yet Konstantin, probably soon. [ Laughter ]
As you know, one of the key differentiators of WordPress's philosophy,
especially in contrast to some of our open source
copatriots like Drupal or Joomla is we keep a fast version release cycle.
We've done three a year now for several years
We've found this is a pretty good cadence
with the way that updates and everything currently work
for getting improvements out to you all as fast as possible,
keeping a steady sort of train of releases, so there's
not too much pressure for anything to get in one particular release.
If we miss one, there's another one right around the corner.
Giving lots different of people an opportunity to lead and sort of make their mark, or sort of philosophy of what a WordPress release can be.
And just keep things moving.
You know? I know that a version updates are a complaint.
In fact version fragmentation is one of the big struggles we've had to deal with in the WordPress world.
Much like in this matter right now, a little bit more like Android and iOS in terms there's lots of different versions of WordPress out there in the world.
So I wanted to tell you a story about how one host has tried to address this.
This comes from Bluehost.
Bluehost hosts over 2 million WordPresses across many thousands of servers.
And around August of this year actually, just a few months ago, they noticed something bad.
We see that red there.
80%, or 1.6 million of their WordPresss were not on the latest version.
Sad Christmas.
There's an emoji for that.[ Laugh ]
WordPress is very easy to install,
but a lot of people so, you know,
once they get it going, they might not think to come back and see the dashboard a lot of notices.
only you all update for majority host for minor versions.
So Bluehost is doing is they wrote a scanner that went through all 2 million plus the sites, including some that some customers had forgotten about.
They might be a different directory, staging directory or backup, and did backup.
And they did a scan looking for white screens and there are problems they immediately roll it back.
Once the system was in place, they got to essentially 99% plus of their sites on their latest version.
They were able to do 2.6 million core, plugin and theme updates within a few days of the release.
Pretty amazing.
Now, a lot of people I talked to this about are like okay, but then what happened.
.006% of the updated sites contacted support.
So testing how much is work we put into the up grades and in fact ongoing support of WordPress sites was down 18%.
A lot of that coming from fewer sites getting hacked.
So this is actually pretty amazing and I think a great example for every single host,
no matter what your size, to get everybody on the very latest.
They're currently working on PHP and it turns out that's a lot harder.
The usage as of today the usage of PHP 7 has passed PHP 4.3.
Yeah, so PHP 7 has more users of version 4.3.
Which is pretty cool.
Yay.
Many host actually turn on a major relace our survey
So, this is a graph of growth a major version of WordPress
and what you notice is those dots actually are closer together.
We're not going to quite hit it by the time 4.4 comes out,
but we're at 48 point something or 49% of all WordPresses in the entire world are on the latest major release 4.3.
This the work of the update system host and many of you, as well,
making sure that your all your sites and of course the sites of the people you care about and not the sites of your enemies are upgraded.
and latest and greatest version.
As you might know, version 4.4 of WordPress is right around the corner.
In fact, it is shipping Tuesday.
[ Applause ]
Now we have to hit a day.
[ Laugh ]
To talk about version 4.4, I would like to invite a special guest on the stage, and that is Mr. Scott Taylor.
So a round of applause for Scott.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
Leading 4.4 was a pretty exciting experience.
We put a lot of work into really transitioning WordPress into the modern era.
We still have a lot of work to go but
I think we've made a lot of head way.
In WordPress 4.4 we had over 2,000 commits.
That's not just me, that's a great team of committers and bug gardeners.
What was really cool we had over 400 contributors.
So we spent a lot of time going back through track and finding tickets that were maybe fixed four years ago but got neglected for some reason,
we tried to find as much as possible
and put that stuff in and recognize contributors who have been around and perhaps feeling disenfranchised because we haven't seen their stuff in a while.
WordPress 4.4 has a lot of little fixes in it.
We did some cool things with comments around performance and kind of modernizing that API.
revealed new objects like WP_Comment, WP_Term, WP_Network,
as giving a lot more stuff coming up in a future release around multi site.
and really heard experience.
Things like used to be that attached to a post, that works for unattached attachments now.
That ticket number was below 2,000.
We went way back to try to find things to work on.
An exciting thing for a lot of people is the phase 1 of the scaffolding of the REST API.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
This is a longtime coming.
There's going to be a future release that's going to contain a lot of end points, but for people who want to modernize the data, this is going to be a cool thing.
We're using it on the New York Times, this is our live coverage platform and that was a strategically picked picture.
The REST API is great.
It's an alternative to what many consider an obsolete technology.
I would say the previous company had to expose data to iOS and android developers.
But JSON is a more friendly thing.
We can now start creating arbitrary endpoints and it gives WordPress this sugar.
The theme which is 2016.
I like it because it has a approach responsive design.
So as you can see on different screens, it actually looks really great.
We got responsive images, which is actually [ Applause ] thank you. A great team of people who worked on responsive images and validating a featured plugin approach and it was a really solid group of people that made this happen and it's a great step forward for the web.
When WordPress adopts modern technologies the Internet adopts modern technologies.
It allows you to specify a set of images instead of just one and lets the browser figure out which image to load.
This is good if you have something that has rich photography and you may have huge use for desk top but on a phone it would be smaller.
It's going to be great for bandwidth in some sense.
I don't know if you remember when we tried to do retina.
This allows us to move forward and provide retina images.
I think pretty soon we're going to come up with a solution in a plugin that allows sites to be fully retina out of the box. Another piece was I asked what people wanted to see, this was not high on my list but it was extremely high on the community's list.
It's very cool that we were able to shepherd in. Another feature which we call I guess what you do on the front end you see a YouTube embed.
If I have WordPress 4.4 and somebody pastes my URL, you get a nice preview of that post on the other blog.
It's also in bed code that makes it if you don't have a WordPress install, you can copy the HTML embed and paste it somewhere else and get the same rich preview.
Tuesday is our goal.
It's been a great experience.
I won't be too sad when it's done.
It's been intense.
But it was fun and now I know what it's like.
So thank you. [ Applause ]
Are you all excited about 4.4? We have chosen new victims, I mean leads for the next three releases that I would like to announce.
Version 4.5 is going to be led by Mike Schroder.
4.6 by Dominik Schilling, and 4.7 we'll just skip.
But I'm looking forward to leading a release again.
It will be my first since 3.8. [ Applause ] over the past year we've had 802 contributors, which is pretty amazing.
And as you might know in the past year, a few of the folks I wanted to highlight were some of the commiters that joined.
Thus far you know Konstantin, and they are now saying seven more people.
Michael, Rachel, Joe, Mike, Mel and Eric.
Stand up because I think you're all here. [ Applause ] We now all have commits.
Please don't break the Internet.
Or at least my site because I update the chunk every morning.
One other final development thing I think is cool I wanted to highlight, we've had a lot of growth in the attention to accessibility in the WordPress development process in particular.
And in the past year we've had almost double what we did before then.
I want to thank Andrea and Vion for working on this. [ Applause ] Some of you, by the way, follow my blog.
I did a call a couple of weeks ago asking what were the coolest things that you've seen with a REST API and got really incredible comments including this one.
I can not believe the gold mine that the WPAPI represents.
There is no better, simpler way to create a mobile stack, period.
He actually put an exclamation point.
It's the code equivalent of Graphene.
Who knows what Graphene is? It's going to safe the world, this single carbon thing, makes everything stronger.
I don't know if the REST API is Graphene, but maybe for 25% of the Internet.
I want to share with you 4 stories that were kind of cool.
The first comes actually from Microsoft, for is not known for its embrace of open source, but in the past several years has done some amazing support of open source.
They have this product called Microsoft dynamics AX.
You're probably wondering what that is.
It's an EOP solution that can increase your speed of doing business, work smarter with connected operations and drive business performance.
You're probably wondering what Microsoft dynamics AX is.
This is directly from their website, by the way.
I spent like half an hour on there.
I have no idea. [ Laughter ] EOP has never made sense I don't know.
But what is kind of cool is how they're using WordPress.
And this was driven by WebDevStudio.
So what's going on here, Microsoft XP, there's like wookie sites.
In 29 languages so people all over the world creating hundreds and hundreds of pages that go into what I can tell looks like a wookietype system.
And it goes to the REST API and talks to the dynamics and is able to display it.
Which I thought was interesting.
And some day I'll figure out how to use it. Another one that I understood a little better came from the nomad base.
When I signed up, I saw tons of people.
So basically nomad base is a tool for digital nomads or people who travel a lot.
And what it does it can pull in different social networks.
And show where people are all over the world.
And show where people are going.
So you can see like in this particular city, Costa Rica, okay.
I have some friends down there or hopefully tell if someone is in the same city which I thought was pretty cool.
So this is all react.
It's combined with Google maps.
Is it react? Map box and react.
Got it. Showing you basically entire JavaScript talking to WordPress on the back end.
When you register and store everything it's all going into the WordPress database. The final one is StoryCorps.
You might have heard of this from NPR.
They're pretty amazing, right? This is a good crowd. So StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose project is to honor and celebrate the lives of everyday Americans by linking to their stories.
And they have their NPR show, but they actually have a TED prize grant so they work with 10up.
This thing called StoryCorps.me.
It's an application, actually.
You can download it and interview someone StoryCorps style.
You've got to get your NPR voice going.
And record it.
And what it actually does is build the website from the iOS app use the REST API with something not even on the web.
It's this app that you see right there. This is actually really cool.
So it opens up this idea of StoryCorps to anyone who wants to contribute.
And around Thanksgiving this year, StoryCorps was featured on the home page and linked from the home page of Google saying grandparents have the best stories.
So for those who are wondering if they can scale, only high enough to be linked from the home page of Google. [ Applause ] So if you're bigger than Google, submit a patch.
Smaller than Google, you're okay. Actually, it was fun because every year when I put together State of the Word, which, by the way is the work of many people coming together, I just get up here and talk, looking at the old ones and things we talked about in prior years.
I have a throwback to old slides that you might recognize.
I'm talking about sort of the three stages of WordPress where the first couple of years of WordPress were really focused on being a blogging system and often WordPress is embedded in the i frame in part of the larger website.
Then WordPress evolved with things like pages, custom post types to be more of a full CMS.
So now all of a sudden everything is plugging into WordPress.
And finally what we started seeing in 2012 and has really hit its full stride this year as I hope some of these I showed demonstrate is WordPress as an application platform.
People using WordPress sometimes to build entire other things on top of.
We actually did a whole different better view of it.
Showing the different Lego blocks of how things plug in.
They're just as big and deep and complex as WordPress itself.
But they're built on WordPress taking advantage of all the things that WordPress provides.
Everything we do well. And more and more things are being built on top of this every single day, whether that's StoryCorps, Nomadbase, Microsoft dynamics.
But thus far, there hasn't been something that did WordPress itself, so there was no WordPress built on an API.
So they say the best way to predict the future is to create it.
So after talking about it for a few years, we decided Automattic released a project called Calypso.
Who's checked out Calypso so far? For the folks who haven't, Calypso is basically the idea that what would it look like if we designed the WordPress interface completely from scratch.
What would it do and what would it look like. The first thing we decided it would be in 100% JavaScript.
Instead of having PHP creating HTML, delivering pages talking to a database, we decided to go a complete JavaScript solution talking only to APIs.
It would be fully responsive.
You would see every single size the calypso database is functional and fluid and at the smallest size it becomes an actual template, almost like a road map for what we wanted native iOS and android apps to look like down to the pixels and design.
We thought it would be social.
Likes, stats, so they'll be all on one interface and they will work with both dot coms and dot org sites.
This is showing you never need to update a plugin again. So there are a few interesting things in this process.
First, and one that for any of you in the session, we have dozens of developers who became world class in JavaScript, and I wasn't sure that could happen.
Because for me it's one of the things that slow downed certain parts was a lack of participation of JavaScript developers.
Where you've probably noticed that many of the major features of WordPress over the past few years, going all the way back to media, the majority of code in these has been JavaScript, not PHP.
It's been a while that JavaScript has been the language moving WordPress forward.
This was just kind of deciding to go the other directions saying what would it take.
So this ended up being last week, last Monday, we released this both as desktop downloads so you can run this... because it only talks to the APIs, you can run it on the client side.
Created a Mac app for download, Windows and Linux coming soon, released it, it's at 50,000 downloads already, so a lot of people using it.
It was the work of over 140 people committing over 26,000 commits.
In about a year and a half.
So a ton of ton of work.
I understand why no one did this before. [Laugh]
It turns out, catching up to 14 years of wp-admin progress was really really hard.
Actually, it might have been a similar number of commits, just over a shorter time frame. But also learned a ton in terms of being able to change some of the interfaces, taking a completely new approach to architecture, how a client for WordPress could work, and just like I said learning JavaScript.
Now, it's a version 1.0.
Like WordPress 1.0, it's very, very early days.
Did anyone use WordPress 1 here in the room? We have a couple.
I feel like such an old man saying this, I look like an old man too, but...
WordPress 1.0 had no plugins.
No themes.
It was just kind of the basics.
And that's where something like Calypso is today.
And it's also important to note, contrary to some of the press that was talked about, is that PHP is not going away.[Laugh][Applause] But I believe quite strongly that JavaScript and API-driven interfaces are the future.
Not just of WordPress but of the web.
I believe this as much as I know barbecue is delicious. [Laugh]
Which is pretty darn strong.
This approach, when you decouple the data from the interface, when you take... we ended up chooing React, but many of the libraries are great, this sort of decoupled approach, it allows you to iterate a lot faster, crate interfaces that are essentially instant.
One very cool thing about Calypso is, out of the box, even on an uncached page it loads about 300 milliseconds faster than the wp-admin.
But when the cache is in effect, like when you're on a desktop, is actually is 14 times faster.
So many pages can render in 15 or 16 milliseconds. So this is like a 10x improvements on what's come before. And the interview before Nacin's talk.
What reverence that we have in the WordPress community for backwards compatibility. But one of the things is I think...
As people start to look at what's been done with Calypso on this approach is... and this is why we open sourced every single line of it, that perhaps there could be a future, especially as we started to get more API in WordPress.
Where there might be something on the other side that's working breaking backwards compatibility for. Also as we bring APIs in WordPress, I truely believe APIs are the key to the open web.
What I mean by this is if you look around... In some ways, we are the ??? of the open web. More and more, even one company is open in API, they put restrictions around it.
For example Uber. If you have an app, you can click an button to call an Uber car.
Which is kind of awesome. I love Uber, it's super handy. But in the terms of service for using this, they say you cannot show the buttons for any competitors there.
So you can't have a call Lyft button next to the call Uber button.
That's great for Uber, but what about the rest of us. We just want to ride, we want to get to some place.
Companies enforcing this sort of terms of service, even around when they have an API, are making the web a less open and integrated place.
Who is driven crazy when they click on an address on an iPhone and then opens Apple maps.
Right? [Laugh] Maps are the worst. The Google maps is amazing.
Why is that not the default? Look at what happened with Twitter, which many of us inclusing myself love.
Their APIs got more and more closed off and people that were built on them either had their businesses put out of it. The clients are token-limited.
Or essentially hit a wall where they found that what they were previously promised as a developer building on what seemed to be a open API was actually not.
And many ways this reminds me of the very early days of WordPress.
There was an amazing post. By a fellow named Mark Pilgrim. What it was is...
Again, this is WordPress history.
But at the time when WordPress started, it was very, very, very small.
In fact, when WordPress launched, the biggest criticism was that the world already had too many blogging systems.
It turned out they were wrong, but it looked that way.
And on the self-hosted space there's one called Movable Type that had like 95% market share.
All the cool kids used it. It was really good.
It is actually what I had my first blog on. Movable Type had the code when you downloaded it, it was Pearl and you got the source code but it was not actually open source. They put a restriction around it.
When they released their 3.0 version, they decided to change their license, so they switched their license to being something you could run lots of sites on they changed some of the terms.
There was a famous blog on the site whose site is gone.
Mark Pilgrim wrote something called freedom zero.
He said a lot of things.
One of which is the utility of online free software approaches zero in the long term, which I do believe.
He also said that it wasn't about people up in arms about the price.
In fact for him to upgrade to this version 3.0 he would have had to pay $535.
Freedom zero, of course, those of you familiar with the GPL is the freedom of user software for any purpose.
No restrictions on it.
He actually said it's not about price, it's about freedom, and he took his $535 and donated it to WordPress.
And said never again will I be fooled by something that seems kind of open, but actually isn't.
That seems like I can see the code and hack on it and it's open enough, but in reality it doesn't belong to me.
I don't have the freedoms given by the open source license.
The four freedoms that each of us have using WordPress.
This set off a firestorm.
And a renaissance of the open web as people started every company had these streaming open APIs and they all worked together. When WordPress adopts modern technologies, 25% of the web adopts modern technologies.
I think we can use this opening up, and this development especially switching to an APIdriven development to actually open up the web.
When you think about the open source looks like when the code being available isn't the most important thing.
When we're interacting with things on our watches, the devices are mobile and everything.
The API has become just as important as the code itself being open.
So this is something I would like everyone to consider and work on, because I think we have a very excited year ahead of us.
Perhaps training to make the weapon a more open place. There are a few things exciting coming this year that I wanted to highlight.
A lot of it happened the day before yesterday.
How did that guy get there? [ Applause ] Projects from EFF supported by many people including Facebook, Automattic, et cetera.
Is making it easy and free for everybody to have a certificate.
You probably have thought about this before if you have an e commerce store, but another advantage of mass adoption of SSL is it makes mass surveillance of the web a lot harder to do. [ Applause ] I think that over the next year, now that LetsEncrypt is 100% free, we can start to drive the web to be much more secure than it has in the past.
Another present we got this week is PHP 7 came out.
So much the success of WordPress is due to the technologies that we're built on, including PHP.
Like I said, PHP is not going away.
PHP 7 is the most significant update to PHP since WordPress started.
There has been some version a lot of it because they haven't provided compelling enough reasons to want to up great grade.
This changes all of that.
PHP 7 will be twice as fast for its predecessors.
So for free, a lot of the web is essentially going to double in speed.
Which is awesome.
Especially as we do more and more API costs.
So check this out.
WordPress works great with it.
Until fact, WordPress was one of the things that PHP developers targeted.
They do some heroic and amazing engineering to get this out.
It's co compatible and twice as fast.
One more round of applause for PHP. [ Applause ] Something important work on getting them all available in every language.
We showed the Spanish plugin directory.
You'll see the top two are translated but the bottom four are not.
So we only had the top two in the screen shot. There's been fewer than 100 plugins and themes.
If you don't count Australian English, Canadian English, as translations.
There's fewer than 100 themes and plugins that have been translated in more than a couple of languages.
So as we invest in the price and recruit more people to be at translate including many of you here in this audience are bilingual and there are many people watching us around the world.
The translation of WordPress is going to open it up to audiences all over the world.
We've seen this in small pockets where there's been a bilingual population like we've had in Japan or Brazil.
We can get ahead in many places.
Now that WordPress is fully responsible, better native client advantages.
I think there's incredible opportunity to actually if any of you speak another language or know anyone who does, bring them over.
We need as many people as possible.
Improving the tools there was well.
I heard there's about 24 million translations so far, but don't get scared by that number.
But basically it was a lot of strings that we need to get to.
And I think that we can get to a point by this time next year, where at least for the top 100 plugins and themes, they're fully translated.
I think again imagine using WordPress with no plugins.
That's the experience that people in other countries get. I talked about this before, but I really do believe that the future of interfaces in the web is JavaScript interfaces with PHP APIs.
This is going to be a better way to involve the existing plugins.
Scaffolding, plugins can register their own end points.
Think about it, especially the more advanced ones that have pretty complexed and advanced interfaces, you can essentially start to build calypso or a single paged apathy about taking all the screen refreshers and reloads and all the PHP files and turning that into something.
This is I think also going to set us up pretty well if we do end up going in a full JavaScript client API direction in the future, which could be pretty exciting, for plugins to be able to come in along for the ride.
Who's a plugin developer here? Whoa.
Give this some thought. Customization.
This is going to be extremely important.
If you look at funnels, if you look at what people fall off, customization is the single biggest opportunity for improving WordPress anywhere.
I believe as we start to become Google level in JavaScript, learning these things is scary and hard and it kind of sucks being a beginner again, but once you get over that hump, it becomes amazing.
Going from one to two things is very, very hard, but it gets easier the more you learn.
It expands your mind the way you think about programming.
And I hope that WordPress can actually reverse the trend of these APIs.
I think we have a chance to do this.
As WordPress starts to power more apps.
Things like StoryCorps.
StoryCorps gets an open API just kind of for free being out there and more and more can and we can do it with more platforms out there.
The API can be open with great terms of service, terms of use, and software.
So it's totals all the way down.
Open source all the way down. I'm going to give you one homework assignment in closing, which I've never done before.
And you might be able to predict it.
And it's to learn JavaScript, deeply. [ Applause ] I am going to commit to this myself.
You will see at least one patch from me in JavaScript by the time 4.7 comes out.
If I can do it, I'm a dumb CEO.
If I can learn JavaScript, every single one of you can, and I encourage everyone to learn it.
Because it is the future of the web.
Think how delicious barbecue is. There's amazing resources online too.
Check out things like code academy, there's coursera courses, meetups going on, lots of sessions going on.
Take every opportunity to really beef up your JavaScript chops because it's what's going to allow WordPress to fly for the next 13 years.
One of the things that's been amazing about WordPress is most software isn't this big or popular at 13 years old.
Typically there's a wave that happens, but because we've been able to adapt and survive the wave, this is the biggest WordCamp ever in history.
And it's going to be extremely important that those from the user point of view and from the developer point of view that we really become as good in JavaScript as well as any other project out there in the world. Have you all liked this WordCamp so far? [ Applause] Do you want to do it again? [ Applause ] My final announcement for today is we will be coming back to this very hall December 2nd through 4th.
So we're announcing the days.
Get on Expedia now. [ Applause ] Philadelphia has been amazing and I think it's really special that this 10th anniversary of WordCamp, this time we're making probably one of the biggest changes in history from a technological point of view, happens in the birthplace of this nation as well.
And in a city with the liberty bell and cheese steaks.
Kudos to the Philadelphia organizing team because you've really made all of us welcome.
And I'm looking forward to coming back next year. That's all I've got.
Thank you very much. [ Applause ] Now, we have a little bit of time for some questions and answers.
So we've got three mics.
This is kind of fun.
The town hall part.
A town hall in Philadelphia, wow.
By the way, everyone download the soundtrack if you can the music of Alexander Hamilton.
It's incredible.
It's essentially the story of Alexander Hamilton one of the founding fathers done like a hiphopper.
Everything rhymes.
It's like John Adams battling Hamilton and George Washington.
It's pretty cool.
Come up with some questions and just say your name and you can ask about anything.
We've got a lot going on this year.
Can you talk a little bit about the future of your big announcements this year?
So I think that ecommerce are going to be key parts of growing WordPress's market share as we go from 25% to 50% to 75%.
Because a lot of websites, both need this, they want to be able to sell things online.
And solutions out there.
I mean when Steve Jobs talked about iTunes for Windows it was the WordPress solutions are so much better. The road map is coming up where I'm going to be going down to Cape Town to talk about what's coming.
I focus with Automattic so far is trying to get as many resources as possible.
If I were to estimate something, the stuff I just talked about could be a pretty interesting direction.
So if you can imagine the interface which is API driven, that would be a really cool direction not just for you but for every large maybe there's a point in the future, it's so easy once you have these things.
So I can imagine a point where, you know, I'm filling up your CD changer.
They can be whatever there is.
And each of these could have purposebuilt interfaces.
This is the beauty of being API driven.
Is we don't have to squeeze everything in the exact same interface.
If you do real estate management or something like that, there might be something that doesn't look like the WordPress white page which is the best way to create that.
And we jump through a lot of hoops for that now.
One cool thing, check out the calypso, it's completely open source.
There's hundreds of open components there that are interface sort of chunks and modules that are completely reusable.
We can actually start to reuse those as actual code and share it.
So I'm pretty excited about going in that direction, what that could mean for WordPress as a whole.
Thank you. [ Applause ]
You said to learn JavaScript.
Which framework, if any? [ Laughter ]
So calypso is using the apps.
Learn JavaScript.
If you learn JavaScript, you'll be able to use it.
Don't worry too much about the framework.
Maybe start with the stuff that calypso did.
Have some fun with it.
Allow you to think about the JavaScript as a language.
So check it out.
So short answer.
My name is Douglas bell.
I'm from 2006, a long way since then.
I'm now from BC.
I now wanted to ask you mentioned calypso and Peter with the interface I'll be honest I still am used to and love the MP 6 WP admin.
Is there any anticipation of calypso replacing the admin in the near future or is that going to be two separate strategies?
The beautiful thing is they're separate right now and they can codevelop and coevolve.
There's 40 plugins, a good chunk of which modify the admin and we've done a lot of improvements through MP 6 to improve WP admin.
The cool thing about calypso it gives us a place.
I fully expect it to be calypso but we're able to do in 20 months what previously took kind of 13 years.
Would be to do two or three terms on some of these core interfaces.
Because it's faster and easier to develop this way.
And you don't need to worry about anything else.
So this gives us it's an incredible blessing.
We should take advantage of this, to reexamine some of the core assumptions.
If we became more usercentric.
What does it mean if perhaps in the future maybe the WordPress you download two things, like the clients app or your desk top or the service side app that gets installed.
Those talk to each other.
That's actually kind of interesting.
Perhaps we can look at differently what it means two WordPresses at once.
Perhaps have an activity stream.
It's pretty cool.
Do you foresee JavaScript replacing PHP as the template hierarchy of choice? Because right now I guess with JavaScript it wouldn't support child themes.
JavaScript totally different from java.
Don't buy a java book.
You'll go the wrong direction.
The way it kind of works is awesome.
There's no reason you should run away from that.
I think PHP is always going to be WordPress.
In fact it's kind of one of the best out there.
Now, people have started to do JavaScript themes.
This could be interesting.
One of the things I think is going to happen with the API is we'll see lots and lots of different technologies for a business reason or for integration reason or something like that, like the New York Times, they might not know what python or something else that's been talking to WordPress on the back end.
It's actually something we're worried about because right now that 25% number that we see pick up every month is from people using WordPress.
So something people should think about is perhaps maybe standardize some sort of header.
So even if your application doesn't run HTTP at all they can send an header that say hey, like a mullet.
Business in the front, party in the back.
But there's some WordPress back there that's doing cool stuff and we can start to track that.
WordPress is an amazing thing and some of the larger sites including WordPress.com, run WordPress on the front too.
But I think that one of the things we're doing, one of the philosophies of WordPress is always to work with where people want to do.
And we're hearing people saying they want to use different technologies for some of this frontend stuff for whatever reason and we want to support that.
That's the key to the open API.
PHP for themes people on the side doing more progressive stuff.
It's Martin.
With 4.4 we are for the first time really wielding the power of WordPress by paving the paths of responsive images and that's a really big deal.
At this conference we are seeing something that's pretty much muted to the WordPress community which is CART captioning, a sign language interpreter in front.
You can't see from the back, but there's actually someone signing right there.
And WordPress core is becoming exceptionally accessible.
Last year I brought up this issue of themes and accessibility.
At the time we had 18 themes in the library that were accessible.
Today we have 79 out of some thousands.
Woohoo.
Which is great, but there's a couple thousand left to go. Now, can we make decisions about responsive images which is great and we have the power to change the web, once we have responsive images, everyone has to do it too.
Can't we do the same with accessibility as well? [ Applause ]
Yes. [ Laughter ] I don't know if that was a question, but yes.
Let me make it into a question.
Can you tell everybody in this room, and our community, to when they learn JavaScript, add on that little extra accessibility part so we'll all start building everything accessible and tell the world that the web should be accessible and that's the WordPress way. [Cheers and applause]
I agree and I would say that that applause.
But I basically I'm worried about getting to a point where we think of accessibility like a checkbox.
Even though there are great guidelines and things like that.
I think that accessibility is a process.
And it's going to be driven sometimes not by every person, but by groups.
And most importantly by the people who need the technology communicating and us observing that and things like that. So I do think that we have presentations on accessibility at every single WordCamp, I think we're a little behind on the theme, because the accessibilities are much harder but I'm really excited about what this group has been able to do and the growing momentum.
I don't think that necessarily saying I want to be accessible moves things as much as the continuing education that we're doing through every single WordCamp through the guidelines, to the group.
So it's very hard in the state of the word saying how we have doubled accessibility in the past year. We also need to think about accessibility.
The 6.99 people who can't use WordPress.
I also think about accessibility in terms of languages, in terms of touch devices.
These are things that as we get there, that we right and expand to a much larger audience.
I encourage everyone to keep that in mind but learn JavaScript as well.
Thank you. [ Applause ]
Hi Matt, my name is Travis Taylor.
As a plugin author, is there anything that we need to do to prepare for the translation?
Commit.
One thing that's been pretty effective for some different plugins, reach out to the community and people using it.
Probably if we think about it, because most plugins are primarily English, if you have users in other countries, they probably are bilingual.
So if you can reach out with them and work with them to get them to submit translations or become moderators, it can increase it.
So use your platform the interface of the plugin, the blog, everything.
The plugin page, to try to bring as many people in the translation page as possible.
Thank you.
Hey, Matt.
My name is Alex.
So I have a question.
It's not technical, but it's kind of messing with me.
So a couple of years ago you came out and you did a talk in WordCamp San Diego, your hair was a little unruly, all over the place.
Like dude, when are you going to cut your hair and you gave us a good story about the story of your hair was and how you met the president and all that.
So your hair is looking a little bit lighter and I want to know what's going on with that and if you're stressed out, you can tell us about it.
But what's going on? [ Laughter ] That's all I got. [ Applause ]
My mom asks the same question.
She doesn't know what's going on either.
The job really ages you.
It's like being president.
One of the beautiful things is that a lot of the companies being built around WordPress, you can look like whatever you want.
You can be whatever you want.
I think it's beautiful that the inclusion and the feel of the WordPress community is now starting to be translated into dozens and dozens of the companies built on top of it and that I think is one of the things that are part of the idea behind WordPress and Automattic is to show companies can be built in a different way.
That there wasn't a company profiting at the expense of open source or that open source becomes unresponsive to the users as many projects kind of collapsing under their own weight.
And now if you look at any of those sponsors, all the companies in the WordPress ecosystem are evenly distributed, they're inclusive, a lot of them have crazy here.
I think it's awesome.
People at these companies, thank you very much for bringing the WordPress magic into that because I think we can change business just like we've changed the web. [ Applause ]
Nice shirt, by the way.
I got it from an awesome booth downstairs.
I work in California, and I have a very unique and prolific relationship with plugins and developers.
I do a lot of the plug interviews on dot org.
One of the things I've been hearing recently is that the constant stream of WordPress major releases has started to put a drain on resources.
And this is from people who are individuals who don't have the depth of resources that WordPress does when it comes to testing, data versions of their plugins or even just supporting people when they do a major upgrade.
And while I am an advocate for the rapid release cycles of WordPress, I do start to wonder if updating four times a year, which is what we will be doing this year, is perhaps a little bit too fast to allow our developers to keep up with a changing ecosystem to learn JavaScript, to learn the REST API, are we perhaps moving just a little too fast and maybe we should tone it down by one?
She's part of a team that reviews those 9,000 plugins that we added this year.
Thank you. [ Applause ]
I quite enjoy it.
I'm glad you do.
It's funny, because every time society starts moving faster, everyone thinks it's the end of society.
Like when trains were first there, people were like human bodies were not meant to go this fast.
Which is a reasonable think to think about.
In all past years bodies moved up to the speed of a horse and now we're taking it faster than that.
So what happens.
I think this is our train.
Three releases a year seems fast and is that too fast as we do these major updates, being more pro active by improving the plugins so that users can share the burden of some of the testing and perhaps some of the updating.
Making plugins less I don't think any plugin should be a oneperson shop.
It's best when there's many people involved.
If you look at everything that's super wrong with us, it's a team.
Part of the reason we do the core plugins process is to provide best practices how plugins can work together and people can work together.
So yeah, I think we can improve those tools, but I think we're probably going to get faster, not slower.
The four releases this year just worked out that way schedule wise.
Three is still our target in a given calendar year.
And we'll probably maintain that for how it is going forward with the current update technologies.
But you know, we're not that far.
A lot of hosts already enabled the flag that has WordPress major updates.
And we're getting to the point where we have half the sites on the web.
I think the other direction.
Not all plugins are able to do, the things the REST API being on half of the websites in the world, maybe we can get that higher.
That enables them to build so much more interesting that perhaps lower their support burden by the things we're putting in the WordPress core.
Things that make the entire ecosystem better.
It will probably get faster and not slower and I'm sorry to everyone who feels like it's too fast.
But it's worked so far.
Thank you.
I'm a core contributor from Japan.
That's further than the other places.
I have a question what's the easiest way to become a lead developer?
Easiest way to become a lead developer.
Don't be mad at me for saying this, but annoy the existing lead developer so much with your patches and contributions that they're just like Ryan was just like shut up already.
So get active.
We're opening up development quite a bit.
We're adding up to 13 committees this year, which is more than WordPress had, it's like the first five years in total.
We added in just this year.
So I think we're moving to a point where commit becomes as much an expression of trust.
So as you build up the trust working alongside track tickets and things like that with the existing developers, then that becomes something that levels up.
And I hope to see more and more folks doing that in the future.
Because what I think is a possibility for WordPress development to actually have more leads within it.
So people who really dive deep, Ella and Oz with WYSIWYG, really get deep in a particular section, just continue to improve it.
And that can have some really great sort of returns.
Also sometimes people are at Automattic are like how do I move up.
Another good thing is to do the thing that no one else wants to do.
So by doing the thing that no one wants to do, people are very happy to delegate to you and you can kind of show awesomeness with that thing.
So find the thing that really no other developer wants to do.
Thank you.
And I'm looking forward to seeing you on the stream in a couple of years. [ Applause ]
My name is Matt from San Diego.
A lot of Matts here today.
If you're a Matt, raise your hand.
Not bad.
It's hard to be a Matt in your shadow, honestly. [ Laughter ] I'm really excited about the new default 2016, it's really gorgeous.
And I got to contribute a little bit to it, mostly because it was on git.
So I would love to hear your insight on when WordPress development will all be on git. [ Applause ]
I think that I'll go old school for a moment.
There was a time where we switched from CBS and there were people who were unhappy with that and we had to redo a lot of the tools and everything like that.
I think that over the coming months if something happened with the contributor base, we're figuring out to integrate git and GitHub more into our flows.
So I would love for a point in the future, and I think we talked about this last year, that things could actually be part of the flow.
And to issue track.
So now but thing core plugins and things like 2016 is a cool way to do sort of a mini version of that and I love that it brings in new contributors like yourself.
Especially if they're named Matt.
But we do have stuff to figure out and we don't want to prematurely announce everything.
Keep an eye on the blogs for any official but know that it is something.
Calypso is also 100% on GitHub.
The future plugins are happening there.
If that's more your style or your speed, there's ways to contribute.
And hopefully more core in the future.
Thank you. [ Applause ]
My name is Scott, I'm from Phoenix. A lot of us filled out a survey, and I believe we're going to be told I wanted to check in on that and see the results of that survey.
Oh, the big survey?
The big survey.
The one that was in the header? Oh.
Well, usually I go over a lot of those results.
It was just too many numbers. [ Laughter ] Some highlights, maybe there will be a blog post on it.
It's kind of the trends that we've been talking about the past two years.
More and more people are using WordPress as a blog, app development is growing.
Think we had over 9,200 people who took the survey who said they make their living fulltime from WordPress which I think is like a 30% growth from last year.
So there was cool trends but it was all kind of the same things that happened in previous years so I didn't have too much of it because I try to switch it up for you all.
Thank you.
Blue tide, purple tide.
Thanks for asking.
I come from Japan.
Absolutely.
Now I can use that that would be WordCamp.org getting there first using the API?
I'm not sure I entirely understand.
We have especially now it's going to core, we've done things to boost the plugin.
You can have themes that rely on the REST API and we'll be deploying this stuff to WordPress.com, WordPress.org and WordCamp.
The only other thing that's coming that we can talk about because it's almost done, we're going to have WordPress.org being a provider.
So announcement.
So that will make some of our different apps connect to that easier.
Does that answer the question? Check out for Olaf coming to a WordPress.org near you.
I'm Jason from Vermont.
As WordPress goes beyond 25% and with the REST API, the amount of interest in things that we could do with WordPress grows as well.
Interestingly WordPress is going to be touching many more parts of the global economy in a real way.
There's a big potential ecosystem there.
Given that developing and maintaining captivating plugins is becoming very expensive.
And do you see any modifications to the dot org repo in regards to businesses making the ecosystem more available?
Not so much.
And what is your position on where free plugins can be.
I think it can be a bad experience, where everything you can click on are kind of gotchas.
They have a free light version but eventually they're just driving you to a paid version.
You need to be conscious about.
That perhaps doing something to promote paid plugins could perhaps help some of the plugins in the short term but I think it would be at the longterm detriment at the WordPress ecosystem to have those.
You can see sort of a parallel universe example in the Juno world where they went pretty hardcore to pay everything.
And the sort of dynamics ended up being corrosive.
People stopped working together as much, users felt like they were being nickelled and dimed for every single functionality.
Core development became a lot lighter because all of a sudden people contributing development wanted to put their thing they charged for.
I think the WordPress.org community and WordPress as a system is still going to be oriented towards a collaborative nature.
Like Wikipedia.
Because that's how we realize our mission.
And businesses figure out how to make money around that.
But it's not something that we want to super in a marketplace or something like on WordPress.org.
Thank you. [ Applause ]
The last couple.
We're returning out of time.
Hello.
A core component of WordPress, and last year you mentioned 5 for the future and give back 5% of things back to WordPress and here's what you've seen in response to that this past year and what you would like to see.
It's a good question.
I've seen almost every organization start to ramp up their contributions.
I've seen more people employed fulltime from agencies, web hosts, contribute back to WordPress.
So that's been good.
I don't know if have we reached 5% yet? Even Automattic is not at 5% yet.
So it's a process and for more examples I would like to get back on you.
Keep an eye on the blog because this is something I want to highlight a lot more.
And if you're in the audience or if you are watching online and you are doing something cool giving back to the group please reach out.
Because this is something I would like to have WordPress.org, also the page that allows people a letter of commitment and sign something that says this is what we're giving back and then we can highlight them.
Because I think that that ultimately creates a longterm sustainable model for the WordPress community.
And this will be the very last one.
So no pressure.
No pressure at all.
Given the release of PHP 7 and how you made mention of a willingness to sacrifice a bit of backwards compatibility if what's being gained is big enough, WordPress presently, the minimum requirement for PHP is 5.2 but it does recommend 5.5.
When can we expect a minimum requirement to be bumped up a bit, given the age of like, say, PHP 5.2 or similar versions?
The thing that we learned is that if we change our minimum requirement, the assumption is if we change it, it will drive more people to switch.
But what would actually happen is we would leave a lot of people behind.
If you look at it, a lot of folks what's really driving this is the web host, not necessarily people choosing to use these older versions of PHP.
As far as we know, all the major web hosts currently have programs under way, all the ones that are big in WordPress, to start to upgrade their PHPs.
It's probably not to 5.7 yet.
We're seeing significant swings and usage.
As we track that, maybe it's just the 5% or 3% on 5.2.
That's still millions of websites.
And one key, you'll see that whenever we can we try to do as much as possible to protect every website.
This is why I will sometimes back date security back to 3.7.
Because if we update to protect the sites.
We do.
And that's kind of our sense.
So when I think about backwards compatibility, it's not leaving behind millions of users because they have no control over a server, it's providing a new way, providing a new interface, a way of developing, that a next generation of applications to be built.
And to be honest, there's not a ton in there that is a significantly users experience.
Whereas the switch to JavaScript actually enables us to build interfaces which is sometimes 10 times as fast as what they're replacing.
So much more fluid.
So I think that is how we have to think about it.
And regardless of what decisions we make, and anything we do will be in the next couple of years, we have this incredible reverence for the user not wanting to break trust and thinking about the importance that backwards compatibility has allowed us to become the most 25% of the web, actually 58% of all CMS's in terms of market share.
As we bring these people on, we want to get to a place where we can tell them the latest and greatest and we can work with the host to find it.
So the things we're going to be doing is try to identify because we get these update things.
So we're going to be looking at who are what's the wall of shame for PHP and I'm reaching out privately and publicly in the future.
So we encourage these web posts to get the clients.
Because it's really in their hands to get as many of them on the latest versions as possible.
It won't be us dropping it to try to change things.
It won't be us dropping it because things have changed.
And that's where we can use our position of power is to work with the web hosts and things to show them what's great around the corner.
I think PHP will help this because it does have really cool performance improvements. And we are out of time.
I wanted to thank both you and everyone else for making this the coolest WordCamp I've ever been to.
Thank you. [ Applause ]