>> Howdy, everyone. My name is
Matt Mullenweg, and this is the
State of the Word. About 17
years ago I co-founded a project
known as WordPress alongside a
gentleman named Mike Little from
the United Kingdom. WordPress is
open source software for
creating the web. We like to say
it's both free and priceless at
the same time, but once a year
this State of the Word address
which is, of course, an homage
to the State of the Union that
the United States President
gives to Congress, is something
we usually do at our annual
WordCamp United States event.
This is a once a year event
where we bring folks from all
over the U.S. together to talk
about and create their future
versions of WordPress. Today, as
many things are happening this
year, we are doing it virtually,
so thank you so much for tuning
in. Whether you're a WordPress
pro or just kind of curious
about our community, we hope
that you will find lots to learn
and hopefully inspire you to
future action and involvement.
2020 was a very surprising year
for us, as I'm sure it was for
many. 2020 was a year of many
firsts. We had COVID-19, my
first global pandemic, resulting
in lockdown and isolation that
many of us have been dealing
with and continue to. It's
really worn on a lot of us as
the year has continued. It's
been a year of a lot of social
tensions. Finally had a year
where we had to learn how to
work together while being apart.
WordPress has always been
distributed. Being open source,
we've always had people all over
the world, but working together
in a distributive fashion during
a global pandemic is very, very
different from how we would
normally work together, and a
lot of contributors and
volunteers' ability to
contribute was impacted
negatively by the pandemic.
Despite all of that, though, we
shipped three really exciting
and amazing releases. Now,
before we get to the releases, I
do want to set the stage and
talk about Gutenberg because
you're going to hear that word a
lot, and if you don't know what
it means, you'll be very
confused. Gutenberg is the most
ambitious project we've
undertaken in the 17-year
history of WordPress.
Essentially, we're attempting to
redefine how people write on the
web, taking it from a
document-based model, like
printing pages, kind of
inherited from things like
Microsoft Word, and turning it
into Atomic Blocks. Basically,
the idea that instead of a page
which you're laying out, is
these rich blocks which can
have, you know, rich
functionality. They can be
embedded from other sites like a
YouTube embed or something. They
can have -- be laid out in
different types of arrangements.
They can be nested inside each
other, and using these blocks,
you can create really anything
you imagine. In 2015, from a
stage actually not at all like
this one because it was actually
a stage, I asked people in the
WordPress community to learn
JavaScript deeply, because at
the leading edge of the
WordPress community, it was
becoming quite clear that was
going to be the future of how
WordPress was going to develop.
In 2017, we publicly launched a
Gutenberg project. This
ambitious thing I just described
to you. And then at the end of
2018 with WordPress 5.0, the
Gutenberg Editor became the
default editor inside of
WordPress. Which is why
sometimes now we just call it
the WordPress Editor. Since
Gutenberg started until now,
there have been over 15,000
commits to the code base, and
it's had over 95 public
releases. That's one on average
every two weeks since it
started, so we've been able to
iterate and ship Gutenberg
faster than even the three times
a year that WordPress does. And
those public releases also allow
us to do lots of user testing,
so we're able to actually put
the working code in the hands of
users and the tens of thousands
of people who run the Gutenberg
beta plugin and get their
feedback, which has been really
fantastic. Now, Gutenberg is a
roadmap of being four different
phases. Now, let me remind you
what those phases are. The first
phase, which we are still in, is
creating the fundamental
building blocks of what you can
do with Gutenberg. So that's all
of the block launches you've
seen. It's also bringing all
those blocks to our mobile
editor, which is very exciting
because a lot of people don't
appreciate that Gutenberg, as
well as being quite fluent to
use on the web, also has native
implementations for both Android
and iOS that we use in our open
source WordPress apps. So, Phase
1's all about editing things
inside the post of the page.
Phase 2, which we're in right
now, is editing everything
outside of the post and page.
So, this is the idea --
sometimes we call FSE or Full
Site Editing that you can use
blocks to comprise the entirety
of your site, which really
allows us to reimagine what
themes and everything else are
going to be able to do. Phase 3,
which we haven't started yet, is
all about collaboration,
workflow and real-time
co-editing. So the best way to
think about this is you know
that awesome feature in Google
Docs when you can see who is
editing what? And a lot of
modern web apps have that. We're
going to build that in to just
Core WordPress. It will work in
a peer-to-peer way, probably
using, like, WebRTC and allow
when you edit something to see
the other people that are
editing. And Phase 4, which just
in the imagination stage right
now, but likely to be taken
under way pretty vigorously in
2022 is multilingual. So, this
is a native way to do inside of
WordPress, which today you need
a plugin to do, which is create
a multilingual website. So,
that's a quick summary of
Gutenberg, and now let's dive
into the WordPress releases. The
first of these releases is
WordPress 5.4, named in honor of
Nat Adderley, the amazing jazz
trumpeter. 5.4 had over 550
contributors, a beautiful new
welcome guide to make it easier
for new users to WordPress, to
get accustomed and learn their
way around. Cool design tools
around colors. A way to do
blocks for social icons natively
in Gutenberg, which means they
load really quickly and don't
have any cross-site tracking
JavaScript. We made it easy for
sites to create a privacy
policy, and then last but not
least, one of my favorite
features is we invested a lot in
performance and code
optimizations in this release.
We got a 14% increase in speed.
This sort of thing is always
important. We endeavor to
rewrite somewhere between, like,
5% to 15% of WordPress in every
major release, so that over the
long term, much like The Ship of
Theseus, we're constantly
replacing all the boards and,
you know, basically we get a new
WordPress every couple of years,
even though we're doing several
major releases per year. Next
step was WordPress 5.5, named
for the legendary vocalist Billy
Eckstine. In the midst of a
pandemic, we had our most
contributors ever, with over 800
folks who were part of that
release. 5.5 introduced one of
my favorite features of the
year, which is Block Patterns.
You know, as we talked about
with Gutenberg Blocks, when you
start thinking in blocks, you
can look at pretty much any
website on the web and see
almost like when Neo sees the
code behind the Matrix. You can
imagine how the buttons and
images and everything can become
a block. What block patterns do
is essentially give you, like, a
shortcut to creating those.
Common best practices of, like,
you, know, a testimonial with
three faces in quotes or, you
know, a hero image that then
scrolls. Or whatever it is,
people can create patterns to
make it easy for you to do this.
This is kind of like a shortcut
for making sites faster and
hopefully can supercharge how
fast you can create WordPress
sites. We did a lot of work on
cleaning up the UI, including
refining the iconography of
WordPress quite a bit. And then
another one of my favorite
features, and this has been a
crowd hit as well, is the
Distraction Free Editor, a mode
which can hide most of the
Chrome of WordPress and
Gutenberg and give you a very
clean and focused writing
environment, which I find really
fantastic for that generative
part of writing. When you just,
you know, close everything, turn
off all distractions and just
try to get as many words on the
page as possible before you go
into the more critical editing
phase of writing. When you are
adding things to your post or
pages using Gutenberg, you might
look for a block that doesn't
exist yet on your site, meaning
that no plugins or cores
supports it. Now WordPress can
transparently go out to
wordpress.org, see if there is a
block plugin which matches the
block that you're looking for,
and then in the background, if
you click "insert," it will
install the plugin, activate
it, and then on the fly sort of
insert that block which was just
-- the code was just added to
port for into your post or page.
This kind of seamless, on-demand
installation of essentially a
plugin, I think, is really,
really exciting and a good
modality that we want to follow
with WordPress in the future,
just making things as easy and
seamless as possible. And then,
finally, another one on the
thread of making things easy and
seamless is we added support for
inline image editing, which
means that without bouncing to
another editor, without moving
to another application or
anything else, you can make some
basic but really powerful edits
to the images in your posts just
right there in line in
Gutenberg. So, 5.5 was really,
again, one of the most Challenging times we've faced in
this year or in the history of
humanity. We were able to create
some really, really great
progress in both Gutenberg and
the Core WordPress experience.
All these improvements that
Sarah Gooding, journalist with
wptavern.com to say, "the 5.5
update is a testament to the
stability of WordPress during
uncertain times, as well its
unstoppable, distributed
contributor base, who continue
to get things done despite the
pandemic's unique challenges."
I was really proud of what the
team did with 5.5, but there was
more right around the door. We
topped the year with WordPress
5.6, named in honor of the
legendary Nina Simone. Over 600
contributors came together to
put together some really
exciting behind the scenes
features to WordPress, including
allowing you to opt into
automatic updates for Core. This
is the first step towards our
goal of allowing your WordPress
to essentially maintain itself,
where you can set it and forget
it, and it will get automatic,
in the background and
hassle-free updates to all your
plugins, themes and cores.
We're doing this for Core first,
and it's on be default for new
sites, but opt in for older
sites, but over time, we hope we
can make this robust enough to
just be on for everyone all the
time so you never have to worry
about updating your WordPress
ever again. Which, of course, is
the best way to stay safe and
secure, in addition to, you
know, the latest and greatest
features. We added support to
the Rest API for application
passwords, which is a more
secure way of getting other
applications access to your site
without reusing or sharing your
normal username and password. We
added support for PHP 8, which
also came out just earlier this
month. PHP 8, different than
Some more recent releases,
changes a ton of things, so both
us and the rest of the PHP
community are going to need to
do lots and lots of updates to
get things to be compatible, but
WordPress Core has
compatibility, and for sites
that are able to adopt PHP 8,
they'll get some pretty cool new
features from the language and
also some performance
improvements on many, many
sites. On the user-facing side
Of things, we took the
opportunity to Update Cover
Blocks.
Allowed you to convert several
different blocks into columns,
which is a fun feature, changed
how the button block worked.
Really start to utilize the
block patterns we added in 5.5,
culminating in a very exciting,
new default theme, 2021, which
I'll talk a little bit more
about in a bit. So, 2020 had a
lot of firsts, but there were
some really good firsts, too,
including a lot for the
WordPress community. One is our
first-ever virtual State of the
Word, which in a very meta
sense, you are experiencing
right now. It was our first time
to crack 39% of the top 10
million websites powered by
WordPress. We are first in this
stat, more than ten times the
number two in the market, and we
added just about 4% of -- to
that stat this year, so we went
from around 35 to 39, which is
the most we've ever added since
the stat started being tracked
in 2011. So, we grew faster this
year than we've grown in any
previous year, and I think
that's an incredible testament
to the really hard work of both
the WordPress Core Community on
wordpress.org and all the
amazing developers, agencies,
plugins, themes, the entire
WordPress ecosystem that really
makes WordPress work. We had a
lot of firsts with online events
and mentorship. In a year when
we all had to stay apart, you
transformed in-person events
into online gatherings and
shared your knowledge and
passion and enabled more
connections through cool events
like WP Block Talk, WP
Accessibility Day, Hallway
Hangouts, Code Streams, and tons
and tons of online meetups and
WordCamps. It's been very, very
exciting to me to see how the
WordPress community has adapted
to stay connected in this time.
By exploring these new ways to
educate, innovate and inspire,
we're lowering the barriers to
entry and removing the need to
travel in order to participate
in WordPress events. I've always
loved the WordPress events and
really wish I was in person with
all of you right now, but, also,
it's weighed on my mind that
these events are exclusionary to
those who, for whatever reason,
can't make it out on a weekday
or weekend to travel to where
they happen to be. In a first,
certainly for WordPress and
possibly for any major open
source project, WordPress 5.6's
release squad was entirely women
and nonbinary folks.
There were over 40 contributors
who led the release, and it
ended up being, as you saw, an
amazing one. That's part of why
we named it in honor of Nina
Simone. If you'd like to see
your face on that list of
WordPress Release Leads some
day, or just want to learn more
about some of the things we just
talked about, including
WordPress fundamentals, I would
love to take this opportunity to
introduce the new learn.wp.org
site, or learn.wordpress.org,
which is a new effort by the
community to create tutorials,
workshops and host discussion
groups entirely online. So,
again, leaning into this new
world that we're in. That seems
like we're going to connect a
lot more on the internet than we
did in person, and trying to
take the best of what we used to
do with our workshops, events,
everything like that, and bring
it to you online any day of the
week, any time of the day. So
much cool stuff going on here,
but what's really happening?
Like, as Paul Graham would say,
those with a cool facade --
Or too cool for school are
always proclaiming WordPress to
be dead and for there to be
something new replacing it. So
how in 2020 did we grow faster
than we ever have? From my
vantage point, I observed three
mega trends that I think
contributed to this. First is
the lockdown. It gave people
space and time to connect
online, but they were looking
for healthier spaces than just
doom scrolling on social. We
didn't need any more tolls on
our mental health. And blogging
about the things you're
passionate about or finding
blogs to read of people who are
into the same things that you
are into is really one of the
most rewarding parts of the
internet, and it's never been
Easier for a do it yourself
aspiring blogger to create and
connect with people online using
WordPress. Second, was the mega
boom in eCommerce. We've all
heard how eCommerce was pulled
forward many, many years.
There's an incredibly flexible
eCommerce plugin for WordPress
called WooCommerce. WooCommerce
facilitated over $20 billion
dollars in sales so far
this year, more than double the
year before. The intersection of
commerce and content is huge in
a growing space, and as people
who might be introduced to
selling things online through
maybe an ebay or an Amazon or a
proprietary sash service like
Shopify, as they reach a limit
of those services, they look for
the most flexible thing out
there, and the most flexible
thing out there on the internet
is almost always gonna be
WordPress. And third and
finally, there was incredible
economic uncertainty this year.
Lots of people lost their jobs.
Lots of people were looking to
supplement their income. This
drove an incredible amount of
entrepreneurship, so people who
were looking for people who knew
WordPress. And on the other side
of that, normal folks who knew
or learned WordPress found that
they had a lot to demand for
their work, so they were able to
supplement or replace their
income, essentially for folks
who have a do it for me
mentality, so someone who is
looking for someone else to
build a website. It's never been
a better time to learn and
invest in improving your
WordPress skills. Here are some
cool examples that illustrate
each of these three trends. For
blogging, I love the example of
Marginal Revolution, a blog
founded the same year as
WordPress in 2003 by two
professors at George Mason
University. I actually had the
good fortune to meet one of the
co-founders, Tyler Cowen, at an
obscure economics conference in
Dallas honoring Milton Friedman,
hosted by the Federal Reserve.
And he told me, actually, at
that point that the very best
thing you could do to improve
your writing was to write every
single day. Tyler and Alex have
followed that and grown their
blog to be a really rich
community of folks finding
connectivity through the
language of economics. That
community is actually so rich
that Marginal Revolution
University was born in 2012.
It's a learning site that houses
the largest online library of
free economics education videos.
Over 900 available to everyone.
On the eCommerce side of things,
you might have come across a
cool product named Tonal,
t-o-n-a-l, tonal.com, which is
like a Peloton of strength
training. A side effect of this
pandemic has been personal
health shifting to our homes.
Tonal anticipated the need for
virtual fitness coaches and uses
AI combined with a really
innovative mirror interface
where there is a screen embedded
in the mirror, and it has
pulleys that provide resistance
training, I think up to 200
pounds, and they can offer you a
superior workout when you're at
home. They don't disclose their
sales, but just a few months ago
in September, they raised $110
million funding round, which
should give you a hint of their
growth in scale. And one of the
investors was actually the
Warriors basketball player Steph
Curry, which you might think is
a good thing or a bad thing,
depending on what's your
favorite basketball team. He had
apparently been using it under a
pseudonym for a few years. He
just kind of bought it off the
website. They also disclosed
when they did that round that in
the past year, their revenue has
grown by 12X, 12 times, and this
is all built on WordPress and
WooCommerce, which is very
exciting, both for the scale and
showing that you can build a
really cool, new product and
service on top of Woo. Finally,
here's someone who was able to
learn and improve their
WordPress skills, connect with
lots of demand for those skills
and transform their life.
>> WordPress powers ventures
like Codable, a nexus that helps
you find a WordPress freelance
developer wherever you might be
in the world. Deborah Butler is
a Codable certified freelance
developer in Cape Town, South
Africa. Deborah's WordPress
skills supported NGOs and small
business responses to the COVID
crisis. Check out her work on
Children's Radio Foundation's
COVID-19 informational page.
These are just three examples of
how all of what we do, how we
express ourselves, how we live
and how we work has been moved
online, and when online is your
only option, WordPress is your
best option.
>> As I alluded to when we were
talking about 5.6, there is a
fantastic new default theme that
we call 2021, which comes out of
the box in a number of
fashionable pastels, but, of
course, you can customize it to
any color you like. You'll see
lots of cool block patterns in
use, and a neat new feature
which kind of crosses Core and
wordpress.org that Helen
Hou-Sand� helped drive. Was
improving the starter content
and the theme. So now theme
demos, instead of showing that
kind of cool but not always
useful boat can show all of
their starter content on the
theme. That's activated already
for all of the default themes
that have ever shipped with
WordPress, and will soon be
activated for the remainder of
themes on wordpress.org, so
you'll be able to see some great
demo content and decide which
theme could be the very best for
you. 2021 makes it easier than
ever to get your vision on to
your site and your site on to
the web. And now we'd like to
show you a sneak peek at some of
what's coming around the corner
with Gutenberg. We have Joen
showing the Site Editor Beta.
>> In this demo, I'd like to
walk you through the new
Gutenberg Site Editor. The Site
Editor allows you to edit the
theme templates beyond the
post's content. It introduces
several new blocks like the
Query Loop. When you make a
modification like adding a
featured image, it naturally
adds to every post in the query.
You can configure the layout and
make simple tweaks and it
propagates to all the posts. If
you prefer the featured image
above the titles, no problem.
All the familiar block and
tractions are available. While
the header is a separate
template part, it can be edited
seamlessly. Everything is a
block, navigation, the site
title, the tag line, making it
easy to edit anything and make
use of all the block tools
available. The block list view
shows all the different areas
like header and footer for quick
access. Since everything is
created with blocks, it's easy
to edit. The site editor engine
keeps track of all the
modifications, giving the user a
clear overview of what has been
modified. The site title, the
header area, et cetera. You can
open the 404 template and modify
it like any other content. With
the introduction of block
patterns to WordPress, themes
will be able to offer any number
of designs, providing a shortcut
to replicating demo sites or
swapping out aspects users may
not like with another that they
do. This is the culmination of
several ongoing projects to
improve and expand upon the
customization possibilities in
WordPress. Both templates and
regular pages can be edited into
the Site Editor. Small previews
can be seen when hovering the
different templates. The style
customization panel allows
making global changes like text,
link or background color. These
modifications can be quickly
checked against the different
pages in the site. You can
customize any template of the
site, such as the page template,
drag and drop the page title
into a cover block to use a
gradient for that page. The
possibilities are endless. We
can't wait to see what you build
with this.
>> As you can see, we've come a
long, long way with Gutenberg
from those first versions you
might have seen and tried out.
If you haven't given it a try
recently, I encourage you to
check out Gutenberg. By creating
this common framework that every
theme and plugin can build on,
we're reducing the balkanization
within WordPress from people who
are solving these problems lots
of different ways and providing
what I believe is the basis for
the next decade of WordPress'
growth. So we're about two years
into a ten-year project.
We've got good chunks of Phase 1
and Phase 2 of Gutenberg done,
that's the post and page editing
and then editing the entire
site. I'm excited to continue
these in 2021 and hopefully
start to get to Phases 3 and 4.
So if WordPress has ever helped
you or if WordPress has let you
help others, I invite you to
learn more about the WordPress
Project. It's a global community
of experts and amateurs and
enthusiasts that collaborate to
maintain, sustain and improve
the software, and we do it all
without locking you into a
walled garden of technology. I
often get asked how WordPress
has avoided the burnout or
tragedy of the commons or things
that commonly afflict other open
source projects, and I attribute
a lot of that success to kind of
our culture of generosity. We
have this program called Five
For the Future. Five For the
Future is the idea that whatever
time your WordPress is
supporting, whether that's a
business or many employees or
freelancing, they try to take 5%
of that and put it back into the
comments of volunteering for
something you're passionate
about in the WordPress
community. Something that makes
-- leaves the community a little
better than you found it. For
some companies, this might be
full-time folks that are
contributing. For some
individuals, that might be, you
know, 5% would be about four
hours a week -- or, sorry, two
hours a week.
So, think about what that 5%
means for you. It's kind of
metaphorical, means different
things to different people, and
if your organization is part of
it, please make sure to list
yourself and set a good example
by what you're doing on the Five
for The Future Page on
wordpress.org. So, with that, we
come to the end of our
first-ever virtual distributed
State of the Word. If you'd like
to follow me some
more, @photoMatt,
p-h-o-t-o-m-a-t-t, on Twitter,
Tumblr, Instagram. I have a
podcast at distributed.blog and
I blog myself at ma.tt and
matt.blog, all powered by
WordPress, of course. So, please
check it out. And without
further ado, we're gonna try to
head to another first, which is
a distributed Q & A. So,
questions and answers submitted
by you all over the past week or
so. And myself and others within
the WordPress community are
gonna do our very best to answer
these questions. So, let's dive in.