Matt Mullenweg's State of the Word 2014

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder, delivered the 9th State of the Word on the final WordCamp San Francisco on October 26, 2014.

Good morning, everybody!

Glad to see you all fully recovered from
the party last night.

A party so good it broke the plumbing.

I don't know what that means...

You guys are full of it. No, I'm kidding.

Just kidding!

I am very proud and honored and privileged to
be in front of you this morning

at the 9th WordCamp San Francisco.

(crowd cheering)

(applause)

Eleven years ago,

when WordPress started,
co-founded it with Mike Little,

no idea that it would ever be like this

and this is, I think, officially, the largest
WordCamp San Francisco we've ever had.

With the three ticket releases selling out
same day, each time.

So, you guys were good at
clicking that button really fast.

(laughter)

All over the world this year..

Oh! my name is
Matt Mullenweg by the way, it's nice to meet you.

(laughter)

All over the world this year

There are now going to be 81 WordCamps in 2014

More than one per week

It's funny because

the first WordCamp we intended
to be a template for others

That other people would sort of take it
BarCamp style and start making them

but in fact, the first year
there was just one WordCamp

and then it really started to pick up, with

the second one I believe
coming in Argentina.

San Francisco has always held a special
place in my heart though,

for those of your who are WordCamp organizers,
you'll appreciate this.

This is the post which started WordCamp.

It wasn't called WordCamp San Francisco,
it was just called WordCamp

because there was only one.

But basically a month before,

posted less than a month before,

about three and a half weeks before, I said

We don't have a venue, a schedule...

(laughter)

All we have is a date,

but we'll figure it out between now and then

and "BarCamp-style" was
code phrase for last minute,

and we did.

We came together in a
very cute venue in San Francisco

called the "Swedish American Music Hall".

That was it, you could see our A/V system
was very sophisticated then.

The wire like hanging down
going to a little projector

We kinda had to bring everything in,
including internet..

and you notice the fan in the corner there?

The A/C system was very sophisticated.

And the number one complaint though, was
not about the A/V, about the anything

certainly not about the barbeque,
it was very good,

it was about the chairs!

So I hope as you sit in these comfortable chairs,

that you appreciate it.

(laughter)

Over the years, it's really grown.

We've now been in Mission Bay for 7 years.

And there's been lots of sunglasses

lots more sunglasses

(laughter)

See that guy right there with sunglasses?

What is it about WordCamp San Francisco
and sunglasses?

We even had Google Glasses!

(laughter)

We've seen the rise and fall of different platforms

We've seen the growth and regression of
lead developer's hair...

(laughter)

(applause)

We've gathered around and ate barbeque

or sometimes salad
as these odd people are doing.

We've got Comic Sans on stage.

We even have had robots attend.

Luckily this year, we have Gary in person.

I think he's downstairs actually.
Hello Gary, downstairs.

But we got him in person.

But all in all, it's been a pretty incredible run.

7 years now at Mission Bay.

So, it's bittersweet, and it's with some sadness

that I tell you that this will be our LAST EVER

event here.

(silence)

We've outgrown it.

I mean, there was
not an empty seat in this whole house,

and I expect that downstairs is similarly full.

But I have something new to announce,

something we've been talking about on and
off for a few years

and much like the original WordCamp San Francisco

it doesn't entirely have a name,
a date, or a place yet.

Next year we're going to do a WordCamp..

let's call it US, just as a placeholder.

So, taking kind of what do in San Francisco

which has the first WordCamp,

the WordCamp before we put cities after the name

and sort of what was pioneered by WordCamp Europe,

try to do an event that brings people from all over the world together

and is a bit bigger.

Again, we're bursting at the seams here.

Literally I'm glad there's no fire inspectors here.

I think we can do something that has a
bit more room

for more presentations,

more people,

more exhibitors, more everything!

So, we're going to try this

uh, next year and we'll see how it goes.

And like it says,

name, location, and date to be determined.

One thing that we do every year is talk a little
about the survey.

And this year, we had over 33,000 responses

to the survey, which kind of blew me away.

Again we don't really promote it that much

we just put a link
at the top of WordPress.org.

One thing that won't be surprising
to many of you is that

is very international,
about two-thirds, about

actually three-quarters
of the survey responses

were from people outside the US.

And 2014 was actually a milestone year

for WordPress in this regard.

I think that we will look back

in the decades to come,

as 2014 the first year

that non-English downloads

surpassed English downloads

for the first time.

(applause)

This makes sense, for those of you who were at
Nacin's presentation yesterday.

He talked about how only 10% of the
world speaks English, and

only 5% of the world as their first language

so, over time,

I really hope that

the usage of WordPress mirrors that,

and that someday, when we talk about
internationalization, it won't just be about

English being translated to other countries

but figuring out how to take plugins

in Chinese

in Russian

in Japanese.

and translate them back
to English.

That's the plan at least.

One of the things we also talk about a lot
is WordPress usage as a CMS.

In fact, who here uses WordPress as a CMS?

Pretty much everyone.

What you might not know is that's been
declining every year.

But what's taken its place?

So it's kinda interesting to see this

because what has started to eat away

at people using WordPress
mostly as a CMS,

so they use as a CMS all the time,

or about half the time.

Blog has also been declining.

But people using it as an app framework

is starting to take a share away from that.

So, it is the early days still, but it
is starting to pick up,

and I'm going to talk about this more
a little bit later.

Other stat I was really excited about is
now a full quarter of the people

who answered the survey

make their full time living from WordPress.

That was 7,539 people.

(whistle)

Yeah right?

That represents easily over a billion dollars
in economic activity per year.

That's really amazing,

That's bigger than the employee counts

of many of the large internet giants.

So this really blew me away,

and something that I'm extremely proud of.

Also, sort of speaks to our
responsibility as a community

That there's now

you know,

something 7-8 times the size
of WordCamp San Francisco,

of people who pay their mortgages
and feed their families

and send their kids to school
with WordPress.

The good and the bad is
pretty much the same.

You guys love that it's easy, plugins,
and community.

You hate the plugins,

the themes, and the updates.

(laughter)

These are actually the last three years
of answers.

Plugins have gotten a little bit better.

But you still love community.

We asked how many sites people built

and actually the survey respondents alone
were responsible for

somewhere between half a million
and a million sites,

with only I think it was 6% saying that

they had only built one site
with WordPress.

So, WordPress is like
the Pringles of CMS's,

once you pop you just can't stop.

(laughter)

And also, what I thought was cool
was 91% of these sites,

took less than 200 hours to build.

So, a lot of these sites that are being
built are much easier

this isn't a platform where

you know,

it costs a hundred grand to install it

and then a hundred grand to upgrade it
three years later.

I mean, it's really something you can get out quickly

and stay up to date easily.

Now, those of you know, we also didn't

do a WordCamp in October last year.

We did it in July.

so, since the last WordCamp,

I didn't believe this when I first saw it either,

We've had 5 major releases of WordPress.

(applause)

Oscar, Basie, Parker, Smith, and Benny.

Five major releases, now granted, one was
the day after WordCamp.

So, kinda slipped in there,

but we have one more, coming in 4.1.

These releases had a ton of stuff, and

I didn't really appreciate it until I actually went back,
so I'd like to do that with you all.

We redid the revisions UI, in 3.6

We introduced a better post locking,

and the Twenty Thirteen Theme.

3.7 we had auto-updates,

which is one of the most significant
features we've introduced

in the past four or five years.

Made passwords better, and
improved global stuff.

3.8 which I actually personally led, was
chock full of things,

We had the Twenty Fourteen theme,

Colour Schemes for the first time,

a new theme browser,

the MP6 redesign,

and for the first time in history we made

WordPress's admin fully responsive.

So it worked on tablets and phones.

(applause)

I was really into that,

I was like hell or high water,
we're going to get this in.

3.9 we focused a lot on the WYSIWYG,

we got drag and drop images in there,

previews of the galleries,

and overall just allowing you
to edit images

a lot better.

And finally with 4.0, our most recent,

we redid the media library,

had rich embeds,

the new plugin browser,
which I'm a huge fan of,

and the improvements to the editor,

which made it, in my opinion,
much easier to write long posts.

I've actually been on a personal quest where

I had a 39-day streak,

I posted every single day,

I'm on new one now,

I had like 12 days,
yesterday I missed it so

So I'll start again tomorrow.

But, it's kinda neat.

And actually if you run Jetpack or
WordPress.com,

you now get a notification for how many days you

have a posting streak for.

Which is kind of a fun feature
if any of you

would like to try to beat my 39.

I saw Tony here somewhere, Tony is working

on it as well. He's doing a month of blogging.

(screen cuts out briefly)

There we go!

I was like aww, please
not another fire alarm.

(laughter)

You guys are just so hot.

Tore the building up.

Besides myself we had seven release leads.

And actually, a few of them are here in the room.

So, John, Aaron, Mark, Dion, Helen, Mike, Andrew

can you stand up?

There we go. We got Mark there, there's Aaron,

Oh, Helen right over there!

(applause)

Being a release lead is VERY difficult,

I'm sure all of these folks can attest.

And it's something that
we've even had people do twice

Andy on this list did it twice in this period.

We also have had a variety of new
contributors to WordPress

in a variety of ways.

When I say your name, please stand up if
you're here.

Rachel and Ryan have been working on
the API

Janneke on WYSIWYG,

Eric on media,

Mel on design,

Takashi is now designing TWO primary themes,

and then Weston on customizer,

and finally Kim on docs,

if you're all here please stand up.

Round of applause for y'all.

(crowd cheering)

Weston, I was liking your tweets
about the API too,

and the node stuff.

Also finally this year we added
5 new committers

Konstantin, Boone, Gary, Jeremy, and Aaron

They all here?

Put your hands in the air,

wave 'em like you just don't care..

WHOAAA!!!

How are you hiding down there?

(applause)

I can confirm that we're going to let
Gary out of the cage soon.

(laughter)

He's been in there for..

also, if you notice this,

We have about half looking left,

half looking right...

And then Andy is just straight on.

Staring right into your soul.

Kim is the only one
looking fully forward there.

So I think that means she's the new Andy.

But here, kinda everyone
is looking right at the camera.

So maybe there's something there,
that's the trick to getting commits.

(laughter)

Update your Gravatar.

All in all, we had 785 contributors
over those five releases.

(applause)

Including one that we bamboozled,

into leading another release.

John are you here?

Hey John.

(applause)

John will be leading release version 4.1,

which is actually coming out on December 10th.

So, thank you very much.

Other big thing over the past few years,

is that the usage of WordPress has grown a ton.

We now power over 23% of websites.

(applause)

To put that in perspective,

from 2013-2014, we grew the equivalent
of two Drupal market shares.

(laughter)

Activity across the board was up,

plugins were a huge boost,

We had over 6,400 added
for a total of 34,000 plugins in the repository.

In activity we reached 1 million commits,

Actually have brought you
the millionth commit here

Otto decided to make a Pluginception.

Thought that was a very clever name

We're going to have to talk about
that donate link though.

But this was the millionth commit
that we had, it was a fun joke.

I love our funny commits, like Helen's song
and things like that.

We get some good ones in there.

Themes also were huge

and this is a real testament
to the work of the Theme Review Team.

We had over 684 Themes added

Think about that, that's 2 a day

And in terms of theme commits,

we had over 10,000 commits

In fact, a full third of all the commits

to themes in history

happened within the last 12 months

So a round of applause for our
Theme Review Team and folks there

(Applause)

We didn't slack on the mobile apps either.

And especially on iOS

We went from 3 releases a year to 8 releases

in the past 12 months

for 16 total across Android and iOS

We focused a lot on these

We've improved the stability, the release cadance

And also we stopped spending so much time in some of the older platforms

There's no longer an official Nokia app

or Blackberry app

or Windows Phone app.

Sorry, both of the Windows Phone users.

(Audience Laughs)

Actually in our stats there's 30 people
still running the Nokia one

I don't know who those 30 people are, but...

This is a big deal.

Obviously, I don't think many people would argue

that there are going to be
more phones in the future

rather than fewer

In fact, this year another cool milestone,

there are now more mobile phones on Earth
than there are human beings

Beginning of the Singularity

The attention we've put into
mobile is very, very important

That, I think, will continue
to be a very strong theme

Also, finally, following up from last year.

You know, on stage, on this very stage last year

we announced developer.wordpress.org
with the code reference

I'm proud to say some time between
then and now it launched.

Wasn't that week like we hoped, but now

if you type in developer.wordpress.org
it'll redirect you to this

and you can now have a great code reference.

But y'all didn't come to know all that

you came to know what's coming next.

So here, actually, right now here at WordCamp

we have over 100 Meetup
and WordCamp organizers

Please stand up if you organize
a WordCamp or a Meetup.

Or ideally both

Look around this room.

(Audience applause)

Stay up, stay up, stay up.

Organizing a Meetup is one
of the hardest things to do

in terms of contributing to WordPress

Every single month you have
gotta come up with new stuff.

It is, I'm sure you can all attest to that, like it's not the easiest job in the World,

but I think it is one of the most impactful.

Because these monthly things that bring the community together

As we saw on the list, community
is one of the most important things

So I want to personally thank
each and every one of you

I really appreciate it.

(Audience applause)

Obviously, there's,
100 Meetup organizers here

Over 100 rather

They're representing 21 countries

Here at WordCamp San Francisco

International has been a really big theme
of both our previous releases

and what's coming.

Now, there's a lot of different ways to think about Internationalization.

Of course there's language,
but there's also things like

the Time Zones,

the date formats

and the settings

which right now are kinda a per-site thing

and you set them on install,
it's hard to change them later.

Are going to become a lot more personal

So, I think there will be a time in the future when

some of these might even be per user

And we have to tackle all the things that
Andy talked about in his presentation

around Internationalization.

About what to do if someone leaves a comment

in Japanese and then
I get the comment notification.

I should get that in English

So things like that are really important.

One of the things that
I am excited to announce is that

we have been in testing with language packs

for a few of our key plugins:
BBPress, BuddyPress, Akismet

We're going to be expanding that in early 2015.

So the promise of language packs,

those of you who are not familiar yet,

the idea that if you're a plugin or theme author

your theme or plugin can both be translated

and also have the description and everything
translated into lots of different languages

without you necessarily having
to speak those languages

or be a bottleneck for them,
is finally coming to fruition

We've been doing a ton of work

This is a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff.

But, I think it's going to be one of the most impactful for WordPress' growth

over the next decade

Which is also why I'm excited to finally announce

That we're going to have a fully localized Plugin and Theme directory

on all of the language subdomains and on December 10th

in WordPress 4.1 on the dashboard

(Audience applause)

What this means is that you'll be able
to go to your dashboard

Let's say you installed in Spanish

You'll be able to type whatever you're looking for

You'll be able to type "anti-spam" in Spanish.

I don't know how to say that.
Does anyone...Spanish?

"Anti-spamo?" I don't think so.

(Laughter)

We'll work on that one.

And you'll be able to get a list of all the plugins
that have that available.

And all the descriptions will be translated.

There will be local reviews,
there will be local support forums

Basically, everything that you've come to expect

from the English wordpress.org will be available

This is actually really fascinating to me,
because if you look at it

One of the amazing reasons that people adopt WordPress today

is the 34,000 Plugins and thousands of Themes

But these don't exist if English is not your primary language for the most part

There's for example, the Plugin Directory doesn't translate descriptions

So you have to -- maybe you can find it
and it'll include a language

so it'll work in your locale ---
but even the discovery process

is hugely prohibitive to people.

And if WordPress is gonna be a global and truly inclusive,

It means it's not just available
to people in English

It means that the other 95% of the world for whom
English is not their first language

Is just as important to have an amazing experience.

So, keep an eye out for that.

I think that it will.....

Well, it's kinda interesting now that we're having sort of these anchor WordCamps

You know there'll be one in Europe

One in America

I imagine there'll be ones in Asia
and Africa in the future.

Sort of pancontinental

and we'll have these 3 or 4 events per year.

and each one I could see kind of having its own thing.

Meaning, like it's own set of contributors,

own set of core committers,

own set of plugin developers

We have the potential

doing things from the web

for WordPress to be a truly global experience.

Related to all the work we've been doing on

plugins and themes,

I know we have a few plugin and theme authors

here in the audience.

We're finally going to be adding

better stats for y'all.

(applause)

(Ton Ton Ton......)

Maybe not!

Ok there it is!

It's like, maybe we're not?!

This is actually being actively worked on right now.

We've been doing a cleanup
of our entire stats system

And actually we've been finding some

pretty interesting data about it.

Which brings us to what I'd like to highlight

as one of the biggest challenges
in the WordPress world.

Today and going forward.

This is a pie chart

of the different versions of WordPress.

And as you can see,

Only about 25% is on our latest release 4.0.

Now I should say that this is infinitely better than it was before.

It used to be we basically only get new installs

in a very small percentage of all installs upgrading.

People would basically do one click

and be stuck on it forever.

But still, as you can see there's

I mean, there's a full third that still doesn't have the full mp6 redesign yet.

I feel bad for those people!

(laughter)

So working on this

is one of the most important things

we're gonna be able to do.

And actually, we have a lot of partners

and sponsors to WordCamp San Francisco here

that we're gonna be working
with to help us with this

and that's the web post.

As you know, a lot of major web posts

have introduced auto major version upgrades

So meaning that, you know,

you can be on the beach in Jamaica

and even if major release of WordPress comes out,

you will be upgraded when you get back.

This is really, really important 'cos when you think about it,

even the whole concept of the version numbers that we have is a little bit archaic

It kinda goes back to the days
of Shrink Wrap Software.

When you login to Facebook or Twitter,

or for that matter,

when you login to, you know, Squarespace

or Wiggio or Wix,

you don't think what version you're using.

Actually I take that back

With Squarespace you do,

but with others you don't!

(laughter)

They don't even really talk about versions

You just get that day's version.

You get October 26th's version of whatever software you're using.

And that is our goal for WordPress as well.

You know, as you saw updates as one of the things
that people weren't happy about

Our vision is to have kinda like Chrome.

You know, where you just login

and just in the background it silently

All updated, all your plugins work,

everything works, nothing breaks.

And the host have been the pioneers of this.

So already I know for a fact

GoDaddy, Bluehost and a few others

have been autoupgrading people.

We're gonna start another way of better stats

Start working with lists with these folks.

And so here are the sites

that are on older versions

Can you use your support resources?

Or your direct contact you have over these customers?

to help them get on with the latest and greatest

Benefits everyone.

Benefits WordPress.

because they're seeing all the new cool stuff

we've been working on.

Even if it's the platform

because they're not comparing

a 4-year old version of WordPress

to today's version of Squarespace.

Benefits the host because these old versions

are ticking time bombs.

You know,

You don't update software on the internet

pretty soon something will happen to it.

It will get hacked,

the plugin will get out of date, something like that.

And so these hosts being on the
latest and greatest versions

is that, I think in the long term lower their support

and things overall

because... Does anyone know
who's ever had a WordPress site hacked here?

Yeah.

It's a pain, isn't it?

And in fact, to be honest,

if you're not pretty savvy,

you're not gonna be able to clean it up
in way you won't get reinfected.

I mean, these guys... Hackers they sneak in our...

They sneak in, you know,

backdoors, they put things in hidden files,

they're very sneaky about
how they put things there,

so you might think that you've updated
the major sites that curing it.

Still... there's a problem there.

You really need systems level access,

and maybe a little command line
to do that right.

The other thing that's been
pretty notable about WordPress in the past

is our relationship with PHP.

Some might call it controversial at times,

most notably we've decided not there was a go PHP thing that happened.

And we said that

there's so many of our users who are on
older versions of PHP

and we're gonna keep supporting those.

And in fact, to this day we support
back to the 5.2?

And core WordPress.

And when we look at the stats,

we still have millions of sites

on these older versions of PHP.

But....

and thinking what can we do with the WordPress...

with the broader PHP community

to help make the situation better.

Cos I'm sure just like us not being happy
about people being on older versions,

they aren't happy about it either.

We're gonna start using our relationship with hosts

to help get everyone
on PHP 5.5 or above.

(applause)

The update system for WordPress

since we're PHP and MySQL versions using

so we're able to use this to...

Again

Hosts with lists

Maybe they don't even remember
that there's a server some place

so things like that.

Actually I have a dreamhost account

that was still on PHP 5.2

for one of my installs.

These sorts of things, you know,

people just forget about it or they don't notice

or something doesn't get upgraded

or you locked a version of PHP because

you use the setting in the control panel
that you forgot about.

Lost of people who...

would be perfectly happy

I mean, WordPress works perfectly
as you see with these new versions

And also there's lots of performance increase

in the last few major releases of PHP.

I think we can have a big impact there.

I mean, certainly on 23% of the web

we can start to work...

our partners and the folks who are part of the WordPress ecosystem

to make this better.

So, I'm excited about this

and hopefully it will bring us a bit closer
to the broader PHP world.

that I know some of you aren't.

Well the other cool things coming this year

is 2015 theme.

Have you all seen this yet?

It is gorgeous.

A little contrast, there's actually 2 colors on there.

This isn't the best screen for showing these things

Well the exciting thing about
2015 is that it's actually

our 5th year in a row

releasing a new default theme every year.

Which is the number of years

that Kubrick was in core.

(laughter)

We said we're gonna fix that,

we did!

(laughter)

And I think the new default theme program

is actually pretty successful.

Again, our guidelines,

our theme for everyone

is not to create someone that's
a perfect teaching theme,

or perfect base theme,

There's things like underscores for that.

But to create something that
shows off what WordPress can do

and it's different from the year before.

So this year we're focusing almost on

a book-like typography

and a book-like feel.

So it has a...

you know, kind of a left menu,

you can have a big hire navigation there.

Who knows?

We might even use it for a
WordPress book that we put out there.

One of the other things that's been
kinda interesting in the past

probably a year or so is the experiments that
WordPress has been doing with Git.

in GitHub.

In fact, moving some things like all of the mobile apps

are now developed entirely on GitHub.

Who here uses GitHub by the way?

Well that's all the hands.

Little thing to announce (not a huge thing)

but we're gonna start doing something experimental.

which is looking at the Pull Requests

that come to the official WordPress repository

on Github

and try to integrate this with our normal workflows.

So now, as of today

you'll be able to submit a Pull Request

to WordPress repository

and that will not go into a blackhole.

(applause)

Today plus a few days.

(laughter)

It doesn't say by the end of it
either so I got a little excited.

Well these next things I'm really excited about

Sorry.

You might remember last year I was on stage
I talked about mp6.

And how one of the things that made the
mp6 program successful.

And in fact, we try to use it as a model for
other plugin 1st release development we've been doing

Was that the team very tightly communicated.

And we used Skype to do that.

Skype was fantastic, 'cos of a lot of the team dev,

a fast asynchronous channel

with which they could kind of
keep up with each other

but a ton of downsides too.

Which I thought about, but are still true.

Skype kinda sucks on mole.

To be perfectly honest.

And this was before the latest redesign they did

that didn't make anything better.

(laughter)

It wasn't archived or

publicly accessible

Like the log wasn't really searchable

They just exist on a few people's hard drives and then they might be gone forever.

So a decade from now

and Siobhan has been working on the next version of the WordPress book

We're gonna have trouble finding that stuff.

That's ok, I'll save them for you.

Actually we have a problem with IRC too.

but one of the things I'm excited to announce

and THIS IS happening as of today.

Is that for the first time

we're gonna experiment in 11 years.

We're not using IRC as our
primary communication method.

We're gonna try a little tool from a company here in San Francisco called Slack.

(applause)

Some of you might have not used Slack before

This is what it looks like.

In fact, it supports color schemes

I've got an mp6-looking colors scheme on here.

Comes in kind of a funny-looking
eggplant, by default.

But how Slack works is that you can have channels

prefix with hashes kinda like IRC

As of these will all be our channels.

So kind of a....

everyone that's part of the WordPress
community will come in there

so instead of having to do like, Wordpress-dev

we can just do

the things on the left.

Sorry, we have a naming scheme

I didn't want to mess it up
by saying anything wrong.

Teams can now use this to
communicate with each other

and this will all be searchable

and part of the normal thing.

We're doing integrations.

You can see wordpress.org commits
are coming to the meta channel.

Also things like

if a ticket is mentioned in Slack,

we'll link that from track.

So there'll be integration between the 2

we'll basically have like a 2-way communication mechanism going between them.

This will be available to every single user
of wordpress.org

Normally, Slack you have to be part of a company

or have a company email address.

We've made it so every single person
will be able to sign up.

And of my favorite things about it

is that it works on every device.

Yes, I'm excited about that too.

You'll be able to keep up with Wordpress chats

no matter where you are in the world.

Has anyone ever tried to run IRC on their phone?

(laughter)

The core contributors!

You had to, right?

So, starting right now, wait till after the talk

but you can go to chat.wordpress.org

And it'll redirect you to a page

to toss you a little bit about the benefits

We've decided to do this first non-IRC
experiment with Slack

As opposed to any of the
other number systems out there.

And so the things we're excited about using.

Actually, Automattic's been using Slack

entirely for a few months

and it's been transformative for the company.

(inaudible)

have the pings,

the mobile apps,

the channels,

the search is actually a killer,

it includes animated gifs

(laughter)

(applause)

We need the animated gif of me going...
(moving left to right)

(laughter)

Turn off the gifs?

We'll turn that back off.

(laughter)

We should turn off giphy, though.

It also has a number of commands.

One of which is the giphy command

So you can type giphy and then search string

and it will pull in whatever comes,
"I'm feeling lucky for gifs"

(laughter)

Which aren't always community-appropriate.

So I agree we shouldn't have giphy.

But the ability to have curated

the spoke chosen gifs,
I think is important.

(laughter)

So check this out

please, you know,
when you go back to Contributor Day

or things like that, login.

I think that you'll be pleasantly surprised

you can use it on the web,
so we're not just on a web browser

they have a desktop client
that you can download that runs it locally.

There's a beta coming out
that allows you to be signed in to multiple teams

And again, run it on your phone.

And it doesn't kill your battery.

Hope to see all of you on Slack very soon.

(applause)

I'm glad you're all so happy,
I'm drinking water.

(laughter)

This "say to the word" brought to you by hint.

(laughter)

Just kidding.

Although they would be great to have a sponsor.

One of the other things I ended up talking about
a few weeks ago at WordCamp Europe,

that became a little bit surprising and controversial
is this "Five for the Future" idea.

Some of you might have seen the blog post.

But basically, the gist of it is,

that for WordPress to remain a
sustainable enterprise

a sustainable thing going forward,

5, 10, 20 years from now

I've no doubt that the project will survive.

You can still go download PhpNuke.

Open Source projects never go away.

Only one person knew what PhpNuke was.

(laughter)

But very few thrive even as long as the 11 years
that WordPress has already.

and one of the reasons that we have been able to, I think will be the key to the future.

Is that all the participants in the ecosystem
put a little bit back into it.

So let's talk about this "Five for the Future" thing

and basically saying that,
it can be totally optional,

we're not coercing anyone,
we're not guilting anyone

we're not saying that anyone has to do anything

but for organizations who feel like
they benefit from the growth of WordPress,

or sort of, they're part of the ecosystem
in a way that they grow alongside it

to take 5% of the WordPress resources,
whatever they sort of normally spend on that

and put it towards core.

Or community, or meetups, or organizing,
or WordCamps, or things like that

Organizing WordCamps.

This has been pretty exciting.

And actually, already 2 companies have publicly announced Gravity,

and one I think I wouldn't see on stage, wpmudev

have announced they're gonna start putting
5% of their resources towards core.

And also today I am proud to announce that Automattic now has 14 people

which is 5% working full-time on
WordPress core and community.

(applause)

This slide is too small

There are probably other companies
already doing this

that we haven't done on the
blog post yet, or not on this list.

And I hope that many, many more
will consider going forward.

You can ask any of the folks
who currently contribute a lot to WordPress

It's one of those things that not just in karma, but you get back so much more than you put in.

It's about also the members of the ecosystem, not just growing their slice of the pie, but growing the entire pie.

And this is what is gonna take us
from 23% to 30%, 40%

or maybe even someday,
powering the majority of the internet.

We're not gonna do that with one company.

We're not gonna do that
even with a handful of companies.

We're gonna do it like the internet works.

With hundreds of thousands of people
coordinating all over the world.

So if you are a part of an organization, that's already doing this, let me know.

And I'll put you in the blog post
when we talk about this.

And if you wanna do it,
I'm happy to talk to y'all

about the ups and downs,
pluses and minuses

and things to think about.

Again, if you're a freelancer you can do this.

5% would be 2 hours a week.

Maybe that's the time it
takes to organize a meetup.

And the meetup people
are looking at me like, "nope."

(laughter)

10 hours a week?

Well you can also think about...
I mean, there's 168 hours in a week

So 5% is close to 8.5? 9 hours?

(laughter)

Ok, let's say 40 in 2 hours...

(laughter)

There's lots of ways you can contribute.

In fact, if you'd like to know how to contribute more,

there is a booth downstairs where you can go
to all throughout the day.

You can visit make.wordpress.org online

for those of you watching from the live streams.

Yeah, I forgot to tell you that.

There's hundreds of people tuned into live streams
including I think, 15 or 20

other locations with rooms smaller than this

but like this, but they are doing viewing parties.

So, say hello to the world everyone!

(crowd cheering)

But there's lots and lots of ways to contribute.

And no matter what your skill is,

There is something that you could do
that would be helpful.

Actually, my path and this whole thing was that,

I discovered a platform called b2, which was the code that WordPress was based on,

and sort of hacking around with it.

And I would ask questions in the forums.

And one of the days when I was going back
to asking another question in the forum,

I saw something that I already asked

someone else was asking.

So I figured I'd answer it.

Because then maybe people
would help me more, or something.

That started a long, downhill path

to being here today.

But that thrill of contributing

rush of helping other people

is really one of the most rewarding experiences
I've had in my entire life.

And one that is still what I ___ around my life today.

So we have a lot of contributors.

Who's a WordPress contributor here?

A contributor, by the way, is a title
that no one can give you except yourself.

That means, that you're doing something that you feel like is having an altruistic impact

on the WordPress community.

So I hope that by this time next year,

a lot more of you all have decided to give yourselves that title.

Because you're welcome.

It's all one big happy family

and we have cookies and barbeque.

(laughter)

(applause)

It's been a lot of talk the
last few days with the rest API

Who's excited about this?

(crowd cheering)

As you know, there's been a project on wpapi.org

Talked about Brian and Rachel about it already,

but many other people involved.

There's been very exciting work around
creating a Json rest style API

for a lot of WordPress.

At the same time on wordpress.com,

there's been a REST API
that's been doing a ton of adoption

in terms of different partners which are integrating with WordPress for the first time.

From youtube to path.

New internet services, which previously
were so scared of our

xmr, PC stuff

and millions of inpoints and also
to different things that they just

wouldn't even do WordPress integrations

even though we're by far the largest place that facebook likes aren't embedded,

and everything else pretty much like
every widget on the web.

You look at the stats and WordPress is one user.

Or they get the most distribution at WordPress.

So one of the other things that I want to point out is very important for us to work on this year.

Is that two robots need to fall in love.

(laughter)

In the Version 2 of both these APIs,

(hopefully Version 2)

We need to bring this together.

There's some things that on the hosted side

we'd figured out around sort of multi-plugins things

or authentication, or around the way certain APIs work when you try to recreate all WP Admin

the things that you can do and not do.

Pagination.

That, I think, are really important.

Things that WP API has been
very comprehensive in doing

including marrying a lot of the things that been done before in terms of internal APIs

Now, once we have this REST APIs,

There's been a few talks on it already, but think of it almost like, WordPress can become a kernel.

And that you can interface with it
in JavaScript, to node,

and python, and almost anything
with easy client libraries.

So, the WordPress engine, is app platform usage that we've been talking about for a few years now.

And it's rapidly picking up.

My feeling is that when we get these REST APIs, it's important to build as many things as possible on the plugin phase.

And once we get in the core,

there'll be like an explosion

that things built on top of them.

Can you even imagine a world where the way that we think about themes settings screens

or how plugins work, or how services work

could be totally different.

Rather than trying to shoehorn a lot of things in the custom post types, or something.

Maybe a plugin, actually, just interfaces
using these APIs to your different WordPresses.

And gives you a completely

Posting interface.

Like some of the things that maybe Happy Tables or other folks have been trying.

This would be so much more possible

and I think that this is finally the time

I haven't gotten the question recently but I get it sometimes where

when are you gonna allow theming for WP admin?
Or things like that.

Which is tough for a bad idea
for a number of reasons.

But maybe what we need
isn't theming for all of WP admin.

Maybe what we need is a way for
a thousand different WP admins bloom.

That anyone in the world can create a sort of, version of the interface and fork each other and

interact with each other.

And that will be able to more rapidly iterate

on what it means to be WordPress.

I've talked for about ____ship.

You guys know about it?

It's the idea that there's a ____ ship, and on its journey, every single board was replaced.

So what point is _____ship?

What is the thing that makes us sort of

semi-logic fashion still the thing that we know as this thing we call ______ ship.

So what's the thing that makes WordPress, WordPress?

Besides you all.

Is it the interface?
The php code?

Is it the the database schema?

I think that we can obstruct
a lot of these things away

and like I said,

______
when things build on top of it.

And finally one of the things I wanna emphasize most is the continuing importance of Responsive & Mobile.

Anyone seen this picture before?

It's actually pretty cool.

So the one at the top, this is where
they're about to announce the new pope.

And you see at once at the top there one that looks like a razor at the bottom right.

And one weird girl turning around.

(laughter)

And then the future, you even have
someone taking a picture on the iPad.

Who does that?

(laughter)

It is just a sea of phones.

Like I said, there are now more phones
on the planet than human beings.

They're winning!

(laughter)

We need to, you know, cater to them,
or they're just gonna replace us.

My phone already has a better memory and everything, better looking screen

More connected.

It's amazing both how fundamentally the idea
that we can always be connected.

That we have these sensors
that are with us all the time.

And then also, how these have been
getting bigger and bigger.

When the very first iPhone came out,

The resolution of the screen on the first iPhone would take up about the size of my thumb

on the 6Plus.

The capacity of these to do more and more things and the richer interfaces

is better than ever.

Who was in Luke's talk yesterday?

We talked not just about being
Responsive in terms of the screen size

But about how far it is from your face?

There's ways we can think about this.

That I think, WordPress can
actually be the lead on.

If you look in the mobile world,
it's all about apps.

Everything's an app.

The mobile web still gets a ton of traffic and in fact, all the stats we see in the mobile web has more traffic than ever.

But applications aren't really being built in it.

This is one area where WordPress
cannot just ride the wave of.

But perhaps be the lead.

For the next generation
of what comes in mobile.

And Android, and iOS 8.

The web capabilities of these devices
are getting better and better.

Android even puts tabs on the browser at equal footing with apps on the task switcher.

This is incredible.

Also the announcement for Android L
showed 60 frames per second animation.

In web views.

You're now able to do things as the
power of these gets better and better

I think the web comes back.

As the dominant computing platform.

Just like, maybe, in the Windows 3.1 days

One connectivity and power and
everything we all used apps.

We all use things like Office.

And they got surplanned by the web.

As computers became more and more powerful.

I think that the same thing is
gonna happen on phones.

And that WordPress both as an application platform and as an app itself

is forced, perhaps to lead that.

So I will encourage all of you,
when you build a plugin,

when you make a theme,
test it on as many devices as possible.

Put it on the tablet,
put it on the phone,

Put it on the old phone.

Don't worry about that razor phone.

(laughter)

It's gone.

Don't worry about Blackberry.

But test these things and think about it.

This is one of the ways that again,
we can be truly global.

A lot of people forget.

Who knows what the
Mission of WordPress is?

What is it?

There you go.

A lot of people forget this.

I did a 7-country, 10-city tour in Asia earlier.

And there's only one or few people
in the audience that knew.

These audiences are 200 or 300 people.

They knew that the mission of WordPress
was Democratize Publishing.

That means everyone in every language.

WordPress is a community.

This is actually the gravatars of
the 785 contributors.

It's a community that regardless of
age, religion, creed,

the longest GPL

gender, everything.

People can be part of it.
Can be part of this family.

Can be part of this thing that we're building.

And the same regard, we want our software, the things that we built to be accessible to everyone.

Be that from accessibility point of view, a device point of view, or language point of view, everything.

This is the vision of WordPress.
It's why we're all here in this room today.

And actually, this year, more than any year in the 11-year history, I'm very excited

on what we're working with all y'all.

Thank you very much!
I appreciate it.

(applause)