Matt Mullenweg: 2020 State of the Word

>> 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.