Hey, it's Matt from the WP minute different kind of episode today. I'm sharing a segment. Of Josepha, Haden trompo, C's recent, presentation or meeting, at the midterm goals for WordPress. That she joined us on the, media Corp team, which is, an initiative@wordpress.org. if you're a media outlet or considering yourself a WordPress media outlet, you can knock on the door of the media Corp team. And I guess apply question mark. I'm not really sure actually. I believe it's open.
I just, I just don't know what the process is for, for joining that team. On a more official level. But I found it a fascinating update. There's a bunch of write-ups that I think I'll do from this interview. I just wanted to get it out there for those who are like really deeply interested in this stuff. And you can hear. from Josepha directly in this recording, and this is an open recording. This is not a private thing. You can go to WordPress, YouTube channel.
I'll link it up in the description. And you can tune in and listen to her. And the, especially the question and answers from other folks that attended. Unfortunately, I did miss this meeting because I had some prior work duties. but I really wanted to join in and throw in some questions, but I still thought it was good. You know, the, the general consensus is slow as it goes. WordPress is continuing to improve. It seems like there.
Hitting the marks that they wanted to this year, there's nothing. That they've like urgently said, boy, we've taken the ship in the wrong direction. there's a lot of investment coming to, well I say investment. I mean, time and effort. probably money, but I'm not in the general sense. to the playground to WordPress playground. And I think that is literally, I've done a video about this, that WordPress playground is the future. Maybe even wrote a post about this.
I'm going to double down on that statement. That, especially as we go into 2025 playground will play a pivotal role in folks experiencing WordPress, whether that's your, whether you're a developer. And you're like, Hey, I just want to try this new GitHub PR that just came through. and I want to test it out and see what it's like. or if you're a WordPress product. Creator plugins themes. You know, get getting yourself familiar and, and working with that platform is going to be important.
And if you're an end user, simply spinning up a WordPress site to test it out. I mean, playground, I think is going to be the future of how we all start to interact with WordPress. In some degree. so I find that rather interesting. It's funny. I also did a video about Drupal. comparing Drupal, custom fields and their views methodology. And they have a sort of click to install and run a Drupal site. And it takes forever. Like, you know, you, you click on it. It says, okay, let's start this up.
And I, and I think it almost builds like a whole Linux. Environment, W, you know, in the browser and it takes like, I don't know, three, four minutes for the whole thing to boot up. whereas playground that wordpress.net is instant. Like you instantly go and everyone has their own unique. Version of WordPress while they're in it, it just runs in your browser. so it is fascinating as much. As, you know, folks have been, you know, giving it back to automatically lately.
They're doing some great things. especially the playground. I can't say it enough. So here we go. We're going to dive into Joseph a segment. Remember. Click the link in the show notes. If you want to watch the full YouTube video, so you can see the entirety of this meeting and also hear the questions and answers. From the folks that were live on the panel, I'll be at work camp us. Be sure to say hi. As always, thanks to all of our sponsors and supporters who have joined the slack community.
You can support us@thewpminute.com slash. Support.
It's me. Hi. I'm Josefa and I'm here with WordPress. yeah, so I wanted to talk a little bit about our midterm goals. So WordCamp Europe, obviously Matt showed up with his 11 opinions, about, about what WordPress needs to do, what it needs to be. and after that, I ended up having quite a few conversations with folks about like, what is WordPress? How does this fit with the overall big pictures that we put out there?
big the big picture, posts that we that I put out and fortunately everything almost everything that showed up in those 11 points are still Absolutely relevant to the big picture posts that I put out now the Biggest change, obviously, this year is around the CMS, so we had hoped to get phase three kind of prototyped and built out and put out in front of the community, but early on in the year.
It became pretty clear that one of the, more pressing items for user facing, I don't know, user satisfaction of WordPress is to maybe make our admin a little bit more modern looking and probably get all of our, you know, five different interfaces kind of looking the same, which I think is actually part of what that design system that, you know, when published is about, and so the work on phase three, the active, like everybody.
Focused diligently on phase three work sort of paused early in the year while we took a look at the admin and what we wanted to be in the future, how blocks will work in there, and then ended up doing a bunch of foundational work, which is not user facing a lot of, major backend elements and APIs to make sure that we can get that done. and so I've been really excited to see that design system get out, because I think that one, it does kind of.
Pull together some visual elements of what we are aiming for. And then also gives a common design language to WordPress. That is the hope is that we can improve the user experience by having a more consistent look and feel across our admin, and then also having the dashboard and the admin areas. Just be more modern and more in line with what the software actually is capable of doing now. So that is probably the biggest shift from that big picture post, but it happened a long time ago.
And so there are, however, four things in those 11 points that Matt brought up at WordCamp. Europe that I think really commit to that and, and support that change in direction. Obviously the first one being that simple things should be easy and intuitive and complex things should be possible. the admin area, along with just kind of having a massive influx of notifications has gotten more and more complex as we have gotten through WordPress as a whole. and so.
Getting that into a state that's a little bit easier to kind of fall into and understand is going to be really important, and then there were three other things in there as well. One, that WordPress should be more opinionated and quirky, that people who are building WordPress should be using WordPress and a bunch of the, Gutenberg engineers recently did a ton of user, user, what is this called? Sorry for the recording. I am sick. And so I can't get my words. Sometimes user testing. That's it.
A bunch of user testing. not only to check flows for onboarding, which I know have been an ongoing concern for, the project or for the software, but then also for like any basic activity that you want to accomplish so that you can feel successful and have the desire, to learn those bigger concepts. Just trying to make those a lot easier, a lot clearer, and a lot quicker. And so, that goes into that.
And then, if we get all of those things kind of back into an easy, comfortable state, then the, the part that Matt shared about blogging and commenting and pingbacks being more fun, and allowing websites to be more dynamic again, I think that that shows up over time in it. the second element from the second goal from our big picture post was around the community, continuing to support, our community as a whole through learning events and mentorship.
and that would be for current and future contributors early on this year as well, the community facing teams, the event folks. had a big shift toward, less focus on bringing in new contributors, which has been our lifelong focus, and more focus on bringing in new users with the belief that everything that we've done to enable contribution will still function as, as it always has. so the work that is going in now is to get better feedback from.
People who are attending our workshops and our events and making the online learning as clear and important and valuable as all of the business stuff and networking that you can do at meetups and WordCamps and then also all of our flagship events. We have the dashboards coming, which Ray has mentioned, and that's part of the reason we're doing that.
Like we're working to standardize the questions that we ask new and returning attendees to our events so that our organizers can have some clearer and better information to make decisions that are helpful for them and impactful for them. We also are foregoing the giant annual survey this year. We're going to take advantage of the giant annual survey that, Stack Exchange does.
We're included in it, again this year, and so we're going to take advantage of that information because they get more people from outside of the WordPress space, to give us some better information, more accurate information about future users of WordPress as opposed to current users of WordPress, so that we can kind of get some, some indications of what our opportunities are for future growth, but then also, Making space for those kind of ad hoc polls that we see popping up on LinkedIn and
Twitter and anywhere else where people can just say like, Hey, do you use it for this or this? If you were doing this activity today, would you choose this or this, and get kind of more timely feedback for the features that we're trying to experiment and build toward, that way. And so the things from Matt's 11 points that fit in with that are that we should have better feedback loops in general. Agreed. Hard agree. it doesn't help us to be moving forward with speed.
If the direction that we're moving forward in is not something that our, users need or want from us. and then also one of his call outs was to be a supporter by going to meetups, events, and other things that help us stay close to users, because we are the people who are building WordPress. And so, if we are building it, we should be using it. And that includes if we're building it, we should be talking to the people who are using it. In ways that we expect, and ways that we don't expect.
And the best ways to do that is to get to those events, either as organizers or just regular old attendees. I'm headed toward Camp U. S. and I'm going to do my best to be a regular old attendee, sitting in some sessions, seeing what's happening and not. and that'll be a change of pace for me as well. So that's a, that's a kind of one of those changes that occurred on our second big goal. And then our third one actually has not changed too much.
The third big goal that we had was around the ecosystem and especially focusing on the data liberation project to make the process of getting from one non WordPress space to a WordPress space easier, and then WordPress to WordPress, as required. That has been ongoing all year. We had a few prototypes at the start of the year that. We're kind of okay, but not quite what we were looking for.
and it was around WordCamp Europe that we had gotten a pretty viable, concept of what could work and what will work, I think for easier migrations. And the hardest parts of that, the, the parts that require, you know, you to be as brilliant as Adam Zielinski are. Almost done. We're ready to start, to, to start hooking into it and extending it like we do any other WordPress thing.
And so for that, actually, we're kind of get gearing up for an adoption phase of it, of all of the, like, top hundred plugins that exist in the WordPress repo. I think only 12 of them. Use blueprints so that when you are testing a plugin inside playground, it gives you some information, some, some fake data so that it's clear what it's trying to do versus what you are hoping it will do. and also so that it functions correctly in there.
And so that's going to be our next phase for that, is to get the hardest parts built so that, so that every In the WordPress ecosystem can make a blueprint and put it in there. And so their users know, is this solution, something that's going to solve my problem. as we have been gearing up for that, we also are really nearing. I believe it. I feel it in my bones nearing the time when we can just put a try out WordPress now button on the homepage that takes you to a playground instance that has.
valuable, not valuable. A useful theme, a theme that looks like what we want, a good first timer site to look like, and a couple of plugins, so you get a sense for like what a theme is, how it works, what plugins are, and how they work, and really can, can test drive your site before you get into it. We're really close to that, I'm pretty sure. And so the things that Matt had brought up, this summer. If you're in the northern hemisphere about that in his 11 points were wikis for documentation.
We are actually prototyping a playground driven wiki experience for our documentation. And that looks like it's going well, I don't understand it, but there is a post out that we can get a link for and share with you all.
Getting forums back into kind of a front and center space so that people can have not only conversations, but also like see who else around them is having the same issues or the same, excitements, the same extending, opportunities that they are having, and a lot of work is going into that. We have a bug smashing event for it at WordCamp US coming up, which should be pretty fun. and the call to having plugins and themes, having mirror.
Infrastructure to the WordPress project is still ongoing better theme previews obviously playground is going to drive that. And the work with data liberation is playground driven at the moment. And so as we are building out all of these things for the data liberation project powered by playground. I'm pretty sure the rest of these, holes that we have in the new user experience when they're trying to just decide whether WordPress works for them or not will also, get a few bridges over those gaps.
And at that point can only be made better by our plugin authors and our theme authors, really embracing that new tool and making sure that their tools work inside it. And so. A little bit. Matt's 11 points show up almost as like tactical elements that live inside the goals that we have for the WordPress project this year. We pulled together.
A whole list of projects that we either have shipped or are about to ship that specifically relate to all of those 11 tactics that go along with the three goals that we have, and I'm going to try to get it published before WordCamp U. S. so that we all kind of have the same sort of thing that we're looking at. and I, I think maybe.
Reyes can get you all an early, an early copy of it, before, before it gets out there, so that if you have questions around that, we can get those answered, or if there are anything that doesn't really make sense to you all, you can let us know about that too. but that's kind of the, that's kind of the long and short of how those all fit together.
and in the post that we pulled together about the work that's been done just kind of in the last quarter around those, tactical elements for our goals. I was tired looking at it. It was like four pages long. And so we're going to try and make it a little shorter. but it's just a continuing testament to the work that the community does toward the things that we think are going to make WordPress be able to grow in the future. And so I'm really excited to be able to get that post out for you all.
Like I said, depending on how fast my brain continues to work, well, I'm sick. I'll get that out before WordCamp US. I believe that we can do it. and so, yeah, that's, that's it. Kind of the lightning tour of where we are with that. And I'll pause for questions on that or anything else. I guess