Matt Mullenweg is returning from his three month sabbatical, dubbed sabbatical, which kicked off February 1st, 2024. He handed the CEO reins back to Tony Schneider and placed Daniel Bakuber in charge of WordPress. com in his absence. I thought we'd see the whole organization coast while the open source benevolent dictator dug his toes into the sand, but Automatic and WordPress stayed as busy as ever. I don't know how much Mullenweg was involved with all of these milestones.
Something tells me he didn't stay as disconnected as he had hoped. Let's take a look at some of the big moves that happened with WordPress, Automatic, and the community while Matt was away. Number one, the WP Tavern Hunger Games. One of the first major activities to kick off was the search for two new full time writers to breathe life back into WP Tavern. It was a Hunger Games esque approach where seven or eight writers duked it out to be crowned winner number one and number two.
Author Brian Cordes was the last contestant to publish a post on March 14th, 2024. There hasn't been any clear announcement on who earned the position or what happens next, and most authors I've spoken to are still wondering what's next for their writing careers at the Tavern. Number two, Woo. com is back to WooCommerce. com. Something I hadn't had on my bingo cards was the short lived Woo. com domain defaulting back to the original WooCommerce. com domain. Quote from WooCommerce, moving to Woo.
com created challenges for our users to find WooCommerce in Google searches, which were made worse following the Google's March update. To address those challenges, we assembled a group of SEO experts and consultants to evaluate the best way to build on the strength of WooCommerce brand, said Kevin Bates wrote in that update. Number three, the old WP admin dashboard is new for wordpress. com. In another what's old is new again. WordPress.
com is giving users the ability to roll back to a traditional WP admin interface. It seems there's no future for the once innovative Calypso project, citing that developers were looking for. A more familiar interface when working on WordPress. com sites. This might be a sign that more WordPress consultants are starting to recommend. com more to their customers. Now that the platform has been supporting user installed plugins on the 30 a month and up plan.
Number four, automatic spends an additional 125 million on messaging with the beeper acquisition. Automatic is pouring money into messaging with its latest acquisition of Beeper, which I'm assuming Mullenweg was quite active on during sabbatical. I like the idea of Automatic building up a strong solution for messaging.
In a world where SEO is getting squeezed and social media feeds being curated by ad driven algos, we need more direct channels with our readers, subscribers, and customers, and I think that's direct messaging. It could be an exciting new frontier with automatic leading the charge, and I'm here for it. Number five, WordPress. com launches studio app. The new studio app allows users to run WordPress installs locally on their computer.
This is a great way to learn WordPress and develop WordPress sites for free. It's powered by the same technology that runs the official WordPress playground and gives users the ability to publish their local websites to temporary WordPress. com accounts to share with the world. Other hosting platforms like WP Engine and Kinsta offer local development environments, making this a natural fit for Automattic to offer. Number six, Big Sky, WordPress.
com starts a waiting list for AI designed websites. WordPress. com decided to throw their hat into the AI web design ring by opening up a beta sign up for their latest project, Big Sky. I've signed up to trial products, to the trial product, but I also signed up for access to studio before it was released and didn't hear anything. So fingers crossed with this one. If anyone at Automatic is reading this, I have found 100 percent AI website builders underwhelming.
It's basically machine learning with blocks and patterns that are tagged with keywords that just get mashed together based on the prompt. I prefer starting with a collection of professionally designed themes and patterns, but I'm happy to see if they can change my mind. And that's not all. The above mark, the above marks six of the biggest moves I think happened around the WordPress space while Mullenweg enjoyed some time off. But again, that's not all.
Here's a quick list of other notable events that happened over the last three months. WordPress 6. 5 launched. The community led Make Marketing team was shut down in favor of a new MediaCore experiment. WordPress. com now supports GitHub integration. WordPress. WordPress. com launched a new public pattern directory and WooCommerce launched a new update manager plugin. Was there anything else on your list that didn't make it here?
Let me know on Twitter by sending me a message at the WP minute or at Matt Medeiros, if you want to reach me personally.