State of the Word 2023

And as we all collaborated on that project across time zones and boundaries, I was reminded just how much the WordPress project comes together to ensure not only the freedoms of the open web, But the freedoms of people we welcome into our communities. It's that feeling of shared responsibility for our project that has brought us this far, 20 years into the project. And it's about, and it's probably also, what will take us into the next 20 years.

And so now, my friends, I would like to introduce to the stage WordPress Project Co Founder, Matt Mullenweg.

Yeah. Um, this is our time to really, first we're going to start with sort of celebrating some of the things we did in 2023. We're going to move on to a little bit of what's coming next, and we've got some fun announcements for you today. So, as you may have heard, WordPress turned 20 this year, on May 27th.

I got a chance to celebrate, uh, first in, this was in Tokyo. As you can tell, we had like a really awesome cake. But actually there are amazing 20th anniversary celebrations all over the world. And it turns out We really like cake. This was a year as well of us coming together again. So this year, there have been 70 WordCamps in 33 countries. That was a subset of the 3, 300 gatherings, including about 300 dedicated to learning, events like WordPress School Days.

As I mentioned before, bringing future generations into WordPress is very important, so things like KidCamps and others. To put in perspective the 70 WordCamps for this year, Um, obviously in covert we dipped in 2021. We only did 19 in 2022. We only did 26. So we have more than doubled year to year. And it's really exciting to see the community coming back. Um Although I couldn't be there physically, uh, to WordCamp Asia, I'm very, very excited. So mark your calendars.

The next big WordCamp is going to be in Taipei for March 9th. The last batch of tickets are on sale. And actually, although I've traveled the world, I think I've been to over 500 cities, um, I've never really been to Taiwan. So this will be my first time there. I'm looking forward to exploring the country. I think I connected in the airport once, but I don't count that.

So, this will be my first time to actually get out of the airport, explore the amazing food, and, uh, meet some of the, I think, what's the attendees registration so far for WordCamp Asia? Do we know? I think it's, it's, it's coming up there. It might even be WordCamp Europe. So, around 2000. So, I don't know. See a little competition. Um, but get ready for a little bit of a surprise.

Um, there were over 2, 500 organizers that made this possible, including 1, 600 meetup organizers and 800 WordCamp organizers. So thank you so much to all the people. And with all things in WordPress, we are always trying to get better and always trying to learn. So we are right now running a survey for how to make meetups better. So for those, for those who don't know, meetups are basically like local, typically monthly events that are often sort of the feeder to later becoming WordCamps.

So we got a QR code here, you can scan it or um, you know, there's a, there'll be a link to it on wordpress. org as well. We, we want to learn how to make these better and also create great feedback loops to get them going all over. Um, it can feel challenging to keep track of so many wordpress. org events in the world. So one thing we're doing, you may have noticed in WPAdmin on the dashboard, there's a nice little widget. that shows, like, nearby events, sort of geolocates.

Uh, we are adding this now to wordpress. org. So at w. org slash meet, there is going to be a sort of thing that'll show you all the events happening in your area. Um, other things that I've launched, um, is we've relaunched how the showcase works. So if you go to w. org slash showcase, um, it's now a great sort of example of what can be done with WordPress. I find this is the most effective antidote to when you meet someone and they're like Can WordPress scale? Is it secure? Can it grow?

Well, it turns out it can scale enough to handle Swifties. As we saw the other day. We're at time. com named Taylor Swift, the person of the year. And at their peak they were serving over 100, 000 requests per second. I know. It's kind of like the new dig effect or slash doc effect. When Taylor Swift joins. And can it be secure? Well, it runs whitehouse. gov and nasa.

gov and many other you know, incredible websites around the world, so the answer is yes, and I find examples are the best way to show this, so check out the showcase. We're also hoping to expand this in the future with more case studies, particularly around enterprise WordPress, which is something that, as I've mentioned, is very very, uh, it's happening, but we're still fighting some perceptions of people who think that open source can't do these things. And of course, we know it really can.

Finally, and we've talked about this before, as our community grows and matures, um, we want a way to honor and remember those who are no longer with us. So at w. org slash remembers, you will see a place where we can honor those WordPress community members who are no longer here. We have talked about the open verse before.

For those who aren't familiar, the Openverse is basically a project that we took over from the Creative Commons, which aims to index all the open license content in the world. Uh, including that under Creative Commons license, like CC0, CC, there's a variety of Creative Commons licenses. Um, this, uh, the Openverse work actually just won an award this year. It got the Open Education Award for excellence in open infrastructure.

Um, we've also been growing our photos directory and everything, so basically we're trying to make it Uh, where all the open content on the web, just like WordPress has become a repository and a resource for great open source code and functionality. We want to make it so, uh, other content is available. So, congrats to the OpenVerse team on this win. Another project that's been super exciting is the Playgrounds. Who's played with the Playgrounds? We got a good number in this room.

So who, for those who haven't seen this, it's one of the most mind blowing things you'll see, especially if you've been working with web technology. So what the playground is, is basically, uh, using Wasm, uh, WebAssembly, we can actually found a way to load all of PHP, and like a little web server, and a little database, in your browser, in a few seconds. So you can visit it, and it basically creates an entire virtual machine. On the fly, in your browser.

Um, this allows for a lot of fun experimentation. You know, when we did contributor days and other things in the past, a big challenge was always like, getting people's development environments set up, all those sorts of things. Now it can happen literally in seconds. And you can do all this learning and development in the browser. Um, we have a little demo here, I believe narrated by Adam Zielinski, showing some cool stuff with Playgrounds.

You can load more PHP extensions, like libxml. You can even give Playground access to network to interact with APIs or simply to browse plugins indirectly in WP Admin. And you can also stay ahead of the latest WordPress features with the latest nightly WordPress version preview. Furthermore, you can even test specific upcoming features with a new WordPress pull request previewer. Just paste a link to a WordPress PR of your choice to try it in Playground. And by the way, previews.

WordPress plugins, like this interactive code log, may now opt in to a live preview feature in the WordPress plugin directory. With a single click, you get a pre configured Playground where you can try the plugin out without risk. You can also use Playground to develop WordPress plugins. First, synchronize Playground with your local directory. Then, update the code on your computer, like here, we're updating the admin color from navy to purple. Finally, sync your changes back into Playground.

And voila! The admin is now purple without any local setup. Want to learn more? Visit developer. wordpress. org slash Playground.

And we're hoping to see a tenfold increase in users in the next year, especially with this live preview. It's really a testament to the spirit of innovation in the community, and the closest thing to sci fi I think we WordPress. Another fun achievement of this year is the 2024 theme. So 2023 saw the finalization of phase 2 of the Gutenberg roadmap, which is around customization. And our most recent default theme, 2024, is a great example of everything that's been accomplished there.

It's got over 35 patterns built in, and it really can meet the needs of anyone, whether you're an artist, an entrepreneur, or a prolific writer. It's kind of the first to take advantage of the full powers of Gutenberg and show what can be done. So I also hope that this inspires many, many other themes being built. If you haven't tried it yet, set up a demo site. Maybe using Playground. And check out the 2024 theme. It is quite, quite powerful. It's been getting some great reviews so far.

Um, Jamie Marsland said it's the best default WordPress theme we've ever seen. Ray Marais says, 2024 are a match made in heaven. And Brian Con Cordes says, personally, I think this theme is a game changer. So, please check it out if you have not already. Here's a little short demo of it. So, basically what you're seeing here, everything, all of these screenshots were made with default 2024. And just editing through the site editor.

You can see you can make portfolios, you can make business sites. Literally everything you're seeing here is, this is a great sort of like gallery. Everything you're seeing is being done with Gutenberg. That was a little blog going by. Look at that. All of that now, built in. We have 1339 new contributors to WordPress this year. That is five better than being leet. Or two better, right? One, three, three, seven? To remind you of the four phases of Gutenberg. The first phase was around editing.

The second phase was customization. We're currently working on phase three, which is collaboration. And phase four is going to be multilingual. Something might be exciting here in

Apologize for that intermission. So as Matt was sharing, we got a lot done this year. Um, and as we move into this phase three, which is called collaboration, Um, I want to touch a bit on the, sort of how we conceive Gutenberg as an editor, because it's aiming to do two things extremely well. So it's a very challenging, uh, design effort. Um, one is as a writing environment, and the other one is as a design tool. We've been making a lot of progress on simplifying the writing experience.

Even though this was technically part of phase one, we continue to add, like, writing flow improvements. Um, we recently launched this year, uh, footnotes. Alguien página de Gutenberg? It's a pretty cool feature, the footnotes. Um, and the distraction free is also getting like extremely well now. We've applied this also to the site editor itself, so you can get like a distraction free experience in the design editor.

So this is the context for what we need to do next, which is to start looking into these and workflows environments. Uh, we really, we're going to continue to polish these experiences as they are now part of the core offering of WordPress. So, collaboration and workflows. Um, we have a, we don't have a timeline yet for these, but we do have an actual working Uh, prototype of real time collaboration in the editor. It's a pretty interesting flow because it's doing some peer to peer.

Um, it's establishing a sync engine into WordPress so you can have this side by side. And as you're seeing, like, again, you update an image, it gets reflected for everyone on the session as soon as it gets updated. You can test this today if you install the Gutenberg plugin. You need to enable the lib collaboration. It's going to be buggy. But we want to get as much feedback as possible so that we can figure out, like, how viable this, uh, this approach is.

Uh, so if you can, and there's a, if you go to, uh, github. com slash WordPress slash Gutenberg, there's a pinned issue with a lot of the sort of next steps that we're looking into for the real time collaboration feature. Moving on to some other cool stuff that's coming up. Um, we, with the site editor, we really started emphasizing patterns. So we want to continue us moving to like in phase three.

We're doing both collaboration and workflows for the workflows part We want to really embrace the idea of patterns as these sort of section elements of design To also to answer to a lot of the feedback, which is like blocks are great but sometimes they are a bit too granular and people want to have like Again, people, freelancers, agencies, enterprise customers, they want to define the design units that then users can interact with, but they cannot really like, modify or messed up or, uh,

deconstruct them. So patterns are a crucial tool for that. And we're introducing this new mode, like we're calling it like zoom out mode. So the ideas that you can step a bit back and see the structure of the side and operate at a bit of a higher level. So the other thing that, um, we're adding to this is the. to swap, um, patterns that are related to a specific semantic category. So if you define a hero section, like you'll be able to like swap between patterns that are related to that.

The other thing that we're adding to patterns is the, um, who has played with the theme. json files? Okay, got a few people. So theme. json can now be applied to specific patterns. So you'll be able to have Um, specific style variations that only apply to the patterns, so you're not changing your whole site design, you're just changing these units.

And this is one tool that we're giving to developers and agencies to ensure that, uh, users can have this, um, sort of some ability to customize, but within the boundaries that are established by the creators. And there's one thing that I'm really excited about, which is, uh, um, I think like with this new thing, Patterns are going to be gaining, like, superpowers. Like, so far, patterns have came in two flavors.

You could either have these reusable pattern blocks, where, like, any modification you make to them, they apply across the whole site. Or you have these patterns that are sort of a starting point. You insert them and then you customize them. But once you insert them, you sort of lose that original pattern. What we're doing now is to have, like, a sort of hybrid between the two.

So you'll be able to customise the text of the pattern, so you can add it to like a hundred pages, customise the text, but still be able to update the design globally. So this would allow you to, as was seen in the demo, to offer people the ability to have this really powerful thing, which is the ability to, like, again, change the content, which is what you want to do. And at the same time, keep control of the global design.

So once you go into editing the pattern And if you modify, like, the color, the layout, the structure, that would update and reflect across all the pages. So this is, uh, I think it's going to be, like, a really powerful tool for developers and the workflows between developers and users. Now we're going to get a bit into custom fields. This has been the UI for custom fields for years now in WordPress.

Um, What we're going to have now is the ability to connect blocks to custom fields without having to create custom blocks. So essentially you can insert a heading or a paragraph and say I want this to come from this other custom field. So then this becomes the, again it's just a regular core block. The interactions for the user are extremely intuitive but it's coming from this separate data field. It's not serialized back to the HTML.

So this is a way to bridge the worlds between custom fields, which are very developer friendly, and blocks, which are very user friendly. So we're trying to make these like the best of both worlds. I want to talk a little bit about another thing that we're constantly doing, which is performance. Uh, performance, and when we talk about performance here, it applies in both.

Uh, in two cases, it's both for the editor itself, so the people, the creators that are using the editor, and it's also for visitors. Like, we have a responsibility for the people landing on websites, that they get something that's both super fast, performant, usable, accessible, and so forth. So performance was just like those two components. So we'll first talk about the editor performance. And we have this beautiful dashboard, uh, if you scan the code, you can see it, uh, live.

This tracks, um, the past, sort of like 20 or so commits to Gutenberg. And what this is measuring is, uh, How fast are the basic operations of the editor? Like typing, inserting, hovering blocks, and so forth. It's a great sort of feedback loop for everyone that's contributing to Gutenberg, especially as we keep adding features that we want the curve of speed to go down. So we want to add features while at the same time making things faster.

And the really cool thing is that over the past few weeks, we're making the editor at least twice as fast. And hopefully the typing experience might even get like a 3x improvement. We still are quite not sure if we're going to get there, but it's looking like this. This is the, if you look at the early portion of the graph, that's 6. 4. And 6. 5 is going to be like a lot significantly faster.

This also to me, it makes me really proud of everyone that contributes to the project that keeps always this at heart. Like everyone is so passionate about making This sort of improvements, ensuring that like, it's not just new features, but we're also like polishing and making things snappier, more usable, and so forth. The other part of performance is the frontend performance. And we have the, we're going to be working this year on this um, thing we're calling the interactivity API.

And this is purely for the frontend. This website is built entirely with blocks. It's a block theme, and it's the transitions are instant. Even searching is instant. But all of these things are real WordPress templates, it's not like just done in the, like the permalinks when you go to a single movie and so forth, are real, all real WordPress permalinks. We want to bring this to the tool set of blogs, so that anyone creating a site with blogs is going to be able to get this sort of experience.

And if you saw in the demo there was also a trailer playing while navigating, so you'll be able to get like, again, if you're building, with a podcast, you can sort of toggle this on and you don't need to do any sort of headless setup or anything, it's just normal WordPress running in the browser like this. You can check this one on,

So we want to allow as much customizability and extensibility as possible to them. So you can see pages as a list view or as grid items and so forth. This is going to be highly extensible. And the idea is that everyone will be able to shape WordPress to like their specific needs. If you have a commerce, if you have a, um, if you run a plugin with a newsletter, that all the elements in the admin are relevant to each use case.

So the idea is that each WordPress can be unique, yet familiar to everyone. That's sort of the direction that we're going with, with the, these design improvements. Um, a lot of these elements will need a ton of feedback, a ton of, um, and your ideas, suggestions are invaluable, so if you can engage, if you can give that wherever in all the places that these are at, in, either in GitHub or on, Social media, whatever you want to reach out, like, we'll be hearing about this.

So, that's it from me, I'm sending it back to Matt, so thank you very much. Muchas

Last year, um, in Porto, at WordCamp Europe, I asked you all to learn AI deeply. Uh, This was actually before ChatGPT came out, or anything else. And this year, the year of 2023, I think we can very, very safely say it was a year of AI. It's been incredible to see the growth of generative AI, the amazing models like GPT 4V, Gemini, Mid Journey, there's so much exciting stuff happening out there.

Um, I want to show you just a little experiment of something we've been playing around with in WordPress itself. So this is combining playground and a little bit of AI to use natural language to instantiate and interact with playground blueprints. So, as you can see what it typed there was, make a woosh site for the shoe shop, Ola Madrid, and give it, uh, SEO, give it some e commerce, and call it this. And it responded yes, and it created a playground blueprint.

What playground blueprints are, it's almost just like you might have a. You know, files for kubernetes or something else that tell you exactly how to configure the site. It says How to set it up with plugins, extensions, version of WordPress, everything that you just saw earlier. So this is, uh, pretty fun. I'm excited to see, you know, I feel like generative AI, so far, has already given superpowers to everyday people and users.

Um, if you're a developer, please check out Copilot and other things. Um, if you're a user who wants to be more creative, like, play with these things. It's kind of like, uh, I love the democratization of technology, where This is very much the vision of WordPress to democratize publishing, like what does that mean? It means we take things that used to require developers or advanced technical knowledge to do and try to make it accessible to everyone.

And I feel like that's what these tools are really doing. Uh, I'm very excited now to see if, because WordPress is still a power tool, if we can create more conversational interfaces to some of the things that we do. And I'm particularly excited for this, when it doesn't just do the thing, but actually shows you how it did it. Um, we don't have quite all of that yet, but you know the old saying, if you give someone a fish, they eat for a day.

If you teach them how to fish You know, they can eat for the rest of their lives. Um, or they have a hobby now. I don't know. When I go fishing, it's more fishing, not as much catching. But the, um, very much so, I would love for future versions of this, whether it's developed on WordPress. org or by anyone else, to not just do the thing, not just make the site. But actually maybe walk people through what they're doing. Hey, I'm loading the settings page. I'm putting this in.

Here's how I'm creating blocks. I think there's very, very exciting things you can do. Um, the thing that if I had to say what I'm most excited about with AI is that we will all have access to essentially like a personalized tutor available 24 7. So, imagine that, throughout history, that's been inaccessible, but now, in any language, 24 hours a day, we can have a very, very smart assistant, if you will, to teach us whatever we want.

It means that our growth and development will only be limited by our curiosity. And I think that's been one of the most amazing things about the internet so far, and I cannot wait to see where this goes next. So, please keep learning AI deeply, and also have AI teach you stuff. So that's our AI stuff. Can't have a presentation in 23 without AI, right? But the next thing I'm going to show you is actually what I'm most excited about.

And this is a little bit of a new direction in 2024 that we're going to be taking. So, you know, for a long time, six, seven years now, we've been on this Gutenberg roadmap. The four phases that I talked about earlier. And so, uh, plans are great, but you shouldn't just blindly follow a plan that you made seven years ago. You should be, feel free to modify it or change it. Based on changing market conditions or whatever else is going on.

So, what I'm excited to announce for 2024, as a focus area that we will be doing in parallel to Phase 3 of Gutenberg, is what we're calling, uh, Data Liberation. So, if you notice a common thread in all of our projects, it's around everything we do with open source is around data ownership and freedom. In 2024, we want to unlock the web. Uh, through a dedicated focus on migration tools. Whether you're switching from a different WordPress, a different CMS, you know, like a Wix or Squarespace.

By the way, Wix does not even offer export right now. Or, if you're just moving between WordPresses, which is a lot harder than it should be, right? Like, we offer an export format, WXR, but it doesn't bring over plugins or images and moving WordPress, you know, migrating from a staging site to a main or migrating between hosts is very, very difficult today. Um, so we want to make sort of first party community plugins, tools, and workflows available on WordPress.

org that are going to assist with this. I want it to be seamless, straightforward, and as zero friction as possible. So, what we want to do is unlock the digital barriers. Um, I think what has happened You know, in mobile we've seen this since 2008, the advent of the iPhone. Is mobile platforms were a lot more locked down than desktop or the web were.

Um, the same thing is that the new breed of CMSs, particularly the ones that have become popular in the past 10 years, really do a lot, a lot to lock you in. Whether that's through the payment providers, not allowing you to export your subscribers, they create this sort of subtle friction, which, uh, again, I think decreases the amount of freedom on the web. So, we're going to work on one click migrations between all of these.

Um, we're going to do a lot to focus on the export format for WordPress. Finally, we're going to keep working on copy and paste. You may have noticed this, but Gutenberg is actually one of the best places to copy and paste from. Um, Super nerds in the audience will know that when you have rich text, when you copy and paste from certain other webpages or applications, it goes very, very, very wrong.

So we've been doing a lot of work, doing even things like sideloading images on demand to bring that in. These solutions are going to be available at wordpress. org slash and slash whatever the thing is. So, as these projects boot up, there might be a slash and slash Shopify, or slash and slash whatever. Um, it could be page builders, it could be anything. And we're going to create great migration tools from that to the first party things for WordPress.

Um, but the data deliberation is not just about building the tools, it's about cultivating a community ethos. So we're setting up a streamlined moderation frameworks. So every one of these, uh, sort of migration paths or projects, um, well one that's really exciting is they can be done in parallel. I've been thinking a lot, especially around 5 for the future, how do we make it easier to contribute to WordPress? So, 20 of these projects can happen at once. They don't need to happen one at a time.

We're going to give every one of these projects a dedicated Slack channel. And, um, they're going to get GitHub repositories on the official WordPress. org GitHub. So, they will have the best in class tools, very similar to what we do to develop WordPress itself, are going to be available to every one of these communities. You might have noticed as well that there's a little bit of a backlog for registering new plugins. I believe right now we have a 79 day delay to add things to the directory.

So we are also ensuring that for every new one of these projects If you apply to start one of these, it's going to be reviewed in about one business day. So these will be able to start almost immediately. So again, if you're thinking about getting involved with WordPress, and you've probably done migrations before or written tools for this, Come join one of these projects. I think it'll be a really exciting way to get involved. Thanks.

This would not be possible without the amazing work of the plugins team and the community team. We have seen a huge growth in sort of sponsoring companies and things around this. But, as I mentioned, we are right now very behind with reviewing plugins. The plugins team is now accepting applications for new members.

So if you would like to be part of that group that, you know, keeps the plugin directory healthy, thriving, and representing the very best that WordPress and its community has to offer. Um, you can now, uh, apply to join the plug in review team. Alright, it wouldn't be a WordCamp without a little bit of a reveal. So, I am happy to announce that WordCamp US is going to be in Portland, Oregon this year. If you haven't been, Portland is a lot of fun.

We're actually excited that this is actually going to be, you know, with WordCamp US we tried to do it in the same city two years in a row. And we are locked in for Portland now for the next two years. Also, if you've never been to that part, the West Coast of America is beautiful, and Portland is super weird in amazing ways. So I'm looking forward to the WordPress community getting to explore and experience it.

Alright, so we're gonna do a little QA, but we also have a little bit of an AI twist. So, uh, we're gonna have a little announcement here. You might recognize the speaker. In Portland, Oregon World, Portland, Oregon World Camp US in Portland, Oregon.

So you'll be able to hear me, in my voice, and with my lips moving, like I can speak another language. Which is going to be kind of fun to experiment with. It's imperfect, it's early versions, but I like that we're embracing these new tools and having fun with it. So, keep an eye out for, you know how many languages we're going to translate this into? We're going to translate it into four languages, and so it'll be posted in the next, uh, couple days. So, see you all soon, in a new language.