In June the Ephox/TinyMCE team of Joakim Lindkvist, Johan “Spocke” Sörlin, Jessica Lee and I attended our first ever WordCamp in Vienna. At the event, Matt Mullenweg spoke with Brian Krosgard about the past, present and future of WordPress. You can view the full interview on WordCamp.tv and read our full annotated transcript below.
Introduction
Matt Mullenweg: Wow. This is incredible.
Brian Krogsgard: So if you’re the founder of WordPress, you get a free water.
Matt: Would you like one? It’s a really good water.
Brian: Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you Matt, for joining me.
Matt: Oh, it’s a pleasure. I wouldn’t miss this.
Brian: This is quite a venue. The largest WordCamp ever, so congratulations to the entire WordPress European community.
Matt: I must say, you have set the bar very high for WordCamp U.S.. Also, just on a more solemn note, it’s beautiful to see so much of Europe coming together on day when there’s a lot of Euro-skepticism throughout the union. I’m glad everyone’s come together here.
Brian: Absolutely. So, Matt, we have an opportunity here to do something that’s pretty special in an open source community, where we have a co-founder of the project and the lead developer of WordPress here, willing, and open to answering questions. We’re very happy to have this opportunity, briefly.
Matt: We have two co-founders here. Mike is here somewhere.
Brian: Yeah, Mike is here.
Matt: Hey, Mike! There’s Mike Little.
Brian: Mike opened this up this morning with a great story about how he used punch cards in his first programming projects.
Matt: That was WordPress .72.
Brian: That’s how you all sent code back and forth to each other?
Matt: Yeah.
Amazing crowd before going on stage at #WCEU earlier https://t.co/dYLpv8kKzV pic.twitter.com/SSzJ4dNVMk
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) June 24, 2016
Work-life harmony and coping with responsibilities
Brian: I think everyone here knows who you are. However, you wear many hats. You are the CEO of Automattic and Audrey Capital. You’re the co-founder of WordPress and you run the WordPress Foundation. I would like to get a little bit into your day to day, but I’d like to skip type of life-hacker-y type of stuff that they can find on a great Tim Ferriss podcast episode that you did.
Matt: Thank you.
Brian: What do you do when you wake up in the morning? I know they’re not all typical, but what’s your schedule like and what are the primary things that you check in on?
Matt: Obviously, the first stop is Post Status.
Brian: That’s a good stop.
Matt: There is almost no typical day. Because of wearing very many hats, sometimes it’s hard to predict what is going to happen day to day, but also, different things might need different attention. Automattic is now over 470 people in 50 countries. It’s a very large enterprise, and running that is more than a full time job. Some of the other things you mentioned, including the Foundation, sometimes takes quite a bit of time. WordPress Core sometimes takes quite a bit of time, especially more behind the scenes stuff. All of this. What I try to do is find wherever I can be most useful, and wherever there’s something that only I can do. Otherwise, someone else can and should do it, and will probably do it much better than I could.
Brian: Last time we spoke, you told me that you had, I think, 23 direct reports, so people that were talking to you, you’re their primary boss. You said that your goal was 10 people, so that you could provide better focus on each of the items that you’re responsible for.
Matt: How long ago was that?
Brian: This was in November of 2015, so I was curious, do you have an update on that, and if you’ve gotten any closer to your goal?
Matt: I think it’s 27 now. I think we’re a little closer to the goal. That’s just at Automattic. It doesn’t really count the other responsibilities.
Brian: How many people outside of Automattic would you say are direct reports? A number.
Matt: That’s the thing. Direct report is such a company term, and doesn’t really encompass what a relationship might entail. A direct report shows what’s on the org chart, but obviously, in WordPress, there’s not really an org chart in the same way. A direct report might say, again, have the line, but it doesn’t necessarily say how much autonomy that team might have, or that person. How often you need to connect with them. If it were a lead on Jetpack or WordPress.com, I might talk to them every day-ish, or every other day. Other teams, like let’s say, our editorial team at Automattic is much more open. They don’t really need to talk to me that often, even though there’s a direct report relationship. It’s not necessarily a day to day time taker to answer a question, I try to spend about a third of my time on hiring of people, and that spans the project, from recruiting volunteers and working with folks there, to obviously hiring people at Automattic, and about a third on product stuff, any of the products, of which there is a long list. Sometimes that’s WordCamp, sometimes that’s dot com, sometimes it’s core. Then, a third on whatever the fire of the day is, which is always entertaining.
Brian: It may be a coporate-y term, however, you are spread thin, because of the number of people that you’re talking to every day, but also the number of roles that you have in the community. That amount of activity and pressure can lead to burnout. I assume you, like most people, deal with burnout, and maybe get sick of WordPress or Automattic or whatever. How do you cope with burnout?
Matt: I actually don’t believe in the term “work life balance.” I think you should try to harmonize. It’s something I blogged last year. I’m going to butcher the quote, but it was, roughly, “Find three hobbies. One to make you money, one to keep you in shape, and one that feeds you creatively, feeds your soul.” I think, if you can get all of those three going, and I like the word ‘hobbies’, because it implies that it’s something that you would do even if you weren’t paid, or even if it weren’t something for which participating in WordPress is for, probably, a vast majority of people here in this room.
That’s basically how I try to do it. I try to run or exercise as frequently as possible. You said no life hack stuff, but I do like a few little things every morning. I read. Actually, just last night, I was up a little bit too late, but has anyone ever read the book “Dune”? Yeah, wow. I literally just finished it last night. I know I’m like 20 years late to this. That’s the amazing thing about books, though. There’s always going to be more books you haven’t read. That was an incredible story. That I find incredibly helpful. I don’t think that, as long as you’re cognizant and self-aware, you can avoid burnout just by knowing where your energy levels are every day. That’s one of the reasons I wear a FitBit. It’s not to track how few steps I take per day, but to track my sleep, because I find my sleep has a huge impact on how the rest of the day’s going to go.
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg spends a third of a day in hiring people @photomatt #WCEU pic.twitter.com/rVyaFIsc1n
— Oliver Berndt (@oliver_berndt) June 24, 2016
The importance of JavaScript
Brian: Amongst all these other activities, you promised, at the State of the Word, that you would learn JavaScript this year. We’re just over halfway through your allotted time to learn JavaScript, so I’d like to get a report card on how that’s going.
Matt: That’s actually not too bad. But how do you know?
Brian: I won’t quiz you. I don’t think that’s a good interview method.
Matt: Calypso is open source, so I’ll see if I can get a commit in Calypso, before the State of the Word this year.
Brian: Okay. Speaking of Calypso, we talked last time about engagement, and how, at Automattic and with WordPress.com, you are willing to try whatever you can to increase engagement. You told me a statistic that was a little depressing to hear, because I think that it translates from WordPress.com and WordPress.org as well, and that was that only about 4% of users stick with their blogs. You wanted to move the needle, and that was one of the primary motivations for coming up with Calypso, and putting in a significant investment there. Quite a few months on, now. Has it moved the needle?
Matt: That number has moved, but I don’t think that … The 4% is actually high, if you consider all the people who maybe went to WordPress.org and opened a zip file, and were left with a bunch of things on their desktop and had no idea what to do. That’s just counting .com at a certain point in the funnel, and a few hosts that we’ve worked with, to look at their onboarding process. The reality is that, to truly achieve our mission of democracy in publishing, we have to think about every single aspect of it, from what do people find when the search YouTube for WordPress, to of course, something very relevant here, and something we’ve made huge strides in, in the past year, is, is it available in a language that they speak natively? All of these things, it’s incredibly challenging, because when you think about the entire experience of someone having an idea or problem, and WordPress being the medium through which they were able to solve that, whether that’s publishing, selling something online, making a brochure website, blogging, sharing their story, any of these things. Again, WordPress is a means to an end, and the more that we can lower the friction, the better.
I do believe that we’re at a juncture point. This is why I said to learn JavaScript deeply, and I will repeat it here.
Brian: I actually own the domain, JavaScriptDeeply.com, just as a backup plan.
Matt: Where does it direct to?
Brian: I think a blank page on post status. I didn’t market that too well.
Matt: You should redirect it to like, a tutorial or book or something. That would be fun to refer to, I do truly believe that we’re at a juncture point where the way the interface of WordPress is written is not going to be what most people use to publish in 10 years. Whether they use WordPress to publish in 10 years or not depends on if over that time, we’re able to adapt and evolve the way that we do things, and the way that we write, to be the thing that people are going to use. I think that some people might have thought, when I said, “Learn JavaScript deeply,” when Calypso came out, that was something that would happen in the next year or two.
When I think of WordPress, I think in decades. Over the next 5 years, every developer in this room is going to need to learn JavaScript deeply. The thing that people interact with is going to more of a application model than a document model. A bunch of .php files we have in WP Admin, that’s just not going to be how most people interact and publish. What they looks like beyond that, we need to figure out, and we need to create.
Brian: I do think most people agree that learning JavaScript is a tool for a broader goal of making a better writing experience, better publishing experience with WordPress.
"Within five years all WordPress developers will need to learn javascript intimately." – Matt Mullenweg #wordpress #WCEU
— Stanislav Khromov (@khromov) June 24, 2016
WordPress competing with Medium
Matt: You actually said the word Medium, so I’ll use that as a segue. WordPress, in its early days, when it was competing against Movable Type and Drupal and Joomla!, and other platforms, it was the easy thing to use on the block, the thing that made publishing easier, made updates easier, and with a more social web, and also just a greater demand for ease of use in our tools, we’ve seen other tools pop up. At one point, we probably overreacted a little bit to Tumblr, and some of the ease of publishing that it created.
Now, we’re seeing Medium really rise to today’s demands in publishing. For instance, TheRinger.com just launched on Medium, which is the type of project that we would have celebrated coming to WordPress several years ago. There are a number of publishers that are going to something like Medium. It doesn’t seem like just a fad. I saw an article recently on Nieman Lab that was talking about a number of publishers that had moved to Medium, and the editor, whoever it is, in charge of the Pacific Standard, Nicholas Jackson, said, “WordPress is a nightmare.” Medium helped them solve a lot of their problems. They’re obviously doing some things right in the content editing perspective. What is the threat that Medium or similar tools provide, and how do we improve?
Matt: That was like 14 questions.
Brian: Yeah.
Matt: There’s a number of things I’m going to unpack in just a second.
Brian: This is my first live Matt interview, so …
Matt: You’re going to get it all in. A number of publishers, the number was about 5, which is the number that were in the Nieman Labs. What the Nieman Labs article did not mention, but if you check out, I just retweeted something from Mark Armstrong, who is the founder of Longreads. They’re paying those people to switch.
Brian: They are, but you also actively recruited people that were on Movable Type to use WordPress as well. It may not have been …
Matt: Didn’t pay them.
Brian: It may have not been monetary, but it was active recruitment.
Matt: That’s the thing. Millions of dollars is going to The Ringer. They are promised and guaranteed revenue. I think that you have to look at this from the point of view, not that they’ve gotten 5 people, and they’re making a great deal about it, 5 publishers, but that they were on WP Engine, or WordPress VIP or something like that. People pay tens of thousands of dollars to use WordPress. On Medium, right now, they’re being paid to use Medium.
Brian: Do you think WordPress is a better publishing experience than Medium right now?
Matt: Without a doubt. Absolutely. You said ease of use, but in reality, Blogger has always been easier. There’s been a number of tools that, perhaps because they have fewer steps to publish than WordPress does … Where WordPress has always thrived is in two things. It’s flexibility, meaning you can do anything with it, and the community. The fact that there is such a … And that manifests itself in the plug-ins and the themes and the developers and everyone here in this room. Those are the two things that WordPress has done over the past decade, better than every other person out there, which is why our market share has grown commensurately.
“WordPress has always thrived because of its flexibility and its community“ @photomatt #wceu
— TinyMCE (@tinymce) June 24, 2016
Medium has an amazing WYSIWYG, and a great editor. However, there’s no themes. Your site looks generic like every other one on there. In Mark’s post, he has a screenshot of The Ringer, where all you can tell that it’s the Ringer, is this little “R” in the top left. The rest is a sign up button for Medium, a follow button that requires you to sign up for Medium … They essentially have outsourced their entire future of their business in many ways to this platform, which does not have a business model and is not certain how they’re going to monetize, if they’re going to monetize, and what effect that will have on both their readers and their publishers.
I believe, and I would think that most WordPress users would believe that you should control your destiny in that regard. That if you’re going to have followers, you should be able to export those followers, and switch them to another platform. You should have good permalinks. Medium has terrible permalinks. You should have all of these things that allow you to be in control of your digital destiny. Which, sort of trading off freedom for convenience on these platforms, there’s people who chose to publish purely on MySpace. People have chose to publish purely on AOL. There’s people who have made these decisions over the days. Media companies, I think, are particularly challenged, because they’re being completely disintermediated by the aggregators, by Twitter, by Facebook, by Google. They typically don’t have, or the ability to hire or retain great tech talent, and so when someone comes to them with an offer to take care of everything, and if you read the Nieman Labs article, you see that literally, the core developers of Medium were switching each person over, one by one, requiring no development or investment on their side. They’ll take it, and they’ll try it, and I think they should try it.
The other essay you should read here is called, “Billionaire’s Typewriter.” Just Google it, check it out. It explains many of these things far more eloquently than I have. [Ed: and Matt’s highlights].
Matt Mullenweg at WCEU 2016 Vienna. Photo by Tammy Lister.
How the open web competes with closed platforms
Brian: One of the reasons people have flopped to consuming content and creating content on some of these social tools is because it is significantly easier, but it’s not open. Some of the challenges that we have in the open web, for instance, even using WordPress, dealing with spam, comments, and dealing with managing statistics and things like that. A closed web can perform much better. Automattic has monetized these closed components to your business through Akismet, and Jetpack and other services that power some stuff behind the open web. Is the open web, in terms of being able to make awesome stuff with it, under threat, because of the ease of use and the great user experience that you can create when it’s a more isolated experience?
Matt: In many ways, the open web is more important than ever before. Imagine your tweet stream, or your Facebook newsfeed, and then imagine none of the links out.
Brian: That’s basically Instant Articles, isn’t it?
Matt: Instant Articles comes from the web. That is supported by the business models of the open web.
Brian: For now.
Matt: Everything. Think how many companies started to do only mobile apps, and then all made web versions. We’re at a point when the independence afforded by the web has perhaps reached a nadir, and is now coming back. Of course, from a user experience point of view, it behooves a host that’s trying to provide kind of a unified experience to worry about things like spam, backups and security, because it’s true that if you signed up for Squarespace today, they don’t charge you extra to not get spam. They don’t charge you extra to have a backup of your site. I do think that its hosts are going to need to bundle more and more of these things, whether they develop themselves, or partner with someone else. That’s more from the user experience point of view.
You made fun of Tumblr a little bit.
Brian: I did. I don’t think it’s that good.
Matt: Tumblr, from a publishing point of view, is still the best competitor we’ve had in the past 5 years. The first 5 or 6 years of WordPress, our best competitor was maybe Movable Type, or TypePad. If you look at it, even Tumblr, under Yahoo!, in its decline since the day it sold, is still 80 to 100 times bigger than Medium, which is now 5 years old. They have actually captured something, in a real way, that even though it’s perhaps not in the zeitgeist as much, I think that they really nailed something with their tool. I was very sad when they sold, because we lost a very good competitor. I think that we probably still have more to learn, even from the old Tumblr.
Brian: Well, you never know. Maybe the founders can buy it back. I’ve heard that’s happened with Yahoo! products before.
Tumblr is the best competitor we’ve had in the last 5 years. @photomatt @ #WCEU pic.twitter.com/oS4ITFlll4
— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 24, 2016
How is Automattic growing into its $1.6 billion valuation
Brian: When we’ve talked before, you’ve put Automattic revenue into 3 buckets. You were talking about other companies’ revenue sources, and Automattic, last time you raised money, had a 1.6 billion dollar evaluation. Eventually, that means that you make money to help those investors recoup their investment.
Matt: Eventually, yeah.
Brian: Eventually. You listed those buckets as WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.
Matt: WooCommerce, yeah.
Brian: For a year now, under the Automattic umbrella. Which of those buckets is biggest for Automattic right now, and where do you see the most growth?
Matt: Sure. Our buckets are still the same. We’ve added one additional one, which, as some of you might have heard, in November, we’re launching the dot blog TLD, which I’m very excited about.
Brian: It’s big enough to be a bucket.
Matt: It’s big enough to be a bucket.
Brian: You paid 19 to 20 million dollars for that.
Matt: I can’t officially say, but …
Brian: To be fair, though, you put that on your blog, and then removed it, but it stayed on Facebook. Hot tip.
Matt: I definitely keep a lot of lawyers in business.
Brian: Where do you see the most growth from these four buckets? Which of the three is your biggest revenue source right now?
Matt: I honestly believe that the first three have the ability to be multi-billion dollar businesses, each on their own. Dot Blog could be a multi-hundred-million dollar business. Where they are ordered right now is kind of in the order you said them. I believe it’s Dot Com, Woo, Jetpack, and Dot Blog obviously makes zero dollars right now.
Brian: Where do you see the most growth potential?
Matt: I think there’s a huge growth potential in all of them. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in them. What I like about each of those 4 businesses is that they’re, one, complementary to each other, and two, complimentary to the community at large. The way that I’ve tried to structure all my commercial enterprises is to make them that, even if I were no longer guiding them, or at the head, that as they succeed, and they give far more back to the broader WordPress community than they make or take themselves. I think this is a model for enterprise and capitalism in general that I could see being far more prevalent than it is. One of the things I’m most proud of is how many of the companies in the WordPress ecosystem do exactly that. They give so much more back to the community than they make in revenue, or they make from the world.
The future vision for WordPress
Brian: WordPress is 13 years old, so congratulations.
Matt: I have a teenager.
Brian: You have a teenager.
Matt: We all have a teenager, so we all got to …
Brian: We’re at a bit of a crossing point with WordPress, where it has to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
Matt: Did you decide that when you were 13?
Brian: Pretty close. I was a weird kid, though.
Matt: I’m going to be a WordPress blogger and …
Brian: Well, it never really turned into that, no. I decided on what I wanted to major in in college, but this interview is not about me. I’d like to know, what is your vision for WordPress?
Matt: You know, the thing I keep coming back to, and it’s a little cheesy and a little abstract, but WordPress really can be an operating system, for not just the web, but the open web. One of the things that I love about as we grow, and as we become more successful, and gain more of that market share, is that we shift the web to be more open, just by dint of the things built into WordPress. The APIs, the way we do everything, feeds. Twitter no longer has RSS feeds. It’s crazy. Medium blocks the WordPress user agent. They literally block WordPress from accessing Medium in their code. There’s all these things that the web … We talked a little bit about the politics that went on in Britain today. In the U.S., we’re seeing this Trump-ism. Wow. That was a noise.
There’s a segment of the population that’s feeling left out from the economic growth and development of the past 20 years. There is a segment of the population, I think, rightly, is impatient and unhappy with the way unfettered corporate entities have taken and given back to the world at large, environmentally, socially, ethically, in some cases. We essentially have, whether it’s the Brexit, Trump, or Bernie Sanders who I identified much more with, I think you have some very valid criticisms of the status quo and the way things have been done.
Where our reactions that could be, to sort of close yourself off and go inward, or xenophobia, whatever it might be, that drives some of these nationalistic or xenophobic tendencies, I think a far more powerful way to address these problems is to bring radically open, and through, in the words of someone far better, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” With WordPress, we have the ability, each of us, actually, to create our own vision of how we want the web to be, the web you want your children to have.
That’s why we should and must think about things as a multi-decade endeavor. I think we have an opportunity to create software that is around in 50 years, that is around in 100 years, in a way that’s completely unrecognizable to us now, but that is a force for good and for openness on the web and in the world, because the web becomes the world.
Decision making for WordPress
Brian: Practically, to take this vision, which is a noble one, and to translate that to software, lines of code that we write, it requires translation of sorts.
Matt: Lines of JavaScript that we write?
Brian: Lines of JavaScript, maybe quite a few. You have to translate this broad vision and make it a more narrow vision, and turn it into project goals. WordPress right now, we have 6 lead developers. At times, you have different strength in your voices. Sometimes you don’t use them as much, and there’s maybe 1 or 2 lead developers that’s more influential. Even still, in the lead developer role, it’s not a lead of product, a lead of implementing the broader vision that you have. My question is, do we need a product lead for WordPress.org?
Matt: Well, for WordPress.org, the website, perhaps. For WordPress the software …
Brian: WordPress the software.
Matt: That is the beauty of the release lead model, is that we … What we’ve done now over how many releases? We have release leads? 8? 9? Is basically give the ability for a lead to have autonomy and authority over everything that goes into that release.
Brian: The release itself is pretty temporary, usually about a four month period where maybe just a few weeks is the actual visionary tenure.
Matt: That’s where it is on the schedule, but the reality is that that’s the culmination of things that have happened over the past 6 to 18 months before. The infrastructure that had been put in place enabled things being built in the future. I think that what’s interesting is that … I think you could completely say that we should think further ahead, and that’s part of the reason that we’ve been designating the release leads further ahead of the release coming on its head. I’m very sad that I won’t get to lead one this year, because I was excited about that. The rule of the release lead, and lead developers in general, is … Probably the best way to think of it is editorial.
Brian: You don’t think that we need a more broad vision product lead? Someone to create more structure and implement some of your big vision?
Matt: I think that the big vision is getting implemented. I actually am not concerned about that. When you look at what actually drives adoption of WordPress, we have leads of hundreds of visions, through plug-ins, that are doing amazing things. If you look at … This is one thing I want to do in the plug-in directory, is there’s some plug-ins that are kind of “hello dollies”, right? That just kind of make a minor tweak. There’s some plug-ins that are completely behind the scenes, there’s some plug-ins that affect your themes. There’s a class of plug-ins that are essentially applications of the complexity and power of WordPress itself. They’re built on WordPress as an operating system, what I used to call the content management kernel. If you think of a Woo, or a Yoast, or a Gravity Forms, or Contact Forms, these plug-ins are amazing, and what is beautiful about our structure is that it allows you to have this base, which gets better with every single release, and then mix and match the sort of visions that you want to bring into it, and the Jambalaya or Gumbo that you create is unique to you, and tailored perfectly to your needs. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, it’s not a off-the-shelf [inaudible 00:29:51] solution.
With Jetpack, we try to give you the best of both worlds, of both cloud and self-hosted, so you have control and the cloud power. This is not something that’s out there right now in any other products, and I think it’s why that, even though I’d say a Wix and a Squarespace between them are spending 200 million dollars this year advertising against WordPress, that they have to. That our competitors are having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising, or literally paying users to come over to them, while, organically, WordPress is doing well. We could do much better, and we have so much work to do. Please don’t let anyone think that I don’t believe that. It’s coming along pretty nicely. We’re at 26% now.
Brian: For several years, WordPress has been very iterative, and I do think there’s merit to that. Getting big features, getting to that point where there’s community buy-in to say, “This belongs in core,” that’s a difficult process right now. I think I’ve heard from a lot of committers, even, and a lot of people that have led releases and I think without some form of Matt stamp of approval saying, “This shall go,” it can feel challenging to muster up the momentum that’s required for one of these good ideas to actually go into core. How do we get that past that?
Matt: I think our challenge is in the lack or presence of a Matt stamp of approval, as evidenced by how long it took mp6 to come into core.
Brian: It steamrolled, none the less. Maybe a little slower than you wanted.
Matt: It took a year, and to be honest, from a software development point of view, it should have taken three months. I think that’s what we have to look at. That’s where we can give in the project, and particularly in our organizational structures, more authority to people to make decisions, not that decisions should come to me. That’s not how any great product or any great company or any great organization works, although I’m flattered that you think that me just making lots of decisions will change the course of WordPress. The reality is that what we need is, we can’t have decisions by committee or consensus, because then, when there’s something that comes up … The [inaudible 00:32:15] polyglots the other day. I said, “Well, who will make this decision?” It’s, “Well, the group of us do.” “Well, who’s in the group?” “Well, whoever shows up to that meeting.” “How do you decide?” “Well, we kind of vote on it and slack.” These things, I think work for small, iterative things, but are more challenging to push through bigger things, or do experiments, or do things that are risky. In some ways, that structure rewards things that are not going to fail.
It’s not that we can’t continue to grow, perhaps even as fast as we have, through that model of decision making, but the Gordian knot that the release lead structure tries to cut through, and the other things we can do, we can probably think about organizational design more. I’m excited for people to chat about this at the community day here in WordCamp Europe, to perhaps allow more speed and iteration, because the reality is, it’s just code. There is basically nothing we can’t undo, or rollback.
Brian: It is just code, but there are oftentimes hundreds of hours that go into those projects. Not to say that that should be automatically what makes it go in, but I’d like to use a quick example of improving the content editing experience. There were ideas for content blocks, and front end editing, and the customizer. Each have their own positives and potential negatives. Whose role is it to help decide, let’s go after this, and let’s make this the future of how you publish in WordPress, because that’s the type of thing where I feel like we’re held back right now in our one administrative writing box that we have. We could benefit from a more immersive writing experience. Those are three pretty different directions. Could a product lead, or a more involved in the day to day Matt that you don’t have time for that as much, how do those types of big, top-level decisions happen?
Matt: I feel like you have an answer kind of embedded in your question.
Brian: I don’t. I’m looking forward to your answer.
Matt: I think it’s important that we consider things that seem even completely [inaudible 00:34:32] our orthodoxy, or the complete opposite of what we’ve done before. I’m happy to consider what you’re suggesting. Appointing someone, I guess, above release leads, that drives things across releases? Is that kind of the crux of it?
Brian: Yeah, somebody across release leads. Someone to more fervently implement the vision that you set.
Matt: I guess that isn’t necessarily what’s worked well for us in the past. We could consider, and then discuss it. Right now, the practical answer to what you said is that the release lead has the autonomy and the authority to do those sorts of things. My role, when I’m not release lead, is to support them however possible. The best release leads have come to me and said, “I need more resources here,” or, “I need more help with this.” I do whatever I can to get that for them. If they’re stuck with something, if I can use my accidental unfortunate role as a co-founder of the project to help move something forward, I will absolutely do that to help them. The exact idea is to give them a chapter of the book that they can write. The continuity with previous chapters and the coherence with what we’ve set out as a vision for the future, which I actually think there’s more unity among the lead developers than you might assume, even though we disagree on many other things, is that kind of is part of the job. I’ve been very, very happy with a lot of the releases that have come out since we’ve attempted this model.
Brian: We’re going to move on to audience questions in just a second. While I look those up, I’d like to …
Matt: This audience is amazing, by the way. This is an awesome room. There’s an entire other room?
Brian: There’s a whole other room and the live stream.
Matt: Oh my goodness. Hey, other room. Miss you all.
Auto-updates in WordPress
Brian: I’d like to ask, while I’m going to these other questions, about auto-updates. Updates are hard. They’re still hard for WordPress, and I recently looked at the philosophy page on WordPress, and we talked about how great it was to have one click updates. Today, people really don’t like updating things at all. I know when I’ve seen auto-updates on my phone, I never missed going to that page and pressing update. When are we going to move beyond minor versions for auto-updates in WordPress, and have a more Chrome-y style update experience?
Matt: It’s a topic we’re going to be talking about on Sunday, I believe. You’ll find [inaudible 00:36:58] and bring your crazy ideas. It’s challenging, because we’re not running on desktops, we’re running on servers, and servers have a lot of variables. There’s security aspects, there’s compatibility aspects, and how people can modify WordPress goes far beyond how people can and do modify Chrome. If we break it, it’s not something you see necessarily right away on your desktop when you launch your browser. It’s something that maybe your store goes down, and you lose thousands of dollars for every hour that your store is down, in sales. There’s a lot of important parts of the internet, a quarter of it is reliant on us doing this well. I think it’s absolutely right for us to be cautious there, especially when the ability to move more aggressively here is in the hands of the host, whether that’s your hosting yourself, or the WordPress-focused host, or the larger generic host for whom WordPress is more than half their customers, usually. They’ve done, actually, some pretty awesome work here.
Audience Questions
WordPress jewelry?
Brian: Our first question from the audience comes from David [Bassett 00:38:02], who said, “Where did you get that sweet ring, and when are the knockoffs appearing in the swag store?” For reference, this made the rounds on Twitter last night. Matt has a WordPress wedding band of sorts, and said last night that he is married to the game.
Matt: This is a prototype. I’ve been kind of beta testing it.
Brian: Coming to the swag store near you?
Matt: I like it a lot. It’s big. I think it would really only work for men. It’s too large. We’re going to try some other designs, and we’ll see what pops up.
Brian: All right.
Matt: For other people who are married to the game.
Brian: I hope I get these names right.
Matt: There should be more WordPress jewelry, right?
Photo by Florian Ziegler
Advice to WordPress theme and plugin companies
Brian: [Newembar 00:38:51] Charma said, “What advice do you have for theme and plug-in companies to accord with the direction of WordPress in the future, especially all the way through the next five years, even?”
Matt: I will give two key pieces, one for each [inaudible 00:39:07]. If you are a theme developer, right now I think one of the biggest gaps between the promise and reality of using WordPress is when you see that theme demo, and you try to make your site look like that. Think about that. That is an extraordinarily important part of the WordPress user experience, completely outside of Core, in many regards, and … Work on that. I think that I’ve not seen a theme that does it perfectly yet, and I think we all have some room to improve there. Really give that some thought, and talk to your users, talk to your customers. Work with them, look at it. Think about documentation. Think about videos. Thank bout whatever you can do to help them close that gap. Think about what we can do in Core to help you close that gap. To pre-empt a future question, I agree that demos on WordPress.org should be better.
Brian: Me too.
Matt: For plug-in authors, I’ll reiterate what I said at the State of the Word in December, that I believe that the future is JavaScript interfaces talking to APIs. All of the scaffolding, everything is there in WordPress Core today to shift your plug-in to be API driven. We’re living what we preach, and WooCommerce is doing a big interface rewrite around us now. Jetpack is doing a big interface rewrite, both using React, and they’re doing it. I think that I’ve heard a few others of the large plug-ins are doing it. I don’t want to out anyone that might not have announced it yet, but if you’re not working on that yet, and you are either an app plug-in or you have a significant interface that’s in WP Admin, that will best position you to make the transitions that we’re going to over the next 5 years.
Photo by Florian Zeigler
REST API and the WordPress Core
Brian: Speaking of that, someone named Pablo asked, “What is stopping or slowing down the merge of the REST API into Core?” I believe they are referencing the end points rather than the infrastructure, which went into Core in 4.4.
Matt: I think that, in terms of the end points, they need work. It’s not one specific thing. There’s nothing that I’m going to say on stage that I haven’t already said in the stock meetings, or other places. We are running the end points now on WordPress.com, so there are tens of millions, close to a hundred million sites that you can develop things against these endpoints, not to mention, everyone running the plug-in already. There is a large cohort of sites in the wile. Surely, on the dot com ones, we’re not seeing a ton of usage of the APIs yet. I mean, we knew this was going to be hard. There’s so many constituencies that are being served by the APIs. There are sophisticated WordPress agencies and developers who are using to integrate with, essentially, custom developed bespoke applications. There are web crawlers that want to access WordPress content differently. There are our own mobile clients, there are broader other applications that want to integrate with WordPress. Let’s say you have a WordPress button on YouTube that lets you post to your blog. There’s all of these different use cases, all of which have challenges, and I would say particularly authentication, is one that is proving to be incredibly difficult to do in an open web distributed way.
If you all want to check out something pretty cool, that perhaps could change what a future WordPress looks like, check out the Interplanetary File System.
Brian: The Interplanetary File System.
Matt: It was not in “Dune.” It’s a real thing. I think there will be something inspired by block chain technology, inspired by the distributed nature afforded by the incredible power that Moore’s Law is giving to all of our devices, that will allow a more massively distributed application set, that bypasses many of the problems that we’re having right now, where the web sort of naively assumed openness and distribution in ways that end up not being that use-friendly, like DNS domains, et cetera. Check this out, because there is some stuff there that may be beyond the next five years, after we rewrite everything in JavaScript. Could be an interesting direction for WordPress to enable.
WordPress business potential
Brian: Peter, from WPPusher, asked, “If you were starting a business around WordPress from scratch, what area would you get into today?”
Matt: Not.
Brian: Not WordPress?
Matt: Not e-commerce … If it weren’t going to be one of things Automattic were currently in, I’d probably work on sort of a site builder aspect. The idea of the customization going beyond what the customizer or themes do. A way to do that in a clean code and open way.
Plans for the WordPress.org site
Brian: Luis [Herrans 00:44:17] said that a year ago, you said you want WordPress to run 50% of the web. Is WordPress.org an important part of the plan, and if so, how is Automattic helping WordPress.org to make this happen?
Matt: WordPress.org is a centralized hub for many things that we do. I certainly don’t mind when it’s centralized hub for things like developments, or things like the folks here in this room. I think that’s okay. I get more nervous about inserting it as a choke point or a single point of failure for the tens of millions of WordPresses out there for many of whom, the beautiful things about them is that they’re independent, and not dependent on any centralized service. Also, just that creating a sustainable model for supporting that infrastructure can be challenging, particularly in the near term. That’s why I’m hesitant about those things. I certainly think, as a community hub, as sort of our town square where we gather and drink and have fun and work together and do everything, WordPress is essential to that. When we start to get into things like authentication for the API, that’s where I get a lot more pause, and I think that’s a decision we should make much more deliberately if we’re going to go down that path, because it does put WordPress as both the single point of failure, also a point of security that we would have to protect, to protect every other WordPress site in the world, to think about.
The constant for WordPress – openness and collaboration
Brian: X-Kid asks, “WordPress is constantly changing. However, what is not going to change, in order for WordPress to remain great?”
Matt: Open source. The ideals, the licenses, everything around it. I think that the thing that ha brought us together, more than almost anything else, is this default to openness, this feel like the web could be a better place than it is today, the working for the good of a community over your own personal gain. These are things that, if you think about it, define why we’re all here in this room. Why WordPress gets hundreds and hundreds of contributions. Why it has out-innovated and out-succeeded competitors with literally billions of dollars spent on them, billions and billions of dollars. That’s, to me, the coolest thing about the web. That when a Wikipedia can outdo an Encyclopedia Britannica. When a WordPress can outdo the dozens of CMSs that came before it, and the dozens that will come after it. That has a power of collaboration, and openness, and to me, what speaks to the human spirit, what makes us beautiful as a species: To transcend the pure self-interest for the greater good of the whole, or align the self-interest for the greater good of the whole, for my libertarian friends.
Matt Mullenweg at WCEU 2016 Vienna. Photo by Tammy Lister.
The theme review process
Brian: Omar [Ossman 00:47:08] believes that the review system, I believe for themes, is a little broken, and tends to take months. Could you add more resources, or how could that be improved?
Matt: I think we’re about, what is it? 800 or 900 themes behind right now?
Brian: Sounds about right.
Matt: [inaudible 00:47:29], yeah. Again, I think it’s an area where we should re-look at what we’ve done in the past, and consider it in light of the future. In terms of a cathedral and a bazaar model, we have more of a cathedral model right now with themes. That has been a challenge. The bazaar model of plug-ins, in many ways, has been more successful and more scalable. We’ve decided against that in the past. That’s a decision that we should continue to re-examine, particularly if we’re falling further and further behind in sort of the basic necessity of what we’ve promised to do with the themes, which is have a timely way for themes to be published and available to the world.
Global WordPress Translation Day
Brian: I think we have one or two questions from the room, if we have one prepared.
Matt: Room questions are awesome. Cool. How about right over here?
Speaker 4: What’s your …
Brian: Wait for the mic to come.
Speaker 4: Hi. How’s your [inaudible 00:48:18] about the Global WordPress Translation day?
Brian: Global WordPress Translation day.
Matt: Awesome.
Brian: It happened.
Matt: I missed it. I barely speak one language, so it’s not bad that I missed it.
Brian: We were a little worried about our potential “y’all” usage up here.
Matt: Yeah.
Brian: Is there a Southern translation of WordPress yet?
Matt: No, it’s just the default. I mean, I’m almost like a broken record. I think that our mission becomes so much more powerful when we transcend the English-centricity of WordPress’, even history, and go to be truly global, you know? I think that as a product, we will be most successful when we ourselves, both our users and our developers, resemble the audience which we’re trying to serve, which is the 7 billion humans on this planet. To this end, we don’t resemble that in whichever ways, whether that’s the gender makeup of developers, or the languages which we’re available in, or most used in. That shows an opportunity for improvement and for investment, and a place where, as we get closer to that, we will have an even richer and better product. I see the challenges and our shortcomings there as incredible opportunities that get me excited about working on it.
Brian: We have one more question from the room.
Matt: I think we got the mic up there.
Speaker 5: Hi.
Matt: Yeah, stand up.
Promoting more mobile-friendly websites
Speaker 5: Oh, gosh, I can’t stand up. I work at Google, with search, and we obviously think the web is important, and mobile is important, but one thing that we noticed is that 28% of the new sites that choose WordPress and come online that we’ve discovered, still choose desktop only themes, so they’re not going to be mobile friendly. I was wondering if you had any ideas about how we could maybe promote more mobile-friendly opens for less savvy users.
Matt: What do you think there, Brian?
Brian: Well, I do believe there’s a responsive tag on the theme directory to help people filter, but …
Matt: But it’s not a requirement?
Brian: No, I don’t think it’s a requirement.
Matt: It should be a requirement.
Brian: In addition to the responsive theme, do you think that there are other things that WordPress could do to better support mobile-friendly web experiences?
Matt: Let’s get that out of the way first. What did you say, it was 28% that still don’t have it yet? That’s amazing in 2016. It’s like … I think these phone things are going to stick around. Let’s fix that, and then we can look at perhaps what takes us to the next level. If there was something beyond that, I would say it’s performance. That, when you’re on mobile networks, mobile networks are getting better, 5G is coming, et cetera, et cetera, but speed is a feature, and every time that we’ve made WordPress faster, or the admin faster, we’ve seen positive benefits from that, and there’s lots of research around the web, whether it’s the loading times of Google search results, or the artificial delays inserted into Amazon that show imperceivable amounts of delay to the human consciousness actually show real changes in behavior. Anything we can do to make WordPress faster, I think is very much worth it.
Brian: Another note on what has been achieved lately, John [Blackburn 00:52:08] shared this morning about the usage of SourceSet on the web, and it was introduced in WordPress in 4.4 and there was a significant uptick in the global web and the usage of SourceSet, and what that means for mobile performance, because of the release of WordPress. Progress is being made. All right. I think that’s all the time we have, Matt.
Matt: Wow. Thank you Europe. Appreciate it.
Brian: Thank you, Matt.
We had a blast organising #WCEU for all of you. Thank you for coming, for smiling, for sharing. See you in Paris!❤️ pic.twitter.com/RCeRCNPyUS
— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 25, 2016
Title photo by Tammie Lister