The Ephox team and I attended this year’s WordCamp US in Philadelphia. Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word presentation and gave us his vision for the Future of WordPress. Along the way Helen Hou-Sandí introduced some of the new features in WordPress 4.7 Vaughan. You can watch his full presentation on WordCamp TV and read our full transcript below.
Introduction
Matt Mullenweg: Good afternoon everybody. Hi. How are you all doing? We’ve got a lot to talk about today, but I would just like to recognize the amazing city of Philadelphia one more time. It was a bit of an experiment. We thought about doing it how Europe does it, where they switch cities every year. But I thought that returning to a city, so we kind of get … Decreases some of the logistics, and then we get the familiarity of coming back to a cool place. Who was here last year? Can we agree that this has been the smoothest WordCamp ever?
Very, very impressed. So I would like to repeat the thank you’s, to the sponsors that make this all happen. SiteLock, which is security, WooCommerce, which is e-commerce, .blog, like Matt.blog, and Jetpack. A round of applause for the organizers. Please stand up if you are a volunteer here today. How many volunteers total do we have in addition to the onsite as well?
(Audience member): 200.
Matt Mullenweg: About 200, that’s what I thought. Just as a moment before we get started. A WordCamp ticket, you all paid 40 bucks, so about $20 a day. The actual per person cost is actually closer to $516. I would like everyone to picture $470 and close your eyes with what you’re going to do with it. Extra gifts at presents, extra dinner tonight, and that’s possible because of the sponsors and the volunteers. You cannot do this without both of them, so thank you again very much.
Next year, I don’t know if you all heard … Wait, actually before we go any further. Someone came up to me last year and said, “I loved your talk, but who are you?” I’m Matt Mullenweg. I was the co-founder of WordPress, about 13 or 14 years ago with Mike Little, and also the CEO of Automattic, and I’ve been lucky to be doing this now for its I think the 10th State of the Word. We got a hashtag there, and that is my username on Instagram and Twitters and all that stuff.
Next year, I don’t know if you heard, but we’re going to Nashville. Yeah. I think we have some of the Nashville team here as well. I’ve never been to Nashville. Hello! I hear you have something called hot chicken. I don’t know what that is. I’m very excited for it! We could even make an exception to the “barbecue-at-lunch” rule for a little of this hot chicken.
WordCamp by the numbers
It’s been a great year for WordCamps and meetups – 115 total WordCamps hosted in 41 different countries. #wcus pic.twitter.com/yVGkT0j52C
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
It has been a very, very, very good year for WordCamps, and meetups. This is a map of all the WordCamps and meetups that have happened in the past year. My only question when I see this is, what’s up Russia? Seriously! So hopefully there will be a dot in Russia next year. If there are any Russian WordPress family watching this in the live stream, we actually had 115 total WordCamps. The first year we broke 100, that was up from 89, and 41 unique countries hosting WordCamps which is amazing.
There were 36,000 tickets sold. 36,000 people who attended WordCamps. That was put together by 750 unique organizers, 1,036 sponsors. That was a lot of sponsors, and over 2,000 speakers. Who’s ever spoken at a WordCamp? It’s a little stressful, isn’t it? I’m glad that you can relate with what I’m going through right now. Especially if you have to tie a tie let me tell you – that adds a whole other level for it. I was going to ask if anyone here could tie a tie, but then I remembered where I was.
Ticket sales, organizers, speakers, and sponsor numbers continue to grow. #wcus pic.twitter.com/K9xMU55j3h
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
It is kind of nice, it is one time a year I get to dress up for you all. All of that stuff with WordCamps is actually over-shadowed by meetups, which of course as we know so were the pre-WordCamps. We have 3,193 meetup events, with 58 countries hosting. That means again, meetups are a leading indicator for WordCamps. That means there will hopefully be 50 plus countries hosting WordCamps next year.
They were attended by 62,566 people. The red dots are the new people. That was the improvement over next year. This is a real testament to the entire WordCamp and WordPress Foundation organization, because this is the fastest growth we’ve had in any of these events in five, six years. It’s very, very impressive. You all paid 20 bucks per day. It’s kind of amazing, because the first ever WordCamp was free. It turned out when it’s free a lot of people say they’ll show up and don’t.
Total WordPress meetup attendees in 2016 has passed 62,500! #wcus pic.twitter.com/eGpFV0SUQK
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
This had an upside and a downside that were both, that we’d order barbecue for 500 people, and only about 350 showed up. I ate barbecue for several months afterward (Laughing). Whatever would fit in my freezer. That was, not quite, I was just after being a rogue student at the time. It was much appreciated. As inflation has compounded every single year – so the next year we charged 20 bucks. There has been I think a 24% inflation since the first WordCamp, but WordCamp tickets are actually the only thing getting cheaper. The average price per person per day global is $15.79.
Again, testament to the sponsors which cover about over 80% or 90% of the cost. WordCamp US, we have increased our numbers a little bit in person, so we got up to just under 1,900 – probably just over with some walk-ins. The livestream went way, way, way up. The thing to note here though is that we made it free this year. As everyone who uses WordPress knows, free attracts a lot of people. I will say as impressive as this is, we must still tilt our hats, and bow down to Europe, which beat us this year.
My hope was that we could kind of leap frog. Europe wins 2016. Hands down. For those who don’t know, WordCamp Europe will be in Paris next year, which I’m almost as excited about as Nashville. Does Paris have hot chicken? I’ll take some duck confit instead. My hope is that as we move to Nashville, we’ll actually be able to expand the reach of WordCamp US, and then we can go back to leap frogging. We can’t let the Europeans win every time.
This is translated into an increase, I don’t know if all of you know this, but if you missed a talk, if there was something you didn’t see, it will be on WordPress TV later. In fact, we had a 26% increase in the number of videos uploaded to WordPress TV.
Something that is an announcement for many of you, is that there’s now a WordPress YouTube channel. I know you were thinking. There’s not enough videos on YouTube. We have solved that. There are now over 150 videos from WordCamp US, WordCamp Europe and the prior State of the Words. So, if you would like to see my hair get shorter and longer throughout the years, you can go all the way back to 2006 I believe.
A lot of people know, and I actually haven’t talked a ton about the Foundation in prior State of the Words, but I wanted to talk about it this year, because it very much dovetails with the success of what has happened with the WordCamps, and it’s also going to be changing next year.
Changes to WordPress Foundation
In 2016, we’re estimating about $4.3 million coming into the Foundation, which is up from $2.8 [million] last year. It sounds like a lot. It is 99.999% WordCamps. That’s all the sponsors, all the cost, all the sponsorships, all the tickets, everything runs through there.
Some of you who have sponsored before know that because the WordPress Foundation is a [501(c)(3)] nonprofit, there are certain rules that people sponsoring have to follow, which are a little bit arbitrary, especially since this, we’re not really doing any nonprofit stuff. There’s no tax deductible stuff around with WordCamps.
Something we’re going to be doing next year is actually switching WordCamps to its own company called the WordPress Community Support. Yes. Which is a normal company, but it’s what’s called a PBC, or Public Benefit Corporation. It will be fully owned by the Foundation, so it’s just like a subsidiary. This allows the Foundation to still get all the benefits, and for that still to be the father organization, or mother organization, of the WPCS. Then, actual WordCamps can have a bit more flexibility in how they do things.
This is also important because, the important thing, the most important thing that the Foundation has right now is holding the trademark. The Foundation has zero employees, zero cost besides legal and accounting stuff and taxes. It’s basically all volunteers. It’s meant to be as low load as possible, but to hold onto that trademark which was donated to it in 2010. If certain things had happened at WordCamps, events that were official events, that could’ve endangered the overall Foundation.
That’s another reason to put this subsidiary structure. That is going to leave a Foundation without any WordCamps, and so it needs something to do. What do you think we should do? I’ll tell you what we’re going to do in 2017 to warm it up. First we’re going to support some like-minded [non]profits, and so this is the first place I’m announcing that we’ll be doing major-to-us grants to hack the hood, Internet Archive, and Black Girls Code.
These are organizations very much aligned with WordCamps, or WordPress Foundation’s overall education mission. Second is we’re going to run some educational workshops, in developing countries. Then, finally, we’re going to promote hackathons to help build websites for nonprofits and NGOs. Who’s ever been [Audience clapping[… Yeah!
Who’s ever been to a “do-action” hackathon? They are really awesome, and it’s that idea exactly. The idea is that any nonprofit or NGO can come, coordinate a little bit before-hand and say, “I would like a new website, or I would like a website just to start.” Then volunteers come together, and designers, developers, project managers, copywriters, whatever you can do you can help out. The idea is that the nonprofit leaves the weekend with a beautiful website that they can update and maintain forever and ever. Pretty excited about that.
The Foundation will focus on supporting like-minded non-profits, education/workshops, and hackathons that benefit non-profits/NGOs. #wcus pic.twitter.com/6VfdP82KuM
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
The WordPress Foundation’s extended family
Talking about the Foundation, I also want to talk a little bit about the extended family, or what we call the cousins of WordPress sometimes. They’re not redheaded though, although J-trip is [BuddyPress lead developer John James Jacoby], and this is a picture of J-trip on the homepage of BuddyPress.org. It’s a huge coincidence, I don’t know, it just must be a random rotation. It has been a lot going on with BuddyPress, so it went from a 2.4.4 release to a 2.7.2. We’ve got a new API, tighter security, daemon template changes, drag and drop avatar load, which is pretty cool, and then finally easier management of user-generated media.
For those of you that don’t know, BuddyPress is like a social layer on top of WordPress. It can transform WordPress to do things like the profiles page on WordPress.org, if any of you have seen that. If you are working on something that you think might need a bit of a social layer, check out BuddyPress.
Second, and very near and dear to my heart, because it was the first thing, actually I think the first thing I ever worked on from scratch. Because WordPress was of course from Café Log b2, which is called bbPress. bbPress is what we use for all of our forums. bbPress has now a WordPress plugin.
It used to use something interesting called BackPress. That was the idea, to extract out parts of WordPress, and put it in there. It’s now a native plugin, we’ve got, the plugin tables, everything just built into custom post types. The WordPress.org community has been migrated, so all of the forums and everything, and in fact as we’ve done this we’ve open sourced this.
WordPress.org itself is becoming more and more open source. If you see something on the site that you like, you’ll be able to go to GitHub, and already can in many places and say, “How does that work? How does this theme work? Can I use it myself?” The answer is yes to all of those things.
A brief discussion on security
Finally, I want to talk a little about security. We started using a system last year called HackerOne. HackerOne is basically a bounty system. In the past year, 65 hackers have contributed. What does this mean? Basically in HackerOne you can report a bug privately to the developers – prior was Automattic, and now there’s a WordPress one that will be opening up relatively soon – and say, “Hey, I found this bug.” It can be verified, and much like any other security communities, depending on how severe and widespread and everything the bug is, what the implications are, you actually get a bounty.
You essentially get a cash reward for finding the security issue. This has been great at attracting more people to do security research around WordPress, and our key properties. We’d like to expand it to more plugins, but we don’t want to go bankrupt. Just kidding! We are looking to expand this more and more, because this sort of system, especially the way it attracts things is very smooth, and look for this to open up in the coming months. It hasn’t – right now we have a dedicated .org one. It’s not yet open to the public because we’re catching up with some backlog.
There’s a new security bounty program for https://t.co/AVxAgsJege, where 65 hackers have already contributed – more info soon. #wcus pic.twitter.com/BoZvkpQwWr
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
Finally, GlotPress. Who knows what GlotPress is? A couple of people. Who’s ever translated something on GlotPress? I’m going to talk about you all in a minute, you are awesome. What language do you speak? English? Okay. It is true that there are, even Australian translation, you can get a British translation at GlotPress. I don’t know, I think they just changed the howdy. “Hello Dolly” becomes “God save the Queen”, I don’t know.
GlotPress has had a huge year. It’s gone from version one to version 2.2.2, which I love for its railroad-like symmetry, and now powers the translation of WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress, WordPress plugins, the default themes, and all of the Rosetta sites. It also is rescued from BackPress, and we upgraded the security quite a bit. The results of this I will talk about in a little bit.
WordPress developments in the past year
WordPress.org was someplace else that got a lot of love this year. This is our Community Hub. It’s where all the development happens, a lot of the communication happens, a lot of the support where you find plugins, everything. Support was one of the first things we focused on. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of messages here every single year.
The folks who volunteer on this one – actually it’s not well known, but I actually got my start on support forums. Literally how I got involved with Café Log and bb – sorry b2 – prior to WordPress existing – was just they had a forum and I was there to ask a question, and I saw someone asking something I’d already figured out, so I thought, “Well, okay, I’ll answer this while I’m here.” And look where we are now.
Participating in forums is not just a great way to help other people, but a great way to learn as well. It’s all responsive, reviewed on how it looks. We’ve also brought all the Rosetta sites onto the new version of P2 called O2. All the team P2s are now O2s. We migrated a lot of that and open-sourced much of O2.
For those who don’t know, P2 is the system that, internally, Automattic uses instead of email. Many don’t believe this, but inside of Automattic, there’s basically no email. Who feels like they would like to get more email in their life? One person. I’ve got some mailing lists you can sign up for. Or I’ll just forward you some of mine.
We use this to communicate, it’s really taken off on all the make sites, it’s probably where you’ve seen it, make core, make accessibility, et cetera on WordPress.org. O2 is the next version, O2. We say communication is oxygen, O2. Ha ha, and … I love elemental puns. It’s been working pretty well.
Then finally, not quite launched yet, is the new plugins directory. You might have noticed when you visit the existing plugins there’s a little banner at the top and it links you to WordPress.org/plugins-wp. It has a new design, it is running WordPress. That is a big deal. It was not before. One of the things I’m personally most excited about is the search has been totally revamped. You’ll start to notice both in your dashboard, and on WordPress.org much, much more relevant search results. I’m sure that Yoast will tell us how to tweak that in the future.
We’ll look at what he’s doing, and then try to compensate … No, kidding. There’s been a 20% increase in active plugin usage. I think partially driven by some of the improvements we’ve made to the plugin director, on reviews, or on graphics, things like that. In fact, the downloads are up to 1.48 billion which is a 34% increase in just the past year. That means we went from about a billion to 1.48 [billion] in just one year, which has been kind of crazy.
Speaking of the plugin directory, active plugin usage is up 20%, plugin downloads up 34% (to 1.48 billion) – wow! #wcus pic.twitter.com/q3Vt2ay4Oo
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
What I think is driving this is internationalization. We went from 5,000 translation contributors in April 2005, to it’s now 17,000. On Translation Day, which is November 12th, actually just about a month ago, in one day we had 780 people translate 60,000 strings. I did not know this, but apparently about two-thirds of the world speaks at a native fluency one of these 12 languages: English, Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, et cetera, et cetera. WordPress covers all of these along with many, many, many others. In fact, on release day of 4.6, which is our most recent release, we were available on release day in 50 languages. I’m amazed at that.
And Language Packs launched. So now in the top 10 plugins they’re now 82% complete in those top 12 languages. What you see in the bars there is actually the number of languages that each of those top plugins is 90% or above. You can see some of them start to get to above 40 languages that they are natively available in. This is important, because WordPress is great, but WordPress with plugins is magical.
Who uses no plugins on their WordPress? Wow, fewer people than want more email.
We have this new system where we decoupled the translation of plugins from the plugin itself. This allows translation editors, and people who, frankly, can speak the language, as opposed to the plugin developer to manage this. We’re up now to almost 1,600 plugins that have active language packs, and 1,224 themes with language packs. That is from [314] and 641, respectively, last year. It’s been a huge growth in this.
Basically what this means is that in other parts of the world where, let’s say Spanish is a native language, WordPress is starting to light up. It goes like a Christmas tree that was a little sad before. Now the lights are coming on one by one, those are the plugins, and people are starting to come and enjoy it.
That kind of works. I’ll think of a better metaphor as I walk off the stage.
Let’s talk internationalization efforts – as of November 2016, there are 17,000 translation contributors. #wcus pic.twitter.com/zjpJhWXtG9
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
WordPress & JavaScript
One of the things I talked about last year was the admonishment and request for you all to learn JavaScript deeply. How did that go? Yeah? I have good news, 28% of WordPress is now JavaScript. Yeah. It was about 28% last year though. I think we need to learn JavaScript deeper.
I wanted to give a special shout out to WordCamp Miami. David Bisset, and the WordCamp Miami organizers. Who actually had a Learn JavaScript Deeply track, which I thought was super cool and something I think that WordCamps, including Europe and US should emulate in the future. Because this is an area where we don’t have as much expertise or experience yet. I also promised you last year that I would learn JavaScript deeply. How did that go you might ask?
We are very proud to announce that 364 days into the request I submitted my first pool request to Calypso yesterday! It was pretty exciting. I had actually, I of course had written in JavaScript before, but never worked in React. It was surprisingly easy. If you see a followers count show up in the top right of your stats page… sometime – if I make it passed the code review which has been pretty tough so far. That was some code I wrote which always gives me a thrill. Learning JavaScript, and really becoming as native at JavaScript, as we are at PHP, I think is a major key as the kids say this day.
As we move from a document-based system to being a true application, which means that those of you who have used Calypso know that it feels much faster, things can change instantly, we can move data around instead of the whole page. It is very clear, especially with the API coming into WordPress. This is the future of how WordPress wp-admin is going to be.
Let’s return to “Learn Javascript Deeply” – 28% of WordPress is Javascript. #wcus pic.twitter.com/LNo9FgkAlQ
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
Design and inclusion
One of the other fun projects that started this year is actually a blog called Design.blog. Who’s been to this so far, or checked it out? Highly recommend … Oh, cool. Highly recommend checking it out.
The new https://t.co/d1NqRq1KTG is bringing WordPress to a wider audience. #wcus pic.twitter.com/nfBF7v5fxS
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
There’s been over 40 different folks who have contributed essays, or studies writing about design and inclusion, sometimes with or without tech. This is I think one of the areas – you might have noticed that this year’s programming at WordCamp US had some more of the human side in addition to just the technical that we’ve had before. I think that a lot of our opportunities to grow over the coming year are on the human side. And understanding the humanity of an open source project and working together and creating the code that’s going to touch humanity as well.
I want to call out two particular essays I think you all should check out on there. The first is from Kat Holmes, some quotes from [her]:
“Inclusive design is for those who want to make the great products for the greatest number of people.”
“Inclusive design puts people at the center … in the center at the very start of the process.” And
“Exclusion happens when we solve problems using our own biases.”
Her story is amazing. She works at Microsoft, I believe she’s the head of inclusive design there. And actually it’s a story about playgrounds and playground design. She talks about how playground designers who think about this. Designing for inclusion starts with recognizing exclusion in the process. There’s so much that we have to learn there, and so please read this essay. Check it out.
.@katholmes: "Inclusive design is for those who want to make great products for the greatest number of people." #wcus pic.twitter.com/BGZyep7BGY
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
The other one I want to highlight is from Hajj Flemings. I believe Hajj is in the audience. Hi. A round of applause. Thank you for writing. Did I pronounce that right? Close enough, okay. Some quotes from there:
“Detroit’s future requires connecting the worlds with design, technology and innovation to neighborhoods.”
“53% of small businesses in Detroit operate without a website.”
“81% of people research a business online before making a purchase.”
Hajj, through John, had an amazing story that made me wake up to some of my own learnings in this area which is when you talked about that, there’s a lot of these businesses that aren’t even on Google Maps.
I realized that in my life, I don’t know if I’ve ever tried to go somewhere that wasn’t on Google Maps – Apple Maps, absolutely! I feel like Google Maps has everything. There’s entire swaths of communities and businesses that are not there. And so WordPress, along with other tools, that help bring them online is literally like those Christmas tree lights lighting up. They are coming online, and now are discoverable. Hopefully that can lead to flourishing in those businesses and communities in the future. The project he’s working on is actually creating, correct me if I’m wrong, but a hundred small business websites. A hundred websites for businesses that don’t have them yet.
I’m going to repeat that, he said that’s the start, then we’re going to turn the hundred becomes getting 100% of them online which is amazing. Can we give a round of applause for that? The urban revival in Detroit is very very interesting. It’s a community that – I learned from your essay – is 84% African American and as a community represents some of the biggest opportunities and the biggest challenges that we have across cities all over the world actually.
Round of applause for @HajjFlemings's goal to get 100% of Detroit businesses online. #wcus pic.twitter.com/PwVyv760N3
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
Some of this relates to being more accessible. Every WordPress release has become much more accessible thanks to the hard work of the Accessibility team that I highlighted last year and just want to give continuing kudos to this year because they’ve been looking at the WCAG standards for every single release.
The link there for when you look at the slides later actually shows the accessibility coding standard. So if you’re a plugin developer, or any sort of developer, you can learn this and check it out and see how you can make your code available to more people. It’s interesting when you think about it that an interface, or [an] application, that works well for someone with one arm, also works well for a mother holding a baby. It works well for someone checking Twitter with one hand while typing with the other.
As you make things more accessible, you’re addressing wider and wider audiences, and bringing more and more people in, far beyond the folks who you might have imagined when targeting a particular improvement or thinking of it from an accessibility point of view.
Using WCAG standards for each release means WordPress is more accessible than ever. #wcus pic.twitter.com/HU486fvAKH
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
Helping WordPress create a more sophisticated path to growth
The other things that happened in the past day is the announcement of a WordPress Growth Council. I want to give you a heads up here. You can see on my blog those white dots are not artifacts. Those are actually snow. It’s a time of the year where many WordPress.com and Jetpack sites start snowing. One of my favorite features.
What the Growth Council is, basically we talked a bit about this last year. I said that in the coming year an unprecedented amounts of advertising dollars are going to be spent essentially for proprietary CMS’s. Some way actually directly against WordPress. You would do a search for WordPress, and it would say, “Hey, WordPress, wa wa, check out X Y Z.” That number is actually going to wind up around $320 million this year…. A lot.
Advertising does work. Even though I believe we have a better product, and infinitely better community, we’re starting to see in certain markets these tools which are typically proprietary, actually all are proprietary the ones I’m referring to, start to pick up different shares.
I think that in the past WordPress got by on a lot of marketing by happenstance, and very powerful. Who uses WordPress because a friend recommended it to them? Honestly that’s the best thing in the world. If someone who you like recommends software, what better introduction to it? They probably taught you how to use it too, and helped you get past some of the bumps, and maybe when you downloaded a zip file, and they’re like, “What are all these files on my desktop? What do I do with them?” Getting over those humps, that is an amazing form of spreading and organic.
I think that we have a real opportunity especially as the businesses around WordPress grow larger and larger, to actually coordinate a bit. What I talked about is there’s no one company in the WordPress ecosystem that’s large enough to match 300 million dollars and spend on telling people the WordPress story. No one company needs to be large enough, because we’re a community.
I feel like we can become a lot more sophisticated, particularly with our messaging, and our presentation on WordPress.org to bring people in, and really tell a story about what makes WordPress different. The things that brought everyone in this room here today. I do think that we’re fairly unique in that regard. And, as I’ll talk about later there’s some cool stuff coming to the software too.
The WP Growth Council will amplify our efforts to bring open source to a wider audience: https://t.co/Qpj3z9gJAL #wcus
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
Encryption and scripting
The other announcement that you might have seen in WordPress.org is HTTPS. Starting next year, WordPress is going to start to have progressive enhancement, so certain features which are only available if your site is encrypted.
Last year, this is again the follow up to last year, I said, Let’s Encrypt and PHP7 are going to be pretty big. Turns out Let’s Encrypt is huge! We are now tracking, and this is the first time we’re going to report this number, and I hope to report it going up every single year: 11.45% of active WordPress websites are now on HTTPS.
Let’s Encrypt is a free certificate authority. It’s a way to get, before certificates used to cost, excuse me, $50, $100, $300 they were very much a pain in the butt to get. They would want a phone number, or they would want to look you up in the Yellow Pages. It was really bizarre. Now you can get one programmatically issued instantly for free, Let’s Encrypt. Many hosts are starting to include this. We’ve said that starting next year we’re only going to recommend and point to hosts that give their customers, new customers, access to a certificate by default.
Right now 11.45% of WordPress sites are using HTTPS. We're moving toward more SSL: https://t.co/R0oKKZ0KYM #wcus
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
We’re hoping to bring more and more of, yeah. We want to bring more and more of the web to be secure. I think, as I said, this is especially important in a post-Snowden era. I think the more and more encrypted traffic that can be on the web, the better.
Other thing I talked about was PHP7. WordPress.com is now 100% on PHP7. It was a monumental task. You want to imagine the code base of WordPress.com, think of WordPress plus like 500 plugins. This is, I think, absolutely beautiful. For those of you who do server stuff, this is a graph before and after of PHP7 being implemented.
You can see basically what happened was that performance doubled and CPU load fell in half. For any of you who watch server graphs, this is a work of art! It is like the Michelangelo’s David of CPU graphs! Our friends at Tumblr who switched to PHP also found a similar thing. Right now in the WordPress world PHP7 is not that widely adopted. We’re only tracking the sites that ping us, only about 4% on PHP7 or above. If you look at the rest of this graph, it’s actually starting to do pretty good with the largest chunk there now on PHP5.6.
You might not have noticed but secretly in the night, we did a quiet update to the WordPress Recommendations page. If you look now, the official recommendation of WordPress is now PHP’s version seven or greater, and HTTPS support on the page with a copy and paste note you can send to your host. This is a big deal, and I’m very excited about it! These technologies, well one, when you upgrade to PHP7 you essentially for free get a doubling in performance. As hosts start to adopt more of these technologies, I think that it allows us to push the needle on some of the things that we want to do on core as well. WordPress is still backwards compatible to, I forget exactly, PHP5.2.4. We are now recommending and encouraging all of our partners to get the latest and greatest, and hopefully we can see that 4% go much higher, just like we’re hoping to see the 11% on HTTPS move up.
https://t.co/VrQffeOtG0 has been 100% switched over to PHP7, bringing significant performance improvements. #wcus pic.twitter.com/MChiS9QBJh
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
Calypso adoption accelerates with new changes
Last year I talked to you about Calypso. For those of you who don’t know, Calypso was a from-the-scratch rewrite of wp-admin using Node and React talking purely to API’s. It exists as a desktop app. It is what you see when you visit WordPress.com. It’s actually 100% open source. It launched about two weeks before WordCamp last year, maybe three, and it was a big deal, because I believe that this is the future of what the WordPress interface will be.
I have some updated stats for you here. In the past month on WordPress.com, a full 68% of all the posts that were posted were actually through the Calypso interface. 17% through mobile, and only 15% were still being posted through wp-admin. This is in just about 55 weeks, a huge shift to this new interface which I’m excited about because this shows that it can happen. We had wondered before, do people just want to keep the old interface forever, or will anyone move over? The people will have a choice of both and they are using the new Calypso interface which bodes well.
Last year saw the announcement of Calypso a few weeks before WCUS. Now, Calypso usage is on the rise. #wcus pic.twitter.com/YiyxU79mYK
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
I also pulled some pretty cool stats, but this is a complicated graphic. It’s a multi view Venn diagram, so what you have on the top is desktop users, the bottom left is mobile app users, and the bottom right is the mobile browser users. What you see, this is basically out of a thousand people, how you can read this. Out of a thousand people, 129 of them use the mobile app, 18 of them use the mobile app and the mobile browser, but not the desktop.
The trends for this over the past year: everything associated with desktop going down, and everything associated with mobile browser and the mobile app going up. You might have heard about the smartphone thing, it’s going to be big. It is happening. This shift is now officially happening. The desktop has peaked. In the WordPress world we have reached peak desktop, and we now need to start thinking about mobile devices as the primary way that people are going to interact with WordPress in the future.
Everything associated with desktop usage is going down, everything associated with the mobile app and browser is going up. #wcus pic.twitter.com/QUOrPJ8rfS
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
The whole Calypso process, it’s like changing the engine of a plane while it’s flying. It’s catching up to 13 or 14 years of WordPress development in about two years. It’s honestly been a big part of where I’ve been spending a big portion of my past two years. As we reach this point where the Calypso base is a lot stronger now, and a super majority of the users are now using it to post, I start to think about what comes next.
The obvious thing is certainly for Automattic’s plugins to start to bring them in. WooCommerce, Jetpack, Kizzmit, Vaultpress, et cetera. These plugins to get to their Admin interface still, if you’re on a site that has them active, you still have to go back to wp-admin. Users are bouncing between two completely different interfaces.
What's next for Calypso? We'll start bringing @Automattic's plugins in. #wcus pic.twitter.com/RL8ZduRczM
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
What we started to do was, and a big focus of 2017 is going to be making Calypso plugin-aware. Basically saying, if you’re using Calypso on a site that has one of these plugins, let’s say WooCommerce, all of a sudden in the interface, there will be all the WooCommerce stuff. It’ll talk to the API, it will run on the desktop just like the rest of Calypso, and it will only be loaded if the plugin is active. This is pretty cool! I went to the team and said, “Well, can we do that for everyone?”
Announcement number eight, or whatever, Calypso is now plugin-aware. This PR was merged today, and as a way to bootstrap this is if we’re opening up for what I just described for plugins to create Calypso interfaces for what they’re doing, any plugin to start with over one million active users. That’s about 20-25 plugins.
Some of them have been emailed already and have already begun working on this The purpose of this, though, is just to figure out what the plugins need to do. How that’s going to work, how the loading’s going to work, how the security model is going to work, and basically open this up, soon, to every single plugin in the world.
This is a really important step, because in our JavaScript-first application interface we haven’t figured out yet how to do plugins. As we know, the 47,000 plugins in WordPress are one of the most interesting things. Please check this out if you’re a developer, and you can see that poll request getting merged, and you can see mine not getting merged. Again, for those who don’t know … Sorry, Calypso is 100% open source, GPO, fully compatible with WordPress’s license, and on GitHub. The hope is that one day it actually becomes, or something like it becomes, what drives the primary WordPress interface.
Cool! Good for catch up from last year, there were a lot of requests to cover the things that we covered last year. Often I just talk about something, and then hope that you all forget about it.
We'll also be making Calypso more broadly plugin-aware. Today it's open to sites with over 1M active. #wcus pic.twitter.com/HXnkKjF0ES
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
A look back at Core releases
We’ve had a cool year of Core releases as well, and I just want to celebrate some of these. Version 4.4 Clifford launched with responsive images. Also WordPress Embeds it was also the first to bring in the scaffolding for the new REST API. 4.5 named for Coleman Hawkins included inline links, responsive previews, custom logos. And finally 4.6, named for Art Pepper, included inline plugin and theme deletes, and in-browser content backup. This is very much a year about doing things differently.
For the first time ever in WordPress history, we’re going to pre-announce the Jazzer that will be honored in the next release. Never happened before, but we’re very excited about this. I’m proud to announce WordPress 4.7, Vaughan, named for Sarah Vaughan, and to talk about it, I would like to invite to stage the amazing Helen.
It's been a great year of Core releases, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and (on Tuesday) 4.7. 2016 saw over 100 contributors. #wcus pic.twitter.com/qtAi2F0wxZ
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
A look forward at WordPress 4.7 Vaughan
Helen Hou-Sandí: Hello everybody…. My name is Helen. Helen Hou-Sandí. I am the release lead for WordPress 4.7, and I’m really excited to get to talk to you a little bit about it today. There is a lot happening in this release thanks to a lot of people here, and then a lot of people who aren’t here. I’m not going to get to cover every single thing that’s happened in 4.7, but I’ll talk a bit about the things that I think are going to impact a lot of people.
The first is, we have a brand new default theme for 2017. It is a beautiful theme. I am extremely excited about it. It has a multi-section front page that you can set up, and I’ll talk more about setting it up in a few minutes. You can have a beautiful large header video, something that we started to see more and more across the web. You have widget areas, Nav menus, all those sorts of things that you’ve come to expect from a WordPress Theme.
This one in particular, I think, really targets businesses. Let’s think about a coffee shop. I think that’s a pretty typical example, but also like a doctor’s office or your local candy store or something like that. I’m really excited about it, and I hope to see more and more people using it over the next year.
I meant to mention WordPress 4.7 will be coming out on Tuesday. Promise!
I also would like to recognize the people behind WordPress. Behind 2017 we have over a hundred contributors to 2017 which is really amazing. Themes are a place where a lot of people start contributing, because that’s what a lot of us do when we get started with WordPress, is we start tinkering with themes, and that’s a really great place to learn how to contribute to a piece of software, so that’s very exciting.
These features, we have this multi-section home page, I’m just going to scroll. What this scrolling doesn’t quite show you is that those big images actually stay fixed when you’re scrolling, and this stuff scrolls over it, and it’s a really cool effect. That will show up again later.
To support this theme in particular this time around, but also to set us up for better theme setup in general, that’s been the central focus for this release of WordPress. How do you get your site setup, especially for the first time?
Those of you who follow me on Twitter, for basketball gifs I assume, watched me Tweet a 60-part Tweet storm about what it was like to change the theme on my site which is Helen.blog. It’s a pretty simple site, but trying to change my own theme was this really complicated process – and I’m supposed to know what I’m doing! So I thought a lot about that. What can we do to make this theme setup process better? In 4.7 we’ve done a lot of work toward making this better.
This is a feature, the video’s going to play in the background while I talk about it. We have two features here, that we’re looking at, that work together. They’re called Starter Content and Edit Shortcuts. What this means is that themes in 2017 will ship with this. It can define some content that will better showcase them when you first go to customize them. That could be a Nav menu setup. So the social Nav menus are pretty common where you have those little icons for Yelp, and Instagram, and that sort of thing. It’s sort of magical how those icons are made to appear in the first place.
.@helenhousandi during State of the Word. #wcus pic.twitter.com/uYU52nluwi
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
We sort of pre-populate that for you in giving you an idea that this is something that will work really well in this area. So for example with these edit links, in this example it’s editing the tag line, but think about having a widget. When you set up a theme for the first time, you have widget areas and they’re labeled, but you have no idea what corresponds to which. Themes now can pre-populate them, kind of say, this theme is really good for businesses, and so in the footer here, you can have a widget for your business location and ours.
Not only will it show that widget – it doesn’t make it live on your site – but it shows it to you when you’re customizing for the first time. Then you get a little edit icon, and you can go and you can edit it right from there, and really get started with this good solid base for setting up your site for the first time.
Also, along with that we have better menu building which means that when you’re setting up a Nav menu for your site, you can actually add new pages right from there the same way that you can make categories. When you’re writing a post, now you can add pages. You don’t necessarily have to be ready to write your grand About page, but you know that you want it in your menu when you’re setting up your site. Now you can just add that.
Also we have custom CSS, additional CSS, which a lot of you have probably seen. It’s very common in themes, definitely a lot of commercial themes. It’s also a feature in Jetpack, although not with live previews, so it’s really cool in 4.7 is that we will have live previewing custom CSS. So you can make tweaks for those of you who are comfortable with it. And it will work with Jetpack, I promise, because I’m a heavy Jetpack custom CSS user.
This is one of the features, this is stepping a little outside of the setup process, but we have these big beautiful video headers, and 2017 showcases them. I know that there are a lot of themes out there that have started to do this. So I’m really excited that we have a uniform way of handling this for our users and that you can have these big beautiful videos to check out on your site.
We also have some cool features. I think of these as sleeper hits. I really like this one. We have PDF thumbnail previews for those of you who have to do a lot of document management in WordPress, something higher ed, I used to do that. You get thumbnail previews now of the first page of your PDF so that you know, you can tell your stuff apart, and you know my upload worked and feel a little better.
We have user admin, or user dashboard languages. What this means is that when you have multiple languages installed on your site, your individual users can actually choose which language they prefer their dashboard in.
You may operate a Spanish news site. But you have an English writer who is good with Spanish but maybe prefers to use our interface in English. Or even a Spanish speaker who prefers their interfaces in English, which happens. Actually my husband is one of the people.
Finally, I think this is finally, for developers I think this is a thing that a lot of you are really excited about. WordPress 4.7 includes the content endpoints for the REST API.
Really, it’s thanks to this team over here I think spread out a little bit, I’m really excited about this, I’m really excited about taking this enthusiasm and building stuff with it. That’s what I really like to see, and that’s what made me feel like this really, truly has been a successful thing that we’ve chosen to do.
Finally. Two finally’s! I would like to give a special thanks to these two people who we call release deputes, Jeff Paul, who is a team lead at XWP, and Aaron Jorbin whose job title I don’t know, but he’s here somewhere, you can ask him. They’ve been incredibly helpful to me through this release. There’s a lot of management, people wrangling. I’m a developer, and occasional designer, but my strengths are not necessarily in project management and that sort of thing. Having people who’ve been able to help me in those areas has been incredibly valuable, and I deeply appreciate you, and I’d like a round of applause for these two.
We also ran some quick numbers. We have more than 475 contributors, yeah, to 4.7 which is significantly more than some other past releases. I think when – I actually lead 4.0 – and I think we had maybe 300 then, this is huge growth in that area, and of those 475+ contributors, just over 200 of those are first-time contributors, and that’s extremely exciting to me.
Now I get to leave you with one final thing, and that is that you get a nice preview of the release video. It’s coming on Tuesday, and so, thanks to Rommie Abraham for producing and narrating this video. He’s local to the area. You get to watch it, and I want you to pay special attention to the Jazzer, Sarah Vaughan, I’d like to pay attention to the middle name.
Video Voiceover: WordPress 4.7 Vaughan, named after jazz legend Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan, makes it easier than ever to set up your website the way you want it.
Meet Carly. Carly operates a pet store, and needs a website. Carly looks at her options and discovers WordPress. With WordPress, Carly can choose from thousands of free themes to fit her needs. Carly’s decided on 2017, a brand new theme for WordPress built from the ground up for businesses. 2017 includes a sleek design with large images throughout. Perfect for both small businesses like a pet store, and larger businesses.
Because this is a brand new site 2017 will show some starter content to help Carly visualize how it can work for her store, and get started with customizing it to fit.
New visual edit shortcuts show what aspects of her site can be changed right there within the live preview. As she customizes her theme, Carly notices that she can add a video to her heading. She chooses a video she shot of her niece with her puppy and adds the video header to her site directly from her tablet.
Because you can create pages while editing menus in the Customizer in WordPress 4.7, Carly can continue building her site structure without breaking her current workflow. Carly wants to make one more change before she’s ready to share her site: make the name of her store more noticeable. The new CSS panel makes this easy, and shows your changes live as you build.
Matt Mullenweg: I can watch that puppy all night.
Video Voiceover: With that she publishes the brand new website for her pet store. Carly’s happy.
WordPress 4.7 includes all of these features and more along with the exciting developer features like REST API Content Endpoints. WordPress 4.7 Vaughan. Helping you set up your site the way you want it.
Matt Mullenweg: Can we get one more round of applause for Helen? It is incredibly humbling and one of my favorite parts of the work I do to be able to work with folks like Helen and other contributors, so thank you.
We’re going to talk a little bit about … By the way, that video was pretty funny, I liked how it was like, consumer, consumer, consumer, and the REST Content Endpoint API. Someone was probably like, “Oh, I get this. I get this. Whaaat?” When everything’s capital letters, you know …
Content endpoints for the REST API
I’m going to talk a little about the REST Content Endpoint API. We like to show some of the examples that are starting to use it, and we have two cool new ones to highlight this year. The first is the Guggenheim Museum. Beautiful amazing museum in New York. If you go to Guggenheim.org, and click around, notice how fast it is, and then view the source and see the amazingness that is happening, because it is actually fully powered by the new Content Endpoint APIs.
The second site that you can see this on is vocativ, which is stories from the deep web. I don’t know what that means, deep web or dark web, I forget. Those would be very different. It’s safe to visit, don’t worry, I checked it out. They have an entirely 100% React front end that I thought was pretty cool.
Then we have ustwo with Human Made’s help built their site completely in React and are using the new Content Endpoint APIs. What’s especially cool about ustwo is it’s actually fully open source. If you go to http://ustwo.com/blog/open-sourcing-our-website, much like WordPress.org and Calypso and everything like that, they are open-sourcing as well. Some cool stuff happening with APIs, a round of applause for that. It’s been some good things.
It’s been a busy year, but actually I want to rewind just a little bit. Talk about a longer term view towards the past and marry that to a longer term view towards the future. We have had 14 releases, major releases, in the past five years. So 14 times we’ve done what Helen just talked about, what I talked about for the releases that happened the past year. They’ve been led by 10 different release leads. Helen is joining the small crew which has done two or more. Congratulations!
It’s been, if you noticed 14 over five years, it’s very steady. Almost exactly three per year, which is what we started to do about five years ago. We’ve had a very, very predictable release cycle, which has definitely…. We’ve cleaned up I would say quite a bit our release management side of things, and our sort of…. Even though it’s still a struggle every time, but the project management, the getting things in on time, the testing, the all of that. It’s so much smoother than it used to be. For those of you who are around pre-3.0, you know what I’m talking about.
Also in the past five years, we’ve managed to grow WordPress’s market share from 13% to 27.2%. It more than doubled. This is not market share of people running a CMS, this is market share of all websites. And this, both the size and the growth is completely unprecedented. The number two is around 3.3% and the number three is 2.2%. It’s Joomla and Drupal. Just in the past five years, we’ve grown the equivalent of, like, what Drupal has done over 16 years. Six times over.
WordPress market share has more than doubled in those 5 years, from 13.1% to 27.2% #wcus pic.twitter.com/VDrA3F7mzJ
— WordCamp US (@WordCampUS) December 3, 2016
It’s a real testament to how the community has come together, and really thought about the user first, and thought about how the experience is going to be, and how it affects everyday folks. Not just developers, not just whatever it is that we might be ourselves, really thinking about the larger community.
We’ve also had a new default theme every year since 2010. I will say that 2017 is one of my favorites because you haven’t seen a theme like that before. You haven’t seen that done with WordPress this way before. It brings us. We’ve been doing it this way for about five years now.