And so, without further ado, let's go ahead and hop into the questions and answers, or
at least the questions.
I can't promise answers, but y'all can bring the questions.
So, yeah, make your way over here if you got a question, and it looks like we have someone
amazing and brave to kick us off, so introduce yourself, and we'll all say hi.
Hi, my name is Milana Tzap, I'm from Serbia.
And I'm here on behalf of MakeThings.
So I'm from the commutation team, and we started contributing, collaborating together with other
teams, like learn and training teams, because we have, yeah, we have needs for the same infrastructure,
but there is no infrastructure.
And we also started collaborating with hosting team on new handbook that will happen at VEST
administration, and we really want to collaborate with core team to have dedicated documentarian
for every developer, so we document everything while it's being developed, so we don't ever
again ship code that is not fully documented.
Now, my question is, because we are doing this all in private messages, and that's not
the way for open source, can we have some, you know, support from meta team or something
to make this, to create the infrastructure for collaborating between teams?
So, would that be like a channel in the Slack, or an AP2, what would be the idea there?
Not just that, you know, when you start with just release, there are changes, and now we,
from documentation, we document that, but there has to be some waterfall that information
goes to learn team and support team and training, so if we could have some system where it kind
of expects us to work together, not to be just separate team.
I mean, we can discuss this tomorrow at contributor date to see how we can do it.
We just know that we need to do it.
Yeah, the good news, all the changes are happening in source control, and so everything is there.
Maybe what could be a good role is someone to keep an eye on that, and do like a notification,
so that could be even more than a new form, it might just be like a new way for people
to contribute.
Yeah, that would be also great.
That's the way that I try to keep up with things as well, is keeping an eye on the GitHub issues
and the change sets.
I used to read every single one, but not so much anymore, but I would say that if you
want to know what's coming, reading the change sets, and we have pretty good commit messages
now, is by far and away the best way to do it, but I could, perhaps if that might be
too technical for someone who wants to contribute otherwise, someone to translate that could
be helpful.
Yeah.
Cool, thank you for the suggestions.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So, non-serious question, followed up by a serious question.
Sure.
So, welcome back.
In honor of you being back in San Diego, are you going to do Irish car bombs again tonight?
I don't remember the last time doing them, so they must have worked.
That was our first word camp here in San Diego, 2011, and there was photographic evidence
of that.
I seem to recall taking photos of you behind the bar.
You know, as I enter my late 30s, hangovers seem to last longer, so I drink a lot less.
Cool.
So, a little bit more serious of a question is, recently I had, as a developer, worked
on a project on wordpass.com, and they didn't want to move, despite my urging, and I ended
up having to really go through the process of working on there and seeing some real,
like, struggling to work through being on.com and some limitations that are on there.
It was not a great experience as a developer, and, like, I've used some very strong language
about it before, but, like, it was a very poor experience as a developer, like, working
on the platform, and getting anything done.
Like, as I was created as an admin, as a user, I couldn't install plugins or themes.
You know, they had their main account, which, I guess, was what was paying for their premium
service.
I had to be logged in as them to be able to install or edit plugins, that sort of thing.
So, my question is, what are we doing about.com?
This is the thing that really drives, you know, this, what we're doing here, right?
This, like, really pays for all that.
You know, like, where?
Well, some of it.
Not most of it.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
So, but, I mean, that's, I mean, the majority of, like, you know, the user base that we
have as WordPress, right, is, comes from the.com.
So...
Yeah.
Probably it'd be good to talk about a little bit of the history and then what's some of
the latest stuff that maybe you haven't seen yet.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And not how depth we started as.
I'm just kind of curious, I feel like we're being overlapped by Squarespace and Wix these
days, right?
Like, onboarding, user experience is, like, you know, taking significant leaps above and
beyond what WordPress.com, I think, has now.
And I'm kind of concerned that some of the dip in user base that we've experienced in
the last year or so is kind of a direct result of that.
These public companies that have the money, that have the background, throw all kinds of
stuff at that.
And they have almost an infinite supply of, you know, like contributors as being an open
source platform.
And I think that what's missing is a little bit of, is the vision.
And maybe you can talk a little bit about maybe there is some upcoming vision to that.
Yeah, originally WordPress.com started as, like you said, a way to onboard brand new
people.
And it was a big multi-site instance.
So there were a lot of plugins and things built in, but you couldn't modify the code
or install your own or things like that.
What changed is on the business plan and above, you know, it's a full, essentially like VPS
type site.
So you do get complete control over the code top to bottom, including being able to install
plugins and themes.
It sounds like this customer might not have been on that business plan.
Oh, he was.
Oh, they were.
Yeah.
I had to be logged in as him to actually do any of that.
I couldn't, even as an admin user, I couldn't do that, which is.
They might have set you as the wrong role because you should be able to, and the thing
that just launched, I want to say last week is now full SSH and WPCLI access.
So it is something we've been, a lot of people don't know about this yet, but definitely
we've been hearing from our developers and we want to make it a developer friendly place.
We also launched a pricing change that we ended up rolling back that brought the full
kind of hosting access to basically every plan and lower the price.
And that ended up being a huge disaster for some reason.
So we reverted back to the old plans.
Sure.
Yeah, there's new things launching there, I would say developer focus is a big part
of it.
And particularly if you haven't yet, check out the SSH and WPCLI access.
And of course, what's happening in the back end that is unusual there is actually multi-data
center failover and also super high performance, including high frequency CPUs and everything
like that.
So you can actually run like very advanced LMS sites or WooCommerce sites or other things
on it.
So if you haven't checked it out recently, check it out again.
Okay.
And in fact, that platform behind it is WP Cloud, WP.Cloud, which is now being used by
a few other folks like Pressable, Grid Payne, some other hosts are starting to license that
as well.
Right.
Because it is one of the highest performance.
Yeah, we're just talking to Patrick this afternoon.
Yeah, yeah.
But sorry you had a bad experience there.
And definitely, I would say right in on the admin thing, because maybe that's a bug.
Okay.
But the other things like the SSH access just launched, so check that out again.
Okay.
Thank you for the question.
Yeah, good to see you again.
Hey, my name is James, I'm with PMC.
And my question is, if you could wave a magic wand and make a WordPress problem that seems
otherwise insurmountable just disappear overnight, what would you choose?
A pick two, because one really drives me crazy.
Y'all know the capital IDs in the database tables?
Oh my goodness, what were we thinking?
I think that goes all the way back to the B2 days.
So that would be one I would change.
And we probably can change at some point, we just need to migrate some things.
I think none of people actually directly created a database so we could do that.
I guess I'm going to wave this magic wand three times.
You're the boss, you're in charge.
The second one, and I think there is some solutions for this, but I've been thinking
a lot about projects that really build for the long term, and I think not just in years
but decades.
And of course, open source has some of the best ones of these, and one I've been kind
of particularly enamored with recently is actually SQLite.
They try to think about their data formats being accessible for decades to come, like
a really safe data storage format for rich data.
And so something a little more native in terms of supporting SQLite, I think actually would
pair very well with WordPress's thoughts on longevity and permalinks and everything
like that that we try to support.
And third thing I would say, which came up in a lot of questions, particularly in Europe
and other places, is if we could help people on board better to get involved with the community.
And I think particularly with the loss of a lot of meetups during COVID, they're now
starting to catch back up, and I know there's actually going to be some focus on that at
Contributor Day tomorrow.
By the way, who's taking over at Contributor Day?
Oh, wow.
That's great.
I think was it Porto?
We actually ran out of food and chairs and stuff because we had so many more people at
Contributor Day.
So I think the best way to get involved with the WordPress community is typically sitting
down on a laptop with someone else who's already involved and like kind of walking through
it and learning and learning together.
And so meetups, Contributor Day is coming back and everything is fantastic.
I would love to get better at doing that in a distributed fashion.
So I think we're pretty good at it if you're in person or able to come physically to a
Contributor Day, but as you all know, we had to cap the tickets quite lower.
This is, I think, the smallest WordCamp US since, oh, wow, I kind of love it because
this feels like the old days.
Not quite 2002.
That one would have been much smaller.
A lot of people don't know, but the very first ever WordCamp was organized with only
like a few weeks of notice, and we did it at the Swedish American Music Hall in San
Francisco.
I just saw an amazing documentary as well called We Are As Gods, which is about Stuart
Brand, who is this amazing character who founded the Whole Earth Catalog, which of course
inspires Steve Jobs, and they were going to some of the original, I think he also organized
the very first ever hacker conference, kind of like around the homebrew computer club
and everything like that.
And in the documentary they had pictures of this first conference, and gosh, if you
wouldn't believe it, it was at the Swedish American Music Hall.
I was like, wait, I recognize that weird place.
So that in-person is helping, but I would love for us to, whether that's online pairing
or online meeting times that are in different time zones and things, to make it easy for
the folks who, for whatever reason, aren't able to come to a WordCamp or meet up, get
involved.
Because that's, I think, part of the power of our online community as well.
Time to wake up.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Can I help him with a mic there?
Yeah.
Got it.
Michelle Fischette with StellarWP at Liquid Web, and post-status.
Whoa.
Yes.
My question.
Busiest woman in WordPress.
What's that?
Busiest woman in WordPress.
Right.
Maybe.
Merger.
You've met Josefa, right?
Mergers and acquisitions have been a hot topic in the last few years.
What are your thoughts about this for the WordPress ecosystem?
Do you think it's a good thing or a bad thing?
Why?
Or why not?
I think mergers and acquisitions are value-neutral in and of themselves, and it's more about
what happens afterwards.
So I think it's natural that, particularly when we enter moments of economic uncertainty,
which we've certainly had a lot of in the past few years and might be going into more
of now, or when markets are super hot, like they kind of were a year ago, for there to
be some consolidation, or folks that particularly have a lot of equity value in their stock
to use that to join up.
And I'll also say that having done over like 25 of those, but on both sides of a lot of
those, including as an investor, they're tough to do right.
And one thing that I actually see helping the WordPress community versus acquisitions
that happen in more general technology is there's so much philosophical alignment across
a lot of the organization in the WordPress community, including very many of them being
distributed or having a strong, like, distributed aspect to them.
And so, of course, like having the open source ethos.
So I feel like the WordPress organizations are really good influences on each other.
And certainly at Automatic, we've had a lot of inspiration from, you know, some of the
cool things that other organizations do, including around contributor days or how they get back
or all sorts of things.
And because there's so much sharing and blogging about it, there's just a lot of cross-pollination,
which I like.
Where they're tough is just integrating different cultures are hard.
Sometimes founders might leave after an acquisition, or just there might be sort of like an organ
rejection of the cultures of a new organization, an old organization.
One way we think about it is that when we buy a company, we're hoping to both influence
them and be influenced by them.
So Automatic itself is kind of like a different organism once the cultures merge.
And depending on the size of what's joining, that might both take a while or be a really
big change.
Like, for us, one of the most, the largest ones in terms of people is Tumblr, which
is about, I think, 200 people, 180 people when we bought it.
That has been an interesting process.
I would encourage, you know, folks who work on acquisitions or do them in the space, to
think about the day that deals are signed as the halfway point, not the finish point.
Because however much work you did, getting to that and working together is, I think you
need at least that much on the other side to really intentionally integrate the cultures
and onboard people well.
And also just make sure there's not something, you know, kind of lost in the bureaucracy
that's happening around, like, expense policies or vacation resetting or just all the kind
of logistics that sometimes we can forget about when those things happen.
So.
I'd love you to have you on post-data so we can talk about it more.
I'm happy to.
I'm always happy to join the podcast of the different WordPress publications.
And thank you again for the question.
My pleasure.
Hey, Matt, I'm Matt Graham from Whitby, Ontario, Canada.
I love Whitby, actually.
What's that?
I love Whitby.
Whitby Island.
What's that?
Oh, no.
It's Whitby.
I'm thinking of Whitby Island.
Never mind.
I haven't been to Whitby, Ontario.
That's okay.
It's very small.
I wouldn't expect many people in this room to even know about it.
So it's all good.
Okay.
So much has been said, discussed, and argued about accessibility in the block editor.
Though the block editor is technically accessible, efficiency is greatly hindered for those who
are blind low vision and keyboard users.
Is there any plans to move the block editor forward from being technically accessible
to functionally accessible?
And what would make it more functionally accessible?
That would be an example, because I know we put in a tremendous amount of work to make
it all keyboard navigable and simplify some of the navigation.
Right.
From my accessibility expert actually sent me like a really long message, and I tried
to slam it into like a paragraph.
This might not be the same, but back when it first launched was like having to hit tab
or back buttons like 20 times just to bold something.
Something like to reduce that somehow.
Even moving blocks up or down in the hierarchy seems to be very...
Which is why we created the navigator.
Exactly.
So moving more towards that, I definitely agree that there's been a lot more done recently
with that.
Is there more plans coming up to make it even more so?
So very much so.
So I would say that especially if you were to compare, well, one thing that's tough is
that the block editor is giving exponentially more functionality than more of an extracional
document editor or different things.
We do put a lot of work into creating keyboard shortcuts for everything and a good amount
of testing, including creating some entirely new interfaces to allow sort of faster, particularly
keyboard-based navigation.
But of course accessibility is more than just that.
And so particularly if there's feedback from users or it sounds like this person who sent
you the long couple paragraphs, one of them they haven't checked it out recently, check
it out because it's been incredible improvements.
Actually WordPress 6.1 is including 11 releases of Gutenberg.
So we're still releasing at a very, very fast pace.
It's actually the part of WordPress that's having the most commit activity and the most
growth in the past year.
And feedback particularly from users who are using different assistive technologies is
really invaluable because even the standards and other things like you said, what we might
do technically might not reflect how a certain client or a certain use case, so that real
world usage is really, really helpful, particularly because for user testing it can be difficult
to find enough users that access the technology in different ways.
The final thing I'll say is that the WordPress both has API and multiple ways to do things.
So for example, if someone were primarily just writing blog posts, for example, didn't
really need the advanced layout capabilities of the site editor or the blog editor, I would
actually encourage to use a different method of posting, including there's lots of desktop
clients that talk to XMRPC or the REST API, and I have given some thought as well as if
actually for the entire interface of WordPress, if there could be an interesting project,
create kind of a parallel API-driven version of it that was designed to perhaps have, like,
hide some of that more advanced functionality for the everyday use case, again, particularly
if you were doing something more like blogging on it versus the full layout stuff.
And so you could access that more complex interface if you needed to do that particular
task, but for the everyday, that could be a simpler one.
So that's already possible with APIs, but I think actually a pretty interesting approach
for the accessibility team or something, because we now have APIs for pretty much everything.
So you could actually create a completely parallel WP admin with not that much overhead.
That could be a much simpler markup or something.
Thank you.
Hello.
Bonjour.
Konnichiwa.
Megan from Canada here.
Howdy.
Howdy.
Multilingual in WordPress.
It's always been the last priority, unfortunately.
Not the last.
Well, so in the Gutenberg roadmap that we know, it's actually number four, and that's the
last on the list.
Over 60% of people speak more than one.
That's because we haven't announced five or six yet.
I'm patient.
I wait.
Over 60% of people in the world speak more than one language.
Over 25% speak three or more.
Like I'm curious as to why it's always been a lower priority and what we can do specifically,
what you think personally, this has not been a higher priority.
What barriers do you see that we can start working towards and what can we do in the
next three releases to finally let WordPress democratize language?
Yeah, this one comes up.
Although, I think this is one of the first times I've gotten it at WordCamp US.
Usually I get this question at WordCamp Europe for perhaps obvious reasons.
I took a long flight to get here to ask you that.
Where'd you come in from, by the way?
Ottawa, Canada.
WordCamp 2025.
WordCamp 2023.
Also, we're going to plan a 20th-year birthday party for WordPress.
I think everyone else should too, maybe.
Oh, nice.
I'm curious who came here the furthest.
I met someone from Pakistan earlier.
Who thinks they came in the furthest?
From Pakistan?
Yeah.
Nice.
How about over there?
Australia.
Australia.
Australia?
Whoa.
Although, on flight time, I think you said 30 hours, right?
I'll travel.
That'll do it.
And where?
How about in the back?
Where from?
Karachi, Pakistan.
Yeah.
That's a long one.
Thank you, by the way.
So there's a few questions in there.
One, multilingual and WordPress today.
And two, why is it further down in the Gutenberg roadmap?
So I'll try to address those separately.
Multilingual today is obviously not in core, but the good news is there are a number of
pretty good plugins for it.
And so many, many WordPress sites are running a multilingual fact.
Actually, who here runs WordPress in more than one language?
That's pretty good.
Yeah.
That looked like about a 5% or 10%.
And we're in WorkCamp US, so I'm sure it'd be much higher if we asked that same question
in WorkCamp Europe or one of the international WorkCamps.
So very possible.
And actually, these plugins are pretty good.
I'm not going to endorse a specific one.
I used to work at one.
I can guarantee you that.
But they still cost money, and that's not the democracy we're trying to build.
And most of them have free versions, and then some of them have paid upgrades and other
things.
It is tricky, particularly the data model for it.
So that brings us to why it is later in the Gutenberg roadmap, and just do a quick refresher.
Version sort of phase one of Gutenberg was blocks, sort of the post editor.
Phase two, which we're in right now, is taking those blocks and allowing you to edit the
whole site.
So that's what we're now calling the site editor.
We're moving away from the full-site editing term, and probably won't call it site editor.
Phase three is workflow and collaboration, which there's a little bit of attention earlier,
because there's actually a lot of folks who want to start that right now.
And I'm actually trying to pump the brakes a little bit, because I really want to get
our site editing to a point of excellence and accessibility before we move on.
And then fourth is the multilingual.
And that's the only four of the phases that we've announced so far.
One of the reasons I really wanted to create the building blocks, sometimes literally, before
we got to multilingual, is because, to me, one of the big parts of creating a really
great multilingual experience is that collaboration and workflow.
So when content is created in one language, how does that then flow to the other languages?
What does that look like?
And so having some ability to have some different roles and workflows built into WordPress,
I think it's going to be really key for doing that well.
The other thing in why multilingual is going to be, I think, tricky to address in core.
If you notice, a lot of the WordPress plugins actually use different models of the data.
And some use other tables.
Some use the post table.
But regardless of how they work, it's very tricky, because you move to kind of a one-to-one
relationship between a page and a post or the content there to almost like a many-to-many.
And there's so many different workflows.
Some sites want every single page translated, and some might want a subset, or some might
want how switching works, whether that's URL-based, subdomain-based, cookie-based.
There's so many different ways to address it.
Do you want the same slugs, which is kind of what's in the URL for all of them, like
slash contact, and then just the content is translated?
Or do you want a way to map?
It's contact in English, and someone tell me that in another language.
A different word, right, would be in the URL.
So that kind of many-to-many approach is honestly going to add a tremendous amount of complexity
to WordPress.
And I'm actually still not 100% whether we should do more of a core plugin for it that's
officially supported and created by folks, but maybe not actually distributed with core
WordPress, kind of like Gutenberg was in the beginning, or whether it should actually be
in core, just because it creates that.
But the number one thing I do want to figure out there is the data model, because then
much like page-building plugins can all now use core WordPress blocks, and that's kind
of a new standard, versus having a different way to do blocks across to different page
builders, whether you're a Beaver builder, a Divi or whatever.
If we could make it so all the multilingual plugins are using kind of a common data structure,
I think that would be much easier for other plugins than to integrate with them.
But I don't know what that right data structure is yet, and I don't think we have enough folks
to work on that simultaneously with these other phases.
So it is really kind of a matter of focus, and it drives me crazy, because I get this
question every single time.
It seems natural that we want to grow our market share, and this is the way other softwares
make it a little easier.
Yeah.
Anyway, thank you.
Well, I don't know if it's possible.
I haven't seen also an implementation that does it in a super great user way yet, either.
So that would also be something, like if any of you have, you know, whether it's another
CMS entirely, or one of the plugins for WordPress that you think really nails the user experience,
I would love to spend some more time with that, because the complexity of this many
to many, and how the workflows work, how the URLs work, everything like that, it appears
I haven't seen like a perfect implementation, it's more like a series of trade-offs or implementing
a subset of it.
I will follow up with you on that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Gracias.
Thank you.
I'm at my name is Birgit Palihaak, and I have a question about tomorrow is the contributor
day.
Yeah.
And if you stay, and I don't know if you do, but what would be the favorite, the most
favorite thing for you at contributor day to work on?
Oh, I believe, by the way, is it that we have 17 of the 21 make teams represented as well?
Oh, cool, I'll repeat that.
So she said there will be some representatives online as well there.
So there will actually be 20 of the 21 teams.
Which team did make it?
Plugins.
Oh, it's okay, plugins aren't that important, right?
We've got a lot of them already.
Oh, where'd you go?
Oh, there you are.
So yeah.
Hmm.
You know, something that I've actually really enjoyed at previous ones is there's so much
on WordPress.org that I think is, you know, we just redesigned the homepage and a few
of the things.
It feels like there's a lot of lift from relatively simple changes, whether that's more CSS or
just copy-based that could really improve both the core main WordPress.org site.
And I also think a lot about the Rosetta sites, you know, again, being relatively monolingual,
at least for natural languages.
I don't know.
Probably some folks in here could say like on the es.wordpress.org or one of these other
ones, how good of a job are we doing?
We're both having compelling copy that's, you know, relevant, that's maybe synced up
with what we learned to be best on the main site.
And it's kind of a version of the last question, what's the workflow for propagating those changes
in different directions?
Or is there more that we can do, particularly on the Rosetta sites, which is our international
sub-domains, to be more compelling and relevant for that market?
So that would probably be my pick.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And I'm looking forward to seeing lots of you all there tomorrow as well.
Hi Matt, Philip Levine from South Florida Web Advisors.
I got a quick question.
Many of the people in the room, I get used block-edder, that's the direction things are
going in, but there's a lot of folks who are still using classic editors, still using page
builders.
Whenever I do a new install, it's a pain that I got to remember to go in and install classic
editor, classic widgets.
Could there be a toggle for during the install to say, install in classic mode and throw
those plugins in automatically, and that way you're not having to do it every time?
There could be, but no.
Okay.
Thank you.
No, it's okay.
Let me give a slightly longer answer there, which is that we definitely are going to,
we actually, I think it's dended how long we're supporting the classic editor plug-in
and everything like that.
Technically it's not too hard to keep that going for a while, because we still need to
have kind of tiny MC support and other things kind of embedded within Gutenberg.
We do have a classic block in Gutenberg as one example that provides the legacy support.
So if you open a post that was created before Gutenberg existed, you can still edit it and
convert it to blocks if you want to really simply.
But very much so, the preponderance of new development in WordPress is really focused
on the block editor.
And so any effort that we could put towards adding that toggle or something, we'd rather
put into making it so you don't want the toggle anymore.
And someday, it sounds like that day is not yet, but that won't be the first plug-in
you install in things.
And more and more, we want users to also be demanding that, because they want a functionality
of a block or an integration with a plug-in which primarily operates through blocks, because
it just allows such a more common user interface to what could be very, very advanced functionality.
So all the new developments going into that, and think of classic as just like a stop-gap.
So if you're still bidding sites with classic in 2022, see how you can maybe minimize that
or migrate the users, spend an hour with them to teach them how the new stuff works, because
it's really the future of WordPress.
So thank you for the question.
Hello, sir.
How are you doing?
Good.
I have a quick question.
You may not have a quick answer, but I'm William Jackson, and represent my wife, Aida.
And we're real interested in knowing, we've been teaching about the metaverse and onboarding
people and applying it to a business aspect as well.
We wanted to get your idea of how the metaverse and its growth and immersive communities and
societies, have you taken that into account of how you can apply it or work with WordPress
or in some fashion?
That's a good question.
Thank you.
So we're teachers, so we always try to ask good questions.
It's interesting because operating and developing connections online hasn't really been my entire
adult life, even before I was an adult, and it was so powerful to me from a very young
age to be able to save online communities, like going back to even like BBSs and IRC
and everything like that, where my physical identity or age or parents or anything wasn't
a barrier to connecting with folks, particularly I was pretty young, my voice was like three
octaves higher, you met me in person, you wouldn't take me seriously, like I'd walk
in a Best Buy to save up money to buy a camera and they wouldn't even talk to me and stuff
like that.
But then online, you know, I had my usernames, Photomat, before that it was I think Illusion
or something, you know, my hacker names and it was fun to be on the forums and learn about
whatever it was from BBSs to phone freaking or whatever it was, that was kind of what
I got into in my youth.
And then of course, you know, a lot of computer space informs and getting involved with open
source, which is still one of the things I was gladdest to this day, things I was so
glad to stumble across in my life and is something I hope to be the rest of my life.
So the element of what's now called the metaverse of like being able to put on and off online
identities and participate more on the basis of your contributions or your avatar, how
do you choose to present yourself online?
I think is like one of the best things about the internet and very cool that the WordPress
community is so good at translating that into person, where I'm sure a lot of you have
experienced this already, but like very much a community where people don't judge your
book by the cover and it's great, you know, every WordPress event you'll see folks from
tons of different backgrounds, ages, everything, like it's like, doesn't matter, we're all
here combined by like a similar love of open source WordPress and everything like that.
And that's what I think one of the best parts, particularly, you know, a lot of the recent
conversation around metaverse is centered and pushed by Facebook now meta and very much
around their investments in VR, which is not insignificant.
I think they're spending like $5, $10 billion a year.
And the hardware is getting better, much faster.
You know, in theory, like Apple's going to come out with a new headset or there might
be some AR type things.
And if that technology was to follow similar curves that cell phones have over the past,
it's now 15 years since the iPhone was introduced, I guess even prior to that with like, RIM devices
and hand springs and stuff.
I could see five or 10 years from now, maybe a lot of us wearing these things in the audience.
I would certainly love something that would like remind me of someone's name or something
when I met them or like some sort of scanner, like that would be kind of cool.
And a lot of y'all wearing glasses already.
So if the technology got to a point where it could be embedded in a glass, that's pretty
cool.
And then hopefully we don't have to wear a mask then so they won't fog up so much.
But my personal experience is that screens are still really good.
And so I've enjoyed VR, for example, the headsets for like gaming or just having fun.
But I think it would be hard for me to imagine wearing one of these for the amount that I'm
on a computer all day.
And having a screen that you can put in your pocket, take a look at, show people, share
really easily, it's still pretty great.
So I'm not actually convinced that the sort of VR use cases are going to be as ubiquitous
as the more screen ones, unless there was some sort of breakthrough in technology that
is just like impossible to imagine, at least for me yet.
I'm sure in the depths of Apple or Meta they have some prototypes there that are pretty
neat.
And in the meantime, I'll say that games, forums, there's so many online communities
that are I think fulfilling all the promise of what Meta is saying could happen.
So if that is appealing to anyone, I'd encourage them to like spend some more time with some
of these online communities that exist, including the Roblox and Minecrafts of the world that
create like really rich worlds.
Thank you, because we're seeing more and more conferences reaching out to us to see our
ideas and opinions about how to integrate people in the conferences like this into the
Metaverse, and people come in as avatars, so we just wanted to kind of get your perspective
of the way it's going to go and how it's happening, so we can kind of guide what we're doing
and teaching.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
And just to follow up there, maybe that could be a fun like word cam.
I definitely, you know, now that we can come in person, it wasn't as not as interesting,
but during COVID, I definitely went to a few of those online conferences and software advanced
pretty quickly.
There was even an online Burning Man one year that I think there were actually multiple
ones you could access through different platforms, and it was interesting.
Not as good as the real verse, but coming up, but still pretty neat.
So was that, sorry, I couldn't hear that, okay, cool.
How about lightning rounds?
Should I get through the rest?
Okay.
Oh, hard stuff.
What time?
Okay, so I'll try to answer short answers, but we'll try to get through these five, and
if not, we'll have to stop right at the 545, so.
Sure.
Clarifying on a question.
Hi, I'm Courtney Robertson from GoDaddy Pro.
At Work Camp Europe, I asked about the translation on learn.wordpress.org, and I'd like to clarify
that question was more around courses.
We do have ways of storing some of the other languages, but courses are using Sensei Pro,
so I'm not sure on the timeframe of multilingual, and I would like to see an alternative before
we wait that long to make languages more available, and if that means a plugin or a Rosetta site
or something to maintain that, I'd like to see that get unblocked, and then related to
that, you and I had a conversation in Slack around the data of how many views or what
the access is on learn, and as we know on.org, gathering too much data is a little bit tricky
because people don't like a whole lot of data being gathered, especially on an open
source site.
It would be helpful.
So those are areas that I'm not sure if we can get unblocked, but it would be really
nice too.
I think we could.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we can continue that on the.org Slack, but I know we do run Google Analytics in some
places, and we've shared that with different contributors, so that shouldn't be too hard.
And I do think we do have some other language courses on learn as well, so it's a little
bit of a manual process now, but it is already happening.
Right.
And do you have an ETA on overhauling makethemainmake.wordpress.org page itself?
I don't think currently on the roadmap, so perhaps that's something people can take a
look at tomorrow.
Cool.
Thank you.
All right.
Lightning round.
I'll try to.
As you can tell, I can be loquacious, so I'll try to keep these short.
Hi, I'm Nathan from Elegant Themes.
One of those weird people that got into WordPress for blogging and still does it to this day.
Cool.
If anybody remembers way back in the day, like WP mods that wrote for them.
And so I fell in love with WordPress as a blogging platform.
It's been my profession for like 10, 15 years now.
And whenever I go to WordCamps, or I especially was surprised at WordCamp for publishers that
it wasn't actually for people like blogging, it was like for news organizations.
You seem to be at a very interesting position right now as like the company that acquired
Tumblr that reinvented the editor within WordPress for Gutenberg.
We are kind of seeing a potential for new ways to revolutionize blogging itself as a
medium and what's possible there as someone at the nexus of all that.
What do you see as the future of blogging?
Short answer.
So a quick stat, half the people coming to WordPress.com are actually blogging and bloggers.
And we're seeing a ton of activity there.
Things I'm most excited to work on, like as I mentioned before, we're switching Tumblr
to be WordPress powered.
So I think that could provide a really nice sort of like gateway into the WordPress world.
And I hope as future WordCamps they'll be like, because Tumblr is a younger audience,
people who started on Tumblr and then now are like at WordCamps writing plugins, things
like that.
I think that would be really cool.
And things that we're working on right now, particularly the remainder of the year, some
teams focused on the reader.
So because I think, you know, since Google Reader has been gone there hasn't been a good
way to follow other blogs.
And commenting.
I feel like commenting is, there's not good interactions for follow-up.
So I think both of those can help reinvigorate, because of course comments are the best part
of blogging.
And so keep an eye on for some improvements there, both in Jetpacker and WordPress.com
on its way.
Okay.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Hello.
David Yard from Orlando.
First, I want to thank you for the awesome photo that you took of me and John Mehta back
at a random obscure meetup where I was more nervous than anything else.
And also you said people.
Thank you for having us speakers here who are challenged by the attendees to be better
and do more cool stuff.
My question is, after talking to a few people here, it kind of seems that WordPress has
a marketing problem, where it is an amazing platform.
We know the power of it, but really and truly, only developers are kind of like welcome at
the table.
So as designers, as UX people, as brand strategists, we're just kind of like, yeah, WordPress
is great.
You should get it.
And then hopefully pass you off in the hands of a great developer.
Or if you're lucky and you find someone that is kind of like that unicorn, then so be it.
No pun intended.
Oh snap.
So how would you see as a best way for designers in the field, content people, to kind of come
together to collaborate around those more and not make it so technical, so to speak?
That is why we started Gutenberg, is to try to open up the flexibility and power of how
people are able to customize if they knew code in the past or just got good at building
themes and things to a much wider audience.
We also, there's going to be a design table tomorrow.
So come to that if you're, or maybe you're already at it, I bet you are.
I will say that one thing I hope to develop is a more culture of open source participation
from designers.
And part of that is showing the impact of user research, design, everything.
I think, at least when I hear developers in WordPress, is they're really hungry for it
because we might do a first version of a design or the developer might do it themselves.
But the feedback from like a user test or something else, I find incredibly influential.
So I'd love to see more of that actually as a way, and if we can publish it and show,
do that in public, I think it's actually, could teach a lot of people design skills,
even though they might not identify as a designer.
Cool.
Thank you.
All right.
We might actually get through these by the time they kick us out.
So I know if the lights are going to go off or my mic will cut out, I don't know.
We'll see.
Hi.
My name is Cassandra.
This is my first word camp.
Welcome.
You picked a good one.
Yes.
I only understand about half of the development conversation, but that's all right.
So I actually come from the nonprofit world, and I have had the privilege to learn from
presenters here about some of the efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
But I wanted to hear your thoughts about how our community, everyone, right, not just
the community team, could actively and strategically create avenues for disadvantaged communities.
I've helped build relationships locally between companies and schools, for example.
But this community is brilliant.
It's loving.
It's so focused on connecting.
And I just feel like we need to be intentional about fighting for access and combating poverty.
Yeah.
Thank you.
With the time, I'm definitely only going to be able to scratch your surfaces this one,
so I apologize in advance.
For a longer depth in this, if you didn't see earlier, there was a great talk by Kami
Chaos.
Yes, I did.
Kami here?
Yeah.
Somewhere.
So that's already online on the live stream.
I got to catch a bit of it, and of course, David Bissette's great tweets and everything
about it.
But I think that's worth a much more in depth, because it really, like you said, there's
so many different avenues and places to try to be more belonging as a community.
I will also point, as well, just briefly to some of the work of the WordPress Foundation,
the different programs that are being run, like workshops in other countries, the do
action type things that actually build websites for nonprofits.
So it's both teaching people how to do it and helping a nonprofit in a different field
have a better online presence, has been very high impact.
And I know some of the work, Automatic is a team that builds websites for folks just
for basically friends or influencers and stuff like that.
And we found it being very high impact, that even more than just giving money to an organization,
if we were able to help them convert more visitors to the website to be donors, that
had like a big multiplier effect.
And so it was one of the big ways that we are, one of the giving back that I've been
most proud of that we've been able to do.
So think about that as a way as well to support not just WordPress, people learning WordPress,
but other nonprofits in the space.
Helping their online presence is, will be very, very powerful.
And most nonprofits you contact will, if you say like, can I help with the website?
They'll be like, oh, thank you.
So thank you for the question.
That's brief, but hopefully some pointers to some deeper discussion on it.
All right.
Bring us home.
All right.
Hi, Matt.
It's Christina.
And one of the things I love about WordPress, I've been working with it since 2008, is
the flexibility and the choices people have and the commitment to diversity, accessibility
and inclusion.
Many of my clients are older and they've been using the classic editor and classic widgets
for a long time.
And when you say just teach them the new Gutenberg, that puts a hardship on older people who've
been using it for many years and are very happy with the classic editor.
So I'm here to urge you to keep it around much longer than what you suggested so that
the older community is not put in a hardship, that they have to learn something that's new
and technical.
So please do consider those folks.
That, hmm.
I think that represents one of the most difficult things about products in general.
As for example, iOS, was it 16, is about to come out.
So constantly operating systems, everything.
We need to update if we're going to be both not just update versions for security, everything
like that, but also to expand our mission of democratizing publishing.
And so one thing I do worry is that the longer that people stay on the old thing, the bigger
the delta is between what they were using before and what they're going to have to learn.
It's much, much easier if you're learning the latest thing to keep rolling with that
update than if, let's say, they were going to wait another five years and then try to
learn whatever, you know, Gutenberg 48 going from classic editor.
So I would actually, I will go back and encourage them to make the leap now because that will
give them most forward compatibility with where things are going.
And I actually believe that, you know, we were kind of early-ish to this, but if you
look at every CMS now, they're using some form of block editor.
And other document things are doing it.
Even Google Docs is moving to have some richer blocks.
So I think the concepts that you learn block editing is actually the future of just writing
and publishing on the web and just how everything's going to work, not even just Gutenberg.
And maybe they learn Gutenberg, as you all know, we're re-licensing the mobile version
of Gutenberg to be more easily embeddable, even in commercial apps.
I think Gutenberg blocks actually could wind up becoming like a wider web standard.
So it won't just apply to WordPress, but perhaps even for other applications.
I'd love if someday MailChimp or even Squarespace or Wix were to use Gutenberg.
And so it becomes more of a cross-CMS standard.
I think Gutenberg could actually be bigger than WordPress itself in terms of, you know,
being usable for lots of different apps.
We already have it on Tumblr, actually.
Gutenberg is still changing, so if you could make the transition longer, that would help.
Because it's hard for them to learn, and now it's changed, and they've got to learn it again.
So I'm eager to teach them, but I'd rather wait.
And so if you could make the transition longer, that would be great.
Well, we've already extended it a few years.
So, but Gutenberg started in what, 2016?
So it's been a while already.
And when Classic Editor was our main editor, it would change a lot every single release
as well.
So there is, I know it's hard to learn new things, but I can't recommend anything else
in good faith.
So I think it's hard but worth it.
Well, just consider the hardship on them.
That's all.
We do, yeah.
Thank you.
And now overtime a little bit, so thank you all for coming.