Matt Mullenweg 1:13 am on December 12, 2023

Overflow Questions from State of the Word 2023 in Madrid, Spain

Will put them in comments. We need something like Tumblr’s Ask feature. We had tens of thousands of streamers across Facebook and Youtube! Here’s the cleaned-up video with chapters:

Matt Mullenweg 1:44 am on December 12, 2023

Which region do you think has the most potential for WordPress growth? Where in the world do you hope we get more contributors from?

That’s going to depend a lot on the community-building and cohesion across the Spanish-speaking markets and India over the next year or two, my bet is it’s one of those two.

I’d like more contributions not from a region, but from an age-range: younger people! I was so lucky to get exposed to open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. at a young age, which was incredible for my education and development. I went from making Frontpage sites like this mentioned in the SOTW to co-founding WordPress in about two years. That was because participating in online open source communities, building products and solving problems for real users, was an incredible accelerant for my learning. I’d like for more people in their teens to have that opportunity.
Matt Mullenweg 1:48 am on December 12, 2023

In the past years some people have left or reduce their contribution. What are the plans to protect long term contributors and make them feel safe?

I don’t know if we can make anyone feel “safe” but I do think we can create a positive community around a shared philosophy of personal freedom and open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. liberty that is supportive and welcoming, and most importantly… fun! If we do that, I think people will stay involved. If it becomes not-fun, they won’t. That’s true for me, too. Let’s ask ourselves with everything we build or system we create: How can we make this 10% more fun?
- José Arcos 6:25 pm on December 14, 2023
  
  Thank you, Matt, for your answer and being available to the community to answer this and the other questions. I want to say in advance that I’m grateful for your work with WordPress and how you encourage the Open SourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. community to maintain the principles behind OSS.
  The point of my question is about how to prevent people from leaving the community or reducing their contributions, not because they have taken that decision or because they stopped getting amused by their role, but because they felt forced to leave, to protect themselves or because they don’t feel aligned with the community anymore. You are probably aware of different cases.
  Having fun is important, but you might stop having fun because other people, inside or outside the community, make you feel bad, and not because you are tired of contributing.
  What I’d like to hear is a plan from the Project and Teams Leads to ensure that everyone feels safe. An open channel where voices can be heard and taken into consideration. Something like: “The Office for Long Term Contributors”. It can be said that everyone is open to expressing their opinions on the P2s, Tracs, GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issues, etc. Yes, there are different channels, but expressing their opinion is not synonymous with being listened to.
  In summary: Long Term contributors are a key part of our community and even if they evolve in their roles and contributions to the community, it will be great to keep them active, even if they are just mentors for others and not daily active contributors. We need a plan to protect them and to encourage them to keep contributing and teaching others.
Matt Mullenweg 1:49 am on December 12, 2023

The WordPress community is getting older and older. Do you have any ideas on how to attract the younger generations?

I think it all goes back to events and in-person mentorship. I’ll leave this open for others to respond as I know there have been some cool projects and initiatives all over the world, from Kidscamps to Fresher onboarding.
- Saxon Fletcher 5:40 am on December 12, 2023
  
  I’ll add that 2024 is shaping up to be an exciting and pivotal year for WordPress from a product standpoint. There are so many projects already in motion that have the opportunity to change how developers, designers and end users outside the community all perceive WordPress. I want people to feel the same energy and excitement that I personally have about what’s being shipped, what’s coming and the overall direction. It’s easy to feel this energy when you’re deeply involved day to day but much harder when you don’t have that level of visibility. What we need is to really elevate our product marketing to capture and communicate this momentum, aliveness and direction. If we can do this, the energy is contagious and will translate to user growth and contributor growth. Our new release pages (6.3 and 6.4) are a great start.
  
  This, along with greater focus on the most impactful pain points and opportunities, would also be my answer to the following question.
  
  According to W3Techs, WordPress usage has been going down since June. What do you think about these numbers? Any ideas of what we can do to reverse this trend?
Matt Mullenweg 1:54 am on December 12, 2023

You said it: you shouldn’t stick to a roadmap just because you made it 😀 is that a good reason to switch multilingual and collaborative, and work on that 1st?

No, I think that the workflow and collaboration tools we’ll build in Phase 3 are going to be critical for making multilingual work in an optimal way.
Matt Mullenweg 1:55 am on December 12, 2023

Matt, with the recent acquisition of Texts, is Automattic thinking about implementing text technology into wordpress? Like a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party for example?

I think Texts works best as a client app, so that it can keep everything end-to-end encrypted to your device. But for something cool for messaging on the web, check out the Chatrix plugin for Matrix.
- Matt Mullenweg 1:56 am on December 12, 2023
  
  Also I’ve apparently been into chat for a while, because that Frontpage Geocities Columbia site had a chat page!
Matt Mullenweg 1:59 am on December 12, 2023

Do you see the WordPress user experience eventually splitting along the lines of the page builder users and the Blocks (GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/) users?

Page builders already have effectively forked the primary user experience of building and editing a website that is WordPress’ coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. mission. What I hope is with Gutenberg we’ll have a common framework that builders can build on top of, and a single data structure and APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. that plugins can integrate with, rather than having to support dozens of different page builders, each solving the same user need but with different code, data structures, and APIs.
Matt Mullenweg 1:59 am on December 12, 2023

There was a one-time attempt to do bug scrubs for long-standing bugs. Can we make this a monthly occurrence?

Sure! No objection from me. Just don’t forget Chesterson’s Fence!
- Aaron Jorbin 5:55 pm on December 13, 2023
  
  I’m going to add that anyone is welcome to run a bug scrub at any time. As the documentation for leading bug scrubs states
  
  Leading a Bug Scrub is something any interested community member can do.
  
  Doing a scrub doesn’t require anyone else to attend, so even if no one shows up you should still scrub the bugs you planned. Often talking through a bug in slackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. will help you think about good next steps for it and may encourage people to speak up even if no one else says they are attending the scrub.
  - Torsten Landsiedel 8:27 am on December 18, 2023
    
    @matt As pointed out on Twitter/X this is about tickets which are stuck and are in need of a decision from leadership.
    
    Tickets which have multiple challenges. Because they are so long there, there are solutions to circumvent them and fixing them could break those workarounds.
    
    Single contributors couldn’t fix those huge tickets.
    
    One example for such a ticket is this one about the export feature:
    https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22435
    
    Data liberation is also the freedom to export everything and going elsewhere.
    
    @jorbin In theory this is true. In my “testflight” I felt that leading a bug scrub is not that easy. I felt belittled and ignored trying to get this on an agenda post. My personal experience is that you need much more time and reputation to seriously get a bug scrub.
Matt Mullenweg 2:00 am on December 12, 2023

What is something that WordPress won’t do this year?

Decrease the freedom and openness of the web. 😄
Matt Mullenweg 2:04 am on December 12, 2023

According to W3Techs, WordPress usage has been going down since June. What do you think about these numbers? Any ideas of what we can do to reverse this trend?

I believe three things will help:

1. The Data Liberation work I spoke about in the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/.. Right now this is so clunky, we need to make it super smooth.
2. Ecommerce plugins for WordPress need to significantly improve their user experience and integrations.
3. We need to make sure all the cogs in the engine of the WordPress community are spinning at full-speed: as close to zero-day wait times for theme directory reviews, pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party directory reviews, translation queues, etc as we can get! Every place there is a delay or wait time, it slows us down. They add up.
Matt Mullenweg 2:06 am on December 12, 2023

Is it possible to check the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party directory for possible guideline violations, and would you fund people for this work?

I think manually going through all plugins is probably a Sisyphean task, what I’m far more interested in is creating great feedback loops so that the millions of users of WordPress can feed data back into the directory that encourages plugin developers to create the best user experience possible. We want to create a self-reinforcing and scaling system, not another team or task we have to staff.
- Torsten Landsiedel 8:33 am on December 18, 2023
  
  @matt Of course, it is, that is why the former plugins team rejected all those ideas from the beginning (as provided in the links I shared in Twitter/X after which you have not answered anymore).
  
  The metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team which would be needed to implement such a report system is small and even little tasks are laying around for a decade. How could such a self-reinforcing and scaling system be implemented by them? Or how do you think this will work specifically?
Matt Mullenweg 2:10 am on December 12, 2023

Hello Matt, from now on there is a plan to implement anti-spam technologies such as akismet itself natively in the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. without using a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party for this purpose?

I’m not aware of any non-cloud approaches that can remain effective against spammers for more than a few weeks. There might be something with passkeys and such down the road but we’ll have to see how that technology plays out in the adversarial arena of the web in the coming year or so.
Matt Mullenweg 2:16 am on December 12, 2023

How can we make sure that accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) gets the same amount of attention as performance or fancy blocks and features?

You can make sure by showing up and contributing! There is a list of a number of things we need to get right with every release—performance, security, accessibility, backwards compatibility, localization—and that’s before we even get to the question of did we make something that people actually want! I think the best thing we can do for accessibility is stay close to the needs of users, work with them directly on helping them accomplish their goals with WordPress. (I originally answered this one on Twitter.)
Matt Mullenweg 2:17 am on December 12, 2023

Hey! With Phase 3 potentially containing an Admin UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing./UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. redesign, will the focus be on a consistent, universal UX, or a modular and customisable approach? 😊

I don’t see the dichotomy too much. We need to modernize the interface, but still will keep it totally pluggable.
- Matias Ventura 9:28 pm on December 13, 2023
  
  Indeed, I think it’s largely an effort in combining both of these aspects—a beautiful modern interface that is malleable for the widest needs. With every WP being unique yet familiar.
Matt Mullenweg 2:22 am on December 12, 2023

With the integration of AI into the playground, what is being done to ensure only ethically gathered data is used to train these AI models?

It’s unclear which models we’ll use or launch yet, but whichever we do we’ll really rely on the attestations of the providers to the legitimacy of their training data, and probably the next 3-5 years of court cases and legislation around this. Given things like ChatGPT already have 100M+ users, and the total number is probably much larger when you include everything Microsoft and Google and Amazon and MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. are doing, we’re not breaking new ground here nor are we the first place people would go to resolve this. It’s also worth noting a number of those companies have offered full legal coverage.
Matt Mullenweg 2:23 am on December 12, 2023

The websites in Showcase are all beautiful. However, that’s often at the cost of usability and accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility). Can we have a11yAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) as a requirement for Showcase?

No, but we can definitely have an Accessibility tag that highlights sites that break the negative perception that being accessible means trading off beauty and design.
- Nick Diego 10:07 pm on December 13, 2023
  
  For visibility, a discussion was started in today’s MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team meeting about adding an AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) tag to sites that meet a (yet to be determined) level of accessibility.
Matt Mullenweg 2:24 am on December 12, 2023

Are there any plans to make the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Development process more easy?

Sure? Follow-up with what you’re having difficulty with and that can help us see where we might need to focus attention on documentation, tutorials, etc to make things more accessible and easy to get started with.
Matt Mullenweg 2:27 am on December 12, 2023

Matt, te veremos para la WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Sevilla 2024 ???

It doesn’t look like dates have been announced yet, or if they have we need to make sure the website better reflects that. But I’m always up for some good huevos a la flamenca.
Matt Mullenweg 2:29 am on December 12, 2023

Will State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. now travel globally going forward?

We’ll see, my guess is we’ll default to New York or San Francisco but may occasionally go international when a country has really been firing on all cylinders in creating a great local community, as Spain has the past two years.
Matt Mullenweg 2:32 am on December 12, 2023

Muchas mujeres dejan de asistir a WordCamps cuando se convierten en madres. Has pensado la posibilidad de que Automattic patrocine las ludotecas en las WC?

I believe this is about having better options for kids at WordCamps so more parents, particularly mothers, can attend. I think that’s a great idea. Perhaps someone can comment with what WordCamps have tried there so far so other organizers can copy it. I know there have been kids rooms, because I’ve visited them to say hi! It’s also been fun to meet so many second-generation WordPress community members.
Matt Mullenweg 2:33 am on December 12, 2023

Any news about https://wordpress.org/hosting/ page?

It’s on my list but there’s just been a lot of things more urgent that have taken priority.
Matt Mullenweg 2:35 am on December 12, 2023

Why we don’t give more atenttion to WooCommerce? Some plugins always are needed and this should be integrated to show that is the perfect e-commerce solution

I feel like Woo is pretty well covered with talks and sponsorships at WordCamps, but we also have to keep in mind that there are a lot of other plugins that provide ecommerce functionality for WordPress and we need them all to be awesome if we want to maintain our growth and serving customers evolving needs well.
Matt Mullenweg 2:36 am on December 12, 2023

What do you think the phase 4 will start? How do you think it will be implemented??

My guess would be late 2025, and not sure how it will be implemented yet.
Matt Mullenweg 2:39 am on December 12, 2023

Matt, when will you be coming to India? 🇮🇳

It’s true, been too long since I attended WordCamp Delhi in 2009! I was just telling someone, though, how I expect India will have a regional WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. that’s just as large as the US, Asia, and EU ones. It faces many challenges, but I think India has the potential to be one of the great economic and social stories of the 21st century.
Matt Mullenweg 2:39 am on December 12, 2023

What would it take to get you and other core contributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org. behind the Fields APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. project as it goes into implementation development in 2024 w/ the BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Editor?

I’ll defer this to others who know more about it, but posting the question so they can respond.
- Aaron Jorbin 7:11 pm on December 13, 2023
  
  I think it might help if the Fields APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. was thought of as an extension of the blocks API. When the Field API was first proposed nearly eight years ago, the blocks API didn’t exist. As more and more of the admin is Gutenbergized, this becomes more and more important. Seeing comments like “The proposed code will likely remain similar to what was proposed in 2017” makes me think that what the team behind the Fields API wants is a solution targeting 2017 problems rather than one targeting 2024+ problems.
  - Scott Kingsley Clark 7:18 pm on December 13, 2023
    
    I don’t think we’re targeting 2017 problems anymore, we’ve had a bunch of planning in 2023 with the reboot of the project and BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Editor is one of the primary areas we hope to implement with/for.
  - Scott Kingsley Clark 7:19 pm on December 13, 2023
    
    But certainly, we’ve been thinking of the Fields APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. as a WordPress-centric solution. It won’t require the BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Editor to work and is PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. driven but it has a ReactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/./JS pathway through the Block Editor work we’re planning.
Matt Mullenweg 2:41 am on December 12, 2023

Do you have in mind any AI application merging to WP coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.? Is WordPress going to have its own LLM?

That would be pretty unlikely, but I think LLM functionality will be embedded and built into OSes and browsers in a way that WordPress can tap into, just like we do with WASM on Playground.
Matt Mullenweg 2:43 am on December 12, 2023

Is WP planning to adopt Bedrock’s streamlined development and enhanced dependency management for a more efficient and attractive process to younger developers?

I wasn’t immediately familiar with this, so for others who want to check out more, here’s Bedrock’s homepage.
Matt Mullenweg 2:45 am on December 12, 2023

At WCEU you said that there is a lot of data which is not being used that can improve the community. When are we going to create make.w.org/opendata/?

I think it’s less a separate project, and more looking into how we can integrate data into our existing projects to create self-reinforcing positive feedback loops as I talked about above.
- Courtney Robertson 8:14 pm on December 12, 2023
  
  Anticipate a post about the progress with Stats/Dashboards within the next 2 weeks. This would be a method of gathering data that can improve the contributor community in particular.
Matt Mullenweg 2:45 am on December 12, 2023

Will WordPress support passkeys for login in 2024?

I think it’s very possible we’ll be talking about that in next year’s State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/.. It’s exciting technology, and WordPress has always had best-in-class user authentication.
Matt Mullenweg 2:49 am on December 12, 2023

Matt, as a public figure representing WordPress, you’ve had arguments/controversy this year which color general perception of the project. Can you address that?

I am human and will inevitably mess up, I have many times in the past and promise I will again in the future. Personally, I’ll use that to learn and grow. Also luckily WordPress is a lot more than just me, and you can see by the rich and vibrant community we talked about in the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. and you see looking around the room at any event. So, yes I’m an imperfect messenger, but I also think people are able to separate out my personal views or foibles from the project at large. I will do my best not to tarnish WordPress’ reputation by association, as every community member should.
Matt Mullenweg 2:50 am on December 12, 2023

The new MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. feature on WP.org. Will it be available for the local communities as well?

Yes! I think it will be a blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. anyone can use.
Matt Mullenweg 2:51 am on December 12, 2023

Are there any advancements in accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility)?

Tons and tons, the accessibility page on about is a good starting place to explore all the activity in this area.
- Aaron Jorbin 6:04 pm on December 13, 2023
  
  In total, 61 enhancements and bug fixes related to Accessibility were fixed in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. during the 3 releases of 2023 and 372 issues/prs were closed in Gutenberg related to AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility). So I would absolutely say there were advancements in Accessibility this year!
Matt Mullenweg 3:04 am on December 12, 2023

What is the state of governance for the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development team? We used to have lead developers … what do we have now?

For core we have release leads, and that’s been working pretty well the past few releases. I’m very open to experimenting with novel organization and responsibility structures within the WordPress community, especially if it’s an area that we aren’t getting the user results we want, and we can try it in one area without having to roll it out to everything. The “governance” branding hasn’t seemed to get many excited, I suggest framing it around some goal to be accomplished, ways to get there, documenting what we’re doing now and why it has worked, and what we could try differently to achieve higher results.
Matt Mullenweg 3:07 am on December 12, 2023

Can WordPress do anything to speed up/increase the Visa approval process to attend WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US or other international WordCamps?

This is very much on my mind, and we’ve been trying to get in touch with anyone in Taiwan who could help with that for WordCamp Asia. (Any leads?) WordCamp attendees are often self-employed, so can raise red flags for immigration, but at this point I think we have a really great track record of many thousands of people getting visas and abiding by them, and bringing a lot of economic activity to the places where we host events through hotels, food, venues, and also things like do_action events to help local non-profits.
Matt Mullenweg 3:12 am on December 12, 2023

Okay, that’s it for tonight. Please feel free to respond or add to the above! We probably should build out something more like forums for this in the future, so the threads can get deeper. Thank you again to everyone who attended live or streamed it online! The team really set a new bar for everything at this SoTW, it did a real honor to the broader work of the community this year. I can’t wait to see what comes in 2024. 😄
Webizito Web 4:05 pm on December 14, 2023

Hello:raised_hand_with_fingers_splayed:
How can i make child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. in wordpress latest version 6.4.2?

Share this: