 Okay, let's start. So great to see so many people here for day two. I was going to ask how the after party went, but I guess it's fairly clear that it went really well for quite a lot of people. I'm sure they'll turn up later, bleary-eyed. So we're, you know, they're missing out on a treat by not being here because we've got a pretty exciting start to the day. A core panel, everyone here on stage, is part of building WordPress, which is a pretty special position to be in. So we're very excited to be hearing from them and I think equally, if not even more excited to have Mike Liddle, the co-founder of WordPress, here chairing the panel. So we've got Mike Liddle chair, we've got Konstantin Obenland, sat here, and we've got Pascal Burtcher, and then we have John Blackburn, and on the end, Tammy Lister, so that's our panel. So I'm going to hand over to Mike and he's going to kick the panel off. And we're hoping for lots of questions from you guys and girls. So if you've got pressing questions, you want to know how to become a core contributor, you want to know how WordPress is made, then get ready to ask those questions. So here we go, Mike. Thank you. So the first thing I'd like to do, actually, is ask the panel to just introduce themselves and perhaps just mention a little bit about the perhaps their specialisms within core and what they do. So over to you, Konstantin. Thanks. My name is Konstantin. I have been working with WordPress just over half a decade now. I specialize in themes API, I would say. I added or like I was responsible for custom logo now in 4.5 coming out side icon in 4.3. I'll let the 4.3 release. I'm currently working on rewriting the plugin directory for WordPress and do a lot of other WordPress.org meta work. So I'm Pascal. I've been using WordPress for about 10 years now and I've been responsible for the embeds feature in WordPress 4.4 and probably some bugs here and there. Morning, everyone. I'm John. I was a release lead for WordPress 4.1 last year. Recently been doing some work on better support for HTTPS and O embed and things like that. Generally work behind the scenes on creating bugs and fixing bugs in WordPress. Hi, I'm Tammy. I worked, helped get 2016 released. My focus is kind of themes and also design, particularly focusing on UX. And I've been in some user research recently. Before that, I was also working on the body press project. So I've kind of written both WordPress and body press. Thank you. So I've got some pre-prepared questions that were asked earlier through various channels. And I think it'd be a good idea to perhaps just to kick off with some of these to just get you used to the idea and then get everybody warmed up, get their jaws warmed up, as we say, first thing in the morning. So one of the questions I think is probably one that would have come from the audience setting, but it will get hopefully quickly out of the way. And that is when will we drop PHP 5.2 support and when are we going to upgrade the minimum PHP requirement? So who thinks it's best to answer that? Yeah, so this topic comes up quite a lot. I'm pretty sure it's come up in every Q&A session we've done for about the last nine or 10 years, actually. So as many of you know, hopefully WordPress is a very user-oriented piece of software. It means that if we are to increase the PHP version requirement, then we have to fix the usability aspect of that for the end user. A lot of people who use WordPress don't even know what WordPress is, so there's no kind of expectation that they would know what PHP is or what a web server is or how they can even go about increasing the version of PHP that they've got on their server. So if we were to increase the minimum version of PHP, we would really need to look at the way that we can communicate that to the end user without completely baffling them. It's the same thing for plug-in dependencies and dependency management and things like that. These are all actually fairly simple things to fix on a technical level, but the end user needs to have a good way to handle that kind of upgrade, and these are requirements that we're going to be imposing on them. So, yeah, we just wanted to get that out of the way. It's a topic that's on everyone's minds. Some of the other issues there are whether we even get any value from increasing the minimum version of PHP. For example, if we jump to PHP 5.3 as a minimum, are there actually enough features and things in there that are going to benefit the WordPress project to benefit the WordPress project in order for us to be able to say, right, we're going to drop PHP 5.2 support? So, yeah, basically it comes down to user experience and putting the user first. Unfortunately, sometimes that is at the cost of keeping developers happy. So that's about it. Thank you for that. Anyone else has got anything else to pitch in on that? I think that was a pretty good story. Next one, more interesting. What recent and upcoming features about WordPress are each of you excited about? So, start with me constantly. Are you the nearest? Well, since I'm first in line here, I'm just going to say REST API. And as you guys think about something else. So, as you probably know, the REST API infrastructure was introduced in 4.4. We're still waiting for the endpoints to be added. So, I'm really excited about the infrastructure and I'm looking forward to the endpoints. Is that a valid answer? So, Constantine already mentioned the REST API. I could say shiny updates, because that's the feature plugin he's been working on, which is an awesome thing because you can just update your plugins or your themes or even your site without refreshing the page and it gives you a better user experience. Yeah, way faster too. Sneaky. So, slightly different. I'm excited in this release. I'm excited we've removed the word submit from the password protect form. It just had a button that said submit by it. So, we've actually got something that's a bit more human and I'm really excited about more human language and interactions in WordPress, which is kind of the next level of a project. And I'm also really excited about the future project focus and that's going to be really research driven and kind of having UX as a big focus of what we do. That makes me very excited. How do you feel? So, one of the things I'm excited about recently is the localisation of the plugin and theme directories on WordPress.org. So, it's not quite part of core itself, but it connects the whole kind of ecosystem together. It's really interesting. If you speak, for example, Hebrew, you can actually find out about WordPress, go to WordPress.org, download and install WordPress and install some plugins and themes without having to know any English now. The whole process is completely translated and that's the same for a lot of languages and a lot more are in progress. So, the whole translation thing for me is really exciting. I think we've had some stats yesterday, which says that it's only about 40% of sites now that are running in English. So, that means 60% of the sites which aren't running in English don't even need to see English in order to be able to install and use WordPress. Cool. Thank you. That was good and enlightening. I'm going to do one more from this list. And in fact, well, no, I'm going to do that one because you've kind of mentioned it already which was about plugin and theme dependencies. But here's one, one I'm particularly interested in myself. What workflow will help ensure that all commits going forward are WCAG 2AA accessible? So, that's been more accessible. So, what workflow will help ensure that all commits going forward are accessible? Because we've had a mention that that's the desire. So, how is that going to be achieved? Do you want to take that one or who wants to take that one? So, we just had a good chat with Graham about this. He's a resident accessibility expert. Just to clarify the question there, it's about the web content accessibility guidelines. WordPress now requires that all changes to WordPress meet the AA requirements, which is quite a subjective set of requirements. And it's all fairly simple as well. It's about keeping your navigation menus standard, making sure you're not using title attributes and you've got alt tags, like really, really simple stuff. Ensuring that WordPress complies to those standards means that we can use a few automated tools. Graham there was telling me about some tools that Joe Dolson has written. Oh, that's right. He's written a plug-in, sorry, which you can install on your site and it will run your site through the accessibility tests. It's something maybe we need to look at for core, hooking up to Tenon, which is a web content accessibility guidelines tester. But there's also the awareness in general that developers should be aware of, which is a general awareness of accessibility. In Graham's talk yesterday he mentioned that a great way to get a long way into accessibility is to make sure that the site or the administration area of WordPress rather works with the keyboard. So it means getting developers used to hitting that tab key and tabbing through all of the elements in the admin area to make sure they're accessible, make sure that the tab focus is visible. So maybe we need to have a bit of a think about how we can bring that all together into a workflow. So when we make large kind of visual changes to the admin area in WordPress, that is taken into consideration. So something I'd like to add on that, which kind of goes beyond the focus on purely accessibility, I think, is user testing. And testing all users, no matter what ability they have, not just focusing on one particular group or one everything. So I think part of what we can also do in our workflow is user test everything and widely user test everything. And it's a chance for more people to get involved in the project, who maybe aren't developers, because user testing is such a useful thing that we can have. At contribution days, I would love to see user testing be a first class citizen and part of that, and actually a group, so. Okay, let's take our first question from the audience. So if you'd raised your hand, you've got a question to ask the panel. Generally, or an individual must have some questions. Come on, raise your hands. Okay, so just wait for a mic to get to you, and then let's chat with her. Hi, everyone. Oh, it's quite loud. So I'm contributing a lot to WordPress Moly Sight. And in 2013, I think it was Nathan wrote sort of a roadmap for that, what that would look like. So I was trying to contribute work towards that roadmap. And then I got a lot of my tickets closed saying, well, that's not what we're doing with this anymore. My point is if you're going to have a roadmap and it changes, should you be updating that? And I think, you know, would you guys think about having a roadmap for stuff, just putting a blog post out saying this is where we want to go with it, and then if it changes, updating it? Okay, so does anybody want to take that? Come on, John, you're going to say that? Yeah, if you want, nobody else is going to say it. Oh, God, thank you. I'm not going to necessarily be able to speak on that exact thing, but I think on a human level, if we publish something, or if I publish a roadmap and I've done things like that, and it changes, then absolutely we should iterate on that. And I think part of the future projects is probably going to see that happening more. There's like a fortnightly check-in on things now. So I think there's probably going to be more of that. I just think if something changes, communication is important. We have to make blogs, so definitely communicating that would be important. So the post that you're talking about was published by one of the lead developers called Andy Nason, and he's not so involved in the project at the moment because he's gone off and he's working for the US government, doing some interesting digital things there. So he's sort of been a bit out of the frame at the moment, so he's not been able to really kind of push that forward. But yeah, you're absolutely right if we're going to change roadmaps, which is perfectly fine to have a roadmap and then to change your mind later on date. Yeah, then communication there is really important, yeah. So yeah, maybe it's time for us to have an updated multi-site roadmap. We have been doing a bunch of work on multi-site lately, but yeah, maybe we should have a new roadmap for the next 18 months or so. It's not just multi-site, there's generally all features. We should have a goal that we're all trying to work towards, and you're right, if it changes, it's fine, but it felt like it changed behind closed doors and was never updated. Somebody had a slack conversation somewhere and it changed, and I was trying to work towards that roadmap and it's frustrating for me because I'm wasting my time writing patches. Sure, sometimes these things change organically as well. They just sort of evolve a little bit and then nobody really realises that what we're actually aiming for now isn't what we'd originally decided to aim for. Yeah, communication, we have a similar question last year and it was that we need to make sure that we're always on top of communication and it's not just the core team, that's all of the teams involved and the particular feature leads and the component leads. Is it worth doing a yearly, like here's what we're going to do in 2016, for all the different areas? Yes, I think it is. That was a topic I touched on at a WordCamp last week, which is about goals of WordPress. Have you got anything you want to say on this, by the way, because I'll just carry on, if not. So WordPress has never really had much of a focus, it's never really had long-term goals. If you go on the archive.org website and go back on the way back machine and look at WordPress.org from like seven years ago, the description of WordPress is almost the same as it is today. It says WordPress is publishing software that you can use to create a beautiful website, blog or app. And the only change that was made was the addition of that or app on the end of it from like seven years ago, it's the same. So it's never really had a sort of a focus that people can go on to WordPress.org and find out, what is WordPress really doing? Is it going to stay as a blogging platform? Is it going to be an enterprise piece of software that powers biggest websites in the world? Is it going to be a sort of a headless app platform using REST API? It's never really had this direction. So I think WordPress, this lack of direction has caused WordPress to kind of go here and there, a bit back and forth on a lot of features. The project is really in need of some long-term goals, like you say there. Maybe if we start thinking about some goals for maybe a year or two years or five years, but then if we've got some goals, we can then say, right, what are the short-term goals? What do we want to do with multi-site? What do we want to do with the import and export functionality? How do we want to get new users on board much easier? I really do think that long-term goals are the way forward for the platform, definitely. Thank you. Thanks for that. More questions from anyone? Yep. Let's jump over here. Oh, we've got one here, and then we'll take the one on the back. Thank you. Sorry. I'm very new to the world of WordPress, so I'm learning a lot right now, and this is a great opportunity to do that. So where do you see WordPress going in terms of user experience? I'm not a developer. I'm more concerned about how people come and use WordPress. So what are some of the key things that are going to help them have a better experience with websites overall and better interactions? OK. Who would like to take something on that? Tami? Yep. So first of all, welcome. And if your background is user experience, I'm really excited that you're interested in contributing to WordPress because that's something that's very dear to my heart, and I think we need in WordPress. And I think part of what we can do is... I said it earlier, but actually watch users. Something that's happened on Flow, which is going to become Test, I think it's going to be renamed, is there's been a lot of flows which is like going through the processes on different devices, going through the processes of different sections. That's a big thing because half of user experience is data and making things obvious. Because if things are obvious, you can't ignore them. You can very easily ignore and accept a user experience if you use it all the time. But if it's brought to your attention, you're just like, oh, yeah, that's really bad. We should fix that and fixes will happen. And I think people championing that, doing that, and then just being really annoying core developers about it and saying this needs fixing. And I feel there's a great lot of voices starting to do that and I'm really excited about that. The feature projects is one way you can get involved. Every fortnight, isn't it? Do you want to say when the meeting is? Because I'm trying to remember when it is. So the way that features were developed for WordPress over the last two years or so, has been via feature plug-ins, which is where we build a feature as a plug-in first. And then only once we decide that it's ready will it sort of be proposed to go into WordPress. But that's changing slightly now. We're going to call them feature projects instead. And the idea is that the whole product design workflow will be considered for the project. So that's like research, design, spec-ing, user testing and stuff before you get to the implementation part of it. So our first chat was last Tuesday, and they're going to be fortnightly for the next, I don't know, a few months probably, until we sort of get into how that workflow works. And the meetings are held in Slack in the core channel. So you can just go on there. So I'm fairly sure they're going to be fortnightly in the core channel on Tuesday evenings. Sorry. I just wanted to add one more thing. We also have on track at WordCampUS. We actually have a report for UX feedback, which made me so excited. So people can tag that, and we can go in the ticket and just comment and test things and give opinions. And that to me means that the project's moved a lot more in that direction. So I'm really excited about that, because it means that we can start making it usable for all users, no matter what your ability is, no matter what device you're using on, no matter what country you're in, and I think that's how WordPress becomes a really usable project. Myself want to add just a couple of things. Following on from one of the things that Tami said, yes, do pressure the right people to do things, but always with respect and always politely. Because still, most of the people work on this stuff are volunteers, so it's always best to always be respectful and polite. But also I want to perhaps bring in Pascal because your experience of getting into WordPress core was via a feature plugin as it was. So are you looking forward to the change of this workflow in the feature stuff? Yeah, absolutely. I'm looking forward to that. Because when I got involved with that, there was a chat about feature plugin, about your embeds. I had an existing plugin, so I haven't had done any user testing before or research really. And I think it's great that now you're kind of getting forced to do that. Well, maybe I have another idea for a feature plugin in the future. I don't know. Constan, have you got anything to add to this one? How Pascal became a committer through a feature plugin? No, just generally on the usability and so on. No, I would have said the same thing. All right. Okay, so I think we had another asker at the back if he had raised your hand. Yeah? Can somebody get your mic? Okay, thank you. Hi, so I'm mostly a user. I'm learning the movement, but I can see lots of people in Facebook group and all around me being really overwhelmed when they arrive on WordPress. Is there anything in the pipeline about better onboarding for people who are a bit tech-adverse? Okay, so... And is that something I can help with? Sure, so yeah, so the question was, is there anything in the pipeline for better onboarding of people who want to get involved, who are perhaps tech-averse and used to the environment? Cos it's a mature environment that if you're in it, there's lots of things you know and you know where to start and where to go. So other things in the pipeline or what's the best way that people can at least perhaps self-help to get onboarding? I think this is an ongoing process for the project as a whole. One of the ways that we try to make it easier for people to contribute to WordPress is certainly contributor days like the one we had on Friday. Where John led a group of people and kind of gave them an introductory to how to contribute to WordPress just to lower that barrier of entry for a lot of people. So that is one of the things another tool that we use to get people started contributing code specifically for WordPress Core is a tag on track that we use which is good first bugs. These are tickets that are fairly self-contained fairly small people have an easier time grasping the problem there and just get an opportunity to practice creating a subversion diff and uploading that to track. Things like that. And then also developer Q&As like this one where we share chat times chat channels and my people to join us for these chats and she's not happy with that answer. Sorry, I was talking about users people who arrive in the dashboard and freak out lots of new apps now they've got a welcome suit of things to make you understand the bits in it so proper onboarding for people who are going to use the software for their own site. So there was a project a while ago called the new user experience project and the aim of that was to make it easier for people to get into using WordPress which I think is what you meant rather than a developer side of things and one of the things that came out of that was when you first install WordPress and you land on the dashboard there's now a big welcome message which says welcome to WordPress get started here you can install plugins install themes click here to preview a site it was a fairly small change but it was a thing that we hadn't had in the past basically prior to that you would land on the WordPress dashboard and you would sort of go where do I start there's a bunch of menu items on the left hand side but there's a whole bunch of stuff that could be done so Helen who's one of the lead developers of WordPress has put a lot of focus into this lately and I think one of the things that Helen wants to do is to let you preview your entire site like all of the customisations and things in the WordPress customiser from the outset so you sort of maybe even when you first install WordPress you land on the customiser instead of landing in the dashboard and from there you can change your title you can browse themes you can change your theme around you know do all of the customisation that you might want to do before your site even goes live or that's the first thing that's presented to you I'm not sure whether that is really in progress at the moment or whether it's a bit on the back burner but that would be one of the ways of making it much easier for users to not have such a roadblock when they first land on the dashboard in WordPress I think that came up in the future projects chat and I think it's deaf I don't want to say definitely but I think it's happening because of that so I would expect that I think you sound quite passionate about it so I would encourage you to come and join that project and I think I learn an awful lot from I'm going back to it but user testing and seeing that so just I think by listening to new people and listening to people that aren't we we have certain models of behaviour and patterns that we do because we're used to WordPress so we're blind to things but having people come and remind us like you just did I think is super important and I think that the NUC's focus will really see gains in that and see a lot more stuff become obvious through that I just want to add something to that actually if I may because I run beginner courses in WordPress and yeah from people absolutely beginners don't even know what WordPress is and there's just a whole lot of upfront explanation that I have to do to explain to people what these things are so anything that can improve that I think would be a great thing and sometimes it is just about the human words and the terminology and trying to remove some of the more technical terms so I'm looking forward to any project that will help bring that forward as well anybody else got anything on that one or should we take another question we're running okay if we've got another question please so somebody at the back yeah oh Jenny you can go first oh right I develop plugins some of which are on WordPress.org and like most plugin developers I use Git and obviously WordPress doesn't so I was just wondering if there's any tools, plans to help people who develop on Git sort of use WordPress as well so the question was really so lots of developers are working on Git now and are there any plans to help developers who work on Git make more contributions to Core to Core or to plugins because you mentioned plugins both yes so you're going to have to go at the state of the word Matt mentioned how it certainly is a goal of the core team to get people more involved through Git and give them that opportunity to contribute to it that way so far we have not made a lot of progress in that direction but it is on our roadmap and in the backs of our minds for plugins I'm currently working on rewriting the plugin directory where any contribution is welcome by the way so if you guys want to help me to do that that would be great and one of the things that a lot of people ask is hey when can I use Git with the plugin repository this will probably not happen within this year but currently with feature plugins what we do is we have a kind of like a sync tool between GitHub and so opening that one up to other plugins not just feature plugins could be something that could happen sooner rather than later so just you know making it easier for you to develop your plugin on GitHub and you know keeping it up to date on the .org side as well I think we've certainly got time for one more question who else do we have Jenny we'll see how quick it is actually so I wanted to ask since you are all lead developers and I know some of you have been there for a while and some of you have been there quite recently what is the best thing that you've seen happen as a lead developer in the WordPress in like your time working on the WordPress.org and what is the worst time and I want to announce it from all of you okay so to perhaps start with some of these experiences in the US Pascal good question I can't think of like the worst thing yeah it happened but a good thing actually is that the barrier for entering for contributing to core has lowered so it's easier, there's better documentation because when I started contributing to core or reading about it there was no no real good documentation so it's definitely made easier but let me think about the bad part first I think we should clarify the term lead developer first none of us is actually a lead developer John is a permanent committer and the rest of us three we are guest committers to WordPress so I received commit access three weeks into leading WordPress 4.3 so that weighs very heavily on memory like I remember that part of my life very clearly and one of the things that I wish didn't really happen was the outcry of people we started talking about adding menus to the customizer mostly on WP Tavern where they felt like we ran features down their throats did not don't consider user needs it got pretty ugly to be honest I wish it wouldn't have gotten that far other than that I was really proud that we got to actually the ship menus in the customizer in 4.3 and that we were able to pull off another feature which was a site I can fairly short notice in 4.3 so those are probably my high and low lights I think the best thing that happened recently is when Matt Mullardwick dyed his hair grey at WP US last year it's green now oh yeah it went green last week didn't it I think I agree with Pascal the documentation drive that's happened over the last 18 months has been a huge boon to the whole project so the inline documentation in the code of WordPress now powers the developer site so there's no duplication of effort there and we're gradually getting rid of the codex function references in the codex and replacing that with automatically generated documentation that's a huge thing documentation is really important to open source projects so that's probably my best thing that's happened recently so I'm just going to focus on the best thing because I'm going to be quick and wrap it up which for me is going back to the fact that the user experience is becoming so important and the people are asking this release I was asked to user test something and that to me just gave me such delight that it was happening and also seeing two committers who are designers get commit access that just gave me the hapies so seeing the focus not just being on pure developers and embracing everyone in the project because then that means we're going to embrace everybody who uses WordPress as well so we're just about out of time so I'd like to thank everyone who contributed a question and for coming so early this morning but I'd like to ask you to join me in a round of applause for our panel