 Somebody toward Camp Asia Right this wonderful crowd out here. Yeah, and you know, I'm used to be Standing when I speak Feels a little different sitting down But I hope you guys are full of energy. Are you okay? I don't know that I believed them Are you all high energy all right, okay good so You know It was 2014 when I met Matt for the first time in person and We were at World Camp San Francisco and taking selfies with him And it was like a fan moment for me Yes World camps are like wonderland You have so many of your heroes here People that you've seen online people that you've learned from and you've only seen them online And you come to a world camp and you can take selfies with them. You can shake hands with them That's the opportunity you don't get anywhere else. Yeah Unfortunately, we're gonna miss that Yeah today because Matt is not here But I think you know what Matt Is probably missing us more. Oh, yeah I'll say yes on his behalf Because I know you know he rooted for World Camp Asia. Yes, and he's been behind this to make this happen and Unfortunately, he's not here So I know that while we miss him When we bring him on Can we welcome him such that he feels that he's here? Yeah, that he's not sitting somewhere else, but he's with us Can we please do that? Yeah, so let's welcome Matt. Can we have madden please? I don't think I've ever been more scared of anything in my life. Great wonderful So, yes, they're there if you cannot walk down these stairs flag down one of our runners where our runners and They have a wireless microphone for you. Yes, so When you're at the mic Say your name Where are you from and what is your involvement in the project and then go ahead and ask your question try to make it a question and Try to be crisp Yeah, and y'all seen here me. Yes Well, let me repeat what I said earlier, which was I am so excited even to be here virtually with y'all because to have a new Continental scale work camp happening in Asia Is amazing and it's been a dream of mine and so many others for for many many years So thank you all for making it happen. Really appreciate that and if you want to take a selfie with me now is a perfect time Well, I'll be in it so I Can't wait to attend in person next year and would love to see you all a future work camp So I'm sorry very very sorry. I couldn't make this one Heartbreaking to me, but thank you so much for the whole team for setting up this virtual way that we can still connect the video Thanks to those Just resuming what I was saying One question will be alternating between pre-submitted and live questions If you're in the line and if your question is already answered Feel free to step away, but before doing that if you want to say hello to Matt, you're welcome to do that. Yeah We may have to moderate or intervene at times just in the interest of time All questions are important, but we need to make sure that we can get maximum questions answered. Is that fair? Yeah, okay. All right, so good to go All right, so let's start on this side. Please introduce yourself and ask a question Yeah, I'm first question on all three continents, so I'm Milana top from Serbia and from the commutation team and I have a question On behalf of the commutation team, but also all make teams We have Foundation that is helping and supporting work comes and that's wonderful. Thank you very much But my question is could we have something like that for make teams now Volunteering and contribution and open source. It's all beautiful and we don't have We cannot afford that kind of romantic thinking because we are too big. It's not sustainable so I understand that logistic of You know Supporting all volunteers all over the world is a nightmare and maybe not possible I don't have answers. I have only questions But if we could have something that would help teams, you know Sponsors something I don't know per project or something like that and every team Besides what they are doing for WordPress. They also have a lot of other things that they are doing So the commutation team is not just writing the commutation We have so many things around it that we are working on and we We are paying tools by our own money. I'm paying a tool by my sponsored money from XWP and If we could have some kind of support for those kind of things that logistic that we are doing To be able to do what we do for WordPress that would be So helpful. So if that's possible, I I would like to see that while I'm still on Inside the project. Thank you There were a few layers there, so I'll try to work through them On tools you're using I'm curious what tool that you're you're having to pay for and that there wasn't an open source Alternative so what is that? Yep That is a tool that I build on boarding form for documentation team to help people You know find a way and Discover all the roles they can do in documentation team and that involves Conditions so based on what you answer. I create condition to give you the list of the Roles that you can work with so there is no free tool for that And I don't have enough time to build it myself so, you know, we have to balance time and and What we can do So there are tools that can simulate something like that, but the logistic is not Completed so I had to pay for it Actually, you paid for a work as plug-in or is it like a third? It's a third-party service Okay Yeah, so again a few things there one like part of what we want to do on wordpress.org and with the meta team is Try to use our development efforts to try to create open source versions of everything you need to build a community like wordpress is so Hopefully someday like I think it's great. Let's be pragmatic. So and thank you I guess xwp for paying for that tool that you used if Anyone else needs any tools You know, we we don't mind paying for software if we need to we're always looking for an open source first if we can and Many companies are very happy to donate their services to us such as slack does currently for our daughter work slack but If there's ever something you need, please don't hesitate to get in touch with the sort of meta team If you need a tool sponsored, we're getting something done on the broader issue of being sponsored or not I will say that The foundation side of wordpress as you know has had no employees ever since it started So no one gets paid by the foundation. We do do grants and scholarships and sponsorships and things like that But it's not really set up to be an employment entity WordPress has always tried to be a place where people can come together regardless of who employs them or how they get paid or whether they want to get paid or not and Work together on something I realized that this isn't for everyone and that Number of folks as part of their fire for the future contribution Companies sponsor people, you know automatic has over a hundred people that we sponsor full-time That just contribute to various elements of work pass And you sounds like work for XWP a number of other companies. Yoast is a big one that sponsors a ton of great people But I I would strongly disagree with you that People need to be sponsored or that sponsored work is better. I think that open source Is the idea of coming together around a cause? It's not about Being paid for work. It doesn't mean the work is value isn't valuable. In fact, it's as we say both free and priceless at the same time But yeah, I don't see that changing For the foreseeable future that the foundation will ever have any employees. It's really just meant to be a intellectual property holding You know doing things like events and places to facilitate places where we need an entity, but not an employment entity now or in the future Yeah, thank you. Well, I didn't say that sponsored work is better just to make sure Yeah, yeah, I didn't say that and I don't think that I'm just think It's more sustainable when we have something a project to do like this Right design that has been done. It's marvelous, but it took a lot of Time and sometimes we need things to be done faster So, you know, maybe having some kind of support would do it faster. That's all I'm saying So you then identify another issue, which is in many areas we are moving I think a lot slower Then we should I would love to say that paying people would certainly help them go faster, but I have lots of experience in working Inside automatic with projects that went too slow even though everyone was paid So I think there's something else there that we need to identify and get a lot better at Around how we are If I had to guess, I would say that Too often we are doing particularly designed by committee and trying to develop a consensus and everything And it would probably be better if we just chose A single person to be a decision maker and said even when we don't all agree with it Let's just start with that person's decisions And use that to move things through faster and and then we can always iterate from there But right now we're taking a very long time to get the version one out And I think that's not conducive for creating great products or experiences or anything I wrote an essay on this on my blog So, MA.TT if you look for it was called 1.0 is the loneliest number I talk a lot about sort of the idea of design by committee, consensus And yeah creating great user experiences If I'm super honest right now, I'm pretty embarrassed by a lot of what's going on On wordpress.org the website right now I think the information architecture, the design, the menu system, everything is Not up to the standard of what WordPress itself provides, which is world-class software So inside the core software, I think that we're doing pretty decent And in many places, fantastic job of many things But we haven't yet been able to translate that to the projects surrounding it Including wordpress.org itself So it's very very much on my mind and something I've been talking to Joseph a lot And thinking about and you just heard my best theory that perhaps we need more Sometimes we call them DRIs or Direct Responsible Individuals Maybe try that approach a little bit more Than necessarily the consensus which we've been attempting now for several years Thank you Thank you So at this time, you know, as I was hearing the answers and questions Something else popped up and you know, Subash's chattery from the community Had a very interesting question And I could relate to that as a parent of two school going daughters And he said, is there any way that we can start WordPress, you know, education Using WordPress, teaching people to code with WordPress And at school level That was quite interesting And as I think of it You know, if you imagine the impact this could have over the long term future It's just amazing So any thoughts on that? You know, how do we get kids start contributing early, get to use WordPress early? Joseph, if you're up for it, I'd love for you to take this one Because I think you're welcome So I'm just going to double check We're asking how to get WordPress taught in schools And how to get WordPress very young Okay So first things first My favorite question This is a thing that I worked on before I even was sponsored to work on WordPress by automatic I want WordPress as software and as a way to collaborate with one another To be in schools I think it's something that we have to be able to teach people WordPress can teach you how to use all of your 21st century skills well But also it is able If you're contributing You're able to learn how to work across cultures You're able to work across global boundaries as all of you are aware I've worked with some of you for like five or six years And I've never been in the same room with you before today And I think that's fascinating So I'm a strong advocate for it And in my current experience of trying to get open source or WordPress into school systems It moves too fast for them to be able to build curriculum And if it's not moving quickly Then they are worried about this concept of open source It's kind of like a power to the people sort of thing And schools find that moderately alarming So that's why we have not succeeded I think at getting that done yet But around the question of like how to get it to young users early We are working on getting kids camps started back up If anyone is familiar with that It's students who are 13 and younger They get to go to a whole day of sessions alongside a regular word camp And they get to learn basics of WordPress Basics of basically project management And for some of them like the start of their entrepreneurial spirit is there But then also I've been having a lot of conversations with our attendees this weekend About how to do that also for like basically teenagers Because teenagers don't want to do anything that their parents want them to learn And so we got to figure out a way to help them get that experience as well So strong advocate, lots of difficulty getting it done in my current experience Yeah, I can understand I love that you mentioned kids camps And perhaps that's actually something that could be part of future work camp ages as well That would be pretty good Is there a Slack channel or a place for people who They're helping younger folks get involved WordPress coordinate or share what they're doing I don't know if there's a specific channel for like kids camp and such But we do have the community team in the Making WordPress Slack Where you can join the working groups for those things But also, if you just want some self-serve content that helps expose your students Your children to WordPress, you can also go to learn.wordpress.org There's a lot of content there as well Oh and meetups, don't forget meetups So I can go to meet them in I think I'll call it like a hashtag kids camp or something And you know what, I'll start that right now, I'm on a computer So this is actually a hot page Make it so And then folks are interested about that You know, because in education, no one understands better than a parent or teacher Who's directly working with the kids And so I think the folks who are attempting this are going to have the most wisdom and experience there And if they can start sharing in a peer-to-peer way what's worked and what hasn't I think that would be kind of the best way to scale this up Yeah, awesome Next question Yeah, as we're talking about learning and learn WordPress I had another question from the community earlier, Lux Mariappin He said how can designers and developers upscale themselves Now we have some great material on learn.wordpress What else can we do so that in all these new things it's easier for people to learn all that Yeah Matt, do you want to answer or do you want me to answer it? Well, I just made the kids can panel So I'll answer it because he was busy Great on the WordPress So the question is how do you help designers and developers level up their skills? Yes I think one of the best ways in the WordPress project that you can do that is actually participating in a do-action hackathon So those hackathons are put together by the community but through the WordPress foundation And you can learn all sorts of skills required to work inside that To work with WordPress and you're actually building websites for people Sometimes creating content for companies and nonprofits And so you get a lot of hands-on opportunities and that pragmatic work that helps you to remember it So that's my recommendation All right, so shall we go to another question here on the right side? Michelle has a question Michelle, do you have? Oh, okay, go ahead Yeah One moment Okay, perfect So Michelle Frischat with stellar WP and post status Nice to see you I'll be it from the other side of the world With the wave of layoffs and hiring freezes that we've seen lately in the WordPress community Do you think that we as a community can do to create more jobs in our ecosystem And stop the anxiety and fear that comes with the layoffs that we've seen? Not a softball question today, I know Never, never softball questions for me One moment, Matt One second, Matt Oh, now we can't hear you at all, okay, hang on We can tell it's an excellent answer Oh Oh, we can read it Can you hear me? Yes Yes, okay One thing that I found consistent through economic boom times and receptions Is that We try to create more value than we capture And so as we continue to stay close to our customers Stay close to people doing real things in the world I think actually WordPress can benefit from recessionary times as well Because we provide one economic agency where people can do things themselves Everyone can be an entrepreneur with WordPress Businesses always are going to need more customers And they might become more price sensitive They find they're paying hundreds of hundreds of dollars at Shopify And a WooCommerce site could do it for one-tenth the cost Or they're spending too much money on Wix and Squarespace So I would encourage people with WordPress skills To look at businesses in their area Or once they have contact to Particularly who might be spending more on some of these other services And look at the opportunity to bring in the WordPress Because you could probably give that business Or nonprofit or whatever organization it is A better website and save them a ton of monthly costs as well Which would be really great So I feel like open source really shines in recessionary times In terms of as a community I feel like the relationships that are formed at work camps And online and by people working together And probably contributing to open source Is really one of the very best ways to also be connected to jobs as well And from the very first days of WordPress When I was starting automatic Who did I look to? Of course the people I had already been working with Building early versions of WordPress and MU Folks like Donica, Andy Skeleton and Ryan Bourne These were folks I had already had experience working shoulder to shoulder Making things with And so participating in an open source project If you find yourself having some extra time Is a great way also to build your portfolio To make professional contacts and network So alongside other things you might be doing Like polishing your resume, improving your portfolio I would say I know as someone who's hired thousands of people One of the first things I always look at is open source contributions I can't think of a developer application I've gotten in the past 15 years That didn't have a GitHub link Contributing and participating in something Is a great way to fill those holes in your resume as well I'm going to add on a thing here For the folks here and watching at home Or wherever you are I think also an important part of this answer Is that you all are a step ahead of everyone who isn't here already You came here to learn about WordPress Or to teach others about WordPress And you are making those connections that Matt's talking about Where you are finding other people that you can do Fun projects with, learn new skills Or just partner and come up with a new business entirely And I think that that's excellent I'm so glad that you all are here For that reason and many others See, when that conversation is going on I'm just kind of in the presence of the contribution That WordPress has had on this community The Asian community It's created so many jobs already I mean, like 2010 is when we started Storaps And doing all this WordPress work And I didn't even imagine where this could reach Right And I meet so many people every day WordPress has changed so many lives here Would you agree to that or not? Has WordPress changed your life? Yeah Mine for sure Yeah So it does change lives It may take time at times There are ups and downs And life goes through the stages But this community has contributed a lot back And it's also received a lot On that topic, you know When we're thinking about the roadmap for 2023 Is there anything specific or particular Any announcements or updates That you think this community needs to know About WordPress, the project Before we get to that Should we take another audience question? Sure We could do that Yeah, we have people lining up Alright, so let's go to this side And then we can come back to that Hi My name is Yogesh I am from Bangalore, India Nice to see you again Yeah Okay, my question is You know, recently we see that There's a lot of upheaval in the tech scenario And things change rapidly But when they change, a lot of it affects People who are usually working in the open source Like when Google went with AXE on the jobs The first thing they cut down was Their open source contributions department And then on the other side Microsoft came up with Chatchapiti Yeah, very popular But they took it They basically bought GitHub They used all the contributions And they closed source it They say, no, not really closed source But they monetized it And so we see that the tragedy of Commons Keeps happening out there So as WordPress is around 40-42% of the web How do we avoid the... How do we make it resistant to tragedy of Commons Or how do we make the open source itself Resistant to tragedy of Commons You had a few really good things in there So I'll try to address each of them First, for technology like Chatchapiti And other large language models and other things I think are absolutely the future And we should be thinking about how we can leverage them To make ourselves more productive And not try to fight it So the best... But they also... We should recognize their limitations The best essay I've seen so far Actually one of my favorite sci-fi writers Ted Chang wrote an essay for The New Yorker Called Chatchapiti is a blurry JPEG of the web It's an amazing analogy for showing Like how these things learn And why they astound us in certain ways And also their limitations But I 100% just like you might have had an IDE Or something else that would help you with autocomplete Based on reading the code and knowing the classes Like imagine that times 10 And it's going to improve the quality And our ability to create software so quickly Like there's articles and YouTubes online And people creating entire WordPress plugins In minutes, you know Using Chatchapiti or Bing or other things So I think it would be foolish to ignore this And I don't see it as... I'm not sure how it's going to play out economically So I was kind of astounded There are groups like... Stable diffusion Who have been able to take things out of the ag Basically trying to go in source for the most Six months later, a bunch of us Use the last class to be very quick On putting these tools back That I'm going to have to interrupt you mid... Oh no, we're reading you Nevermind, continue So the best that I've been able to come up with there In talking to thousands of WordPress community members And studying the history of open source And economics and everything like that Is a five for the future So for those who aren't familiar Five for the future, this is the idea Because if you are benefitting from WordPress In some way, like if it's changed your life If you're making money from it It's kind of like there used to be These legal pain to take a pain Or you could say take five percent back Or whatever you feel like getting from WordPress Contribute that back to the open source site So whether that's a variety of ways To make the people contribute Whether it's taking support I probably don't need to explain it to you all Because we're probably doing it already By identity and ad work in Asia I feel like if we can continue to use those Us all benefiting a tremendous amount From WordPress, but also taking a little bit Just five percent back And putting that back in some That will help us avoid the comments And it's certainly allowed us to be I think one of the most respectful Long-term open source projects so far When I see, you know, our other Open source projects and our co-hosts Or the editors that haven't had The vibrant community of us It's generally been when they have That social moral norm of contributing And so that's why we talk about it so much It's also why we demonstrate it Why I do it myself By contributing a lot of my time back to WordPress And for companies that I'm involved in Both that I invest in or run like automatic We take it very seriously Now for the tune of over a hundred full-time people So yeah, we try to lead by example there But I think anyone who's really done it Also can talk to the benefits Of how contributing can benefit you a lot As well as the community The good news is that I don't worry about it Because it's in everyone's interest For the commons to thrive with open source And that's why when open source The flywheel kind of gets going Of contribution and the improvements in the software Leading to more usage which leads to more contributors Which leads to the software getting better It becomes kind of a world standard If you will Much like WordPress is starting to We have ten times the number of domains Using us as the number two in the market Which is the proprietary competitor called Shopify So if we continue doing that It doesn't mean that we don't need to ruthlessly iterate ourselves And get better at doing meetings and collaborating And everything else But if we keep doing that I can see WordPress being around Not just around But actually core to the fabric I have a hundred years from now And I would love to attend to work in Asia In my eighties or something like that That's awesome Thank you I do want to give a fast Where are you to hurry If you want to know more There you are If you want to know more about The Five for the Future program That excellent steward of that program Is the person to speak to I'm sure that he will be made available out here In the sponsor area Shall we take one more question? Hi, man Good morning My name is Vishal I'm from India And we build plugins for WooCommerce We have been doing that since 2012 So yeah It has created a lot of livelihoods For me and for our team of 17-20 people My question is Regarding the onboarding process Of the self-hosted version of WordPress So currently When we download the WordPress version It is meant to be for a developer Or someone who knows What's the database user And what's the password And those things Do we have a plan to Change it such that Rather than all those details coming first We ask as to what is the kind of site That you are trying to build With this particular installation Let's say Maybe a physiotherapist is trying to build a blog Or someone based on the domain That they want to use it for Based on the purpose of the site That's what we ask first And then We follow up based on that Instead of what is the theme you want to install What's the plugin you want to install So yeah, do we have a plan Or anything in that Yeah, in that context That's a great question, thank you Our plan has been to leave that To the folks providing WordPress as a service Whether that's a web host Or WordPress is a fast type of writers And there's been a ton of innovation In that onboarding flow And if you look at the The Bluehost or WordPress.com Of the world, there's a lot they're doing So experiment there And as to whether Or which you have for as well Open to it, but there's nothing not to It's just been something We've decided not to do so far But if that's something you're personally passionate about Or want to spin up, we could definitely start To build some onboarding core And of course because it could be Completely configurable Anyone who already has a custom onboarding Which is turning off the bits of onboarding But they don't like But there's so much to do within The kind of after the onboard User experience With the four phases of Gutenberg That we're working on But also just all the rest of WP admin There's just so much we can still improve That hasn't seen like The most crucial area It definitely appears By It's not that these parts are important It's that we're bringing a lot of people On the board for us every day It's that I think a lot about that maintenance And that usability Or how to customize the site That you want And sort of picking a theme And a plugin only gets you so far What we're trying to do with Gutenberg Is actually take it so that So much of what before You used to have to use a plugin Or a theme for We can provide a common block based interface For And so I hope that as Gutenberg gets further and further Like You'll basically start with like One of a blank canvas And be able to use block patterns And other things to create a site Just exactly like Lomac Or customize it however you like Right now themes are Pre-packaged versions of that But I mean it's not going to be the next couple of years But maybe 10 or 15 years from now You could imagine Basically everyone starting With a blank canvas theme Or themes themselves just being collections Of these patterns And blocks So I think that's kind of the answer to our Onboard At least that we're going to do in court Okay, thank you Matt That's an interesting perspective actually And that kind of Links back To contribution, right So what do you think Could be some of the most Impactful ways The Asian community in particular Can contribute to WordPress In meaningful ways Especially keeping the big picture goals Of 2023 and beyond like the next 10 years Matt Yeah, I would say that But if you want to jump in just a little Can I start and then you do it Sure Great, so I think Especially since you're here with Exactly the right people Some of the things that are most impactful That you all as a community can do right now Is number one Get The meetup programs Your meetup events started again With wherever you went you guys, I don't know where you went With the five for the future question as well Having more people attending these Events helps us to onboard New users and onboard new contributors So that's one thing And the other thing that is so incredibly important Right now is translating Our content that is Onwordpress.org The training content that's out there Needs to be translated into All the 200 languages that WordPress core is translated into Docs as well I think could use some attention From a translation standpoint So those are the three things that I would say You could do right now Now Matt, what you got And by the way Normally Joseph and I would be in person And we would kind of like to look at each other To know who is going to go first So Feel free to jump in Or interrupt me at any point If you want to take something I was going to say exactly what you said Oh shoot Sorry No, no, no, that's perfect You said it better And it is true that Outside of Japan it feels like Many of the countries represented In Asia WordPress's adoption Within many of these countries Is not as Most As in Spanish, you know, some of these Japanese So I would say that No one better Than To connect to the Local Starting In schools Adults, developer Businesses, colleges Universities Really making WordPress present in every single one of those And truly localizing it And translating it Not just in the language But for the needs Of that particular Culture and society Is something that the folks in this room Will be able to do better Than myself or Anyone else That I would say is really one of the critical things That particularly To see as we start to You know, this is the first work But hopefully the first of very many I would love to see it develop A lot more The difference between localization You have to question India And I mentioned Stuff like that India itself Is so large Has such an amazing diversity Of languages I mean, it's building people on its own Feels like it should also probably have Its own sort of continental work camp And You know, so I think it's awesome That you're all a part of work camp Asia But it feels Large enough that Perhaps, you know, sort of An Indian Work camp could be something that Is kind of the same size as Work camp, you know We've been talking about it all weekend And everybody that I've talked to about it Is chuckling to themselves See, I told you, he was in favor He was in favor Awesome Yes, yes Already discussing it Yeah, if you want to learn more That hand wave was for you Awesome Shall we continue with another question? Yes, on this side Hi Matt, I'm Arun from India I've been doing hosting business since 2009 And frankly WordPress gets a lot of bad rap Of not being secure, not being fast Not being well supported Not easy to maintain because of the Basically KLS hosts Which is sort of improving recently What do you basically see Happening in the near future And what more would you like to be seen And as an opportunity for the hosting Industry per se Well, of course, thank you For hosting WordPress You identified it As someone's If you think of the everyday experience Of most WordPress users It's primarily mediated by the host And the host are taking on a lot of Responsibility to keep their site Secure, uploaded Not just WordPress But everything underneath it You think of the operating system The web server, the database All of these will be patched And updated continuously The hardware underlines things You need to run backups Really is best suited And has a technical proficiency Beyond most WordPress users To be able to access those things I think it's getting better also From the competitive nature Hosting, which is As I'm sure you're very aware Of varying competitive marketplace Where there's a lot of folks Really doing their best To provide a fantastic experience What we focused on In WordPress Was really the auto update And Having updates And backwards compatibility Being something that we take very, very seriously So I When I've studied Sort of platforms and operating systems Everything in the past It's really about How you can update Not just the core But all of the components on top of it And the plugins And I feel like for core We've run very, very good place Where we can even push out For active security updates Tens of millions of sites In hours And we've done that to keep Sites secure across the web I think That there's still a lot to do there Particularly around plugins and features And I'd love to extend Some of our plug bounties To the way we do security Some of the way we do code audits To Top 100 plugins But really everything in the directory Because when we have something In our official directory We're also endorsing it a little bit Not explicitly But we're explicitly saying Hey, we're hosting this So just like you hosting for WordPress You're taking a little bit of responsibility When we host a plugin or a theme Like we have a number of code scanning tools And other things we've run in the past So like when we become aware Of a certain type of vulnerability We can actually scan the entire plugin repo Work for developers to update it With a plug-in of the bandits and not even upload it ourselves In the future Back to the very great side of it I can't say this So just like I talked about I feel like AI is going to make every developer A designer, basically everyone A lot more efficient and productive And I personally will be able to do a lot more With these sort of Increased AIs as the tool I'm very excited that When we can start to run Sort of code AI Banners over the entire repository Work with 4 But also all the extensions to WordPress And how that can help us improve The quality of those For the folks in the audience Who are the developers, the plugin developers The most important thing you can do Is just have people be able to trust updates And I know that's so hard And with the plugins I'm involved with including Google Comments We've made mistakes there in the past But There's nothing more Important than someone You know, looking forward to that update Or even better yet As being able to just Without even Anyone needing to think about it Just everything to be an auto update Or provide the best use of experience So just to add a couple of things there Like Updates is usually never the problem Never in the back of the mind of Entrepreneur who's getting the website up It usually starts with performance And Sort of whether the website will be up or not So Those are the two things whenever we have a conversation Between Shopify versus WooCommerce So Just a thought there Thank you We've had some incredible pains there Over the past couple of years Including with the doubling of PHP performance That came with PHP 7 7.2 databases are getting better I'm actually really excited with the SQLite work that's going on As a MySQL alternative For many WordPress sites That'll open up some Very exciting Performance improvements And doing things like being able to Replicate a SQLite containerized version of WordPress To the edges Automatically run 23 points of presence around the world That are like a cloud for a CDN That allows us to accelerate things Being able to shift The compute of WordPress to the edge Is going to be very exciting For improving performance I think that Well, WordPress Proper caching and everything set up Is one of the most Secured and fastest things you can do Powering sites Is mission critical And security critical Like the White House.gov And I think that Part of what I always think about Is how do we take the thing That right now we do for big enterprises Or people spending millions of dollars And make that accessible to everyone So I would love for anyone To be able to have that same level Of security and performance So always looking at what can we do in Coral What can we do in the basic Systems of how we work To bring those improvements And optimizations into the core software That's been one of the benefits as well For example with WordPress.com And made the decision not to fork the software Basically WordPress.com Runs Core WordPress And in fact Many times I think we've fallen behind this a little bit We'll actually deploy Like beta Or release candidate versions of WordPress To WordPress.com before The WordPress release And we do that to get it on Tens of hundreds of millions To find in the bottlenecks Before it goes out in the core software So that's something that Automatics contributed I know other hosts have done a lot of testing like that as well And something we hope we can do more In the future Thanks We have about 15 minutes left So we're going to be quick On this side Hello, still talking Hi, I'm Shilpa from WP Cubicle And what I really want to ask is Why aren't you here? But I'll stop So In my past life Over the past 10 years we've had a bunch of plugins On the WordPress plugins directory And I'm sort of in the early stages Of getting a new one there But the things that made me nervous With early on Starting on still make me nervous As in the lack of data From the point of view of How many people are landing on my WordPress Or plugin directory page How many of them are actually downloading And how many of them are installing it every day Feedback like that Would be tremendously useful For a premium plugin And so I don't know If there's something going on in the background But I would love to hear from you about that Please How can you make it easier for us? There is a more capital So there is As we know on WordPress.org We're very privately focused But we are looking at What's telemetry Or what's the focus we can share There was Sort of Because it's exactly what you said I want people to be able to Think about how to optimize And their findability I would love Better feedback loops I think that we need To integrate the forums quite a bit better Because users being able to For example, I'd love for Within WB Admin People will be able to Really easily leave feedback For example, there might be users Who are turning it off Like is there something we can capture When they're turning it off That they can go back to WordPress.org Be shared with everyone But also share it with the plugin developer I think those types of I think in the user interface There's little nudges we can do That could provide really great feedback loops And if we do it right It also provides great data For people searching the plugin directory And trying to decide between I'm very excited and say to the word We announced our new taxonomy For discerning between Free plugins Solo plugins Community plugins Commercial plugins And canonical plugins I think that's also going to be A great way for both users To be able to Choose what they're looking for And set expectations correctly And also developers And plugin creators To communicate What they're doing Also thank you for asking the kind of elephant In the room question, which is why I'm not there In Bangkok I really wish I was And right now I'm navigating Some family health things And I decided to prioritize Staying here in Houston So I just couldn't make it But I Really am hopeful that They are growing well So I hope I'll be able to travel again in the future And hopefully before not too long And so by the next time WorkCamp Asia is Have you all announced the city it's going to be in yet I don't know where, but I'm very much looking Forward to being there And meeting everyone in person Shaking hands, shaking selfies All those sorts of things That's one of the things that gives me a ton of energy And attending work camps Is really one of my favorite parts of the job too So I really am looking forward to Being there in person in the future Anyone ever thought that Your WordPress Mentors were Joking when we said we want you to put Your family and well-being first Like this is an example of why we Like we do mean that all the way around And so yes And we again huge thanks to the organizers For helping us to make this work out anyway Okay, hello Math My name is Kitan and I'm from Thailand You can call me Math Thank you for having me to ask your question It has been around three years and a half That since your company Automatically acquired Tumblr Since then I saw some improvement on the platform And I'm impressed that you can Manage both platforms In a great way So my question is after the acquisition Which aspect of Tumblr that influence The development of WordPress Especially in the open source one And also what is your plan to Develop both platforms even further Thank you Yeah I've said it before I'll say it again it's taking a little longer Than we hoped but we are planning to switch The backend of Tumblr to be WordPress powered So that's going to mean Hundreds of millions of new WordPress sites In the world and I'm very very excited about That WordPress is robust enough It can do everything that the backend Of Tumblr needs to do Now simultaneously we've also Been doing a business turnaround of Tumblr So when we purchased Tumblr It was losing I think we publicly disclosed Over 65 million dollars per year So bringing that to a break even Sort of like Stemming that burn Has been the first priority Because of course we want Tumblr to be around For many years in the future To do so it does need to be At least break even hopefully profitable But at least break even For us to really promise to its Community and users that will be able to sustain it For Many many decades to come As we're doing that though The turnaround is going well Like you have seen a lot of platform improvements With the sort of tumultuous Nature of social media recently Especially with Twitter We've gotten some huge influxes Of users huge influx of users And people also just Sort of appreciating the fun stuff we're doing Like the polls feature and other Things we've been doing Tumblr is basically blogging That's really fun and so I believe what it's inspired me To think more about Both of WordPress.com and also core WordPress Is how can we add little moments of Fun and delight Something that We had In some of the early days of WordPress But we kind of like Have iterated our way out Is Easter eggs Language that could Be fun or silly Being celebratory So you know for example when you make a new post Can we do a fun animation there Can we show like some confetti dropping Just things like that I think that we have a lot more room to be Paintingated and irreverent a little bit In some of the design of the software I know that feels less Safe sometimes or we can Always come up with reasons why we shouldn't have Things but I think it's really important To WordPress to Have some personality as well And the very core interface You know it's In things like the hello dolly plugin and others But how can we bring a little more jazz In the WordPress how can we bring a little more That is rather the Of the fun that we have Creating it you know we want to Translate that into the fun That everyday people have been using it The other thing That has been on my mind quite a bit Is If I have to think of like an original Sin of WordPress or something that Is a flaw in how the Software has been designed I think it's our Importance on titles I know this sounds kind of weird And fundamental but Really going back to the B2 days Something that's stinguished WordPress From logger Live journal some of the You know frontier user land Or scripting.com some of the other Early blogging platforms Was WordPress made the title like You basically required it and particularly When we started adopting Our way of doing permanent links That Included the title as part of it We really made it very central And it's kind of hard To publish something without a title And I feel like I know it sounds subtle but There's something kind of magical about What I would call asides On my blog I forget what we might have called them when we did Post-formats But it's kind of what Twitter is, is micro-blogging That idea of just being able to have an update That doesn't necessarily need A title on it So I've been talking to Matias a lot About this and some of the Gutenberg team But how we can make it easier Both in theming and the core interface To really make titles More optional Because I just want people to be able To Feel like they can post anything to their blogs A little bit how blogging has evolved Over the past 5 or 10 years With people thinking a lot about SEO And findability And social media optimization, everything Takes a little bit of the fun And spontaneity out of it I've experienced this myself in my own blogging I used to post hundreds of times per year And now I think of it a little bit more Like I really need to do a lot of work To put something out there And just if we can lower those barriers To entry and make people comfortable With posting just silly things Or just posting a link Or just posting a YouTube embed or something And not every blog post having to be Like a huge thing With a title and paragraphs And SEO optimized And a featured image and all that sort of You know, kind of additional Burden we put on post It's great to allow that and some blogs Will do that and some posts will be that But I think that kind of micro blogging Is something that I want to make a lot More effortless with an interface Great answer, thank you Thank you We have 5 more minutes So if you can get to the Thing quickly then we can Yeah Hey Matt, Bob WP here I do want to answer the question Just very quickly You said is there something to announce Or talk about here at work in And of course I have something for y'all Which is that we are Getting ready to kick off a lot of Phase 3 Of Gutenberg So we've been talking about this Gosh, 5, 7 years now Phase is one of a few That Yeah, Phase 3 is I would say the kickoff for that Is coming soon, so keep an eye out And to remind people Phase 3 Phase of Gutenberg So allowing things like real time Co-editing of documents, pages, themes Blocks, entire sites So people can be kind of working on it At the same time on different computers And see what's going on Editing workflows, I want to really Improve post revisions So there's a lot that's coming Inviting people to share draft Or submit comments Like all that kind of like Workflow and collaboration part That means definitely something more fun When you do it with other people And site creation and everything Like many things in life The more the merrier And so yeah, keep an eye out for Phase 3 Very excited to say that That is coming soon Hey Matt, Bob WP here From your part of the world Question for you, I know you're Love of science fiction And you're intrigued at time travel If you had one point in time What would that be When would it be and why Of course think quick There's um You know I would Happily do the entire thing over again The day that Mike Little left the comment On my blog And that we started chatting With each other on IRC And started collaborating And volunteering I'd do the whole thing over again A thousand times Thanks Matt Alright Can we take one question Matt, are you going to be able to answer a question in 30 seconds I'm going to take it as a yes One more question Okay, quick question I'm Leo from Malaysia, I run an agency The issue that I face in WordPress That Is about marketing WordPress In my agencies We have other agencies coming to my clients Telling them that WordPress is not secure WordPress is not fast You know it's not true But the problem is we have clients moving From WooCommerce to Shopify back to WooCommerce And then Shopify and they say WooCommerce is not secure, really When they know me they say You don't know the right guy You don't know the right agency But overall I don't know about other countries WordPress is for cheap websites Not enterprise websites And what can we do As a community To change the image of WordPress What do you think My quick answer is Nothing Is as good as showing examples So doing excellent work And then raising the profile of those And I know we've redesigned the showcase But I really want to make this a lot more prominent And I want every single Every single language And country version of WordPress To have a really prominent showcase So by elevating the best examples of WordPress I think that is better Because we can say all day That WordPress is secure It's performant or something like that But being able to point to a site Like WhiteHouse.gov That switched to WordPress And when the war in Ukraine started All the Kremlin sites got hacked WhiteHouse.gov did not If it's secure enough for The White House It gets secure enough for you probably Is really, really helpful So examples is my short answer And I guess we're out of time Can I just say thank you all This has been amazing I can tell there's a ton of energy in the room I've been watching the tweets Since some of the live streams And it's been so exciting to follow along This is really one of the best work camps I've seen yet The organizers And also everyone Me? I'll finish this up Do you want to finish? Me? Okay My friends, thank you Matt For joining us all the way from the other side of the world Thank you everyone who is joining us here In the audience, you are wonderful Everybody that has asked a question Thank you Folks who did not ask your questions Or that pre-submitted them and they didn't get answered We will put out a blog post as usual And you now have a 15 minute short break Until your next session starts at 10.30 I guess 10.30 Thank you everyone Thank you for coming Enjoy the rest of the day