 Well, all right, I guess I guess I'm usually the person introducing but it's just me up here so We're doing talk about the state of the word and this is always a fun presentation Because it's modeled on the state of the Union speech, right? We go through sort of talk the past the present the future of wordpress what's been going on what's been interesting and What's coming which is usually the most interesting part? So I am Matt Mullinwick. I'm not the number one man on the internet anymore as Apple mentioned At photo mat on Twitter my website's ma.TT One of the co-founders of wordpress. This is my picture the day I started working on wordpress Well in actuality I was I was 19 years old it was I guess six years ago now In fact tonight we are celebrating wordpress's sixth birthday, which was on Wednesday So I'll come out to the party In the beginning though there was no wordpress there was actually a piece of software called B2 B2 was an open-source GPL PHP MySQL blogging system that I had moved to after using movable type and I was completely blown away Because it's the first time well before if any of you are super old school Remember used to have to have like a CGI bin and certain permissions for certain scripts and to change a title of your blog You'd have to edit a file. I found B2 and it was you know, so easy B2 was also the first time I ever contributed to an open-source project so at the time because I was so cool I was really into typography and like mini-cool 19 year-old weeks and If those of you who wrote on the web back then if you wanted to have proper Typographic entities so instead of a double-prime mark you wanted curly quotes you'd have to actually type it out So to do an opening curly quote you would type, you know ampersand hash 8 2 2 0 Simicolon which was kind of slow down your vibe and so I thought well computers can do this right and It's a great Jamie Zewinski quote. You have a problem and you think oh, I'll use regular expressions and now you have two problems Well, that was my solution. I got a book on regular expressions mastering regular expressions by Riley I just started diving into them like I can do this and Eventually came up with a set of regular expressions That would sort of do their best to curl your quotes We called it texturize and it was so good. It made your quotes cruel and I published it on my blog and the most amazing thing happened the lead developer of B2 His name was Michelle over in Corsica, France saw this code also into typography We actually share a lot of interest also in the photography everything So hey, this is awesome. Why don't you submit this as a patch to? You know be to I had no idea what a patch was I'm googling frantically like what does is there's something there hole in my pants I mean what's going on here? I get on source forage. I make the patch I submit it and it is accepted and that was my first ever contribution to an open source project And it was a total total total rush who here has contributed to an open source project That's a good number. You know, it's it's a total high this the and for me I was like wow dozens of websites around the world are running my code I was blown away So that was the story of my first embalm over the open source I started getting active just contributing to the B2 forums hanging out. I didn't really know any PHP or coding at a time, but just starting out hacking around breaking things fixing them eventually learning a little bit by bit Fast forward about a year The lead developer B2 Michelle sort of disappeared out the face of the planet. No one a gnome or he had gone there was The website was coming up for expiration. There was no activity on the forums And he was the only real lead developer that weren't a lot of people sort of working on the core software So everyone was starting to get worried. I did a blog post actually I called it the blogging software dilemma because obviously this was the most important thing in my life at the time And I said well, you know B2 We're not sure what's going on with it But wouldn't it be nice if there was something that combines so the best aspects of all these other blogging systems And so the ones I mentioned at a time were the elegance of text pattern Which was my favorite if it if text pattern had been gpl Actually WordPress probably wouldn't this I want the simplicity of blogger The extensibility of movable type which had a ton of plugins and cool things going for it and the hackability of B2 This fellow who I'd never met before a day later left a comment on my blog His name was Mike little and he was in England and he said hey Matt if you're serious about this Let's work together and thus WordPress was born on a blog We started working together and the early versions of WordPress focused on You know ease of installation and we brought in this the original we called it the links manager, which is now known as blog role There's some of these initial features and I started cranking But we would have never been able to do this if it wasn't for the core freedoms That were inherent in B2. I didn't really understand this at the time But to go from B2 the WordPress was actually a big shift. It was technically called a fork in the community But we couldn't do this of B2 had it in GPL. What does the GPL mean? GPL guarantees certain freedoms. There's the freedom to use the software for any purpose Which means you can use commercial purposes. You can run the Nazi site Matt cuts, so don't you do anything? You do good or bad things with it. You have the freedom to modify the software So the fact that I was modifying my copy of B2 was actually really important And it's not something that I could have done With proprietary software and then most importantly you have the right to the freedom to redistribute those changes So the fact that Mike and I were able to take B2 and start redistributing something called WordPress Was enabled by the core freedoms in this license. Otherwise, we just would have been stuck You know what happens when a proprietary software vendor goes away The community dies when it goes away an open source usually many things spring out of it And actually there were four or five forks B2. There was B2 plus plus B2 evolution WordPress What they did was we sort of I went to a lot of the other fork people and said oh Hey, let's start working together and we all started working together and then when Michelle came back It turns out he had just needed to check out from the internet for a little bit He was fine. Everyone was fine. He came back and he said this is awesome This is now the official continuation of B2 So we actually got an official blessing from the project we forked from and it became sort of the big thing Then things started to get funny Well before it was just me Mike one or two other people in fact for a while There were more developers on WordPress than there were users I'd install it from my friends a community start to develop and we made two very very lucky Fortunate mistakes if you will and early versions of work that the first was in WordPress 1.2 We introduced plugins the plugin system much those of you who's ridden a plug-in here That's a smart crowd. I should have known it is a word camp, right? You know WordPress has a pretty unique system of actions and hooks Where you can very easily sort of insert your code into almost any point in the execution of the program and with 1.5 We're really inspired with that a theme called Kubrick that started to break up at this time themes and WordPress There was just one there were no themes and it was just one file as an index dot PHP and everything went through it We were inspired by Kubrick and started to bring in themes These two decisions are I think the most crucial in WordPress's history and if you study, you know Successful open-source projects actually something that happens pretty commonly What happens in most open-source projects is instead Everyone wanting their 15 minutes of fame everyone wants their 15 pixels of fame, right? Everyone wants their their bit of code or their feature to be in and if you say no Sometimes they get angry and they want to go work on something else So they don't like the project anymore But if you build a platform which WordPress is you allow them to sort of do whatever they like However weird it is however good it is however bad it is within a framework Which allows them to still be part of the community and other people to benefit it while still keeping the core You know the basic code that runs WordPress and that we all use Clean fast light and easy you can sort of it's secure for bloatware that has played software for the past 20 years so that was our lucky thing and It's growing. You know WordPress has done pretty well I like running these stats every year because it's interesting to see it's a little bit different from master So this is stats from the past 12 months versus the 12 months before that So two years ago. We did 280 40 commits, which is 2,840 which is the number of times the code is changed. That's up to 3400 this year did 5 million downloads and more than double that to 10 million almost 11 million downloads of the core WordPress software We were tracking when I was up here last year. We were tracking about 2.6 million dot org logs That's almost doubled the 5.5 million WordPress comm 1.9 million blogs were created. That's 3.4 now This is one of my favorite stats because it's like an activity of how many how much people are actually using it 31 million new posts last year up to 58 million 8 billion page use last year now to 22 billion page use Of that. Oh last year one third of the pages were on dot org two thirds were on comm This is the page user just things were tracking with our stats system this year. It was 55 percent on comm now 45 percent on dot org so the traffic to dot org blogs is growing a lot There was one stat that did not almost double or triple and I was very happy with it Last year we had about 4.6 billion spams this year only 4.9 billion So thank you spammers for giving us a little bit of a break I've never said thank you spammers before in my life The other thing that we did last year and we do every year at the state of the words is to make a number of predictions And I love predictions predictions are one of my most favorite things It's sort of like the Dilbert quote the best thing about deadlines is the wishing sound they make as they pass you I've got some predictions here 1949 popular mechanics said computers in the future may only have a thousand vacuum fumes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons. I think there's a world market for maybe five computers I've got five computers like on my body usually Of 1943 this is one of my favorites The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a mouse. There's no evidence that people want to use these things Is John Dvorak here actually I hear in the audience. He was here last year. That was 1984. The year was born actually Two years from now spam will be solved Bill Gates in 2004 We need some good fail graphics for this right some good fail block and then in 2008 BB press and back press will be ready this year So a long line of failed predictions Of which I am proud to be a part of good news though Both BB press and back press are officially coming out with version 2.8 I'm not going to tell you when version 2.8 is coming out But it'll be simultaneous and we'll talk about that a little bit more I made a couple of other predictions in 2008 one was that we'd have much better fashion and tattoos this year That's that quote was I'm hoping we can get some of the brilliant minds in the WordPress community to open source our t-shirt stuff You'll see these quotes. I was extra articulate super articulate and this has gone super well So this we got a little slide show here whoops That's interesting Boom, so this is our fine model Andy Skelton. This is the last year's word camp shirt However, the left we have the Philippines on the right. We have Indonesia and word camp That is Australia check that out. Isn't that crazy and look at that contemplative look And the lesson check that's Andy trying to look French by the way I don't know what that means We got Charlotte working but the French one was awesome because there's a combo work him a bar camp and look It's got the wine glass got the guy with the mustache The organizer told me he was like I had to tell the illustrator to take off the beret This was what work camp ed I believe it was I love this one because look what it is It's a bunch of the word press logo a negative space made up by a bunch of different W's This is actually something that's not a production something someone just sent me It is a word all made from all the functions in WordPress So you can see there's sort of a heat map there of all the different functions We got oh and finally we're can't Portland now. Can anyone spot the problem in this picture? Is that it's not Andy? No, no, no The logo. Yes Unfortunately, they use the wrong W. So you can't tell do you see how that W is kind of short and squats The real word test W is tall and elegant. There are thousands of examples of it here as the Adward camp so friends don't let friends use the wrong W. So I said fashion and tattoos. We actually finally made some temporary tattoos This is in Hong Kong And I believe we have some here right we have the temporary tattoos They're pretty fun. You just like get a piece of water you put it on there and Depending on how you do it. I found that I've been I must have put these on a hundred times And I found that like if you if you like clean it beforehand with a little alcohol it stays on for like four days without washing off even if you're showering and But we had another interesting thing. We actually had someone get a real WordPress tattoo Is Ed here, I believe Ed was thinking about coming out Ed a round of applause for this man Can you hold up your hands Nice Wow, I I've actually never seen it At first I was I saw this and I was like this has got to be Photoshop, you know No, it's a real tattoo, right? Wow, that is amazing. Thank you Actually when that happened I was like man, we can never change the logo now Right, I mean now that someone's tattooed it on their body permanently. All right, we're sticking with the logo Good thing. I like it Another prediction we made a set of predictions around crazy horse. I said super duper important is going to be crazy horse I guess I was in a Yoda phase at this point in the keynote last year And we of course had Liz and Jane during her press and lash presentation last year writing the crazy horse For the record when we named crazy course, we did not know it was a strip club in San Francisco. Just for the record No, really, I was very embarrassed when I found that out So this is some slides of WordPress through the years. Does anyone remember this? They wouldn't use WordPress at this time. All right, we got one two three. Oh a fair number So you can have as you there were no colors. It was all black and white That was the logo I designed. We're not using that one anymore. Thankfully, no one tattooed it You can only have one category. There was no publish button. Just a blog this It was very very simplistic No options. No wizzy wig. No tags. No anything. This was WordPress. I think point seven. Oh Later we upgraded. We put a little blue in the logo An interface folly if you click that WordPress it would actually not take you to your homepage or the dashboard It would take you to WordPress or so you can be right in the post and of course There's no autosave or anything like that for you lose your post We added a few more buttons there. You could save as drafts save as private advanced editing Which then took you to a screen. So this was our simple editor Then it was an advanced editor did everything it had like everything smushed on the one page It was like interface diarrhea and then you had Categories you could have more than one category now. We later upgraded. We put your title. Let's off. I believe this was 2.0ish But not out of many other changes then came the revolution we introduced the color blue This was quite controversial Who knew blue could be so much trouble? This is I believe 2.0 when we added two things in there We allowed you to move stuff around added a wizzy wig Which almost caused like a revolution in the WordPress community put a little blue in there 2.5 we did the big redesign Does you remember this we were happy college to look at these ability try to simplify things and then we did crazy horse Right, who saw crazy horse when it first came out This is kind of what it looked like and these screenshots leaked the internet I thought if we called it crazy horse no one would use it But it turns out that these screens on things that I was like oh, this is gonna be the worst thing ever It's horrible. This is the ugliest interface I've ever seen But luckily managed to go from that to that which is what we all use and love today. Hopefully and Yeah, well cool. I Like when you guys clap because it gives me a chance to drink water Lot of changes Basically the focus of 2.7 and whole crazy horse process was to make things faster The goal of WordPress is to be completely invisible. You shouldn't be thinking about WordPress You should be thinking about your content and your readers and your audience and whether you're above or below 6 on hot or Not and now all these important things the bloggers have to Focus on and so WordPress should get out of your way to be invisible. We introduced some things like quick press His little screenshot of quick press in action basically they are putting a ability to post right on your home page This has been pretty successful. We're now getting around 7 or 8,000 quick presses per day just on wordpress.com alone things like threaded comments, you know, we have the ability to have conversations which Have a real meaningful structure sort of closing the gap between comments and And forums something that's been sort of brought to fruition by intense debate Which is actually something we invested in last year. It does sort of everything at once We introduced things like the plug-in browser. Who's ever used a plug-in browser? It's kind of awesome You just type anything in and then direct from WordPress without leaving the site without going to WordPress.org without anything you get all the search results And you could basically as close to one click as we could make it without Amazon suing us Install a plug-in and then you're done one click upgrades, which was really one of my favorite things Still going I guess it takes longer than I thought One click upgrades Which were pretty exciting because as Matt said, you know security as WordPress is a platform having a secure platform was one of the most important things and The biggest complaint we got so far it was it's too hard to upgrade who was getting tired of upgrading I know I was I was writing the darn thing So we made it again as close as possible to we try our darn just when you flick that button to download the new WordPress Upgrade it check your plug-ins everything like that. And this is actually had a huge effect When 2.71 came out, which was the first version of WordPress that include the first update to WordPress that Used to excuse me the auto upgrade We actually did a record a hundred and fourteen thousand downloads that day alone So we're now getting sort of un-pressed into excuse me rates of people upgrading I don't know what this is doing. Oh upgrade There we go, so this is the demo the upgrade and then most importantly we've been focusing on making it faster So improving that actually when I was making those screenshots for like the old version of the WordPress WordPress 0.7 WordPress 1.0 I like went back and subversion used them. I was like, man This is way faster than it is today there's no CSS no JavaScript no images no anything and it made a really fast experience and We're now what using techniques like Steve Souters is going to talk about later in the developer day downstairs all these other things were able to really Sort of hypercharge the performance also the incredible improvements in browsers like Chrome so far for in Firefox 3 5 I used to a lot of really cool things around gears HTML 5 offline Eventually, I want to get to the point where whether you're offline or online whether you're on a plane or at your desk WordPress just works team with everything and everything's just instantaneous and maybe it sinks in the background or something We haven't figured it out yet, but that's the eventual goal, you know, whether it shouldn't matter whether in your browser on the desktop It's all about just getting out of your way being invisible Astralasso said it would be the year of themes. This is where the real innovation is going to be keep an eye on themes this year There are a couple cool things around themes. We introduced the theme directory Which was sort of a big? Wind for us because at the time when I was on stage last year There's a huge problem with themes where people were making these basically other theme directories But embedding all the themes with malware spam, you know they'd have all sorts of bad stuff in them or basically putting restrictions in it like you have to have a link to our you know Get a mortgage with Viagra site or something if you want to use the theme So we really want to encourage themes that were free at the core GPL just like WordPress through and through It's been sort of a trend the new problem the new sort of challenge that we're facing with themes is this whole idea of GPL versus premium Premium who's who uses a premium thing here actually? So-called premium thing a better word for them is proprietary for many of them So for many of these themes we had a big problem last year because people started into themes that remember the freedoms I talked about before the freedoms of the GPL the freedoms open source that would restrict your freedoms They would say you can buy this theme for 80 bucks But after you do you can't redistribute it you can only use it on one site You have to keep our foot a link at any number of things But Fortunately, some folks this year led by Brian Gardner revolution and some other people following started to actually take the premium themes So themes that were had extra features paid support things like that and make them GPL as well Now people always ask me well, how can it be GPL and cost money? Remember the first freedom you have the freedom to do whatever you like with the software including charge work in theory We could charge a dollar for WordPress or something like that But whoever gets it from you has also the freedom to redistribute it if they like they should just call it something different so there's actually nothing incompatible about Selling a GPL theme and it's kind of a cool business model. We'll talk a little bit about business models in the future But you know what they're selling the code is becoming a commodity, right? But if they're able to sell the support the updates the everything like that, it's pretty viable We're also to encourage this. I've never believed in sort of, you know We've had one of the premiums being guys like the thesis guys are like, oh, you should sue us to prove the GPL or something I don't want to do that, but we do want to encourage the good things so introducing today or later tomorrow We're gonna be putting a theme on our theme page In a page of all the people who are doing premium supported commercially supported themes so basically highlight in the people who are abiding by GPL and Allowing the community to grow an amazing thing about themes is that? There's a everything just like WordPress was built on P2 surprising number of themes in the directory use another theme with their base so you have you know the sort of famous themes the cubrics the hemming ways the You know thematics those types of things Inspire a lot of innovation after them and so it's really cool that even these paid things are Allowing people to build on top of other big trend has been GPL free marks. This is kind of cool So what do we got site number one behind door number one? We got site number one site number two site number three Go through those again. What do you think these all have in common? Although they're only using WordPress. Yes. Any other guesses? Sandbox that's close. It's close. That's close one more guess Boom Every single one of them was built on thematic, which normally looks like this So we're having a sort of growth of theme frameworks call it thematic sandbox is a fantastic one They're allowing you to use these GPL bases and create child themes or create really exciting ways to not have to reinvent The wheel and you can customize them quite a bit one of my favorite saying this you remember this cartoon I've modified it here. It says on the internet. Nobody knows you're a blog Originally said nobody knows your dog So yeah on the internet no one knows you as a WordPress you can create amazing full-featured CMS like sites Just using one of these free themes out there and a little bit of customization And I love that now people are starting to combine the GPL business We're now seeing sort of hybrid business models of things that don't take away of your freedoms But still allow, you know people to flourish business to grow and lots of investment to go into the WordPress world And to demonstrate this I was actually going to call for an up-to-stage Alex King So a round of applause for Alex Alex is going to talk briefly about sort of his experience with the GPL on business Hi everybody Are you clicking? Sure I've got a Long history with Matt and WordPress and over the last couple of years created a business called crowd favorite and Denver, Colorado and two years ago hired Hired our first person Started doing a lot of WordPress customization development work, and we're now up to full-time staff of eight people Doing primarily WordPress work. So we've got a good base of people all being supported by WordPress all of the work that we do and Publish is GPL the plugins and themes that we create our GPL and Basically, it's a service model. We're we're able to Leverage the work that we're building with WordPress to solve problems for other people and let them use WordPress to drive their websites and build integrations and Things like that one of the things that One of the things that we've built is theme framework like Matt was talking about Our framework is a little bit different. It's a it's called Carrington. It's designed really for people that are building sites using WordPress as a back end that are more CMS sites Carrington is free GPL and we've also released a couple of themes based on the Carrington framework most recent thing we've done is launch a help center and This is a little bit different. We were You know while crowd favorite typically works on slightly larger projects The help center is designed to kind of pick up the slack things that We were getting a lot of people emailing in with questions Small customizations things like that that we were having a hard time fitting in with our other commitments So we launched the help center, which is I believe the first on-call WordPress support and customization center or you can actually just pick up a phone call some buddy and get an answer right there and Everything's a low cost and this launched a Month and a half ago, and we're already looking to hire two additional developers because it's doing very well so Good success story of being able to make a living and support people with WordPress Question actually is it like Zappos? Can you call them and ask for like the nearest pizza place or anything like that? Will they answer any question? He's not gonna say yes So Alex is a great example of definitely the high end of the market But we've got a list on one of our pages a list of WordPress consultants Just like Alex's business there are dozens of not hundreds of other businesses that are 100% GPL and sort of you know doing lots of work around WordPress So I'm curious to hear who here works on WordPress like it's part of their job or this client work or does hold your hands I look around a lot of folks Also, if you're not raising your hands, you know who to ask for help now WordPress was also the fastest growing skill on elance. It was actually the top platform there and the skills on demand. There was PHP My sequel and 13 was WordPress which was pretty neat See if we can skip back there. We're the very highest platform. I was trying to skip this slide Also on Odesk, there was a 427% increase in demand for WordPress which made it more popular than even our writing So I don't know what they're doing with their WordPress We're probably an SEO more popular than XHTO pretty much anything out there So it's really kind of exciting to see this demand for WordPress And I love that now larger and larger portions of the web are being built on a framework and a system That's a hundred percent open source because that's making the web a more accessible more democratic more Stable and secure place and it's kind of neat to see open source moving up the stack as well I already like 60 or 70 percent of websites in the world go through an open source web server like a patchy When it be amazing if even 10 or 20 percent of the websites in the world we're using an open source system like WordPress We've been doing a lot of things too as well on the theme front one of them is p2 Has anyone heard of p2 here a Couple of folks I'm going to show you just a quick thing here basically the idea behind p2 is What was happening is so you can post and it just immediately Publishers on there and at the home page if you're logged in it's got a postbox at the very top looks a lot like Twitter Right the idea behind this the genesis was that internally to automatically the company We were all Twittering a time, but we never actually used our own blog Just a little embarrassing So we thought well, what if we could lower the friction and have a way to just have Fast way to post the first version is what's called prologue and when p2 came along we started having a problem where well We're doing a ton of posts per day, but the conversation is getting lost So we try to do something different that I haven't seen a WordPress thing before and move the conversation right to the home page So everything's JavaScript everything's Ajax right on the home page You can post a comment and it goes in right there and all the comments are shown in line in threaded format And the coolest thing about this is let's say I'm on my computer and Alex post a comment It shows up on my computer immediately So constantly in the background it's sort of pulling getting updates and everything like that So you have almost like a real-time asynchronous chat, but it's in a blog. So your tags categories search You know real links you can use HTML You can type longer than 140 characters if you're having a big thought I mean, it's actually really really powerful for coordination. We're also starting to see people use this for the blogs We've even toyed with the idea. Well, first I was like, well, maybe we should make this the fault thing But more what I thought is sort of fundamentally cool about this is just that box on the home page So actually looking at now there's a cool plugin for it. I forget the name But just putting that posting box on the home page of every blog if you're logged in Why should you have to do the dashboard? You can also see here this edit links everything on the home page None of this takes you to the dashboard you can use P2 without ever visiting the back end of WordPress Which is a pretty major departure from the way we've traditionally done things Not a big system. We've been doing is buddy press another prediction. I said, I think buddy press is going to be Really interesting over the next year who here's using buddy press just out of curiosity So a handful of people who's heard of it a Lot of people nice. Well, I'll just give a quick intro for those who haven't buddy presses Basically the idea is if what if you could take Facebook and put it in a box And what if you could take social networking and put it on an open-source framework like WordPress where it's as easy to create a Social network as this to create a blog today. What happens it? Well here to tell us what happens, Sandy Peatley Sure Yeah So I'm just gonna give a kind of a brief overview of the history of the project and kind of how the idea came about and It really it started kind of the end of 2007 and a client approached me I was working as a freelancer at the time and a client approached me and said we want to make a network of Blogs or journals for college girls to come and sign up So I was like college girls. I'll I'll take the project So so I took the project and it went really well and and I did the design and put it together And they were really happy with the project happy with the site overall and and they were like well Cool, this is great But we'd like to add some profiles and private messaging and maybe put some forums so the girls can interact with each other So I thought well, we're on WordPress already and it's a great platform to extend Why don't we write some plug-ins and look at what exists and and put it together in a package So I kind of went out and I and I built some private messaging Components and there was some profile components already for WordPress So I kind of tied it all together Install BB press and skin that put it under the same look and feel and you can share the log-ins all that stuff So it came together and it was kind of cool The package in the end was it was well received and people kind of it generated a little bit of buzz in the community And it was kind of like well, this is this is WordPress in a social networking area and this is kind of great So I basically thought well, why don't I make this available to everybody and and lots of people came to me and said We'd like to use this on our site. So I thought this that's release a GPL version of this Let's make it generic. Let's make it extensible. Let's make it kind of so people can skin it and brand it for their own site So it took a while It took a long while it took It did take a long while it took 421 days to get to 1.0 But it was it was worth the effort and it and it was exciting exciting 421 days to build to work on WordPress full-time every day and And also to come on with automatic and be able to do this full-time and really push Push WordPress in ways that hadn't been pushed and pushed before so I'm excited to see it and it's nice to see some of the community start to build up around the project It's still very new and the community is still very small But seems like there's quite a few people that get excited about the project And I don't have to sit in the IRC chat room on my own and talk to myself anymore There actually are more than one person there. So that's kind of nice I think last thing about buddy press as well is It gives more power to the community and that and that means more power to the WordPress community. So It allows theme designers and plugin developers to use their existing skill set with WordPress and apply it to a new Platform and in new areas So if you already know how to build a WordPress plugin or design a WordPress theme You can go and use buddy press and use that perhaps some some client sites or build new sites in the social area and still use your existing 16 skills to to use and build for buddy press So it's kind of nice to see that happen and it's same for end users It gives them the ability to socialize their existing WordPress site So it's gonna be interesting in the next year or so to see where buddy press goes and who takes it on and who uses it So if you want to take a look feel free to go to the buddy press site and download it and try it out It's kind of cool Yeah, from the moment I saw that network of college girls. I knew this was gonna be big It's actually a cool thing about buddy press is that um He sort of alluded to this but the buddy press outside. It's actually powered by buddy press And it's amazing to see the software sort of start to develop itself Where the developers and theme developers and everything around it are using the buddy using the buddy press and the Google are using buddy press to connect with each other and And What's fascinating is we've done, you know, lots of different projects over the years the WordPress community was spearmint of a lot of things Buddy press is the first one I've seen that really has the momentum that WordPress did and its early days So definitely keep an eye on that So that's sort of on the theme extension side about plugins We've talked a lot about theme. What's been going on with plugins? I thought we'd actually pull the community asked the audience what the coolest plugins would be Sorry, I put out a Twitter I linked to a poll and said well, you know, what are the coolest plugins gonna be and you reply So who can guess what number three is? I think this is actually selection bias if you ask on Twitter You're gonna get a Twitter plug That's the number three most popular suggestion now as a plug-in to add things to Twitter Number two, I was pretty happy with is yet another related post plug-in You know in the classic yet another open source naming a great plug-in You can drop in and it'll sort of show related posts right on your home page I'm using it on my blog and then finally the most popular one was WP touch So here's using an iPhone Raise your hand raise your hand. Oh nice. Nice. Nice. Have you guys seen the new WordPress stickers? So it's like it's like a mullet. It's business in front hardy and back How really happy with it? I think this might be are these on the available in the store now Yeah, they are sweet So you can now buy one of these for a while I take like two or three to every word camp and it was like like death matches people wanted to get these is amazing So WP touch which is basically a plug-in that it makes your WordPress sort of mobilized allows you to interface and control WordPress from your iPhone There's also been some cool things like we introduced common API in 2.7 And so made a really neat air app which basically sits on your desktop and will pop up one of those new comments You can moderate all your comments right from there other cool things that have been happening plug-in There's third party to really start to you know build on top of the system a good example is Vidler Which is a video site which actually uses WordPress for parts of the back end They've started to have a cool plug-in where you can you know bring in your videos and things like that Lidget which is sort of a blog based super smart search engine for you and things you love as a really cool WordPress plug-in what that is not a screenshot of Pick after the coin because they allow you to take like all the photos in the world of Barack Obama and Put them on your blog. No, actually, it's it's sort of getty images and things like that They give you a licensing way to put things bring these in pole daddy, which is one of our slides that holds on your blog and Latest is video press which is something we're doing right now. It's just word press calm But dotto the plug that's coming out soon allows you to upload videos and have a cool word press Customized player right on you know right in your home page. You can do full HD. You can have it You know be fast. There's no weird YouTube for into service or anything like that So there's lots of in addition to all the free stuff There's lots of business to which are completely with the GPO building services around WordPress to just plug right in and I do some Really cool stuff I've mentioned Google all the cool Google things you can put on your blog But the next big thing is 2.8 2.8 is coming It's been about six months into last release, which was interesting 2.7 was such a big release that we were all just kind of tired after It was it was really like a lot of work getting that out to you guys and the other cool thing It is basically almost bug free We didn't do a point one update Usually we do the release and then like a point one like two point five point one is out like within a month These are about three weeks later We didn't do a point one update for another like two two and a half months and the reason was they were there No big bugs. It was kind of weird We didn't really know what to do So that's pretty cool, but 2.8 is what we decided to do is sort of refocus on infrastructure things on the hood things That we didn't get a chance to look at in 2.7 for example the widgets Those of you who are using widgets before and know that there are lots of problems with widgets you could You could only do one sidebar at a time You could move a widget from one sidebar to another if you use the theme that had five widgets Then you switch to a theme five sidebars and switch to a theme that three sidebar that wouldn't work and all sorts of things like that It just wouldn't quite work So we've completely redone widgets from the bottom up both on the front end and also on the back end making a new API for developers really easily add new The theme browser so just like you can do with plugins you can now The entire theme directory is embedded in your bar, but even cooler is we've got this great flutter. So let's say you want a black three column theme with a left sidebar and custom colors it'll show you them and You can preview it right there from your site or install it basically with a one-click. So now, you know, there's always a big Thing in the WordPress community, but why don't you include more things? Why don't you include theme box like that now include 800 themes with every install of WordPress? I just embedded directly in there and of course because these are all coming for WordPress directory, you know that they're They're audited. We look at the code. There's no malware and no spam or anything. They're all sort of trusted things And then a bunch of other other things Code press confirmation press this improvements improve screen options. It just got a ton of stuff in it Mostly just sort of stuff. We didn't catch up. So it's not the most exciting release in the world We're gonna name it after a jazz musician who didn't die in like a blaze of glory It's gonna be a little bit slower release But catching up providing a strong foundation for our run the 2.9 and 3.0 Those of you who know the versioning scheme of WordPress is like a two years ago I got really annoyed with version number inflation partially because we were propagating but we made a decision that just every version of WordPress is going to be something point one and 3.0 would just be whatever comes after 2.9, but we do have some cool things Planned for 3.0. I'll tell you in a minute So another big thing last year that has grown is a number of international users So last year about 20% of 27% of downloads were from people outside of the English outside of the earth this year It's 42% So this is really this and also traveling the world visiting work camps everywhere has really forced me to think about Now how is WordPress a worldwide thing? How do we make it successful to people of any language of anything? One example is on WordPress TV, which you should all check out It's got a collection of screencast and videos all the videos from today Like let's say you're in this room and you really want to see something in the other room Everything will be online on WordPress TV. We started to integrate with that stuff This is a WordPress screencast with Arabic under it. So basically people are captioning All our screencasts and everything so all the videos are accessible in any language We're also open sourcing all the videos so people want they can record their own voiceover But the big challenge that we're coming up to is sort of theme and plug-in localization This is a picture I took when I went to Indonesia. I was at the word camp and I said well You know there any WordPress books here because usually when people write WordPress books And they send them to me. They're like, oh sure. We'll go to the store. We can pick one up I'll take them home. I got there and there were 11 books with WordPress logo on the cover. It's blow me away Indonesia I Just sort of I didn't even know what to say. I just bought them all It costs like five bucks for all of them or something the great deal I you know wrote kind letters to the people who use the wrong logo and then And it's kind of surreal to be looking at something you worked on or see your blog or something like that Surrounded by text that you're never going to be able to read but it underlies the challenge as well They're just like themes and plugins are the coolest part of wordpress and the thing that really make it most compelling 99% of themes and plugins out there aren't available for languages as in English Some of the big things we're going to have to tackle this year is try to create frameworks for just like wordpress is translated in 2328 languages a way for everything when plug-in to also be translated into these other wonders Oh, it's amazing as this usage of wordpress outside the US grows. We get a lot more contributions There's huge open source communities in Indonesia and Brazil and parts of Europe Germany that have started to make Presubstantial contributions to WordPress. And so I think this is actually as we expand the development base in these other places It's actually going to accelerate the development even more At work camps are pretty fun. This is a I don't know if you can see this in 2006 There was only one word camp in the world here in San Francisco. Is he went out that word count? Remember we had the giant Superman shirt the logo was like this big Have you seen the shirts this year by the way around her applause for Kohli Rafa. Is she here Kohli? Right there Shirts are really cool I don't know if you notice but there's a boy shirt and a girl shirt and they kind of connect to each other Like the the bubbles go out of one and then come down and the other It's really really neat But anyway, there was just one more camp in 2006 2007 we had about 10 or 15 around the world a couple in the US and this is 2008 I don't know if you can tell but the map just it's flowed I've been going so as many of these as I can But I'm kind of wearing out. It's uh, it's been just phenomenal the growth of this And the cool thing is that since WordPress is all about being accessible being you know open to everyone It's the reason you can come for a day To work camp pay 20 bucks get a t-shirt free lunch open bar See some of the same speakers who were speaking at say D7 a couple days ago was $6,000 a head conference You know offer 20 bucks and the word camps around the world are like this as opposed to like an Oracle Which does one giant conference once a year ships everyone in from around the world San Francisco It's really neat that word camps are local you know for most people they cost nothing or like the equivalent of $20 in the local currency and Down the street and you get some really interesting communities popping around up around each one of these I think