 Howdy everyone, my name is Matt Mullenweg and this is the State of the Word. About 17 years ago, I co-founded a project known as WordPress alongside a gentleman named Mike Little from the United Kingdom. WordPress is open source software for creating the web. We like to say it's both free and priced at the same time. About once a year, this State of the Word address, which is of course an homage to the State of the Union that the United States President gives the Congress, is something we usually do at our annual WordCamp United States event. This is a once-a-year event where we bring folks from all over the U.S. together to talk about and create the future versions of WordPress. Today, as many things are happening this year, we are doing it virtually. So thank you so much for tuning in. Whether you're a WordPress pro or just kind of curious about our community, we hope that you'll find lots to learn and hopefully inspire you to future action and involvement. 2020 was a very surprising year for us, as I'm sure it was for many. 2020 was a year of many first. We had COVID-19, my first global pandemic, resulting in lockdown and isolation that many of us have been dealing with and continue to. It's really worn on a lot of us as the year has continued, but a year of a lot of social tensions. Finally, the year where we had to learn how to work together while being apart. WordPress has always been distributed. Being open source, we've always had people all over the world, but working together in a distributed fashion during a global pandemic is very, very different from how we would normally work together. And a lot of contributors and volunteers' ability to contribute was impacted negatively by the pandemic. Despite all of that, though, we shipped three really exciting and amazing releases. Now, before we get to the releases, I do want to set the stage and talk about Gutenberg, because you're going to hear that word a lot, and if you don't know what it means, you'll be very confused. Gutenberg is the most ambitious project we've undertaken in the 17-year history of WordPress. Essentially, we're attempting to redefine how people write on the web, taking it from a document-based model, like printing pages kind of inherited from things like Microsoft Word, and turning it into atomic blocks. Basically, the idea that instead of a page, what you're laying out is these rich blocks, which can have rich functionality, they can be embedded from other sites like a YouTube embed or something. They can have the laid out in different types of arrangements. They can be nested inside each other. And using these blocks, you can create really anything you imagine. In 2015, from a stage—actually, not at all like this one, because it was actually a stage—I asked people in the WordPress community to learn JavaScript deeply, because at the leading edge of the WordPress community, it was becoming quite clear that I was going to be the future of how WordPress was going to develop. In 2017, we publicly launched a Gutenberg project, this ambitious thing I just described to you. And then at the end of 2018, with WordPress 5.0, the Gutenberg editor became the fall editor inside of WordPress, which is why sometimes now we just call it the WordPress editor. Since Gutenberg started until now, there have been over 15,000 commits to the code base, and it's had over 95 public releases. That's one on average every two weeks since it started. So we've been able to iterate and ship Gutenberg faster than even the three times a year that WordPress does. And those public releases also allow us to do lots of user testing, so we're able to actually put the working code in the hands of users and the tens of thousands of people who run the Gutenberg beta plugin and get their feedback, which has been really fantastic. Now, Gutenberg is a roadmap of being four different phases, and let me remind you what those phases are. The first phase, which we are still in, is creating the fundamental building blocks of what you can do with Gutenberg. So that's all the block launches you've seen. It's also bringing all those blocks to our mobile editor, which is very exciting because a lot of people don't appreciate that Gutenberg, as well as being quite fluent to use on the web, also has native implementations for both Android and iOS that we use in our open source WordPress apps. So phase one is all about editing things inside the post of the page. Phase two, which we're in right now, is editing everything outside of the post and page. So this is the idea, sometimes we call it FSE or full-site editing, that you can use blocks to comprise the entirety of your site, which really allows us to reimagine what themes and everything else are going to be able to do. Phase three, which we haven't started yet, is all about collaboration, workflow, and real-time co-editing. So the best way to think about this is, you know, that awesome feature in Google Docs when you can see who's editing what, and a lot of modern web apps have that. We're going to build that in to just core WordPress, and it'll work in a peer-to-peer way, probably using, like, RebRTC, and allow when you edit something to see the other people that are editing. And phase four, which is just in the imagination stage right now, but likely to be taken underway pretty vigorously in 2022, is multilingual. So this is a native way to do inside WordPress, which today you need a plugin to do, which is create a multilingual website. So that's quick somewhere of Gutenberg, and now let's dive into the WordPress releases. The first of these releases is WordPress 5.4, named in honor of Nat Adderley, the amazing jazz trumpeter. 5.4 had over 550 contributors, a beautiful new welcome guide to make it easier for new users to WordPress to get accustomed and learn their way around. Cool design tools around colors, a way to do blocks for social icons natively in Gutenberg, which means they load really quickly and don't have any cross-site tracking JavaScript. We made it easy for sites to create a privacy policy, and then, last but not least, one of my favorite features is we invested a lot in performance and code optimizations in this release. I got a 14% increase in speed. This sort of thing is always important. We endeavor to rewrite somewhere between like 5 to 15% of WordPress in every major release, so that over the long term, much like this ship of Theseus, we're constantly replacing all the boards, and basically we get a new WordPress every couple of years, even though we're doing several major releases per year. Next up was WordPress 5.5, named for the legendary vocalist Billy Eckstein. In the midst of a pandemic, we had our most contributors ever with over 800 folks who were part of that release. 5.5 introduced one of my favorite features of the year, which is block patterns. As we talked about with Gutenberg blocks, when you start thinking in blocks, you can look at pretty much any website on the web and see almost like when Neo sees the code behind the matrix. You can imagine how the buttons and images and everything can become a block. What block patterns do is essentially give you a shortcut to creating those. Common best practices of testimonial with three faces or a hero image that then scrolls or whatever it is, people can create patterns to make it easy for you to do this. This is kind of like a shortcut for making sites faster and hopefully can supercharge how fast you can create WordPress sites. We did a lot of work on cleaning up the UI, including refining the iconography of WordPress quite a bit. And then another one of my favorite features, and this has been a crowd hit as well, is the distraction-free editor, a mode which can hide most of the Chrome of WordPress and Gutenberg and give you a very clean and focused writing environment, which is I find really fantastic for that generative part of writing. When you just close everything, turn off all distractions and just try to get as many words on the page as possible before you go into the more critical editing phase of writing. When you are adding things to your poster pages using Gutenberg, you might look for a block that doesn't exist yet on your site, meaning that no plugins or core supports it. Now WordPress can transparently go out to WordPress.org, see if there is a block plugin which matches the block that you're looking for. And then in the background, if you click insert, it'll install the plugin, activate it, and then on the fly, sort of insert that block which was just, the code was just added support for into your poster page. This kind of seamless, on-demand installation of essentially a plugin, I think is really, really exciting and a good modality that we want to follow with WordPress in the future, just making things as easy and seamless as possible. And then finally, another one on the threat of making things easy and seamless is we added support for inline image editing, which means that without bouncing to another editor or without moving to another application or anything else, you can make some basic but really powerful edits to the images in your post just right there in line in Gutenberg. So 5.5 was really, again, in one of the most challenging times we faced in this year or in the history of humanity, we're able to create some really, really great progress in both Gutenberg and the core WordPress experience. All of these improvements that Sarah Gooding, a journalist with wptavern.com, to say, the 5.5 update is a testament to the stability of WordPress during uncertain times, as well as its unstoppable distributed contributor base, who continue to get things done despite the pandemic's unique challenges. I was really proud of what the team did with 5.5, but there was more right around the door. We topped the year with WordPress 5.6, named in honor of the legendary Nina Simone. Over 600 contributors came together to put some really exciting behind the scenes features for WordPress, including allowing you to opt in to automatic updates for core. This is the first step towards our goal of allowing your WordPress to essentially maintain itself where you can set it and forget it, and it'll get automatic in the background and hassle-free updates to all your plugins, themes and core. We're doing this for core first, and it's on by default for new sites, but often for older sites. But over time, we hope that we can make this robust enough to just be on for everyone all the time. So you never have to worry about updating your WordPress ever again, which of course is the best way to stay safe and secure, in addition to getting all the latest and greatest features. We added support to the REST API for application passwords, which is a more secure way of giving other applications access to your site without reusing or sharing your normal username and password. We added support for PHP 8, which also came out just earlier this month. PHP 8, different than some more recent releases, changes a ton of things. So both us and the rest of the PHP community are going to need to do lots and lots of updates to get things to be compatible, but WordPress core has compatibility. And for sites that are able to adopt PHP 8, they'll get some pretty cool new features from the language and also some performance improvements on many, many sites. On the user-facing side of things, we took the opportunity to update cover blocks, allowed you to convert several different blocks into columns, which is a fun feature, changed how the button block worked, really started to utilize the block patterns we added in 5.5, culminating in a very exciting new default theme, 2021, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a bit. So 2020 had a lot of firsts, but there were some really good firsts too, including a lot for the WordPress community. One is our first ever virtual state of the word, which in a very meta sense, you are experiencing right now. It was our first time to crack 39% of the top 10 million websites powered by WordPress. We are first on this stat, more than 10 times the number two in the market, and we added just about 4% to that stat this year. So we went from around 35 to 39, which is the most we've ever added since the stat started being tracked in 2011. So we grew faster this year than we've grown in any previous year, and I think that's an incredible testament to really hard work about the WordPress core community on WordPress.org, and all of the amazing developers, agencies, plugins, themes, the entire WordPress ecosystem that really makes WordPress work. We had a lot of firsts with online events and mentorship. In a year when we all had to stay apart, you transformed in-person events into online gatherings and shared your knowledge and passion, enabled more connections to cool events like WP Block Talk, WP Accessibility Day, hallway hangouts, code streams, and tons and tons of online meetups and word camps. It's been very, very exciting to me to see how the WordPress community has adapted to stay connected in this time. By exploring these new ways to educate, innovate, and inspire, we're lowering the barriers to entry and removing the need to travel in order to participate in WordPress events. I've always loved the WordPress events and really wish I was in-person with all of you right now, but also it's weighed on my mind that these events are exclusionary to those who for whatever reason can't make it out on a weekday or weekend to travel to where they happen to be. And at first, certainly for WordPress and possibly for any major open-source project, WordPress 5.6's release squad was entirely women and non-binary folks. There were over 40 contributors who loved the release and it ended up being, as you saw, an amazing one. That's part of why we named it in honor of Nina Simone. If you'd like to see your face on that list of WordPress release leads someday, or just want to learn more about some of the things we just talked about, including WordPress fundamentals, I would love to take this opportunity to introduce the new learn.wp.org site or learn.wordpress.org which is a new effort by the community to create tutorials, workshops, and host discussion groups entirely online. So again, leaning into this new world that we're in, that seems like we're going to connect a lot more on the internet that we did in person and trying to take the best of what we used to do with our workshops, events, everything like that, and bring it to you online, any day of the week, any time of the day. So much cool stuff going on here, but what's really happening? Like, as Paul Graham would say, those with a cool facade of Neal Atmarari, or too cool for school, are always proclaiming WordPress to be dead or for there being something new replacing it. So how in 2020 do we grow faster than we ever have? From my vantage point, I have three mega trends that I think contributed to this. First is the lockdown. It gave people space and time to connect online, but they were looking for healthier spaces than just doom scrolling on social. We didn't need any more tolls on our mental health. And blogging about the things that you're passionate about, or finding blogs to read of people who are into the same things you are into, is really one of the most rewarding parts of the internet. And it's never been easier for a do-it-yourself aspiring blogger to create and connect with people online using WordPress. Second was the mega boom in e-commerce. We've all heard how e-commerce was pulled forward many, many years. There's an incredibly flexible e-commerce plugin for WordPress called WooCommerce. WooCommerce facilitated over $20 billion in sales so far this year, more than double the year before. The intersection of commerce and content is huge in a growing space. And as people who might be introduced to selling things online through maybe an eBay or an Amazon or a proprietary SaaS service like Shopify, as they reach a limit of those services, they look for the most flexible thing out there. And the most flexible thing out there on the internet is almost always going to be WordPress. And third and finally, there was incredible economic uncertainty this year. Lots of people lost their jobs. Lots of people were looking to supplement their income. This drive an incredible amount of entrepreneurship so people who are looking for people who knew WordPress. And on the other side of that, more and more folks who knew or learned WordPress found that they had a lot to demand for their work. So they're able to supplement or replace their income, essentially for folks who have a do-it-for-me mentality. So someone who is looking for someone else to build their website. It's never been a better time to learn and invest in improving your WordPress skills. Here are some cool examples to illustrate each of these three trends. For blogging, I love the example of marginal revolution, a blog founded the same year as WordPress in 2003 by two professors at George Mason University. Actually had the good fortune to meet one of the co-founders Tyler Cohen at an obscure economics conference in Dallas honoring Milton Friedman hosted by the Federal Reserve. And he told me actually at that point that the very best thing you could do to improve your writing was to write every single day. Tyler and Alex have followed that and grown their blog to be a really rich community of folks finding connectivity through the language of economics. The community is actually so rich that marginal revolution university was born in 2012. It's a learning site that houses the largest online library of free economics education videos over 900 available to everyone. On the e-commerce side of things, you might have come across a co-product named Tonal, which is like a peloton of strength training. You know, a side effect of this pandemic has been personal health shifting to our homes. Tonal anticipated the need for virtual fitness coaches and uses AI combined with a really innovative mirror interface where there's a screen embedded in the mirror and then it has kind of like pulleys that provide resistance training. I think up to 200 pounds and they can offer a superior workout when you're at home. They don't disclose their sales, but just a few months ago in September, they raised $110 million funding round, which will give you a hint of their growth and scale. And one of the investors was actually the Warriors basketball player Steph Curry, which you might think is a good thing or bad thing, depending on what your favorite basketball team, but he had apparently been using it under a pseudonym for a few years. He just kind of bought it off the website. They also disclosed when they did that round that in the past year, their revenue has grown by 12x, 12 times. And this is all built on WordPress and WooCommerce, which is very exciting, both for the scale and showing that you can build a really cool new product and service on top of Woo. Finally, here's someone who was able to learn and improve their WordPress skills, connect with lots of demand for those skills and transform their life. WordPress powers ventures like Codable, a nexus that helps you find a WordPress freelance developer wherever you might be in the world. Debra Butler is a Codable certified freelance developer in Cape Town, South Africa. Debra's WordPress skills supported NGOs and small business responses to the COVID crisis. Check out her work on Children's Radio Foundation's COVID-19 informational page. These are just three examples of how all of what we do, how we express ourselves, how we live and how we work, has been moved online. And when online is your only option, WordPress is your best option. As I alluded to when we were talking about 5.6, there's a fantastic new default theme that we call 2021, which comes out of the box and a number of fashionable pastels. Of course, you can customize it to any color you like. You see lots of cool block patterns in use. And a neat new feature, which kind of crosses core WordPress.org that Helen Hosandi helped drive was improving the starter content in the theme. So now, theme demos, instead of showing that kind of cool but not always useful boat, can show all of the starter content on the theme that's activated already for all of the default themes they've ever shipped to WordPress and will soon be activated for the remainder of themes on WordPress.org. So you'll be able to see some great demo content and decide which theme could be the very best for you. 2021 makes it easier than ever to get your visit onto your site and your site onto the web. And now, we'd like to show you a sneak peek at some of what's coming around the corner with Gutenberg. We have Johan showing the site editor beta. In this demo, I'd like to walk you through the new Gutenberg site editor. The site editor allows you to edit the theme templates beyond the post content. It introduces several new blocks, like the query loop. When you make a modification, like adding a featured image, it naturally adds it to every post in the query. You can configure the layout, make simple tweaks, and it propagates to all the posts. If you prefer the featured image above the titles, no problem. All the familiar block interactions are available. While the header is a separate template part, it could be edited seamlessly. Everything is a block. Navigation, the site title, the tagline, making it easy to edit anything and make use of all the block tools available. The block list view shows all the different areas, like header and footer, for quick access. Since everything is created with blocks, it's easy to edit. The site editor engine keeps track of all the modifications, giving the user a clear overview of what has been modified. The site title, the header area, etc. You can open the 404 template, modify it like any other content. With the introduction of block patterns to WordPress, themes will be able to offer any number of designs, providing a shortcut to replicating demo sites or swapping out aspects users may not like with another that they do. This is the culmination of several ongoing projects to improve and expand upon the customization possibilities in WordPress. Both templates and regular pages can be edited in the site editor. Small previews can be seen when hovering the different templates. The Style customization panel allows making global changes, like text, link, or background color. These modifications can be quickly checked against the different pages in the site. You can customize any template of the site, such as the page template. Drag and drop the page title into a cover block to use a gradient for that page. The possibilities are endless. We can't wait to see what you build with this. As you can see, we've come a long, long way with Gutenberg, from those first versions you might have seen and tried out. If you haven't been given a try recently, I encourage you to check out Gutenberg by creating this common framework that every theme and plug can build on. We're reducing the balkanization within WordPress from people who are solving these problems in lots of different ways and providing what I believe is the basis for the next decade of WordPress's growth. So we're about two years into a 10-year project. We've got good chunks of Phase 1 and Phase 2 of Gutenberg done. That's the post and page editing and then editing the entire site. I'm excited to continue these in 2021 and hopefully start to get to phases 3 and 4. So if WordPress has ever helped you, or if WordPress has let you help others, I invite you to learn more about the WordPress project. It's a global community of experts and amateurs and enthusiasts that collaborate to maintain, sustain, and improve the software. And we do it all without locking you into a wall garden of technology. I often get asked how WordPress has avoided the burnout or tragedy of the commons or things that commonly afflict other open source projects. And I attribute a lot of that success to our kind of cultural generosity with this program called Fire for the Future. Fire for the Future is the idea that whatever time your WordPress is supporting you do, whether that's a business or many employees or freelancing, they try to take 5% of that and put it back into the comments volunteering for something you're passionate about in the WordPress community, something that leaves the community a little better than you found it. For some companies, this might be full-time folks that are contributing. For some individuals, 5% would be about 4 hours a week or 2 hours a week. So think about what that 5% means for you. It's kind of metaphorical. It means different things to different people. And if your organization is part of it, please make sure to list yourself and set a good example by what you're doing on the Fire for the Future page on WordPress.org. So with that, we come to the end of our first ever virtual distributed state of the word. If you'd like to follow me some more, I'm Photomat, Ph-O-T-O-M-A-T-T on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. I have a podcast at distributed.blog and I blog myself at ma.tt and mat.blog, all powered by WordPress, of course. So please check it out. And without further ado, we're going to try it ahead to another first, which is a distributed Q and A. So question and answers submitted by you all over the past week or so. And myself and others within the WordPress community are going to do our very best to answer these questions. Hello. How do you see WordPress integrating with Voice AI and 3D publishing on the web in the future? Ava, thank you very much for that question. I haven't thought too much about Voice AI or 3D publishing, but the good news is that I don't need to for it to be possible. WordPress has so many great APIs. I have seen demos before of people using WordPress to power content embedded in virtual worlds or things like Oculus. I have seen people use WordPress to build kind of like a voice menu system for, I believe, was Alexa. So I know it's possible, but probably we're at least a few years away from that being in core. And if there's anything that I've missed that I should check out, please send it my way. I'm Christina Workman from Calgary, Canada. I'm a designer, developer and user and contributor. We saw at the release of WordPress 5.6 that over 600 people contributed to track tickets and GitHub poll requests, all mentioned by name, as well as numerous volunteers contributing in the support forums and translating to make 5.6 available in 38 languages, although unnamed. There's no doubt these volunteers are doing great work, which is supported by thousands of other contributors volunteering their time outside of core releases throughout the year every year, who don't get any recognition outside of their inner circles. Publicly acknowledging the variety of contributor roles available goes a long way to increasing our community's awareness that these roles exist for them to participate in. What plans are there for recognizing contributions made by those who contribute to any team throughout the year, even those not involved in a core release? Thank you. Christina, this was an excellent question, and I do agree that recognition is a fantastic way to get more people contributing to the things that we're doing. The WordPress release post, and of course the core itself is probably better at recognizing core itself and contributors there than anything else. One thing we did build to improve this was the badge system on profiles. If you go to profiles.wordpress.org slash man, you'll see there's a number of badges there that at the very top that show all the different things I've done and contributed to WordPress community. I think there might be a bug there because it shows that I'm a translation editor and I am unable to speak any language besides English and even English I struggle with sometimes. But I noticed that on these badges there's no way to click on them and see all the other people who have the same badges. That could be a really nice start to having pages that recognize folks, particularly folks whose work isn't just tied to a single release within WordPress.org. It could have some sort of natural decay function. If you haven't done anything for an amount of time, maybe you drop off the list. That'd be, I think, a very natural place to start to add it. And we'll look into it as an suggestion and thank you very much. Hi, Matt. I'm Courtney Robertson with the training team. You recently shared an article from ZDNet that indicates an 834% rise in PHP developer jobs since January of 2020. It's fair to assume that some of that will be WordPress developer related jobs. W3tex indicates that WordPress powers over 39.3% of all websites online, surpassing 38.5% of websites that have no content management system at all. Given those stats, what role do you see for employers in the WordPress.org ecosystem as it relates to the learn.wordpress.org website? How do you think that the Learn platform can address hiring skills and ongoing professional development needs? Thank you, Courtney, for highlighting those stats. And also thank you for the awesome WordPress swag you have in your background. One cool thing about this format is it's really neat to see people where they are, not just us all being in the same auditorium. For Learn, I think the first step is really just organizing and getting really high-quality educational material up there. The equivalent, like, if you were going to take a university course on WordPress, how do we walk you from just learning the basics all the way up to being able to be able to customize and basically be a WordPress pro so you can build sites for other people and be kind of like an expert? Down the line, it'd be great if this platform could have some sort of self-certification or perhaps even some sort of administered certification that could show people that you mastered a certain skill that you went through either you went through lessons or you didn't need to, but you were able to take a test at the end and show that you were competent in this. It would be a perfect system, but it could be a nice way for people to learn more about WordPress and hopefully as they go through, since WordPress is open source, improve the materials as we go through it, both from the point of view of making it more intuitive or easier to understand and then also translating as well because there is huge demand for WordPress really all over the world now. Hey Matt, Dan may be here from Big Orange Hearts. We're urged to charity providing wellbeing and mental health support for remote workers. To support our mission, we deliver events to help reduce social isolation for those working remotely. We're more than 12,000 attendees through our virtual event platform built on open source technologies this year. I wanted to ask about your vision for events within the WordPress community through 2021. As a regular WordCamp and Meetup organizer myself, I also wanted to ask your thoughts on responsibility towards safety of attendees and fellow organizers as we start to take steps towards a vaccinated era. And finally, with virtual events offering a greater level of accessibility for attendees, do you see the potential for a hybrid approach towards WordCamps in the future? Thanks for your time. Hi Dan, Andrea here. Thanks for asking this question. It's been inspirational to watch WordPress community organizers rise to the challenges that this horrible pandemic has brought, especially since so many of us love this work because we love seeing each other in person and we know how powerful those face-to-face in-person interactions can really be. And like other WordPressers, I am really eager to get back to those in-person events just as soon as it's safe. All that said, and as you point out, moving all of our events online has made them much more accessible, especially to those who either can't travel or don't wish to travel to our in-person events. When I think about our return to in-person events, I think that some sort of hybrid element will be necessary, especially in those first stages. But I also know that hybrid events are much more expensive. And so yet again, we're going to be hoping and looking for WordPressers who want to take the opportunity to really look for innovative ways to make our community events accessible at scale. I don't know all the answers here, but I know that some of the smartest people that I know at least are in WordPress. And I'm really looking forward to work on this together with the global community team. I hope that's helpful. Thanks for all that you do for WordPress and the WordPress community. I hope to see you soon. Hi, Matt. I'm Dave from Belgium, almost 15 years building sites professionally, which 10 years on WordPress websites. Hope you're okay and happy Christmas in advance for everyone listening. Well, WordPress is in its nature a very clean, no-overkillen options kind of software, and thankfully this created our beloved WordPress ecosystem. It also created momentum for page builders like Elementor to arise with enormous success. And the reason for that is simple. The user got all the options just to mention a few to make my question more specific. I'm talking about layout, padding, margin, desktop versus mobile and tablet and so on. Now the block editor is right now also that kind of no-overkillen options kind of software. Some like that. I totally understand that, but some don't. The question is how far do you think the core blocks must go in those kinds of customization to please the mass non-tech audience? Because if you look back, honestly, that's what they want. That's what they choose. Or do you rather keep that WordPress simplicity again to leave the door open for the next block page builder plugin to arise? So how dependent on a third-party layout plugin do you want the WordPress block user to be? Thank you. Hello, Dave. You bring up an interesting point, which is that we're trying to walk a very fine line between creating something which is intuitive and easy to use and also providing the customization that people clearly want in WordPress. We're also trying to do something which has never really been done before, which is provide a what you see is what you get with the Wix down interface that again is intuitive and easy to use and layout. But that also creates really semantic markup, structured data, and is fast and performance. I don't know if you've seen any of the comparisons on the web between WordPress with Gutenberg versus other page builders or other proprietary CMSs, that page building functionality. Gutenberg blows them out of the water. It is really fast, really clean markup, really lean. This is taking a little longer to do. To do it is taking longer. I believe it's the right long-term investment in both the future of WordPress and the future of the web. In terms of customization, I believe there will always be space for not just one plugin, but many, many plugins to extend Gutenberg. That is really the idea that by where before we had lots and lots of different page builders kind of having their own data structures, their own ways to do essentially the same thing from user point of view, and themes would have to build to one, SEO plugins would have to build to each one. We're trying to provide a common rails or framework that every vision for how page building could work on top of WordPress can leverage these blocks. In fact, blocks are even built so other CMSs can leverage them too. So that is the path we're on. It's the way WordPress is going. I believe it's the future. I hope that as many people get on that train as possible. But if not, I do believe it is inevitable. Hey, Matt, this is Doc from Torque Magazine. I'm wondering what features for Core are you targeting to make WordPress a better headless experience in 2021? First, I have to say I don't love the term headless. I like calling it decoupled WordPress because who wants to be headless? But by and far, the thing that's been driving the most improvements to our APIs has been our first part of usage of them. So with Gutenberg, built on and using the REST API, and of course our mobile apps, both Android and iOS, million active users all running through the APIs. So that has helped expose a ton of bugs and a ton of other areas where we can improve it. I'm keeping my eye on the GraphQL plugin. I think that that is an interesting possible next step after REST to support either as a more official plugin or just something that we point people to because it seems to be doing well. I don't think that a decoupled architecture or headless sites are right for everything. I think that they're right in certain situations. But as I quoted, it was saying they are probably a regression for many of the people adopting them. I actually had a really good debate about this at the Netlify Jamstack conference with Matt Billman. But I guess it was too good because they elected not to post it. But perhaps you can track down a recording or something. And here are some more of my thoughts about decoupled architectures and WordPress there. Hi, Matt. My name is George Alger. I've been a WordPress user since 2007. And I've been watching State of the Word for a number of years. My question has to do with Gutenberg versus Page Builders and more specifically regarding page load speed. I'm wondering, as Gutenberg in the future adds more and more features, do you anticipate that the page load speeds for Gutenberg will also slow down to support the new features? All right. Thanks for all you do. Bye-bye. Hello, George. My name is Riyad Bengela. I am a developer on the Gutenberg team. It's an interesting question you bring here related to performance. As you can see with the different WordPress releases since the initial release of the block editor in WordPress, the performance of the editor has been improving even if we were adding features at the same time. So it's definitely a big priority for us. And for the front end and the page load speed, we've been approaching that in a few different ways. The first one is the block markup. We are trying to make sure the block markup is as clean as possible. And also the interesting thing is that Gutenberg brings semantics to the content that is being rendered. So WordPress can know exactly what blocks are being rendered, what assets they need, what CSS, what JavaScript they need. And in fact, recently we landed a pull request that allows us to only load the CSS of the blocks that are actually in need in the currently rendered page. And this opens a lot of possibilities. For example, in the future, we may do the same for JavaScript and lazy load blocks. And when we expand that to full site editing where a theme is basically composed entirely of blocks, you can imagine that the CSS and the JavaScript provided by the teams themselves won't be as necessary as today. So I think we have a big opportunity here to actually improve the performance of all the WordPress websites and not decrease it as we add features. Thank you. Hi Matt. I'm Hidda from India. I'm a project manager mainly working with the WordPress developers. My question for you today is a simple one. In the recent releases, we have a lot of new features and advancement in WordPress. But as an end user or maybe a content manager, have you ever felt like it would be good to have a more modern design for the backend and it would have been good if we had more customization option just for the backend? Have you ever felt so? Thanks. Hello, Hidda. I'm Yohan from Denmark. I worked a bit on the block editor design. Thank you for your question. I'll try to answer it as best I can. As you suggest, WordPress has landed many features in recent releases but very few changes to the dashboard visuals. If you're asking whether that's going to change, my answer is I'd like to see that very much. One of the challenges to making that happen is that the dashboard as it exists has been customized by a great deal of plugins and developers. And although it is complicated to new users, the fact that it's been unchanged for so long means that it's familiar to existing users. That means whatever changes we make have to be rolled out carefully and in small iterations. But my hope is that over time, those iterations can add up. For example, the block editor, we have a new icon set and a new set of components, user interface controls. Although technically challenging, if we could roll those out to the rest of the dashboard, it would bring a great deal of improvements to both accessibility and visual simplicity. So I'd like to see that happen. You also ask about customization options and the thing is WordPress is a lot of things to a lot of people and customization options beyond color schemes might help tailor the interface to each group. I would suggest though that the first step to take would be to make general user interface enhancements because that would benefit everyone. But after that, absolutely, we could look at customization options. I hope that answers your question and thank you again for your time. Hey Matt, Jeroen here from Belgium. Thank you for taking the state of the word online this year. I'm using WordPress for all of the websites I develop with my company Sidefly and I'm an active contributor to the WordPress project. You mentioned before that in phase four of the Gutenberg project that multilingual features are coming to WordPress core. I know this is in the future, but is there any public roadmap of all the features and functionalities we want in WordPress? Is it going to include a language fallback into core so we can configure multiple locales and the fallback when a translation is not on WordPress.org? Currently as a contributor to the polyglots team, I find it very difficult to translate thousands of plugins and teams and I would love that a fallback to another locale would be there before it goes to English. Currently I'm using preferred languages as a plugin for this, but it would be very cool if this would be included in WordPress core. Thank you for answering my question. Hello, Jeroen. I'm Mattias Ventura helping lead the Gutenberg project forwards. Thank you for your question and for contributing to the project. Regarding the roadmap, there is a public roadmap published in WordPress.org slash about slash roadmap that has sort of like an overview of the next immediate steps and it touches upon the four phases of Gutenberg as well. What it doesn't contain though is a detailed plan on phase four specifically multilingual because it's fairly further ahead for us. We're in the thick of phase two. However, there has been some conversations around the implications of localization and some of the multilingual aspects specifically around patterns and block themes and how those could be built in the Gutenberg repository. Nothing substantial yet, but if you're interested in those conversations, that's a good place to engage with and start looking at. As we approach, as we get closer to phase four, we will have a more detailed overview of what's needed, what requirements, and what we want to do. Regarding the other topic about fallback languages, that's a very good point. For me, I'm very sympathetic to that specifically because I speak Spanish, but of the Uruguayan variant. That means that in most cases, I would benefit from a fallback to Spain's Spanish because there's not much translations going on for you. I'm not even sure if we have a locale honestly. Personally, I think it could happen before phase four. I think it could be like a small step towards a significantly better experience. So it might be good to discuss it before phase four. But in any case, if that happens, if it doesn't happen before, it would surely be a part of the phase four conversation. Thank you again. I hope you're doing well. Bye-bye. Hello, everyone. Good morning, Matt. This is Joe Simpson in Castellet, California, in the Santa Carita Valley just north of Los Angeles. I'm the lead organizer for WordCamp Santa Carita Online, and I run two WordPress meetups in the area as well. As you can tell, I'm a big WordPress fan. I'm a big advocate for accessibility as well, and I've done quite a few events this year in that space. What I wanted to reach out to you today about was a matter that's pretty important to me. When we had our event in the spring, we had volunteers from Bangladesh, we had attendees from Europe, from Africa, volunteers from South America, and it opened up my eyes to WordPress as a worldwide entity and a community that's global in nature. But my concern was these online presentations, these online events, WordCamps, the workshops, etc. I was really wondering whether they could be more accessible. What is WordPress doing to make its online presence more accessible to everyone? I'm really big on inclusion and diversity, and I would love to hear what WordPress plans to do moving forward with online events. Thank you. Have a great holiday and a new good new year, everyone. Take care. Well, first of all, Joe, thank you so much for your contributions and leading by example, which is, well, many would say the only type of leadership. I do believe that as anxious as I am to get back to our in-person events, I do believe that much like your experience of hosting a more local WordCamp and people from all over the world joining, I think if we can move more and more of our community engagement to be really rich and interactive online, we get the benefits of the Metaverse that people can choose to represent themselves however they like or not. They can be treated for their and perceived by their contributions, their words, how they participate, not necessarily who they are or where they're from or any of that. When I first got started contributing to open source, I didn't have any of the background or there wasn't really a community in Houston where I was or anything like that to see. But I appreciated so much that people would look at for me my code and say, okay, this isn't just some young kid in Houston who is not a real engineer. They were able to look at it for its own merits. And I think that almost 20 years later, we can do so much more than that in terms of creating a truly, truly inclusive community. The other thing that's really, really important to me there and that I do see demonstrated throughout WordPress, but I just want to emphasize it again, is what you mentioned, that idea of always being welcoming, always being kind, always being friendly, particularly as more folks from around the world get involved. It's important to remember that not everyone's first language is English. And so there might be communication barriers or misunderstandings. And so just we have a saying within automatic that I think is fantastic for any sort of distributed work or collaboration. And it's a different kind of API stands for assume positive intent. Find that if you can, this isn't something you can ask of anyone else, but if you can remind yourself of it, allows you to see other people's interactions through a lens, which allows you to put your best foot forward and allows them to regain their best foot if they didn't put it forward, probably on accident with whatever interaction or communication it was. So I keep all those things in mind just to recap, more and more online, again, leaning way more into the online education, online engagement, online mentorship, online, everything, which is kind of funny because it is a little bit back to our roots before we ever had events. Remembering that great ideas, great contributions can come from everywhere and anywhere. And then making sure that people regardless of where they are, the background, the language they speak, their economic ability, anything, feel fully included in the WordPress community. Everyone has a place here. We are trying to democratize publishing and commerce. We are, and democratize means it's for everyone. It's not just for the few or the elite or the technical. That's our mission. It's a lifelong mission. We'll never be perfect. And I plan to keep working on this the rest of my life. And I hope that to see you and others alongside in that mission for many years and decades to come. Hi, Matt. My name is Laura. I am a member of the WordPress community in Montclair, New Jersey. And I have used WordPress every day of my life since January of 2006. So I'm a really early adopter and a longtime user. I'm also somebody who doesn't code. I'm a content creator. And I love doing that and getting all kinds of messages out there in the world, primarily of created content for nonprofits, for entertainment industry websites. So I guess my question to you, Matt, is when I go to WordCamps, I frequently don't see a lot of tracks for fellow content creators like me. What could you say to the folks who are running WordPress events, specifically WordPress meetups and WordCamps that might encourage them to embrace content creators and think about creating more tracks for users that were less technical? Hey, Laura. I think this is an excellent question and one that's really important to me. I think that content is the thing that gives your website power and meaning. It's wonderful to have a well-built, well-constructed, well-designed website. But if you don't have anything for your users once they arrive, I'm not certain that your website is really doing its best job for you. And so to encourage event organizers to embrace content creators and make sure that we have provided content for them to up-level their skills, I think the thing that's most important to remember is that writing for the Internet is a specific and different skill. It's not the same as technical writing and it's not the same as writing pros. And so when we want to have very good websites that are engaging to our audiences but still get the point across, I think the only way to do it is with excellent content, no matter how that looks for you. And the best way for us to help WordPressers to do that is to provide training through our WordCamps meetups, et cetera. Hi, Matt. I'm Lax here using WordPress more than 10 years. And congrats for, you know, we grown up up to 40% of the web. That's nice. So my question for you today is, do you have any plans to optimize WordPress performance? I mean, the self-hosted WordPress, it's like, you know, we have Jetpack, we have caching plugins. But I found not only me, my clients, and I see bloggers and everyone struggle with the performance. And also, like optimizing the database queries, like for to get a simple tag or a category, we are running too much of sub queries, right? I'm sure you are a programmer yourself. So you might have some plans for the future. And good luck with our motto, like, you know, democratizing the web. Thank you. Howdy, Lax. You hit on one of my favorite topics, which is performance. I was really excited that we were able to get some performance improvements in WordPress 5.4, as I talked about in the talk. But there's always more to do. That's a beautiful thing about performance, is it can always be better. For the issues that you describe, I would encourage you to perhaps check out a different web post. If you're running into that frequent of performance issues, there might be something where, you know, maybe they have you on a server with too many other clients, or maybe some of their, they don't have SSDs in the servers, or whatever it is. But any modern performance WordPress web post, including the ones we recommend on WordPress.org, can really handle a ton of traffic to even an uncached, unconfigured site. That's always great. In terms of things in core that we could do to make it better, our queries, I do believe they're pretty optimized. They run in a lot of places, but who knows, maybe a new feature got introduced, maybe something regressed. So please, if there is something out there that you have noticed, either open a track ticket, or, you know, share it with someone, or if you, you know, debugging queries is actually one of the ways I learned the most about programming and engineering, just spending hours and hours inside the MySQL command line was actually an amazing sort of way I developed as a developer and progressed as a developer. So it might be something you can discover something new within WordPress that then could save millions and millions of server hours someplace. So let me know what you find, or let me know if that, if you make a ticket there, I'll make sure to bump it with the developers and that it gets the proper intention. 2020 brought new and unexpected challenges. And I'm proud to be a part of a community like WordPress, willing to step up, act quickly and offer solutions in times of need. Which emerging web technologies are you most interested in following in 2021? And how would you like to see groups like MSP media within the WordPress ecosystem innovating and solution building using that technology? Hi, Meg. First of all, congratulations for getting school listed in the call for code top five. I believe the WordPress power tool to make it the furthest. I know that wasn't easy. So congratulations on that. In terms of emerging technologies, more broadly, I'm excited that 2020 looks like it's a year when more mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies is really coming to bear. And that to me is, you know, as someone who's a big supporter of open source and cryptocurrency is kind of like open source applied to money, the finance system. Excited about that. Still very, very early days, probably like, you know, over 10 years into something that's going to take 30 years to happen, but exciting to see steps. Closer to home in the WordPress world, the most emerging technology is not new, but it'll be new to us. When we adopt it for phrase three of Gutenberg, we web RTC, which is essentially like a way for browsers to connect to each other in a peer to peer fashion that we could use for real time communication. So for example, the real time co-editing that we want to put into Gutenberg, and we want to do it without a centralized server so that, you know, clients will be able to connect to each other directly. A little simpler and I guess, don't know if you call it emerging, but it's something that we need to do a lot better at is native development. So both the mobile apps on iOS and Android and native desktop apps for WordPress, I think have a lot of potential for just creating a really slick, highly integrated, ultra fast application like interface for WordPress. We've got the APIs for it now. We've got some good starts, including some of the code that's based on Calypso, which is the open source react framework that runs WordPress.com. So there's some good stuff there, but I would like to see a lot more. So thank you for your question. Hi, Matt. I'm Michelle Frischat, head of customer success at GiveWP, volunteer for WordPress and Big Orange Heart, and podcaster at WP Coffee Talk. We've seen the WordPress community grow and morph over the years and it's been amazing. This year changed a lot of the way that the community meets and interacts due to the pandemic. Some of it has been heartbreaking, like not meeting in person, but so much good has come from it too, like people connecting from outside of their areas on meetups, online conferences, and more. My question is, what do you see for the future of the WordPress community as we move forward and still in certain times? What initiatives should we be looking forward to? And what kind of support can we expect for our communities? Thanks for providing the online state of the word and an opportunity to contribute with questions. Hi, Michelle. Thanks for taking time to send in a question. Andrea Middleton here. Gosh, the changes that we have weathered this year have been immense, haven't they? I agree with both the heartbreak and the unexpected benefits that you pointed out. When I think about what the future holds for the WordPress community, though, especially as we move out of 2020, but potentially into more uncertainty, I'm really optimistic. I know that WordPress enthusiasts are incredibly resourceful and resilient in the face of adversity, as we've proven this year in many ways. The initiative I'm most excited about moving into 2021 is the Learn WordPress Platform, which formally launched this week. This on-demand WordPress training platform has the potential to build more bridges and paths to WordPress and success in WordPress than we've ever seen at a time when more people than ever are looking to move their businesses online or shift careers and become WordPress professionals. I hope to see a great deal of support for this effort from WordPress-based businesses as well as individual contributors who want to help others to help WordPress as they themselves have been helped. The support we in WordPress provide to each other is all about how small kindnesses build into great and interdependent, powerful organizations, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Thanks so much for asking. Talk to you later. Hello, I'm Milana, a freelance WordPress developer based in Serbia and also active member of the documentation team. That is my subject of my question today. As I see it, there are two major problems which are not unique only to the documentation team. All teams seem to be suffering from same conditions. The first one is we are heavily understaffed. We don't have enough active contributors to cover all documentation areas. The second one is that we don't collaborate enough or at all with other teams. This goes that far that sometimes we don't even know who is the person doing documentation for release team, the dev notes. Also, there was this huge gap between Gutenberg and documentation team. It's getting bridged this year, but it shouldn't even happen with such project as Gutenberg is. I'm not saying that anyone here is doing anything wrong. We all do as much as we can. I'm just stating how it is. My question is, how can we as global community recognize this need to connect teams, to work more closely with each other? In the documentation team, we are working right now on two big projects, external linking policy and documentation style guide. Now, these will have impact beyond the documentation team and I'm not even sure how many people are aware of the fact that we are doing it. From my perspective, WordPress as project is getting more complex. The way we were doing things in past and the way we are doing things right now is not sufficient anymore. So, I guess it comes down to rethinking what is the role of making in WordPress project and how can we improve our activities to make our work more efficient in this situation that we are all in that we don't have enough people and we don't communicate. We need to communicate more. So, what is your opinion on that? Thank you. Hey, Milana. It sounds like you have two big questions and I have two big thoughts about them. Firstly, on the question of recognizing how connected we are, I agree. WordPress teams frequently don't understand how connected they are a little bit because it's hard to know how your actions affect others when you just barely have enough time to focus on the contributions that you want to make to the teams that you're participating with. Myself, I think that sharing the internal workings a bit better from my side can help us all to know who we might need to collaborate with during projects and I'm working up a podcast for 2021 to share bite-sized insight for contributors who want to know more about how their contributions fit into the larger picture. But I also understand that part of the solution is getting more contributors into the space and I don't necessarily have a solution for that outside of our in-person events, which of course in 2020 we haven't seen a lot of. But it does kind of lead us into your next question. Given that WordPress is so complex and there aren't enough people, not enough communication, what can we do? I have been on the more communication bandwagon for a long time but I actually think that one of our short-term problems as a project is how to take our efficient communication and make it more effective. I'm going to quote for you now the 19th lesson from the cathedral and the bazaar our kind of source material for things that we've learned about open source in general. To quote it, it says provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one. And later in the document, later in this piece of writing, it's noted that open source at scale can't necessarily function very effectively by constantly having chaos all the time. It's hard for human beings to work in that sort of space. And so I think that one of our short-term questions for the project as a whole is to make sure that when we ask people to communicate about what they're doing, why they're doing it and where they are doing it, we have made sure as leaders in WordPress that the plans for the product are clear so that everyone makes good use of their time. Myself Monica and I am working on WordPress since 2015 and regularly contributing to the WordPress. My question is about the automation testing in the WordPress ecosystem. As we know, people are very much concerned about the securities and the other issues before upgrade to the new version. So what are such things we can implement in our WordPress ecosystem to deliver the 100% secure update? So basically, what are the automation things we can integrate in our WordPress ecosystem? Thank you. Hi, Monica. I'm Jonathan. Thank you for asking this question. Security is always evolving and changing and moving targets are very difficult to reach definitively. It's also a process that unfortunately cannot be 100% automated. Everyone needs to learn to practice a security first mindset. But thankfully, there are some tools that can help us in our projects. For example, the WordPress security team has several automated testing processes behind the scenes. Every change to WordPress core is run through these processes to protect against known security vulnerabilities. The processes are continually changing and expanding as new security issues are discovered and fixed. I'm being a little intentionally vague because often security practices will be tailored to a certain project or organization. Being ambiguous will help you keep your project more secure. There are also some code analysis tools like the PHP code sniffer that can be used to identify potentially insecure code in your project. Adding these tools to your project and requiring them to produce a passing scan is a great way to ensure the quality of the code that you release. In WordPress itself, several user facing features have been introduced in the last few major versions that make it easier for site owners to be more aware of their site security. The most recent one is the ability to opt in to auto updates for plugins and themes. Turning these on is a great way to make sure your sites are running the latest and most secure code automatically all the time. Site health is another great example of a user facing tool. There are over a dozen security related checks included in WordPress core by default. And when they don't pass site health educates the user and provides them with a recommended way forward to fix the issue. Any plugin and theme can add their own tests to site health. If there are any security related checks specific to your project, adding them to site health is a great way to make a site owner aware of a problem automatically. A few of the tests check that you are running secure versions of tools installed at the server level. Using PHP as an example, you could set up an email alert whenever a new version of PHP is released. This would help you automatically become aware of security releases so you can reach out to your host and request that they update you to this new version. Because of our strong community, we have the opportunity to work together to continue educating site owners, users and developers about security best practices. If everyone is more aware of insecure practices, the entire ecosystem will be elevated as a result. I hope that that's helpful and answers your questions and thank you for choosing WordPress. Hey, my name is Robert Anderson. I am a WordPress core contributor living in Sydney, Australia. Seth Miller wrote in with this question. As Gutenberg becomes more modern and feature driven, how do you approach onboarding of new contributors and other curious types? Think not the same developer. To look into block building with the existing complexity of web back and other build tools. Great question, Seth. Thank you for asking it. So before I get into the meat of Seth's question, there's two quick things that I want to note. Firstly, one of the aims of the block editor is to make it so that users can create really ambitious websites without having to be a theme developer. So as an example, if you insert a custom HTML block and then save that as a reusable block, you've more or less created a new block without having to write a single line of code, which is really cool. Secondly, tools like webpack are totally optional. Developers can write a block using plain old JavaScript that all web browsers will understand. And in fact, if you load up the Gutenberg handbook, you'll see that all of our code examples, they're coming to flavors. ESnext, which has all of the bells and whistles, including React's JSX and ES5, which does it. But yes, building blocks and working with React is a lot easier if you are able to use React's JSX syntax. So setting up some kind of build tooling is often worth the upfront effort. And yes, I 100% agree that this is very challenging and can be pretty off-putting to new developers. Broadly speaking, I think that there's two things that we can do to make this easier. Tooling and education. On the tooling front, we now have some really neat tools that make getting set up with block development a lot easier. The first, which is developed by the core team at WordPress, is WordPress slash scripts. This is a NPM package that hides away all of the complexity of webpack and gives you a single command that turns a source directory of JavaScript, which has all the fancy syntax, into a build directory of compiled JavaScript. The second, developed by the WordPress community, is create a Guten block. This one gives you a single command that instantly creates an entire block plugin for you. It does all the work of configuring the build environment and generates the necessary PHP to load everything into WordPress. It's really quite straightforward. On the education front, we have some really great tutorials in the Gutenberg handbook, which cover how to get set up with block development using WordPress slash scripts. And you can see them at WordPress.org slash Gutenberg slash handbook. And lastly, the WordPress training team has actually just recently launched learn.wordpress.org, which is a new home for video workshops about WordPress. And one of the video workshops there by Jonathan Bosentil is all about how to develop a block. So definitely check that out and definitely watch that space. I hope that was helpful. I hope I answered your question. And thank you for choosing WordPress. Hi, my name is Sudhar Muthu. I'm from a city called Chennai in the southern part of India. I've been involved with WordPress for about 15 years now. And for the past six years, I've been working as a full-time WordPress developer. In short, WordPress is what that puts food on my table. So here is my question. So it's been about 17 years since the first version of WordPress has been released. And all of us know where WordPress is there right now. So my question is, where do you see WordPress in the next 17 years? Thank you. Sudhar, 17 years is such a long time. Sometimes I feel amazed that I've been doing WordPress for this long. I think my hope is the same as many others in the WordPress community, that by 2037, we've gotten the vast majority. Maybe as close to 100% as we can get of the Web on open source software. I'd love to see Gutenberg used not just by WordPress, but by all of its competitors as well, by everyone who's accepting text in a box on the Internet or on Native. I'd love them to build on Gutenberg box because then that allows us to work together on something that we used to all have to rewrite and recreate a million, million times. And I believe that's how humanity moves forward is when we collaborate, not when we compete. In terms of freedom, the open Web, it's hard to imagine what technologies will be relevant. One thing I always say within my company and automatic is that the particular change will be impossible to predict. But the fact that change is going to happen is inevitable. It is 100% certain. And so as long as we can stay adaptable, flexible, not become too ossified in our beliefs and always keep that beginner's mind, the ability to learn new technology, I've been really, really impressed with, particularly in the past year or two post Gutenberg, how so many folks across WordPress have been picking up JavaScript. Taking where they were probably PHP pros and JavaScript novices, they've really invested the time to become incredible JavaScript developers. And now the entire WordPress community is benefiting from that. There will be new generations of technology. I imagine 17 years from now, there will be something after JavaScript that'll be the most important thing to WordPress. I don't know what that'll be yet, but I'm looking forward to finding it out. And I hope that you're a part of the journey as well. So, see you around. Hi, my name is Toby or Toby Fjellner as my handle is here for WordPress. I'm one of the people in the biggest contributor team, Polyglots. We have almost 60,000 people who have contributed at least some translations of WordPress to around 200 different language versions. And out of those, between 40 and 60 are actively maintained so that you can use them right now if you want. And a lot of people do that. 55% of all WordPress sites around the world that we knew about use some other language than US English. My question is about multilingual WordPress. It has been mentioned a couple of times that in the future phase Gutenberg will cater for multilingual content. I would like to suggest that we already now make decisions on what storage structures we are going to use and procedures and perhaps even already now go forward to make WordPress multilingual. There are already solutions and we could probably reuse some of those. And by doing this we open the possibility for a lot of new solutions to come up that could support procedures around translation handling of multilingual content and so on. And that part is where Gutenberg actually would need to develop something. But for the storage procedures and so on, I think we're talking more about PHP development where we could reuse already existing plugins to a large extent. Thank you. Toby, thank you so much for your question. And of course, thank you for your contributions for with translations and that entire Polyglots team. Much love to the Polyglots team. I like you. I'm very anxious to get multilingual into Gutenberg, whether we do it as part of core as part of an official plugin, TBD. But part of the reason we made it phase four is I know that we can only do so many things well at a time. And it is supremely important that we really execute super well on these first phases of Gutenberg blocks. That's why also even though I'm super excited about it, we haven't officially started anything with the real time co-editing yet or phase three. If we don't get phase one and phase two to be the best experiences in the world for editing, bar not of any open source, any proprietary competitors, any builders, phase three and phase four just won't matter, right? Because it just WordPress won't be relevant a decade from now. So I do believe that that is the most important problem that we're facing. And part of why, even though we do have a wide breadth of contributors and like you mentioned, some plugins that do self-multi-plugin multilingual already, I don't want to dilute sort of the core contributors focus away from the initial phases of Gutenberg because that's just how important I think there are. Now that said, much like Gutenberg has innovated in plugins and then it gets later adopted and merged into core. There's nothing stopping, I think, more innovation or more investments happening in the plugins. In fact, I think it's interesting that the plugins can take various different approaches with regards to data storage and we can see which works the best and what scales and the pluses and minuses of each. My hope is that down the line, much like the page builders are coalescing around sort of Gutenberg and blocks as a page building primitive that they all build on top of. My hope is that using the learnings and hopefully contributions from all the folks currently doing multilingual plugins right now, we can figure out what is the sort of 20% that gets us 80% of the way there and create a common framework that all of them built on. And then much like we are with Gutenberg blocks, that rails will work well with every other plugin and theme. So that is the hope, that is the plan. 2022 is what I am personally hoping to begin working and focusing on this. That also gives me a few years to learn another language. Thank you for your question. I'll see you around WordPress. Hi, Tom. I'm Otto. You wrote in with this question. It reads, sorry, I can't make a video to ask my question, but what I would like to ask is what you think about plugins like WordFence and SecurityNinja, which recommend removing version information from WordPress headers and changing file operations for certain files. If you agree with these permissions, then I wonder why they aren't implemented in the WordPress core or if you disagree, then why are these plugins allowed to remain in the plugin libraries and charged for making changes that are not recommended by WordPress? That's a good question, Tom. Well, removing version information is often referred to as a security measure, but on the whole, it is kind of an ineffective one. You see the thinking is that hackers search for versions and things like the HTML site before they run scripts on it, but history has shown that to be rarely the case. The most common problem faced by sites is essentially bots and scripting attacks. For these kind of automated attempts, the failed cases don't really matter, so it doesn't save a hacker any time or effort to have sophisticated code to check versioning first. So by and large, this kind of thing is the same as hiding the login screen. It's not for security, it's mostly for vanity. The problem really with calling these kind of things security measures is that users who don't understand security in the form of layers of protection will think that doing these is the only security they have to have. I've seen people use passwords simply because they assume the login screen couldn't be found in the first place. Doing such things like removing versions or hiding logins or anything like that isn't actively dangerous or harmful. It's just not the first thing you should be doing to improve the security of a website in general. So in that respect, they're allowed in the plugin directory the same as anything else is. I mean, plugins are allowed for people who want to do such things even if that isn't the majority of users. I mean, that's what plugins are for. After all, it's to customize your set the way you want it. As for whether they can charge for making changes, all plugins on WordPress.org are free. Any charges made by plugins such as pro versions that are sold elsewhere sort of outside of our purview. So in that respect, I would say I only use free plugins. So there's probably a free plugin that will make the changes you want. Thanks for your questions, Tom. Appreciate it. I hope that helps. Hi, Matt. I'm Winstina. In 2017, I presented at WordCamp US on how cities and towns can work with their residents to sell locally online. My question for you is this, what more can we achieve beyond the freedom of empowerment and expression for all to sell digitally? Essentially, what's your vision for wood democratizing commerce during this pandemic and beyond? Thanks. Hi, I'm Winstina. My name is Paul Mayerana. I'm the CEO here at WooCommerce. Thank you for your question. And thank you for everything you do to support local businesses. We share that mission ultimately. So your question couldn't be more pertinent in a year like 2020 that has brought such hardship to small businesses. WooCommerce powers over 2 million stores on our platform and we take that role really seriously. One of the things that we've been focused on this year, we know that WordPress and WooCommerce can often be or require a little bit of technical knowledge or even just some courage to kind of get up and running with if you're less experienced with the platforms. And this year, especially this year, stores may not necessarily have the budget to go out and hire that additional help. So we've been focused this year on empowering merchants to be more self-sufficient and removing many of the obstacles that a merchant might hit in getting their store online and then running and growing that store. We've been focused on our onboarding, for one, streamlining the setup process and configuration for Woo, such that you can get to that first sale that much more quickly. We're redesigning the navigation around WooCommerce to make it that much more intuitive, again for folks who are maybe less experienced with WooCommerce and WordPress. We've been investing big in the block editor and bringing new product blocks into WooCommerce to enable our merchants to be, again, more self-sufficient in the way that they merchandise their products and not to have to be reliant upon a developer to implement those promotions. And we also know that it's not enough to just get a store online and to kind of operate the store. Our merchants want to grow. So we need to help them reach their customers. So we've also been investing a lot in improving the marketing solutions that are available for WooCommerce to help our merchants grow their stores. So I hope that's helpful. Thank you for contributing to WordPress. Wow, that was a lot of questions and answers. I really appreciate everyone from the community who helped answer the questions. As always with WordPress, these things are so much better when we work together. And it was exciting to me to be able to do a distributed and virtual version of what happens sometimes at work camps when I'll pass the mic to someone, usually in the front row from the WordPress community, who knows so much more than I can and can answer the question so much better. So keep an eye out for these recordings and captions and more, which will be on WordPress.tv and the WordPress YouTube channel. With that, I bid you adieu. Thank you so much for tuning in. I am so appreciative to the WordPress community this year for bringing just a place of stability and strength. I really love and appreciate you all. Thank you so much and see you again online.