 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the main event. He's the co-founder of WordPress and the founder of Automatic. He loves jazz. The office might have aged him a little bit, but he remains extraordinarily passionate about open source. To share with us the state of the word, please welcome Matt Maunweg. With him on stage, I'd like to invite Philadelphia Councilman David O. He is a strong advocate for the technology and creative economy sectors. He's got a killer smile and he loves to shake hands. Please welcome Councilman O. I think we have the three people with jackets now. Yes, the only three of us, right? I think we have to be close to this for them to hear us. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, the three people with jackets were up here. All the ones we found in the whole place. Okay, go ahead. Well, wonderful. My name is David O. I'm a Councilman at large here in Philadelphia. So I represent the whole city, but more importantly, I chair our city's committee on global opportunities and the creative innovative economy. So if you don't want to have one of those in your hometown, make sure you talk to your city council. And I'm so pleased to present today a resolution recognizing December 5th as WordPress Day here in Philadelphia. So if you'll give me a minute, I'm going to present this officially to Matt Muhlenberg. I'm sorry, Muhlenberg, and give me one minute. There we go. Ooh, there we go. All right. It's tough seeing up here, so bear with me. This is a resolution that was passed in our city council, and it recognizes and commemorates December 5th, 2015 as WordPress Day in Philadelphia. Whereas WordPress is an open source software program used to build websites. And whereas WordPress is simple enough for creating personal blogs, yet powerful enough for building large, multifaceted corporate sites, it is estimated that 24% of the websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. And whereas Philadelphia will host the inaugural WordCamp US, the premier WordPress conference of the year December 4th through 6th, 2015. And whereas WordCamp US is the largest gathering of people who develop, use, and support WordPress. This conference will welcome more than 2,000 people from all across the nation and the world for these days of learning, community, and contribution to WordPress. And whereas WordCamp US will draw a diverse mix of people, designers, developers, content creators, strategists, marketers, writers, SEO practitioners, educators, project managers, business owners, and non-profit owners. All attendees will enable a rich mix of skills and experience and whereas throughout the conference, sponsors from top local, national, and international businesses will be available to help attendees learn about and access their WordPress-focused business solutions. And whereas the local WordPress team worked diligently to ensure Philadelphia was chosen to host WordCamp US, the team consists of Alex Block, Liam Dempsey, Tracy Lavec, Jody Rochelle, Drew James, Ingrid Miller, Kami Chaos, Brad Williams, Doug Stewart, Reid Gustau, and Kevin Cristiano. And whereas as a cultural hub with an active and innovative tech-creative community, Philadelphia is honored to welcome WordPress and WordCamp US to our city. Now therefore, be it resolved by the Council of the City of Philadelphia that it hereby recognizes and commemorates December 5, 2015 as WordPress Day in Philadelphia further resolved that an engrossed copy of this resolution be presented to Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and one of the top 10 most influential people online for changing the face of the internet by business insider evidencing the sincere admiration and respect of this legislative body. Oh, thank you. Whereas that was pretty dandy. Gee golly, we're getting fancy here. Yeah, let me give this to someone. Don't fold it. Well, howdy everybody. I knew I got dressed up for a reason. That was very fancy, and we're very excited here to present the 10th ever State of the Word. So welcome. My name is Matt Mullenberg, and you can tweet me at atphotomat and our hashtag today, as you probably all know, is hash-pound-w-c-u-s. I love that WordCamp this year falls after Thanksgiving, because I think it's a wonderful place to start, sort of this touch cornerstone of the year from a place of gratitude and thanks. Some of the first thanks I want to give are, of course, the sponsors that made this possible. Jetpack, Securee, WooCommerce, and Bluehost, collectively between them, donated $275,000 to make this happen. And of course, all the other great folks, I hope you've been checking out some of the booths and sponsors, it's actually, you know, most conferences, the sponsor area is dead, and here it's been hopping. I don't know if that's because the coffee's over there, or... Also, I want all of these folks to stand up. You just heard their names, but everyone who is involved in volunteering are putting together this event. Can you please just stand up really quick? Let's give a round of applause for those folks. Look around. You know, some people did not want it to be in Philadelphia. Can you believe that? They promised jazz, they promised barbecue, they promised no snow. All of these things have been true. Actually, the weather's been amazing, hasn't it? Like, the rain stopped before we got here. It was like the brightness of all y'all's smiles, like, cheered it up and drove away all the clouds. It's been a really beautiful couple of days. You said it would be chilly, but not snowy. And that was actually exactly what it's been. Plus those beanies, who's got one of those hats? Those are the coolest hats. It's definitely some of the cooler WordPress swag I've gotten. Also, in terms of coming from a place of gratitude and thanks, I want to take a moment to recognize two members of the WordPress community, both of whom have either been on stage or highlighted on stage, who passed this year. And that is Alex King, who was a lead developer of WordPress, and Kim Barcell, who is a key community member. So I'd like you all to join me for a moment, to take a moment of silence, to reflect on their contributions, their part of the community and what they brought to the world, and also anyone else who you have in your thoughts. So just a moment. Thank you. I think that would mean a lot to them. In terms of looking back, like I said, past few WordCamps, this is our 10th one. Actually, I don't know if y'all know this, but this is the largest WordCamp ever in the world. You are part of history here, and I think it'll be the largest until we break it next year, right? How much was the final ticket? It was about 1,700 sold? 1,801. 1,801? Did you buy like 10 at the end, just to get it on 1,001? And the last I saw, how many live streams? There were at least 700 there, pulling out the phone. Hundreds and hundreds of people watching on live stream. WordCamp started very modestly, as some of y'all remember. This was the very first one in the Swedish-American music hall. It did have barbecue and jazz, and it was put with about a month of notice and ended up having 500 registrations. So it was a very kind of last minute that came together. I thought I would juxtapose. Juxtapose? Each of the WordCamps with the version of WordPress at the time. So when we did the first WordCamp, this is what WordPress looked like. If any of y'all remember that. Navigation at the top, that was WordPress 2.0. The next one was also there. WordPress 2.1 looked exactly the same. In 2008, we moved for the first time to Mission Bay, where WordCamp San Francisco has been for the past, well, six years now. So we really started to fill it out. And WordPress, who remembers this redesign? That was before the Crazy Horse, which came next, 2.7. It's amazing how far WordPress has come, 2.9. This was, if you look closely, you might see yourselves. This was the, I think, sixth, seventh WordCamp. We did the big redesign. I think in 2012, we did some sort of jam there. I'm not sure what was going on. But we also brought the guide into the core WordPress. 3.6 we brought in the mobile redesign. And then finally, with last year, the MP6. Each WordCamp had something special about it. That it cured the error, or that was introduced into the world. From the first time we started talking about WordPress as an app platform, or WordPress APIs, or even the first time we started to show people using WordPress as a CMS, and not just as a blog. Now, all of these stories and more have been collected. And what I want to make is the first announcement of today. We actually have a ton of stuff to announce today. You might have heard that we were working on a book on WordPress. And I'm proud to announce that this Friday, so December 11th, the book, Milestones, the story of WordPress, will be released officially. So it's a work of a lot of people together. Also, Siobhan did an incredible number of interviews, over 53 hours of interviews with people in the WordPress community, including Alex King, that are all online. So you can go directly to some of the interviews and read the transcriptions. And we've got the summary of this book. Now, we're approaching this book a lot like we do WordPress, much like you saw WordPress change over the years. This is the first iteration. It ends a little bit abruptly right around MP6. So think of this as version .5 of the book. And we hope to release many versions in the future as we continue to write it together. Now, I said this was the largest work camp. But, and since this is the 10th anniversary of work camps, I wanted to highlight a few of the different stats from around it. This year in 2015, there will be 89 camps, 21,000 attendees across 34 countries. Yeah. You know these don't happen just by themselves. There were actually 601 unique organizers across all of those 89 camps, of which 60% were doing it for the very first time. I know that that means that once you do it once, you never want to do it again, or not sure exactly what that stat means. But I think it's also that we're getting a lot. And maybe even next year, it'll be the first year we break 100 work camps in a year, or about two a week. There were also, we ran some stats and found that there were 1.6,000 unique speakers across all those camps and 2.1,000 sessions, or 2,100 sessions. So these stats were kind of amazing, but actually what blew me away were that meetups beat it. So meetups in the past year, we've had 40,000 people attend 2,000 meetups. So almost double the number that have attended all the work camps in the world in the past year. So meetups have really been blowing up. And if there is not one yet, whatever you traveled from, give it some thought. Actually, who traveled the furthest here today? Can't say New York, that was like an hour train ride. Anyone come super far? Back there, what do you think? Bangkok. Bangkok? That's pretty far. Anyone further than Thailand? Romania? I don't know, that's further. What's that? Costa Rica. Costa Rica, that's like, that's way too nice. What are you doing here? I think you went the wrong direction. We should have all gone to you. You can put in a proposal for 2017. I've always said that technology is at its very best when it brings people together. And I think the word camp program, and now meetups happening on a more monthly cadence, have really started to show and introduce people to the amazing community around WordPress. Because when you break it down, yes, our total numbers are very large, but really what makes WordPress run is a surprisingly few number of people, some of whom we're going to highlight today. Now a lot of the improvements over the past year that we wanted to celebrate are actually part of the combination, both the core WordPress and WordPress.org, our favorite community website that brings us all together and has lots of improvements over the past year. One thing, an update from last year that we talked about, and we actually did, as opposed to the updates that we talked about and didn't do, which I'll skip over, is we moved from to more activity-based metrics on all of our directories. So for example, the theme directory and the plugin directory now, instead of telling you how many downloads something has, which is a little bit of a vanity metric, doesn't actually mean something, shows you how many active installs. So these are actually active systems of WordPress coming through our update system, so we can show that now. So this one has over a million. We adopted Slack. This was sort of a surprise from last year, and it's been kind of amazing. There's been over 2 million messages sent on our Slack in the past year, and in fact, I believe there's no official thing, but I think we're one of the largest Slack instances in the entire world, in terms of number of members. So I know this adoption of Slack has been to the detriment of many people's productivity, but we have been able to use it quite a bit. It's been the meetings, WorkCampUS had some organization there. It's been really cool to see people brought together by sort of a richer tool than the IRC that we passed. Who's had a little bit of FOMO because they missed some sessions in the past two days, right? That's the worst thing about WorkCamps is when there's two things that you want to see going on at once. They will all be on WorkCamp TV, or WordPress TV, sorry. Although I think if you type in WorkCamp TV, we also have that, I hope. If not, someone register it really quick. Someone who's not a spammer. We need to open sourcing all the code behind WordPress TV. This is a step along what we hope to do with all of the WordPress.org sites, putting it up on public repositories, and we're initiating a redesign in everything that not only will the community be able to participate in, but actually change them to the code. If you find a browser bug, you can patch the CSS and put it right up there. Then one of the most important things is that we localize the plugin and theme directories. Those of you in the back who might not be able to see, is the Spanish Rosetta site, so es.wordpress.org, and actually selling, in this case, BuddyPress and Jetpack. It's JetpackPore, WordPress.com. I'm not even going to try to read the rest. But this is really important, because as we talked about before, last year was the year that non-English downloads of WordPress passed up to English downloads for the first time, which I said was an important milestone in our history, and you probably know. Billions of more people speak not English than English in the world, and if we're going to democratize publishing all around the world, it's very important for us to reach them. But without the plugin and theme experience in there, think about your WordPress experience. You probably run at least Hello, Dolly, right? At least one plugin. In fact, many people have anywhere from five to 15 plugins. But in another language, if you only spoke Spanish, for example, you would load up and you'd see a bunch of plugins and themes in English, which was not a great experience. And in fact, the little mini announcement is that all themes and plugins now support language packs. We've loaded in every single theme, and if you're a plugin developer, on your next commit, it will get loaded in the translate.wordpress.org to be available to be translated for the entire world. So, yeah. Are you all switching out? That's kind of cool. Good. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Also a very exciting announcement is that the plugin directory cost one billion downloads. And in the past year, we added 9,000 new plugins to the repository, which is actually a pretty significant amount of growth. As I said, we're moving away from downloads, but this does show just sort of the activity that's going on and how vibrant the plugin the ecosystem is for WordPress and one of the key things. Final big milestone you'll probably heard, but we passed 25% of websites. As I said in the blog post and in the slide, that means that we have 75 to go. This is not a chance to rest on our laurels, but I think a demonstration that the web and the world really wants an open-source, open-free solution for the web. As WordPress evolves more and more from being just an application, to being almost more like an operating system for the open web, I think it's been a very exciting year, driven, in fact, by some pretty cool releases. So you all know WordPress 4.1 named for Dino Washington in honor of Dino Washington, included 2015 theme. Cool note about 2015 is actually the most popular WordPress theme of all time with 1.6 million active sites. So... good job on 2015. It dwarfs all the other 20s even. We had distraction-free writing and, of course, language selection, going on our mission and goal of trying to internationalize WordPress to make it available in more countries. 4.2 was named in honor of Bud Powell, which included a brand new press this, themes and customizer, and my personal favorite, can we give it up for Emoji? There are multi-byte languages that the majority of the world speaks and writes in. So we brought that in there as well, but Emoji are pretty fun. And then, oh, finally, 4.2 named for Billie Holiday, menus and customizer, site icons, and formatting short codes. Each of these releases were led by a different person, a new rotating lease, and I believe they're all here. If John, Constantine, and Drew can all stand up. Give you a round of applause for your hard work. Leading a release is not easy as any of these folks who have done it can attest. You definitely get a few gray hairs. I didn't see you yet, Constantine, but probably soon. And, um... As you know, one of the key differentiators of WordPress's philosophy, especially in contrast to some of our open-source compatriots, like Drew Borajumla, is we keep a fast version release cycle. We've done three a year now for several years. And we found that this is a pretty good cadence with the way that updates and everything currently work for getting improvements out to y'all as fast as possible, keeping a steady sort of train of releases, so there's not too much pressure for anything to get in one particular release. If we miss one, there's another one right around the corner, giving lots of different people opportunity to lead and sort of make their mark or their sort of philosophy of what a WordPress release can be. And just keep things moving, you know. I know that but version updates are a complaint. And in fact, version fragmentation is one of the big struggles that we've had to deal with in the WordPress world. Much like... And this matter right now, we're a little bit more like Android than iOS in terms of there's lots of different versions of WordPress out in there in the world. So I want to tell you a brief story about how one host has tried to address this. This comes from Bluehost. So Bluehost hosts over 2 million WordPresses across many thousands of servers. And around August of this year, actually, just a few months ago, they noticed something bad. So you see that red there? So about 80% or 1.6 million of their WordPresses were not on the latest version. Sad Christmas. There's an emoji for that. WordPress is very easy to install but a lot of people, it's so... you know, once they get it going, they might not think to come back and see the end-to-end notices. And we only do auto updates in the majority of hosts for minor versions. So what Bluehost ended up doing is they wrote a scanner that went through all of the 2 million plus of their sites, including ones that some customers had forgotten about. They might be in a different directory that was a staging directory or backup but they performed an upgrade all the way to the latest, which at the time was version 4.2, and then they did a scan like looking for white screens or anything and if there were any problems, they would immediately roll it back. Once the system was in place, they got to essentially 99% plus of their sites on the latest version. And then when 4.3 came out, they were able to do 2.6 million core plugin and theme updates within a few days of the release. Now, a lot of people who I talked to this about are like, okay, but then what happened? .006% of the updated sites contacted support. So the testaments how much work we put into the upgrades and in fact ongoing support for those WordPress sites was down 18%. A lot of that coming from fewer sites getting hacked. So this is actually pretty amazing and I think a great example for every single host, no matter what your size, they're currently working on PHP, but it turns out that that's a lot harder. Although I do have a cool stat today, it's not from Bluehost, but the usage of as of today, the usage of PHP 7 has passed PHP was it 4.3? Yeah, so PHP 7 now has more users than version 4.3, which is pretty cool. Yay. Many hosts actually turn on our major release out there, so this is a graph of the growth and the decay of the major versions of WordPress. And what you notice is those dots are actually getting closer together. We're not going to quite hit it by the time 4.4 comes out, but we're at like 48. something of 49% of all WordPresses in the entire world are on the latest major release, 4.3. And this is the work of the update system host and many of y'all as well, making sure that you're all your sites and of course the sites of the people and not the sites of your enemies are upgraded and on the latest and greatest version. As you might know version 4.4 of WordPress is right around the corner. In fact, it is shipping Tuesday. Now we have to hit the day. To talk about version 4.4 I'd like to invite a special guest on the stage and that is Mr. Scott Taylor. So round of applause for Scott. Come on down. Hey, how's it going? Thank you. Leading WordPress 4.4 was a pretty exciting experience. We put a lot of work into really transitioning WordPress into the modern era. There's still a lot of work to go, but I think we made a lot of good headway. In WordPress 4.4 we had over 2,000 commits. That's not just me, it's a great team of committers and bug gardeners. The cool though is we had over 400 contributors. We spent a lot of time going back through track and finding tickets that maybe were fixed four years ago but got neglected for some reason. We tried to find as much of that as possible and put that stuff in and recognized the contributors who have been around and perhaps feeling disenfranchised because we hadn't seen their stuff in a while. WordPress 4.4 has a lot of little fixes in it. We had a lot of improvements around performance and kind of modernizing that API. We've added some new objects like WP comment, WP term, and WP network. There's going to be a lot more stuff coming up in future releases around multi-site and really hardening that experience. We did little things like it used to be that you'd only get a nice URL for an attachment if it was attached to a post. So we went way back to try to find things to work on. An exciting thing for a lot of people is the phase one scaffolding of the REST API. This is... Yep, thank you. This is a long time coming and this excites me. There's going to be a future release that's going to contain a lot of endpoints but for people who want to kind of modernize the way they expose data on their sites, this is going to be a really cool thing. We're already using it on a little site called the New York Times. This is our live coverage platform and that was a strategically picked picture. But, yeah, the REST API is great. It's an alternative to what many consider an obsolete technology called XMLRPC. I was at a previous company and had to expose some data to iOS and Android developers and they were not too keen on figuring out what speaking JSON is a much more friendly thing when exposing or having people consume your data. The REST API, we can now start creating arbitrary endpoints and it gives WordPress some of this web service sugar. There's a new default theme for WordPress which is 2016. I like it because it has a mobile-first approach and very good responsive design. As you can see on different screens it actually looks really great. I love the phone design. We brought responsive images which is actually yeah, thank you. It wasn't me. There was a great team of people who worked on responsive images in a feature plugin and I think it validated our feature plugin approach and it was a really solid group of people that made this happen and it's a great step forward for the web. When WordPress adopts modern technologies the internet adopts modern technologies and for those who don't know what this is it allows you to specify a set of images instead of just one and it lets the browser figure out which image to load. This is good if you have something that has rich photography and you may have a huge image for desktop but on an iPhone that has a 320 pixel width it would be better to load something much smaller so it's going to be great for bandwidth in some sense. It's also, I don't know if anybody remembers in 3.5 when we tried to do retina this allows us to move forward and provide retina images for every crop we have. It may require some massaging but I think pretty soon we're going to come up with a solution maybe in a plugin that allows sites to be fully retina out of the box. Another piece was term meta. At the beginning of the release we put out a call for features I asked what people wanted to see in WordPress 4.4 this was not high on my list but it was extremely high on the community's list and this is also part of our taxonomy roadmap so it was very cool that we were able to shepherd in term meta there's a lot of people who have been happy with that. Another feature which we call I guess O embed for WordPress or WordPress embeds it's been a long time that you can take a YouTube URL and paste it into your content and when you view it on the front end you magically see a YouTube embed. Well the same thing works for your WordPress install now if I have WordPress 4.4 in my URL into another WordPress blog you actually get a nice preview of that post on the other blog. Your WordPress site becomes an O embed provider and you get these rich previews and there's also embed code that makes it if you don't have a WordPress install you can copy the HTML embed and paste it somewhere else and get the same rich preview of that content. So that is WordPress 4.4 Tuesday is our goal I think we're going to make it it's been a great experience I won't be too sad when it's done it's been intense but it was fun and now I know what it's like to lead the release and I was very proud to do so so thank you. Are y'all excited about 4.4? We have chosen new victims I mean leads for the next three releases that I'd actually like to take right now to announce so version 4.5 and 4.6 4.6 by Dominic Schilling and 4.7 we'll just skip I'm looking forward to leading release again it'll be my first since 3.8 All in all over the past year we've had 802 contributors it's pretty amazing and as you might know in the past year a few more folks who I wanted to highlight were some of the committers that joined so thus far Konstantin, Ella, Weston, Andrea and Ryan and Tammy got commit and we are announcing 7 more people who are receiving commit Michael, Aristotle, Pascal, Rachel Joe, Mike, Mel and Eric please stand up because I think you're all here you now all have commits please don't break the internet or at least my site because I update the trunk every morning so you're more likely to break me from other people one other final development thing that I think was kind of cool I wanted to highlight was we've had a lot of growth and the attention paid to accessibility and the WordPress development process in particular and in the past year we've had 205 accessibility tickets completed which is almost double what we did before then I wanted to thank especially Rion and Andrea for working a lot on this I did some of you by the way follow my blog I did a call a couple weeks ago asking what were some of the coolest things that you've seen with the REST API and got some really incredible comments including this one that I actually wanted to read I cannot believe the goldmine that WPA API represents having built hundreds of apps professionally and managed many high-end clients there's no better, simpler way to create a mobile stack period let's actually put an exclamation point you said it's an exclamation point it's the code equivalent of graphene this blew me away, who knows what graphene is it's going to save the world basically it's like this single carbon thing that makes batteries better everything's stronger so I don't know if the REST API is graphene but it might be graphene for 25% of the internet so I wanted to share with you the little robots back I wanted to share with you four stories about the REST API that came up that I thought were kind of cool that will show for those of you who haven't checked it out yet some of what's possible the first comes actually from Microsoft which is not historically known for its embrace of open source but over the past several years and especially under the CEO Satya has done some amazing support of open source both through their Azure platform and using WordPress so they have this product called Microsoft Dynamics AX now you're probably wondering what Microsoft Dynamics AX is it's an ERP solution that can increase your speed of doing business deliver amazing customer experiences work smarter with connected operations and drive business performance now you're probably wondering what Microsoft Dynamics AX is this is directly from their website by the way I spent like half an hour on there I have no idea but to be honest I don't even know like ERP has never made sense to me Enterprise I don't know but what is kind of cool is how they were using WordPress and this was driven by web dev studios so what's going on here is apparently through some part of this Microsoft Dynamics AX thing XP there's like wiki sites so what they have is a ton of content being created so that's what's on your left there and actually 29 languages and so they have people all over the world creating hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of essentially pages that go into what I can tell looks like a wiki type system translated like that like a translation manager and then that goes to the rest API and then talks to Microsoft Dynamics which is able to bring it in and display it inside of their application essentially which I thought was interesting and someday I'll figure out how to use it another one that I understood a little bit better comes from human made which was the Nomad base and actually a lot of you all are already on this so because when I signed up I saw tons of people and the Nomad base is a tool for digital nomads or people who travel a lot and what it does is it can pull in different social networks including Swarm or Four Square and kind of show where people are all over the world and show where people are going so you can see in this particular city Costa Rica okay I have some friends there I can head down there or hopefully tell if someone's in the same city which I thought was pretty cool this is all React, correct? so it's a React front-end combined with Google Maps showing a really cool, there you are is it React? Mapbox in React, got it showing basically an entirely JavaScript front-end that's talking to WordPress on the back end so when you register or when you store everything it's all going into the WordPress database Final one which I thought was pretty cool is StoryCorps you might have heard of this from NPR, has anyone ever heard of StoryCorps story? they're pretty amazing, right? I'm also glad of the number of NPR listeners we have in this room this is a good crowd so StoryCorps is an independent non-profit whose project is to honor and celebrate the lives of everyday Americans by listening to the stories and they have this NPR show they do like an official thing that they do but they got actually a TED prize grant and a night foundation grant to expand it so they worked with TinUp we have a lot of TinUpers here it's great this thing called StoryCorps.Me so what StoryCorps.Me is is an application actually so you can download it and interview someone StoryCorps style you gotta get your NPR voice going but it doesn't add that I don't think that can be a feature for the next version and what it actually does is both the website frontend and the iOS app talk to the JSON REST API so they're able to use the REST API with something that's not even on the web it's this app that you see right there this is actually really really cool so it opens up this idea of StoryCorps it democratizes it opens up to everyone who wants to contribute and in fact around Thanksgiving this year StoryCorps was featured on the homepage and linked from the homepage of Google saying grandparents have the best stories record your grandparents story this Thanksgiving so for those who are wondering if the REST API and WordPress can scale only high enough to be linked from the homepage of Google any more than that you're on your own so if you're bigger than Google submit a patch smaller than Google you're okay for actually it was fun because every year when I put together which by the way is the work of many many people coming together I just get up here and talk looking at the old ones and things we've talked about in prior years so I actually have a little bit of a throwback to some old slides that you might recognize from talking about sort of the three stages of WordPress where the first couple of years of WordPress coming out of B2 we were really focused on being a blogging system and often WordPress is embedded often in an iFrame and like a larger website it's a great thing then WordPress evolved with things like themes, pages, custom post types to be more of a full CMS so now all of a sudden instead of WordPress plugging into other things everything else was plugging into WordPress so WordPress kind of ran your whole domain everything else fit into it and then finally what we started seeing the first glimmers of kind of in 2012 and has really hit its full stride this year as I hope some of these things I showed demonstrate is WordPress as an application platform so this is again people using WordPress sometimes to build entire other things on top of and I actually did a whole different better view of it so showing like the different Lego blocks of how things plug in so there's full applications if you look at like a Yoast or WooCommerce or some of these other things they're just as big and deep and complex as WordPress itself but they're built on WordPress as both taking advantage of all the primitives websites around user authentication updates everything that we do well and more and more things are being built on top of this every single day whether that's StoryCorps, Nomadbase Microsoft, Dynamism but thus far there hadn't been something that sort of did WordPress itself so there was no WordPress built on an API so they say that the best way to predict the future is to create it after talking about it for a few years we decided as many of you will know last Monday automatically released a project called Calypso who's checked out Calypso so far oh cool so for the folks who haven't including some who might be on the internet right now Calypso is basically the idea that what would it look like if we designed WP Admin or the WordPress interface completely from scratch literally started there was no legacy, no backwards anything, what would it do and what would it look like what we released last week well I'll get to that so the first thing we decided is that it would be in 100% JavaScript leveraging React so instead of having PHP creating HTML and delivering pages talking to a database we decided to go a complete sort of JavaScript solution talking only to APIs of course it would be fully responsive so you can see that actually at every single size the Calypso interface is completely not only fully functional but fluid and fluent and at the smallest size what you're looking at now it becomes an actual template sort of almost like a roadmap for what we want our native iOS and Android apps to look and work like all the way down to the pixels in the design we thought it would be social so including notifications, stats, likes, etc natively multi sites so that all of your sites would be under one interface rather than you having to go between many different dashboards and then finally that it would work both with .com and .org sites through Jetpack so basically the idea that no matter where the site was hosted in the world it was completely fluid and in fact here is a this is in Calypso but it's showing plugins being managed and in fact in this particular screen you can turn on auto updates so that you never need to update a plugin ever again it'll always update so there are a few interesting things in this process first and one that for any of you who are Nikolai session earlier dozens of PHP only developers became world class in JavaScript which I didn't wasn't sure that could happen because for many years one of the things that slowed down certain parts of WordPress was a lack of participation of JavaScript developers where you probably noticed that actually many of the major features of WordPress over the past few years even all the way going back to media the majority of code in these has been JavaScript not PHP so it's been a while now that JavaScript has been the language that's been really moving WordPress forward this was just deciding to go the other direction saying what would it take so this ended up being last week last Monday we released this both as desktop downloads because it only talks to APIs you can run it on the client side so we created a Mac app for download Windows and Linux coming soon released it it's had over 50,000 downloads already there are a lot of people using it it was the work of over 140 people committing over 26,000 commits in about a year and a half so a ton of work I understand why no one did this before it turns out catching up to 14 years of WP admin progress was really really hard actually might have been a similar number of commits just over a shorter time frame but also learned a ton in terms of both being able to use WordPress services taking a completely new approach to the architecture of how a client for WordPress could work and just like I said learning JavaScript now it's a version 1.0 and like many versions like WordPress 1.0 it's very very early days did anyone use WordPress 1 that was here in the room we got a couple I feel like such an old man saying this I look like an old man too WordPress 1 had no plugins WordPress 1.0 had no themes it was just kind of the basics and that's where something like Calypso is today and it's also important to note contrary to some of the press that was talked about that PHP is not going away yes but I believe quite strongly that JavaScript and API driven interfaces are the future not just of WordPress but of the web I believe this as much as I know that is delicious which is pretty darn strong this approach when you decouple the data from the interface we ended up choosing React but many other libraries are great when you take this sort of decoupled approach it allows you to iterate a lot faster it allows you to create interfaces that are essentially instant one very cool thing about Calypso is well out of the box even on the uncached page it loads about 300 milliseconds faster but when the cache is in effect like when you're on a desktop it's actually 14 times faster so many pages can render in only 50 or 60 milliseconds so this is like a 10x improvement on what's come before and interview who are at nascent's talk know what reverence that we have in the WordPress community for backwards compatibility but one of the things that I think as people start to look at what's been done with Calypso in this approach and the source to every single line of it is that perhaps there could be a future especially as we start to get more API in WordPress where there might be something on the other side that's worth breaking some backwards compatibility for also as we bring APIs in the WordPress I truly believe that APIs are the key to the open web what I mean by this is if you look around we're in some ways at a nadir of the open web more and more even when companies open an API they put restrictions around it so for example uber now is an API that if you have an app you can click a button to call an uber car which is kind of awesome I love uber it's super handy but in the terms of service for using this they say you cannot show the buttons for any competitors there so you can't have a call a lift button next to the call a uber button that's great for uber but what about the rest of us we just want to ride we want to get someplace and companies enforcing these sort of terms of service even around when they have APIs or making the web a less open and integrated place who is driven crazy when they click on an address and their iphone and opens apple maps right maps are the worst but google maps is amazing why is that not the default look at what happened with twitter which many of us here in this room including myself love their APIs got more and more closed off they built on them either had their businesses put out of it the clients token limited or essentially hit a wall where they found that what they were previously promised as a developer building on what seemed to be an open api was actually not in many ways this reminds me of the very early days of wordpress when there's an amazing post by a fellow named mark pilgrim called freedom zero what it was is again this is wordpress history when wordpress started it was very very very very small when wordpress launched the biggest criticism was that the world already had too many blogging systems it turns out they were wrong but it looked that way and on the self-hosted space there was one called movable type which had like 95% market share it was utterly dominant all the cool kids used it it was really good and it's actually what I had my first blog on movable type had the code when you downloaded it and you got the source code but was not actually open source and when they released their 3.0 version they decided to change the license and so they switched the license for being something that you could run lots of sites on to charging per sites and they changed some of the terms there was a famous blogger at the time whose site is gone so we need to put an archive or copy of this post up because it was really good mark pilgrim wrote something called freedom zero and he said that he said a lot of good things and one of which is that the utility of all non-free software approaches zero in the long term which I do believe he also said that it wasn't about many people were up in arms about the price and in fact for him to upgrade to this version 3.0 of wordpress or sorry movable type he would have had to pay $535 so going from something tens of dollars to $535 freedom zero of course for those of you familiar with his EPL freedom to use the software for any purpose means there are no restrictions on it so he actually did he said it's not about price it's about freedom and he took his $535 and donated it to wordpress and said never again will I be fooled by something that seems kind of open but actually isn't that seems like I can see the code and hack on it and change it it's open enough but in reality it doesn't belong to me it belongs to someone else because I don't have the bill of rights I don't have the freedoms given by the open source license the four freedoms that each of us have using wordpress and any GPL software this set off a firestorm and in many ways a renaissance of the open web as people started to if you look at the companies at the time it's commonly called web 2.0 every company including twitter, technoradi, lots of things had these extremely open APIs and they all work together you said it when wordpress adopts modern technologies 25% of the web adopts modern technologies I think that we can use this opening up and this development especially switching to an API driven development to actually open up more of the web and when you think about what an open source looks like when the actual code being available isn't the most important thing when we're interacting with things on our watches and our devices and our mobile and everything the API has become just as important as the code itself being open so this is something I'd like everyone to consider and work on because I think we have a a very exciting year ahead of us perhaps trying to make the web a more open place there's a few other things that are exciting that are coming this year that I wanted to highlight some that actually like a lot of it happened like day before yesterday well how did that guy get there a project from EFF supported by many people including facebook automatic etc called let's encrypt easy and free for everyone every site in the world have an SSL certificate this is awesome you probably have thought about this before if you have an e-commerce store or something like this but another advantage of mass adoption of SSL is it makes mass surveillance of the web a lot harder to do I think that over the next year now that LexaCrypt is now at a beta so you can now request a new certificate from your command line and install it if you want to make it more free we can start to drive the web and certainly the part of it that runs WordPress to be much much more secure than it has in the fast another present we got this week which is kind of amazing is PHP 7 came out we saw this we don't always talk about it a ton but so much of the success of WordPress is due to the technologies that we were built on including PHP and like I said PHP is not going away from the PHP since WordPress started actually there has been some version fragmentation in the PHP world in my opinion a lot of it is because new versions of PHP haven't provided compelling enough reasons for people to want to upgrade PHP 7 changes all of that giving a big improvement in the area that many of us care about which is performance for many applications PHP 7 can be twice as fast as its predecessors so for free the web as it upgrades the PHP 7 is essentially going to double in speed which is awesome especially as we do more and more API calls so check this out it's early days a lot of the extensions haven't imported yet so your web post probably isn't going to adopt it right away but WordPress works great with it in fact WordPress was one of the things that the PHP developers targeted and they did some really heroic and amazing engineering to get this out so essentially it's code compatible and it's twice as fast so one more round of applause for PHP something important in this coming year is that we're going to work on getting all the top plugins and themes available in every language now I cheated a little bit on that screenshot we showed you earlier where we showed the Spanish plugin directory if you actually go to es.wordpress.org slash plugins you will see that the top two are translated but the bottom four are not that's why we only had the top two in the screenshot that was my face that was it there's been fewer than 100 plugins and themes if you don't count Australian English, Canadian English, British English if you don't count those as translations there's fewer than 100 plugin and theme respectively that have been translated into more than a couple of languages so as we both invest in the GlotPress which is our translation management software and recruit more people to be at es.wordpress.org including many of you here in this audience I know our buyer trilingual and there's many people watching this around the world the translation of WordPress I think we're going to open it up to audiences all over the world we've seen this in small pockets where there's been a bilingual a bilingual strong bilingual population or strong evangelists in the country like we've had in Japan or Brazil but of the web in many places as people start to come online for the first time or start to get tablets that really work great now that WordPress is fully responsive now that we're getting these better native client advantages I think there's an incredible opportunity to actually fulfill our vision which is democratizing the web so if any of you speak another language or know anyone who does bring them over we need as many people as possible on translate.wordpress.org we're working vigorously on improving the tools there as well I heard there's about 24 million translations so far but there's don't get scared by that number but basically there's a lot of strings that we need to get to and I think that we can get to a point by this time next year where at least for the top 100 plugins and themes that they're fully translated I think those will again imagine using WordPress with no plugins that's the experience that people in other countries get I talked about this a little bit before and I really do believe the future of interfaces in the web is JavaScript interfaces with PHP APIs this is also I think going to be a very interesting way for people to start building plugins or evolving their existing plugins so with WordPress 4.4 we're getting the scaffolding for the rest API which means that plugins can register their own endpoints and start to think about especially the more advanced ones that have pretty complex and advanced interfaces we can essentially start to build something like Calypso or a single page app inside of WP Admin so think about taking all the screen refreshers and reloads and all the PHP files that are currently powering some of your admin pages and turning that into something that's maybe React and JavaScript power talking to endpoints that you register with your plugin this is I think also going to set us up pretty well if we do end up going in a full JavaScript client API direction in the future it's going to be exciting for plugins to be able to come along for the ride so who's a plugin developer here whoa we got a lot of developers here give this some thought customization it's going to be extremely important we already have a single page web app as Weston told me inside of WordPress and that's the customizer if you watch user test, if you look at funnels if you look at where people fall off customization is the single biggest opportunity here and I believe that as we all start to become guru level in JavaScript just like we've seen is very very possible learning new things is scary and hard and it kind of sucks being a beginner again but once you get over that hump it becomes amazing and as Nicolai said earlier going from one to two things that you're really fluent in is very very hard but going from end to end plus one gets easier and easier the more that you learn how to think about programming and my hope is that WordPress can actually reverse the trend of these closed APIs I really think we have a chance to do this as WordPress starts to power more apps things like Storycore Storycore gets an open API just kind of for free by being out there and more and more can and we can do it with one of the few platforms out there where it can be open at every layer of the stack the API can be open and have great terms of service and it's built on open source software like MySQL and PHP so it's turtles all the way down open source all the way down I'm going to give you one homework assignment in closing which I've never done in the state of Word before and you might be able to predict it and it's to learn JavaScript deeply in fact I am going to commit to this myself you will see at least one patch for me in JavaScript stuff by the time that 4.7 comes out so if I can do it I'm a dumb CEO now if I can learn JavaScript every single one of you can and I encourage everyone to really dive into it because it is the future of the web think how delicious barbecue is that's how important JavaScript is there's amazing resources online too check out things like Code Academy there's Coursera courses there's great books there's meetups going on there's lots of sessions on this in every WordCamp now there's going to be a lot more in the coming year take every opportunity to really beef up your JavaScript chops because it's what's going to allow WordPress to thrive for the next 13 years you know one of the things that's been amazing about WordPress is most software isn't this big or popular 13 years old typically there's a wave that happens but because we've been able to adapt we've been able to sort of ride the wave of everything that's happened in technology we're not just I mean this is the biggest WordCamp ever in history and I think to continue to ride that wave it's going to be extremely important that both from the user point of view and from the developer point of view that we really become as good in JavaScript as any other project out there in the world have you all liked this WordCamp so far do you want to do it again my final announcement for today is that we will be coming back to this very hall December 2nd through 4th so we're announcing the days get on Expedia now Philadelphia has been amazing and I think it's really special that this 10th anniversary of WordCamp this time when we're making probably one of the biggest changes in our history from a technological point of view happens in the birthplace of this nation as well and in a city with a Liberty Bell with cheese steaks with kudos again to the Philadelphia organizing team after this because you've really made all of us feel welcome and I'm really looking forward to coming back next year so that's all I got, thank you very much now we have a little bit of time for some questions and answers so we've got three mics they're there, there and there this is kind of the fun part, this is the town hall part so where we kind of bring everyone to get a town hall in Philadelphia, wow by the way let's download the soundtrack or watch if you can the musical Alexander Hamilton it's incredible it's essentially the story of Alexander Hamilton one of the founding fathers done as like a hip hop rough like everything rhymes but it's also a musical so instead of like the debates in the cabinet are actually like rap battles so it's like John Adams battling Hamilton and George Washington sitting back like this, it's pretty cool come up with your questions so just say your name and you can ask about anything, we've got a lot going on this year are the cameras all ready to go? alright kick it off sir hi Matt, I'm Jonathan Derogers I'm from Rhode Island can you talk a little bit about the future of WooCommerce that was one of your big announcements this year so I think that e-commerce both WooCommerce and other platforms are going to be a key part of growing WordPress's market share as we go from 25% to 50% to 75% because a lot of websites both need this they want to be able to sell things online and a lot of the solutions out there I mean when Steve Jobs talked about iTunes for Windows it was like giving a glass of water or someone in the desert like if you use Magento or some of these other things the WordPress solutions are so much better with Woo in particular the roadmap is actually coming up I'm going to be going down to Cape Town in January and meeting with the Woo leadership team to really talk about what's coming our focus with them being inside automatic so far has been trying to give as many resources as possible so growing the number of developers and the people on support to basically beef up what is already happening but if I were to estimate something the stuff I just talked about could be a pretty interesting direction so if you can imagine a Woo interface which was API driven and perhaps written more on the JavaScript side than the PHP reloading PHP side I think that would be a really cool direction not just for Woo but for every large plugin that has a sort of advanced and complex interface to go maybe there's a point in the future one again instead of being embedded in WP app it's so easy once you have these things working over APIs to make them downloadable clients like you did with Calypso so I can imagine a point where you know Ludicrous says I'm filling up your CD changer we can start to fill up your doc they could be the WordPress icon and a Woo icon and like a Yoast icon or whatever there is and each of these could actually have purpose-built interfaces this is the beauty of being API driven is we don't have to squeeze everything into the exact same interface if you're a plugin that does real estate management or something really advanced like that there might be something that doesn't look like which is the best way to create that and we jumped through a lot of hoops for that now one cool thing check out the Calypso codebase like I said it's on GitHub, it's completely open source there's hundreds of open components there that are interface sort of chunks and modules that are completely reusable so as people start to explore React and explore using React for your your JavaScript versions of your stuff we can actually start to reuse those both as user interface patterns actual code that gets shared back and shared so I'm pretty excited about if we go in that direction what it could mean for WordPress as a whole thank you to the right you said to learn JavaScript which framework if any so Calypso is using React JavaScript is but learn JavaScript if you learn JavaScript you learn React you'll be able to use Ember you'll be able to use Angular don't worry too much about the framework maybe start with the stuff that Calypso did but the important thing is just to get really great with JavaScript and have some fun with it build the little to-do list app build the notes app get your feet and think about what the expressiveness of JavaScript is a language which is one of the most beautiful programming languages in the world in my opinion again this is server-side or JavaScript can allow you to do so check it out so short answer React to the left hey Matt my name is Douglas Bell and I was at the first word camp in 2006 it's a long way since then I'm now from DC I wanted to ask about your mentioned Calypso and I've petered around with the WordPress.com interface I'll be honest I still am used to and love the MP6 WP admin is there any anticipation of Calypso replacing the admin in the near future or is that going to be like two separate strategies well the beautiful thing is they're separate right now and they can co-develop and co-evolve so the reality is today there's 40,000 plugins in themes for WordPress 40,000 plugins a good chunk of which modify the admin which works in WP admin and we've done a lot of improvements through MP6 many many other projects the customizer tons of things have been happening to improve WP admin the cool thing about Calypso especially now that it's open source it gives us a place where we can be a little more experimental and in fact I fully expected to be Calypso forks and other people doing completely different ideas with it but again that we were able to do in 20 months what previously took kind of 13 years and move a lot faster I think this coming year we'll be able to do two or three turns on some of these core interfaces like widgets, menus theme selection just because it's so much faster and easier to develop in this way and we've got this sort of brief period of time where we don't need to worry about anything else we don't need to worry about plugins or things modifying stuff so this gives us sometimes not having a ton of users is an incredible blessing we should take advantage of this to re-examine perhaps some of the core assumptions that the WordPress interface makes and think about you know if we become more user-centric rather than site-centric because right now the WordPress admin is very site-centric what does it mean if perhaps in the future maybe the WordPress when you go to WordPress.org you download two things like a client-side app that you're going on your desktop or your phone or something like that and then the server-side app that gets installed on a web post and those talk to each other that's actually kind of interesting and perhaps we can look at differently what it means to like manage 10 WordPresses at once or perhaps have an activity stream of everything going on across all your sites that allows you to dive in this can be pretty cool have fun with 4.7 thank you alright let's go to the middle John Rom from right here in Philly do you foresee JavaScript replacing PHP as the template hierarchy of choice because right now I guess with JavaScript it probably wouldn't support child themes no so JavaScript totally different from Java so completely don't buy a Java book JavaScript obviously you'll go the wrong direction and you'll wonder what we're doing like why on earth are they going in this direction should definitely get a JavaScript book the script is very important the cool thing is PHP is getting so much better I could just double the performance and it's actually the way that themes work and the way that API part of WordPress works and the way WP admin kind of works is actually really awesome there's no reason we should run away from that I think PHP is always going to be in the future of WordPress and in fact as a templating language it's kind of one of the best out there now people have started to do JavaScript driven themes things like Picard there's been a few others this could be interesting one of the things that I think is going to happen with the API is we'll see lots and lots of technologies on the frontend be it for a business reason or for integration reason or something like that like at the New York Times or someplace else Mashable I think runs like this they might have a node or Python or something else frontend that's been talking to WordPress on the backend it's actually something I'm a little worried about because right now that 25% number that we see tick up every month is from people using WordPress on the frontend so actually something I think we should think about as a community is perhaps maybe standardizing on some sort of header like an HTTP header we can send so even if your application doesn't run any PHP at all it can send a header to say hey you know business in front it's like a mullet business in front parting it back maybe that's the header x mullet colon WordPress that there's some WordPress back there that's doing some really cool stuff and we can start to track that alongside tracking the parts where WordPress powers the entire frontend so I think those will happen in parallel WordPress is an amazing frontend framework and some of the largest sites including WordPress.com New York or etc like run WordPress on the front too but I think that I mean one of the things we're doing, one of the philosophies of WordPress is always to work with where people want to go and we're hearing people saying that they want to use different technologies for some of this frontend stuff for whatever reason we want to support that and that's the key to an open API so PHP for themes for a while still but some people on the side maybe doing some more progressive stuff thank you to the right I'm at it's Martin with 4.4 we are for the first time really wielding the power of WordPress on the web by paving the cow paths of responsive images and that's a really really big deal at this conference we are seeing something that's pretty much new to the WordPress community which is card captioning on all talks sign language interpreter in front you can't really see from the back but there's actually someone signing right there and WordPress core is becoming exceptionally accessible now last year I brought up this issue of themes and accessibility at the time we had 18 themes in the library that were accessible today we have 79 out of some thousands which is great but there's a couple of thousand left to go now we've made strong decisions about responsive images which is great and we have the power to change the web because once we roll out responsive images and everyone has to do it too can't we do the same with accessibility as well yes I don't know if that was a question but yes so let me make it into a question can you tell everyone in this room and our community to when they learn JavaScript also add on that little extra accessibility part so that we all start building everything accessible and tell the world that the web should be accessible and that's the WordPress way I agree and obviously that got applause but I disagree in a way as well I'm worried about getting to a point where we think of accessibility like a check box even though there are great guidelines and things like that I think that accessibility is a process and it's going to be driven sometimes not by every single person but by groups like the amazing accessibility group we have in WordPress and most importantly by the people who need the technology communicating and us observing that and things like that so I do think that you know that we have presentations on accessibility at every single work camp we have now the guidelines online I think we're a little behind on the theme reviews which is part of the reason the number hasn't grown as much because accessibility reviews are much harder than even a normal theme review which is already hard but I'm really excited about what this group has been able to do and the growing sort of momentum in the WordPress world that's it I don't think that necessarily just saying like everyone should be accessible will actually move things as much as the continuing education and that we're doing through every single work camp through the guidelines through the theme reviews through the group so that's why I highlighted it in the state of the word talking about how we've doubled the accessibility tickets over the past year we also also need to think about accessibility in a global sense which is the 6.99 billion people who haven't used WordPress yet and many of whom who can't so I also think about accessibility in terms of languages in terms of mobile devices and touch devices these are things that as we get there what we do right can then expand to a much, much larger audience so I encourage everyone to keep all of that in mind but learn JavaScript as well thank you Hi Matt, my name is Travis Taylor as a plugin author is there anything that we need to do to prepare for the translation? commit an update that will bring your strings in the translate.wordpress.org and one thing that I think has been pretty effective with some different plugins is you'll reach out to your community and people using it probably if we think about it because most plugins are really primarily in English if you have users in other countries they probably are bilingual and so if you can reach out to them and work with them to get them to submit translations or maybe even become moderators for your plugin it can increase it so use your pulpit, use your platform via that through the interface of the plugin your blog, your everything the plugin page try to bring as many people into the translation process as possible thank you thank you I like it Hey Matt my name is Alex I'm LA area I have a question it's not technical but it's kind of messing with me a couple years ago you came out you did a talk in word camp San Diego your hair was a little unruly all over the place like a great lion's mane and I was like dude when are you going to cut your hair and you gave us a good story about what the story of your hair was and how you met the president and all that so your hair is looking a little bit lighter and I want to know what was going on with that and if you're stressed out you can tell us about it but what's going on that's all I got you know my mom asked the same questions she doesn't know what's going on out of it the joke I became CEO last year of automatic the job really ages you it's like being president one of the beautiful things is that in a lot of the companies being built around WordPress you could look like whatever you want you could be whatever you want we've got a sticker up here I think it's beautiful that the inclusion and the feel of the WordPress community is now starting to be translated into dozens and dozens of the companies built on top of it and that I think is probably one of the things that part of the idea behind doing WordPress and automatic the way they were was to show the world that companies could be built in a different way there wasn't a company profiting at a expense of an open source or an open source thing becoming so big and in realty it becomes unresponsive to its users and the wider the broadening changing environment as many projects kind of end up collapsing under their own weight and now if you look at any of those sponsors on there all the companies in the WordPress ecosystem many of them are distributed they're inclusive a lot of people have crazy hair at these companies thank you very much for bringing a little bit of the WordPress magic into that because I think we can change business just like we've changed a web nice shirt by the way thanks I got it from this awesome booth downstairs my name is Mika I work in California and I have a very I guess unique and apparently prolific relationship with plugins and plugin developers fairly different from most people I do a lot of the plugin reviews on .org and one of the things I've been hearing through support plugins and WordPress is that the constant stream of WordPress major releases has started to put a drain on resources and this is from people who are individuals who don't have the depth of resources that WordPress does when it comes to testing beta versions of their plugins or even just supporting people when they do a major upgrade and while I am an advocate for the rapid release cycles of WordPress I do start to wonder if updating four times a year which is what we will be doing this year is perhaps a little bit too fast to allow our developers to keep up with the changing ecosystem to learn JavaScript to learn the REST API and all of the things that are moving so quickly are we perhaps moving just a little too fast and maybe we should turn it down by one and Mika was very modest there she's part of the team that reviews those 9000 plugins that we added this year thank you you're welcome I quite enjoy it I'm glad you do it's funny because at every time society starts moving faster everyone thinks it's the end of society like when trains were first there people were like human bodies were not meant to go this fast which is actually kind of a reasonable thing to think about when you think about it like in all of past you know million years human bodies have moved like up to maybe the speed of a horse and now we're taking it faster it happens I think that this is our train I think I called it a release train earlier like three releases a year seems fast and is that too fast for software developers can they keep up I think one thing we can do is as we do these major updates you know be more proactive by improving the plugin directory so that users can share the burden of some of the testing and perhaps even some of the updating making plugins so they're less I don't think any plugin should be a one person shop it's best when there's many people involved just like if you look at everything that's doing super well in WordPress including the plugin review team it's a team and the best plugins part of the reason that we do the core plugins process is to provide the best practices for how plugins can work together and people can work together to develop things in the plugins so I think we can improve those tools but I think we're probably going to get faster not slower four releases this year is an aberration just kind of worked out that way scheduling wise so three is still our target and in a given calendar year and we'll probably maintain that for how it is going forward with the current update technologies but you know we're not that far a lot of hosts already enable the flag that has WordPress including DreamPost I believe and the flag that has WordPress do its own major updates and we're getting to the point where we now have WordPress sites in the world on latest major one I think of it almost from the other direction that what plugin authors will be able to do with things like the REST API being on half the WordPress sites in the world maybe we can even get that higher 60, 70, 80% that enables them to build so much more interesting and expressive experiences that perhaps lower their maintenance burden lower their support burden by the things that we're putting into WordPress core and that's really the point of what we do in core versus do in plugins to make the entire WordPress ecosystem better so it'll probably get faster not slower and I'm sorry to everyone who feels like it's too fast but it's worked so far thank you Hi Matt I'm Kait from Japan and I'm a core contributor from Japan, that's the other places yes I have a question that so what's the easiest way to become a lead developer easiest way to become a lead developer they'll be mad at me for saying this but basically annoy the existing lead developer so much with your amazing patches and contributions that they're just like this is how Nathan got in Ryan was just like shut up already commit it so get active and we're adding we're opening up development quite a bit we're adding total I think 13 committers this year which is more than WordPress had it's like first 5 years in total we added it just this year so I think we're moving to a point where commit becomes as much an expression of trust so as you build up the trust through working alongside on track tickets and things like that with the existing developers then that becomes something that levels up and I hope to see more and more folks doing that in the future because what I think is a possibility for WordPress development to actually have more leads within it so people who like Weston with a customizer for example that really dive deep Ella and Oz with WYSIWYG that really get deep on a particular section of WordPress and just continually improve it every single release and that can have some really great really great sort of returns also I'll give you the advice that because sometimes people at automatic or professionally are like well how do I move up another good thing is to do the thing that no one else wants to do so by doing the thing that no one else wants to do people are very happy to delegate to you and then you can kind of show awesomeness with that thing and then that can expand so find a thing that literally no other developer wants to do and become awesome at it alright thank you and I'm looking forward to seeing you on the screen in a couple of years Hi Matt, my name is Matt Cromwell from San Diego we have a lot of Matt's here today if you're Matt raise your hands not bad, not bad it's hard to be a Matt in your shadow honestly I'm really excited about the new default 2016 theme it's really gorgeous and I got to contribute a little bit to it mostly because it was on Git so I would love to hear your insight on when WordPress development will all be on Git I think that you know I'll go old school here for a moment there was a time when we switched from CVS to SVN and that was a there were people who were unhappy with that and we had to redo a lot of our tools and everything like that I think that over the coming months we're figuring out how to integrate Git and GitHub more into our flows because we do have a lot of tools and things built so I would love for a point where in the future and I think we talked about this last year that pull requests and things could actually be part of the flow into our issue tracker which is track for now putting core plugins and things like 2016 on the GitHub is a cool way to do sort of a mini version of that and I love that it brings in new contributors especially if their name Matt but we do have some stuff to figure out there and I don't want to prematurely pre-announce anything so I would say keep an eye on the WordPress.org news blog or the make blogs for anything official there but know that it is something that we're fans of Calypso is also 100% on GitHub so if there's lots of projects you can get involved with 2016, Calypso, lots of the feature plugins that are happening there so if that's more your style or your speed there's ways to contribute and hopefully more core in the future. Thank you. Hey, my name is Scott I'm from Phoenix, I like to call it the other Fa here in Philadelphia so a lot of us filled out a survey and I believe the results were going to be told over this word camp so I just wanted to check in on that and see kind of the results of that survey Oh the big the big survey, the big survey the one that was in the header for like oh usually I go over a lot of those results it was just too many numbers some highlights and maybe we'll do a blog post on it like it's kind of the trends that we've been talking about the past few years more and more people are using WordPress as a blog and CMS app development is growing a cool one is I think we had over 9200 people who took the survey who said they make their living full-time from WordPress which is like I think a 30% growth from last year so there were some cool trends but it was all kind of the same things that happened in previous years so I didn't highlight too much of it because I tried to switch it up for y'all Thank you. Blue tie or purple tie you know So we'll try to do a blog post on that Thanks for asking. And let's write down that we'll do a blog post To the left How I'm Hidetaka come from Japan and I have a question and we'll use the WP REST API on wildpress.org and wildcamp.org Yeah, absolutely Now I can use WP wildcamp.org using getting the post using the REST API I'm not sure if I entirely understand so we'll have especially now that it's going to core we've done some cool things to boost the plugin like you can now have themes that rely on the REST API and we will be deploying all the stuff to wildpress.com, to wildpress.org and wildcamp The only other API thing that is coming that we can talk about because it's almost done is we're going to have wildpress.org be an OAuth provider actually so announcement Thank you So that'll make some of our different apps be able to connect better and easier. That answer the question Yeah Okay Alright, thank you And yeah, check out for OAuth coming to our WordPress.org near you To the right Alright Hi, I'm Jason from Vermont, I make Postmatic As WordPress grows beyond 25% and with the REST API amount of interesting things that we could do with WordPress grows as well Increasingly WordPress is going to be touching many more parts of the global economy in a real way and there's a really big potential ecosystem there Given that developing and maintaining captivating plugins is becoming very expensive and do you see any modifications to the.org repo in regard to tools for businesses or policy changes to make a more freemium or premium plugin ecosystem more available Not so much So And what is your position on where freemium plugins should be So I think it can be a bad user experience when everything you search for or click on, all the best looking stuff in the directories, be that the theme or the plugin directory are kind of gotchas You know, they have sort of a free light version that maybe does some of what they said they did but eventually are just driving you to a paid version So I think that's the thing we just need to be very cognizant of that perhaps doing something to promote paid plugins there could help some of those plugins in the short term, but I think it would be at the long-term detriment of the WordPress ecosystem to have those because we can see sort of a parallel universe example of this in the Joomla world where they went pretty hardcore and to paid everything the sort of dynamic stuff that created in their community ended up being pretty corrosive and people stopped working together as much they all wanted to make their own sort of paid thing users felt like they were being nickel and timed for every single functionality core development for them became a lot lighter because all of a sudden people contributing to development wanted to put their thing into their plugin that they charged for and not into core So I think that very much the WordPress.do community and WordPress as a system is still going to be oriented towards the collaborative nature it's when we come together like the Wikipedia or WordPress itself people building things to be open and free for the world because that's how we realize our mission of democratizing publishing and businesses will figure out how to make money around that but it's not something that we want to super create like in a marketplace or something like on WordPress.org Thank you Last couple running out of time Hello Hello My name is Jackie and I just wanted to thank you for that So in addition to the code the community obviously is such a core component of WordPress and last year you mentioned 5% for the future people give back 5% of things back to WordPress and I'm curious what you've seen in response to that this past year and what you'd like to see it's coming here Yeah, it's a good question I've seen almost every organization start to really ramp up their contributions we're seeing more people employed full time from agencies, from web host, etc to contribute back to WordPress and so that's been good I don't know if have we reached 5% yet even automatic is not a 5% yet even though we contribute back a lot So it's a process and I say for more examples I'd like to get back to you so keep an eye on either the WordPress.org blog or MA.tt because this is something I want to highlight a lot more and if you're in the audience or if you are watching online and you are doing something really cool giving back to the WordPress community, please reach out because actually this is where I would like to have something on WordPress.org almost like a page that allows people to sort of say their level of commitment and sign something that says we're giving back and then we can highlight them and link to them because I think that that ultimately creates a really long-term sustainable model for the WordPress community and this will be the very last one so I hope it's a no pressure No pressure at all Given the release of PHP 7 and how you made mention of a willingness to sacrifice a bit of backwards compatibility if what's being gained is big enough WordPress presently the minimum requirement for PHP is 5.2 but it does recommend 5.5 when can we expect a minimum requirement to be bumped up a bit given the age of like say PHP 5.2 or similar versions so the thing that we learned is that if we change our minimum requirement it's not the assumption there is if we change it it would drive more people to switch but what would actually happen is I feel like we would leave a lot of people behind if you look at it a lot of folks were really driving this as the web host not necessarily people individually choosing to use these older versions of PHP so what we've been doing is a lot of outreach a lot of encouragement and so as far as I know all the major web hosts currently have programs under way all the ones that are big in WordPress world to start to upgrade more of their PHP and that's probably not going to PHP 7 yet but they're getting into the 5.5s and the 5.6s of the world and we're seeing some pretty significant swings in the usage and as we track that maybe there's just still 5% that's on or 3% on 5.2 but that's still millions of websites and one key if you go to Nathan's presentation you'll see that whenever we can we try to do as much as possible to protect every website this is why we sometimes back date security updates all the way back to 3.7 which again is far behind what we officially support for WordPress but if we have the ability to protect the sites we do and that's kind of our sense so when I think about breaking backwards compatibility it's not leaving behind millions of users because they're not able to upgrade their version of PHP because they have no control over the server and they're not able to do that and that's what we're talking about perhaps providing a new way specifically what I was talking about providing a new interface or way of developing that enables a next generation of applications to be built and to be honest there's nothing in PHP 7 has a major performance increase but there's not a ton in there that would allow us to develop a significantly different user experience as to what they're replacing and much more fluid and much more ability to be iterated so I think that that is how we have to think about it and regardless of what decisions we make and again anything we do will be over the next couple of years we still have this incredible reverence for the user not wanting to break user trust and thinking about the importance of what backwards compatibility has allowed us to become the most dominant CMS on the web right now over 25% of the web are actually like 58% of all CMSs in terms of market share so as we bring more of these people on we want to get to a place where we can tell them you're on the latest and greatest and it's update and we can work with your host to find it so other things we're going to be doing is try to identify because we get these update picks so we're going to be looking at who are the, what's the wall of shame for PHP and reaching out privately at first to really encourage these web hosts to get their clients because it's really in their hands to get as many of them on the latest versions of PHP as possible and so I absolutely believe there'll be a time when we drop it but it won't be us dropping it to try to change things it'll be us dropping it because things have changed and that's where we can really use our position and power in the web world is to really work with the web hosts and things to show them what's great around the corner some really cool performance improvements and we are out of time so I want to thank both you and everyone else for coming and making this the coolest work camp I've ever been to thank you here's the next year see you at the party