 I'm going to stand by the boot. This is a poem I wrote about WordPress. Now, I like to code, and I like to rhyme. Neither is perfect, but I've still got time. Code is poetry, so the saying goes, and in my mind, it's the bomb of credos. Now, don't you be thinking of young men with Fritos with nowhere to go who can't touch their toes? Because I am a coder of the first degree. If they gave out belts, midnight black mine would be. Still, my gender is rare, minorities too. Reflects a black pepper in an all-white guise, too. Times are changing, and the need is great. Computers are in everything, and more coming. Just wait. But where am I going? How'd I get so off track? It's poetry, and code. Let's go back. Once from the heart, then once from the mind, one fueled by caffeine, the other by wine, the one I've had both is when I truly shine. See, the two aren't so different as you might believe. Both go from point A to point B, though one may weave. Lines of code have a function, several in fact. The goal of poetry, more subtle, while keeping form intact. But the best of my code has a grace all its own. You would see perfect indents if the lines you were shown. Now, it's not just the spacing that fills me with glee. It's pure elegance, woven with efficiency. Code's not just a straight line, at least rarely for me. It's a journey you take while staying bug-free. You do it with style, and you do it with smarts. If you're doing it right, it should rival most arts. It's likely a beauty only true geeks can see, but you're still listening, so I think you get me. What I'm trying to say is the code fills a need for my soul to express itself artistically. So while poetry isn't always my rap, I can't turn it on like I do with a tap. Every day I write code of beauty untold, hopefully by now on that you are sold. But I don't do it for glory, money, or fame. For code is poetry, and that is my game. Thank you very much. You guys are the best audience I could ever hope for for that poem. And it is now my great honor and pleasure to get to introduce the man you really came to hear. He really needs no introduction, Mr. Matt Mullenweg. That's beautiful. Come here. Thank you. Thank you so much. Wow, wow, wow, wow. Hey, can we give another round of applause for Amanda? That was so cool. That actually opened up with some real life poetry. There was a, they're doing some research. They think that code is poetry actually came from wordpress, they're having trouble finding earlier references to it. So we might have originated that one. Hello everyone. This is the state of the word. As Amanda said, my name is Matt Mullenweg. I'm available at mat.blog, ma.tt, and Photomat on major social networks. Before we get started, I did want to do a quick thank you to our sponsors. This year the top sponsors are Bluehost, Sightlock, Jetpack, Sporting New Logo, and WooCommerce. You all been having fun in Nashville? All right. Got some hot chicken. Got some, you can't say bingo yet. Barely started. We got the poetry and the hot chicken, but you need at least five to get bingo. There's a bingo game going on right now apparently. So someone's going to yell it out relatively soon. I'm really, really excited. Nashville, I've been here since Monday or Tuesday. They're really, really impressed with the city. There's like so much soul to it, so much amazing music, barbecue, even a Texan can love. I had some not hot chicken before. I finally got the right hot chicken, but I've been enjoying it quite a bit. But really number one, the music. Like it just everywhere. At lunch, we've had great music. Like, has anyone gotten out dancing yet, or had some fun out there? I'm so excited. We got the dancers over there. I'm so excited that we're going to be able to come back here next year. And I definitely have already been making some lists of places I want to return to and some places I haven't made it to yet that I really want to check out. So we should thank the people who brought us here to help bring us here to Nashville. So if you're an organizer for Camp US, could you please stand up really quickly? As you might have seen, there were many cities vying to host World Camps United States this year. And in fact, I saw we had some in the booths earlier. By the way, the sponsor area and all the booths were packed. Like that was a really good, thank you all for supporting all the people who helped make this happen. But yeah, Nashville had just an amazing application. So thank you all very, very much for bringing it together. Like this has been a really fun World Camp. I love the art and the venue. I love the music. I love the food. Looking forward to the party. So one more round of applause for the organizers. That was really cool. This is actually the 128th World Camp we've had so far this year. One of our fastest paces ever across 48 countries. Just under a hair of 40,000 tickets sold, 39 something something. And who makes this happen? So it looked like there were about 15 organizers here. It's a thousand organizers total across all the World Camps that happened this year. So about eight organizers per World Camp. Raise your hand if you organize a World Camp somewhere in the world. Well, that's a good quarter of the audience. That's raise your hand if you've spoken at a World Camp. Ah, okay, that's actually the quarter. First is maybe 10%. So that lines up. Got 2,300 speakers and over 1,000 unique sponsors that kind of make this all happen. They enable it to happen at such an accessible price for everyone. But one of the more exciting things that's been happening this year, you know, World Camps, the ideas they happen once a year in a city, they feature local speakers. But I feel like a lot of the community in WordPress comes from these more frequent events. And we've had a huge up kit with over 4,300 meetups now happening in 73 countries. You might have seen that meetup actually just sold as a company. They sold the rework. Usually I get worried when acquisitions like this happen, but I think that rework is going to be an excellent partner for meetup. And we hope to continue working with them and growing it. We are just a hair under 100,000. I was kind of like, how many meetups can we do before the State of the World? And it's been growing kind of bit. Some of you all might have noticed in version 4.8 of WordPress, we added this new events widget. The idea was it would show you, in addition to just the news, it would show you kind of the events, meetups and World Camps happening near you. So as a result of that widget launching, monthly attendance to meetups are up 31%. As you might know, we split out World Camp and the WordPress Foundation a few years ago. So all of the meetups and World Camps are now running through this World Camps subsidiary of the foundation. And we announced last year that we would be taking some of the foundation to support educational endeavors, which I'm going to update you on now. The first being that we wanted to support three organizations. We were hoping to do about a 10 grand donation each. We actually were able to donate $15,000 each to Hack the Hood Internet Archive and Black Girls Code. So we're very excited about that. Also all over the world, in Johannesburg, Beirut, Cape Town and Montreal, we had these do action events. If you've never been to one of these, they're very, very exciting. So the idea is that nonprofits can come and in sort of like a weekend hackathon, WordPress volunteers, people volunteering will help get them a great website or get updated or anything like that. We had four that we supported this year. These are one of the coolest things I've seen happen around the WordPress community in a while. And I love the name, right? Such a good kind of geek joke. So we're hoping to see more of these coming up. And one of the things I'm excited to announce today is that supporting the educational work of the WordPress Foundation is now easier than ever. With it, we have a donate button, which we never really had working well before. So what is going on is that now that all the work camp stuff is outside of the actual foundation, the foundation needs more diversity of donors for its nonprofit status. So we've set up where you can do a yearly donation. I think starting at, was it 30 bucks a year? $10 a year from $10 a year and the max is $1,000 a year. So if you're fancy business or something like that, it is coming up at the end of the year. So this is all fully tax-deductible. Just since we're gonna continue paying taxes in the future, I don't know. And you can kind of get in your end of year giving and it's a yearly thing. So we wanna sort of develop different folks or different regular contributions. And basically, as you know, the WordPress Foundation has no employees, no executive pay, no anything. So this all goes back out into the community. We're hoping to do more of the grants that we're able to do this year for organizations like the ones I just talked about. So check that out. Another update from next year is in May of this year, we launched Hacker One. Hacker One is a way for basically a bug bounty system. So people can all over the world who do security research for WordPress now have a completely organized way that can say, hey, I found an issue. And we can check out that issue. And if it is valid, then provide a bounty. So we had 52 security issues that were resolved this way this year, important that were valid from 46 different people and 39 of them got kind of a real reward so that they were serious, including someone I just want to highlight, S-Cansing, ScanSing, not sure how to pronounce it, but had nine valid reports. So this has been a really, really great program. It's allowed us to make WordPress a lot more secure. And as we get better at doing it, we want to roll this out to top plugins and themes as well. As I said before, not all of the plugins and themes or we would run out of money, but for the top ones, having your WordPress be as secure as possible is a big, big priority. And this HackerOne program has been really great. So it is, if you ever hear someone say, hey, I know a WordPress problem or anything like that, point them here, because it is where we triage them or we look at them and everything happens. WordPress.org has also had some pretty cool stuff this year. The one I want to highlight the most is that this time last year, this is what es.wordpress.org looked like, which is a Spanish version of WordPress.org. This doesn't look too, too bad, but if you had scrolled down on this page, there was actually like several thousand pixels dedicated to editing a WP config file and talking about when WordPress 2.5 comes out, you're gonna have to change this and that. It was a little bit old school. 2.5 was a long, long time ago. So I'm excited to say that we were able to launch a new homepage that we launched for WordPress.org for over 26 different languages. So they now have a very stylish, cool way to introduce people all over the world to what we're doing with WordPress. We have now over 47,000 plugins getting a bajillion downloads, actually a bajillion, a hundred million downloads. I talked a bit about language packs last year and how that was gonna enable more and more of plugins and themes to be localized the same way that WordPress is. Can now say that we now have over 1,100 themes and 2,000 plugins with a language pack. I'm so glad that's not like 1,900, 990 or something. Of the top 10 plugins, all in one SEO is actually winning with 56 fully translated language packs. But you can see that in these top plugins, we're getting really, really good coverage all over the world. And the local communities that are doing translation days and everything else have done just a fantastic job making this happen. Plugin and theme directories are a really important part of what I wanna focus on next year. And related to that, you might have heard a little bit about a new program we're launching called Tide. Think of it like a rising tide lifts all boats, not a way to clean things, although it actually will clean up the plugin and theme directories, so it works on multiple levels. Kudos to wherever I think XWP came up with that, was it USN? As a group of government, he's a very modest guy. So what Tide is is basically a series of automated tests running against every plugin and theme and the directory. So here's how to imagine this. Some of you might know unit test or continuous integration. Imagine if we were able to run a set of tests against the entire plugin directory, basically in real time as things get updated. And now you as consumers, there's a page on the plugin, a tab on the plugin page that allows you to see the status of all those tests. Some of the tests we might consider like really, really important, like saying if this does not work with a minimum version of WordPress's PHP compatibility, we might actually use the test to say, okay, this plugin will be temporarily delisted until that it fixes this thing. But basically the idea is to give developers much better tools and sort of information for how to improve and know how their plugins are doing. And then for users, to give them a bit more information on choosing things, but over time, of course, we hope that every plugin has 100% here. The, this is just getting started. Each test that will show you the kind of pass fail will also have what the results are. So it'll tell you what lines are being talked about and it'll have a link to the test on GitHub. So that anyone can update it. So there's a problem with the test. Someone could say, hey, this has a bug. It caught something that shouldn't. Or submit a new test. And then of course we will add a way because automated testing and sort of code sniffing isn't 100% perfect. So we'll have a way for plugin authors to say, hey, now I really did mean this line. I know it looks like this is an unescape variable being written directly to the theme, but it's not really. And so they can leave a comment that'll kind of override things. And those will be visible on the plugin page too. So you can kind of see how this is all going. I'm very, very excited about this. It is with the support of some great organizations including AXWP. And so keep an eye out for tied stuff coming. WP, there is a make site for tied already and a Slack channel at hashtag tied. So I'm very much looking forward to raising the quality of every single plugin and theme in the entire directory. So thank you. I like when you don't clap because I can drink. It's water. But watermelon water, which I like. One of the other things I talked about last year was the growth council. This has been a little bit slower in which I'll take complete responsibility for and getting started. But I'm proud to say that the first meaning of the growth council is going to be next week. No, it's actually a schedule. Not like, oh, you know, set a deadline for myself. So we got hundreds, the idea behind the growth council is that all across the WordPress ecosystem community, there are dozens now hundreds of organizations that are helping grow WordPress and sort of bringing to bear whether that's advertising, whether it's advocacy, creating documentation, creating websites, all sorts of different things, that writing books that are part of the kind of flywheel that really helps WordPress grow. So we wanted to bring these different folks together, including a different commercial company so that they can talk about what they're doing and share best practices and also raise anything that maybe they're learning. Like perhaps that we find that in this country that the lack of plugins being translated is really hampering growth or our advertising is not working as well there or whatever it might be. So bringing folks together and we got hundreds and hundreds of applications and we decided to break it into two different councils. So there will be an enterprise council. The way I describe this is people, the enterprise side of WordPress there's lots of agencies and people working on things that the typical customer is gonna be a very, very large site and often investing over $100,000 into making an amazing site. So think of that like big, enterprise-y things and then consumer side, which is often very much in line with the idea of democratizing publishing for WordPress which is bringing people who might never have had a website before or might have a website on a closed source platform liberating them and helping them find the coolest open source way to publish online. So that we'll be meeting next week and I'm looking forward to getting some notes and some agenda and everything posted and next year having a bit more to talk about what's happened there versus just saying, sorry y'all. It didn't happen yet, but it is now. One final thing I wanted to chat about was last year we talked about let's encrypt insights that were starting to go over SSL and WordPress, the project, different hosts, everyone had been doing a fantastic job getting more sites on SSL and I'm happy to say that we've more than doubled when all 36% of all the sites that we know about all the WordPresses that we know about in the world over HTTPS, which is again, more than double what it was last year. So thank you all for making the web a more secure place. So the big shift this year was that we moved to a feature-driven release schedule versus saying we were gonna do a release every four months like we had many years past. I'm glad there's a fan of that. And that was a good whistle. I don't know where it came from, but it was a really good whistle. Even though when I was on stage, I said, hey, I don't know how this is gonna go. We might not have any releases this year because we're gonna work on things that we think are great and then release them when they're ready and the version numbers will follow that. In spite of that sort of warning, we actually had two really fantastic releases around the three focuses and the releases, I talked about the three focuses being editing, customization, REST API. And so around the customization focus, we were able to do some really, really cool stuff. And that was in releases 4.8 and 4.9 and led by Weston, Mel, and Jeff, who did a really, really fantastic job getting some stuff out there. To talk about this, I would actually love to invite Mel and Weston up to the stage. We all have to hear, direct from the awesome people behind us. Hello, hello. So Mel and Weston are gonna talk about what's going on in 4.8 and 4.9. There are a lot of people in this room. Ha ha ha. Cool, yeah. So while Gutenberg has been underway for the entire year, we've been trying to make a lot of improvements still to WordPress as it is now and to make all of your lives a little bit easier. So in 4.8 and 4.9, we tackled some long-term pain points and introduced also some great new workflows for building WordPress websites. So if you visit any popular cooking blog or news website, you're usually gonna find some sort of media in their sidebar, usually an image. So actually adding that image to your sidebar is a disaster. You need to upload the image in your media library. You need to hunt for the URL, copy it, open the customizer or the widget panel, and then manually actually write the image tag in a text widget. It's super complicated and it's just way more than we should ever ask people to do. So now you can actually just do everything in one place. Pop an image widget into your sidebar, click to open your media library, and then just upload it directly there. There's, you know, you could do the same for audio and video, and then also as of 4.9, you could now do it for galleries as well. Yeah, in the same way that it was painful to add images to your sidebar, it was also painful to add formatting to text in your text widgets. And so in 4.8, we added the visual editor to the text widget. And to do basic formatting and also to be able to now, with 4.9, add things like images into your text widget as well. The post editor has had visual editing for ever. And even before that, it had those quick edit HTML helper buttons that you can use if you have the text tab focused. But the text widget didn't have either of those. And so finally now, you don't have to mess with HTML unless you really want to. And this was kind of a cringe moment for the 4.7 release when we made the video because we had this starter content that allowed you to, you know, populate a blog with, you know, business hours. But in the release video, when we added the starter content widget that had the business hours, there in the release video, it's showing an HTML. And that's not something we can expect for users now to be able to have to do unless they want to. So now in 4.8, 4.9, you only have to mess with HTML if you want to. So in the past year or so, WordPress has made some really cool improvements to links. In a previous release, you can now paste a URL on top of some text to create a link, which is actually my favorite feature ever. And I find myself using it in Gmail. It doesn't work. And Google Docs doesn't work. Really frustrating. So we've actually taken that a step further. So I've personally run into tons of problems where I'm trying to update some text that's linked. And so I'll like click at the end. Did it add the text after the link, not in the link. So I'll do this hack where I just like click in the link and then type it and then like delete the rest of it. And it's a mess. But now we actually have this background that appears when you're clicked into a link. So yeah, yeah, it's awesome. So you can double arrow into and out of a link. So it's easy to know whether you're actually editing the text in it or around it. It's actually, it's awesome. And also as Matt previously mentioned, we introduced this new dashboard widget showcasing WordPress events near you. And since launching the widget, we've seen meetup attendance go up by almost a third. So 4.9 just released before Thanksgiving here in the States. And it ended up being a bigger release than I think any of us were expecting. We had a total of 443 contributors, many of whom I'm sure are in this room or watching the live stream. So give yourself a round of applause. And 185 of them are actually new contributors. So this is the first time that they contributed to our WordPress release and got props. So pretty, pretty huge. One of the features that I'm personally really the most excited about with this release is something that we've been working on building up to for so long now and that is being able to draft and schedule changes within the customizer. Now the customizer is really like a staging environment in your production, in your life site. And so now you can go in and start making changes. And instead of just having to decide whether you want to publish them or not, now you can just open that little gear icon and change the status to save a draft. And then you can leave the customizer, come back again, make some more changes, leave, come back again. And then you can schedule them to go live when you want to or you can publish them right away. Yeah, so imagine you have an e-commerce site and you're like, oh, great, you know, it's the holidays, I want to have a sale. I want to push it live at midnight, but I don't want to stay up that late. You can now schedule that change to go live while you're sleeping. It'll get pushed up to all your customers. And then later that week, when you want to end it, you can schedule it to end maybe midnight the following week. And that's all now native to WordPress. Part of that new functionality is the ability to have front end preview links for those changes that you've drafted or scheduled. Now, if you make changes, you can save a draft and then this little link at the bottom in the panel will give you a URL that you can share with a client, a stakeholder to review the changes that you've made and then they can review them on the front end of the site without ever going into the customizer without even having to give them a WordPress user account. So this gives you the ability as an agency or a freelancer to be able to give to your client the ability to see what you're going to do before those changes go live so that there's not the rush, you know, oh, this isn't broken, please fix this right away. Now there's more time that you have to iterate on those changes. So a couple months ago, I attended a hackathon where a bunch of teams made WordPress websites for nonprofits and since we were working in groups, we kept running into issues where teammates would accidentally override each other's changes in the customizer and about a week later after this hackathon, of course, Weston came to me and was like, what if we added post and page locking but to the customizer? So now if you're collaborating on a site with other people, you can't override each other's changes. If you see somebody across the room chatting and the customizer says they're working on it, you can take over like you can with posts and pages and then their changes will be autosaved. So if there's something that they didn't save, they won't lose them either. Yeah, and speaking of autosaving, now when you're making changes in the customizer and you say your computer crashes or you close the tab accidentally and you want to restore those changes you made, now it's much easier to pick up where you left off and restore those changes to not lose the work that you've done. Just like when you're editing posts and pages, that same kind of autosaving functionality, the autodraft is part of the customizer. WordPress has long been a really great tool for learning how to code. I'm sure many of us in this room started out tinkering with WordPress websites. That tinkering became a job, which became a career, which has brought us all to this room and the city with really delicious hot chicken. Yeah, in 4.9 we focus on making code editing faster and easier and much safer so that you can make changes with confidence, even though you may not be a coding expert and without requiring you to have your IDE open. So we added syntax highlighting and autocomplete features to the code editors in WordPress, including the CSS editor and the customizer, the HTML widget, and also the theme and plugin editors. However, editing code live on your site can be very dangerous. I've personally widescreened more than one site in my day, just trying to make some quick edits to my theme, and yeah, that didn't turn out so quick, did it? Yeah, so in addition to improving the usability of code editing with the syntax highlighting and the autocompletion, we've also integrated linters into the code editing to do error checking. So now if you have a syntax error in your HTML widget, now it'll tell you that you forgot to close that nested div. And so if you publish that widget change, it's not going to, it's gonna stop you from doing that so that you don't break the whole layout of your site. In the same way, if you're editing PHP files and you're in a custom theme or plugin, now if you try saving a syntax error instead of widescreening your site, now it will stop you, it'll tell you that this is an error, and it will give you an opportunity to fix the change you made. So yeah, we just wanna give one final shout out and thanks to everybody who contributed to WordPress 4.8 and 4.9, especially Jeff Paul. Jeff, where are you? Stand up. They're in the back. Yeah, they're in the back. Jeff has been totally instrumental with these releases. He's kept us on track. Awesome, thank you all. Yeah, thank you, great job. So Mel, Weston, and Jeff have not just been doing amazing at that presentation, they've been doing a really amazing job really all year. So thank you again. It's showing how, I mean, part of the idea was changing how traditionally we've only had like a lead developer role in WordPress, and that's really kind of the only hierarchy that we've had. And one of the things we tried to do with the three focuses was say that like peanut butter and chocolate, you pair a designer and a developer, and I think some of the work that's happened around the customizer this year in particular, all the things they just talked about really shows when you take a design first approach to some of these problems that you can really find. Sometimes some things that actually didn't aren't that hard, and there are some things that were hard in there too, but some things that like, wow, like I'm so glad that we did that because we're gonna make a lot of people's lives easier and better without like taking a year or two to have to implement it. So thank you very much. The, now what were we talking about? Sorry, just had to. And even though we've been doing a lot more design this year, we decided not to do a default theme. This was because we wanted to keep the focus on the focuses. And so we, this is the first time since 2010 there will be no 20 something theme, no 2017, but that just means we're gonna have extra cool stuff for next year. The second of the three focuses was the REST API. The big update here is that there's still room to improve. We've done some great work around Gutenberg and the posting kind of content APIs. We found that there were some areas where it didn't fully deal with capabilities or maybe have some fields that we needed. So we've done some improvements there, but we have a lot to do still to really make the REST API kind of a first classes in the WordPress world. And the goal, which is in the future to have the vast majority if not all of WP admin actually go through our own API. So that way by using our own API we make sure that it's fully great for everything that we possibly wanna do. But we did pick up a bonus focus this year, which may have noticed that the WordPress CLI, the WP CLI project became an official WordPress project. No, this is very cool. When it became official we did some sort of fundraising for it and also so we've had four releases there and four major releases with some awesome features. 124 contributors and there have been 46 talks on WP CLI at different work camps. That's unique different talks. If you haven't used the CLI before, it's official, check it out. It's basically a way to interact with your WordPresses via the command line. It's ultra fast and you can do really cool stuff like the trunk version actually has a way to do scaffolding for Gutenberg, which is pretty cool. So when I get to what you all are probably curious most to hear about, which is the third focus. Editing with Gutenberg. I don't know why we're laughing. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. It is, Gutenberg has been the longest rudging major feature development that we've ever had. I mean, typically we work on things for anywhere from two to really the longest, I can remember is maybe that spans two releases is the better part of six months in our previous release approach. But with Gutenberg, we've now been working on it much, much more. For those of you who don't know what Gutenberg is yet, it's basically an effort to simplify all the different things we have going on WordPress, short codes, widgets, menus, and the random stuff that people put in tiny MCE into one elegant concept, which is a block which we've demonstrated with this non-trademark copyright and Lego block there. It's been about 11 months since the kickoff. Post from Yoen, Matthias and I, talking about what the focus is we're going to be and how to do it. In that time, in just those 11 months, it's already had over 4,300 commits from over 100 contributors, 1,700, almost 1,800 issues of which 1,377 have been closed. So I don't think those are all open issues. Most of them have been closed. So it's really drawn together the community in a very cool way. And we've been doing almost weekly releases since the first beta that came out. So it's had 18 major iterations over just those 11 months. And these are plugins that people have been testing. They've done all sorts of cool stuff. In fact, I heard that somebody might have seen, did anyone do the word Gutenberg testing down in the booth area? So we actually ran 90 user tests today, which is incredible. So 90 different user tests all recorded, all ready to go. Anyway, to talk a little bit about Gutenberg, I wanted to bring up my good friend Matthias. Round of applause for Matthias. Matthias, alongside Yoen, who started as your design pair at the beginning and lately Tammy along with, of course, many, many, many others have been working diligently at Gutenberg all year. And we're going to try something that we have not done in maybe the history of state of the words, which is a live demo. You ready? All right, take it away. Thanks, Matt. I'll be right here if you need me. Yeah, I'll need to do this. We're gonna switch. Delicate operation first. Let me see. Little tech. Let's see. Log in. I'll narrate what's going on here. Can you make it so it shows your password? Okay, there we go. All right, we're in. I'll let you take it away. So seems I'll be following Morten's footsteps, brave footsteps in attempting the live demo. However, this version is not, it's not even trunk. It's a mismatch of branches. So happy accidents might happen. I apologize in advance if things break. I will start by, so following the Spanish vibe of the WordPress.org page redesign, I'll start by copying the piece of the beginning of the Don Quixote, the work by Cervantes. And I'm going to copy it from Google Docs, and I'm going to pass into the editor to start working a bit with this. So the first thing is that nothing should really look unfamiliar. Like it's just some text on an editor. You can go through the paragraphs and the elements. But as soon as you start interacting, you'll see that you get these contextual toolbars and elements. So this allows you to say, focus on this paragraph and let's make it a bit bigger. Let's switch it to the center align. Let's select it all, apply some italics. So let's move to, if you focus one thing with, so when everything is a block, like you get these little plus buttons here between blocks so you can add other kinds of blocks. And this opens the block insertor, which is what Matt referred to as trying to simplify all the ways you can insert different kinds of content. So in this case I want to add, and I can search here and it shows me the things that are there. I can navigate all this with keyboard, most of it, a lot of work still remains to be done on there, but I can still access this, insert the separator, I'm gonna add another one here, just for repetition. Okay. Now the other nice thing is you can, like it might, you can access the insertor from multiple places, but you can also, and we show a little hint here when you, I don't know if it's too visible on the screen, but it says that you can use the slash command, which is writing a slash to insert any block. So I'm going to add an image here, let's scroll a bit. I'm going to drag an image, when you drag an image it immediately shows, even while it's uploading, it shows you the results, so you can start continuing building that. Let's add another kind of block. I went to the bottom here and I'm going to add a cover image. Cover image is very similar to image in its current state. It allows you to select an image from the media library and then write some text, like in this case it's to like, Higante Sancho, okay. And then we can bump it like this and we start to get some rhythm to this little story. I'm going to add a final block here, text columns. Let me get some more text. This is a long paragraph, like this long paragraphs. So one column and this for the other one. Okay, so this looks a bit tight, but we can expand it a bit here. Okay, and let's add a final separator. Okay, let's close this. Actually let's add one more thing, the little drop cap, of course. And a title. So this shows kind of how you can quickly get into an interesting look impulse with more variation. Basically, the idea is that the block is there when you need it and it disappears when you don't. That's a, it's not a trivial balance to accomplish, but I think it's getting better with each release. So if you just use the arrow keys, you can navigate through the whole post. You don't see the UI, but once you start moving, you can get these additional tools. So I'm going to move to a demo that we have prepared. So when you install Gutenberg, you get this menu item on the side or Gutenberg that has a few utilities. One is a demo. You also have feedback on documentation. If you load the demo, this is meant to be like an already put up post so that you can play with some of the settings. So here you can, if you load this in the plugin, you can just check how some of these blocks behave. This is a longer post that has more of the variety of blocks. You can check the different styles that a specific block can give you. One nice thing in this kind of long post is that we have this utility called table of contents that allow you to basically browse all your headings. If you change the headings to be like an incorrect size, incorrect in the document outline hierarchy, we also warn you about that. So that should be a nice way to still let users do whatever they want, but still inform them about the best practices of what really WordPress has stood out for all these years, which is a semantic and accessible web. So I'm going to show a bit the gallery, which I really like the gallery block because I don't know if you have seen other people try to do this kind of mosaic layouts, but very often I have friends that would just create this in Photoshop and upload a single image with all the mosaic. So I think it's good that we offer something that can be, and you can play with it and just change the columns, change the width if you want three images, go back to single one to like play with different layouts and see what works while still making sure that the markup is the best we can produce and that everything remains semantic. You can also like just remove some images and play with this. I think this allows a lot of layout possibilities and it's quite nice. Let me move back. Oh, the other thing is embeds. Now, if you, if we go back to the insertor, like you can search here for like YouTube or whatever and it exposes all of the embeds that WordPress already has but sometimes users don't know that exist. The embeds of course can be played directly on the post. And we also have things like buttons and little emojis that you can also increase in size. And let me show you. So this is just working with the blocks that come with WordPress but you can also like sometimes you will need to write your own HTML for something. So we have a block custom HTML block. I'm going to add everyone's favorite HTML element and you can keep this HTML between all your blocks and it will just work but you can also preview it in place. So we can see our nice marker. We can also move the marker. Let me add one more. So this is a fun little tag but you can imagine like the kind of custom HTML things that people might need in their site and without having to switch the whole editor to the HTML mode, you can add these little snippets which will be more powerful when we introduce the reusable blocks. But let me show you another a more interesting example of a block which is the latest posts. This is a dynamic block. It means that it's rendering posts that already exist so I cannot edit this text but it allows you to configure things like how many posts to show. And it all, it does all of this in real time. You can enable the post date, switch it to agree and you get like a nice thing with your latest posts. You can add this to whatever post page and you can imagine all the kind of dynamic blocks that you could have like this. So let me go here. Oh, going to stop this video so that it doesn't slow things down. So this code is poetry quote. So this is something that has come up a few times that we were working on reusable blocks. That's one of the reasons why I'm running this mix of branches in trunk is so that I can show you how it actually works. So we have this code is poetry that we want to use in some other post. So we're going to convert it to a reusable block and we're going to give it a name. I will save it. And now we're going to switch to a new post. Still saving. Okay, now. And here if I do, if I go to the, let me see, save blocks, code is poetry. Okay. So I can, you can reuse this. You can see how this could be a very convenient tool for especially when you need, when you think that you might need a custom post type for something, but really what you just want is like to reuse a testimonial in some other page. Like this kind of things, it's basically a way to create blocks on the fly without having to write any code. And if you consider that we could have nesting, like I think Morton showed a blog with like an author biography, like all these kind of things, you can combine them, save them on the fly and then just have them all here in the insert. If you see there's a save here, I have a bunch of weird blocks, but you can just have different kinds of blocks saved that just output to the thing. So I want to show you now some integration with some code. So in the last version of Butomary 1.8, we added support for templates. Templates are really just a list of blocks. And I'm going, hope this is kind of readable, but I'm going, this is just a register book type. It's adding a post type called books. It has the show in rest because we use it with the API. And the interesting thing is this template attribute, which defines an array with different types of blocks. In this case, an image which has some attributes, a heading and a paragraph. So if I come to my editor and I go to books and add a new book, instead of seeing a blank page, now I get an already set up thing here where the, so I can do something like drag an image here so I get my cover. I'm going to grab the full title because I don't want to type it. And I'm going to add a little description. So this is like very quickly, I can get into the intended display that the author, the developer, the themeer intended for this post will still give the user a very intuitive way to input that information quickly. So I think templates, and if you expand templates, right now they work with custom post type, but they can also work on the fly. You can see a lot of interesting mixtures, especially once we add nesting, like all of those things together, I think will give a lot of flexibility to creating these kinds of layouts. One last thing before I extend too much is let me go to the, yeah, just a new post. So the other thing is how themes can extend certain blocks or even general Gutenberg functionality. Like one thing that we have on the paragraph log is that you can add certain colors and just have like 80. So but what happens if the theme wants to have a different set of colors, like with support, we allow things to specify in an add theme support call. You can pass an array of color values. Let me save. So if we reload, now the colors that this offers are the colors offered by the theme. So tonight's another thing we show is if your contrast ratio fails, we warn the user that this is not very legible. And once you get into the legibility, it fades away. The other thing that themes can do, let me add some filler text here. So the other interesting thing is, this looks like, and especially if I collapse this, this is a very wide clean layout, but your theme might be different. In this case, I am going to enable my theme to modify the editor styles. And my theme is mostly modifying, let me add heading one and some more text. So this is saved. Now I'm going to reload the page and now this is applying my theme styles to the editor. So the headings change because the theme sets. So I have the, like this remains, but I can remove it. And so something like latest post, which we saw before, come with their own theme specific styles. So it looks like the theme wants it to look like, but the functionality is the same. If I enable these things, like all the functionality remains the same. Okay. So one more thing is that you can, let me disable this thing. Going to load the demo again. You can also like, since everything is a block, you can also select multiple blocks and move them all together if you need to. Like this also allows different transformations, like to make a list out of multiple paragraphs. If you have multiple images, you can convert it into a gallery or a slideshow or things that planning can hook into. Yeah. So that's about it. I would like to, if all the people that have contributed so far to Gutenberg, like before, and even through the work camp, if you can stand up and have a round of applause for everyone, hand it over to Mac. Plug in. Let's do the thing again. I'll let you, I got it. So that my favorite part of that is actually where the theme styles came into the editor. It was easy to miss. Thank you, Matisse. Thank you. Thank you. Flowing all the way, just for this, so. That was front-end editing. That was WYSIWYG, like in the real sense of it. If you would like to see some more awesome kind of Gutenberg introduction, actually check out Morden's presentation yesterday. Morden, where are you? Somewhere. Oh, that, right there. Stand up. It was funny. He got some questions and he kept getting all these questions. He's like, I'm not actually on the Gutenberg team. But I now crown you an honorary Gutenberg team member because your presentation was so great and we will get it online very soon. So thank you. So you saw that cool stuff. I know what you're wondering. How long will it be? Well, to that, we did some non-traditional measurements. So you might not know. We got a bingo. But I haven't said it yet. I think this thing on my face is because of Gutenberg. So I'm calling it the Gutenbeard. And when Facebook changed or didn't change the React license, I was like, ah, it's like another inch. So we think that this is kind of a before and after of how long we think it's gonna be. And that's Mark Urine who also helped design all this. Modeling over there. But it really, I think it needs about 12 more iterations. So we've done 18 so far, or about four months. So, cool. Yeah, so that puts us back into around April for when I think that this will be ready for the widest audience, even wider than is seeing it now. In the meantime, we're gonna keep doing a lot of 4.9 releases. So we've already had a security release with 4.91, but we'll push other stuff out there in the meantime, including perhaps some enhancements if some really good ones come in, certainly anything else with security. And then at some point, as part of the sort of path to Gutenberg, there will be a sort of a plug for it for people to install and test the plugin. What needs to happen first? Well, we need to get some really great documentation for Gutenberg, which is not there yet. We need continued conversations around it. There've been 77 meetup events and 20 work camp sessions so far. And we need plugin developers to really start to reimagine what their plugins and their functionality will look like in a Gutenberg world. It's actually interesting. So WordPress introduced WizzyWig in version 2.0. That was 12 years ago. Outside of some relatively incremental updates, including like link boundaries and other stuff, that experience has remained pretty much the same for about 12 years. Gutenberg is what we want to build on for the next 12 years. So think of it as the thing that will be around for a while. We're gonna keep working on it. There's many, many, much more to come after the main release. But this is the basis for so much of what's gonna be happening in WordPress is gonna be Gutenberg-based. And finally, it needs you. I love these Wapus. But they were extra cool. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I thought it was so cool. I had a Sally the Riveter and everything. You can contribute to Gutenberg. We have sort of a site that talks all about it, WordPress.org, slash Gutenberg. We've got the GitHub. And also, of course, make.wordpress.org, slash editor is where, right, editor? Is where all the Gutenberg stuff is. As I like to think about it, if we're gonna get about 280 characters, let's have 280 blocks, right? How can we make it so that we can build things that people never even imagined before? You know, things that to do like some of the stuff Matias just showed, which isn't even over the final version that we're gonna ship, you would have needed lots of plugins or basically to be a developer to get even close to that. And now we're making it available to a much, much wider audience, very much in line with our mission of democratizing publishing. Now, I realize that for some people in the room, a lot of people are obviously very excited about that. Some people saw that and were terrified, thinking about everything that was gonna break, everything that isn't gonna work, all the clients are gonna need to retraining, everything. So actually, the Gutenberg team has created a plugin called Classic Editor. It is on the plugin directory today. Ha ha ha. You can install it. It's not, this isn't a joke. This is real. If you think April, you know, the plugins you use or the site or whatever is not gonna be ready, install this plugin now. It will make sure that when 5.0 comes out, the editor that will be default on kind of, when you click edit and WordPress, will still be the Classic Editor. It also allows us to gather usage data there and sort of make sure that we can let people know that as Gutenberg evolves, that maybe where they thought it wouldn't work with say a plugin that they have, it might now be 100% compatible. So check out the Classic Editor plugin if any of that terrified you. This will work for at least a little while. We've taken a very different approach this year and it didn't end. The world did not end, at least in the WordPress world. We've been going, we've had some great releases around the customization focus. The Gutenberg focus has really kind of taken over. We've been doing, it's also reinvigorated how JavaScript works in WordPress. I mean, there's been so much cool stuff happening there. And during all that, we grew about another 2%. This is actually out of date. We're now at 29.1%. That's top 10 million websites. I'm really proud. Oh, my sister got bingo. Really proud of what everyone contributing to WordPress has been able to accomplish this year. This is kind of a lagging indicator. But it's nice to be able to see that our continued adoption among this cohort shows that we're making something that people want. I will be keeping on my lead hat through 2018, originally planned it through 2017. But I want to see Gutenberg all the way through. The next step, so what comes after what you just saw when we finished the editing experience is Gutenberg-based site customization. So if you imagine like those blocks, including some of the dynamic blocks that you saw, something like reusable blocks, well, what's the ultimate reusable block? Everything else that goes around the poster page. So you could imagine a header, a site title, social icons, related posts, all of this as different blocks that could be put in a poster page if you want to, as dynamic blocks, but also be really, really cool to do just laying out the whole site. This is a powerful enough concept that I think it warrants doing a new default theme. So we will start working on that in 2018. Now, I think that this customization part of Gutenberg can actually happen a lot faster than phase one. So I want to announce as the three focuses for the coming year, there will be Gutenberg editing, Gutenberg customization and a Gutenberg theme. I think that most of the hard stuff is out of the way already, but these might be my famous last words. So depending on how the year goes next year, let's maybe forget about this slide. Or if it goes well, I'm really looking forward to sharing with all of you when we return to Nashville, all the cool stuff that's happened with Gutenberg customization, a new 2018 theme, and what the next 12 years for WordPress will look like. So thank you very, very much. Man, a live demo. I don't know if we've done that ever before. We might not do it ever again. Actually went on the audience so I could see everything. So now you've heard kind of the idea, the what we're looking at. This is where we ask questions and answers. So if any of you all have something, I see you're starting to line up the mics already. I will do my best to answer it or pass it to one of the very capable people, WordPress contributors that are nearby. Oh, we got Spotlight. Wow, this is mad fancy. I also, just before we get into QA, wanted to take this opportunity to say, hello mom, this is the first year we've gone to live stream working before WorkCamp US. So I believe that my mom was watching this. And so I want to say, I love you. Thank you. All right, let's kick off with the questions. To the right here. Say your name, where you're from or something and then question. Hello, Matt. This is Fahad from Pakistan. So I'm here to attend the word camp. With the Grutenberg, just a question came into my mind. I apologize if you find it a little critical. So actually there are a lot of plugins. There are a dozen of plugin who are already capitalizing on this idea, different page builders. I don't want to name all those plugins. But with the growth of those plugins, they always kept on capitalizing and branding WordPress. So don't you think that it's more like, you can say like, it's a serious trouble for them with the Grutenberg and WordPress is in fact demoralizing those plugins to grow. That's a good question. I think that the sort of the very many page builder plugins out there show that there's a demand for this. But even the largest of them only have in the hundreds of thousands, a couple hundred thousand users. And what we want to do is bring this to everyone and for free and core. The other thing that the sort of Balkanization of this approach among the different plugins has created is it makes it really hard for other plugins to interrupt with that. And I like Yoast for example. There's basically because everyone presents the content differently. Any plugin that wants to look at the content has to build support for, well, 20 different things. Any theme that wants to support the plugins really natively has to support 20 different things. So by standardizing sort of some of the core functionality into core of WordPress, I think it will actually create a huge opportunity for all of the people we just talked about. Other plugins, the page builders and themes. You saw some of the cool stuff that can happen with themes. When this has been a common concern anytime we brought anything into core or into Jetpack. So for example, when contact forms went into Jetpack people were very, very concerned that it would hurt all the contact form plugins. Oh, it looks like they're doing great. So I think that it will allow that the plugin page builders premium whatever to focus on what's different about them then focus on sort of reinventing the wheel and we can standardize the things, the wheels so that everyone can drive on the same car. That work. All right. All right, during your speech somewhere I came to know like you said there won't be any 2018 theme or something but in the end you said that we are going to build the 2018 theme. There will be no 2017 theme. Okay. There will be a 2018 theme. Apologize if I misspoke that. All right. Thank you very much. Wait. Oh, man. These lights are bright. There will be no 2017 that will be a 2018. All right. Thank you for your questions. All right. Over here. Hi, I am Scott from Dallas, Texas and I have a question. I find it pretty important but I think Gutenberg kind of changes the game there. Do you think that a potential fields API could be just as important as the REST API to developers needing to manipulate fields throughout the six plus screens inside of WordPress or do you think that Gutenberg will negate the need for a fields API in most of the areas? It's a good question. I think a fields API will still be needed. It's not one of the focuses for 2018 so I wouldn't bet that it happens that year but Gutenberg will cover a lot of use cases but not all of them and I think a fields API would still be really useful. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for your work on pods. All right, let's go over here to the right. Hello, I'm Phil from the UK. You mentioned- Not enough UK love in here, come on. Texas beat the UK a lot. Don't mention Brexit. So you mentioned about the customization stuff in Gutenberg and that's really exciting. Kind of more excited about that than Gutenberg itself now. I'm having a little trouble hearing, go closer to the mic. Sorry, so I'm kind of excited about the customization stuff in Gutenberg. How do you think, like do you have a vision for how you think that might pan out with the customizer? So how do you see the two sort of working together or will one be sort of subsumed into the other or do you have an idea of how that might pan out? Yes, well, I mean yes that they will work together. Justin's actually sent me a mock-up just like a day or two ago. When you look at it, I mean one of the coolest parts of Gutenberg is we can kind of take this arbitrary HTML and create a rich semantic sort of structured version of it and doing that for a wider theme and allowing themes to perhaps even provide styles that look just like the front-end wheel. Either we could move customization totally to the front-end so you're actually rearranging things or maybe we create something much like we just showed in Gutenberg or in WPF and there's like a cool way to move things around and that would also be nice because then there could be toggles for like show me what it's going to look like on mobile, show me what it'll look like on AMP, show me what it'll look like on a tablet. Now you can kind of do some cool things for testing it out but a lot of what's in the customizer, like I said, we want to replace shortcuts, widgets, menus, all that. So all that stuff that's currently there all turns into blocks. So some of that interface moves out of trying to squeeze into the customizer or sometimes it can feel a little bit tight. I'm reminded of, have you all seen Aladdin? Or it's like ginormous intergalactic powers. Eee-dee-dee-dee-dee space. Sometimes the customizer feels like that. Amazing powers but in a small space. And so it'll last to break some of that functionality out so there'll be like a full block interface that can really be both responsive and full screen for like editing menus and things like that. So that is the plan for how it's going to happen. However, like everything we've been doing that's really been design led, I imagine that we'll start with how this is going to look and work and do lots and lots of tests and innovations along the way. Although I think that customization can happen faster because we've done a lot of the technical underpinnings with the editor part of Gutenberg. It doesn't mean that we don't need just as much testing and things like that. So we'll definitely want to test the customizer at meetups and do all the same stuff that we've been doing with a Gutenberg editor so far. Cool, thank you. Thank you. All right, over here to the left. Hi, Matt, can you hear? Oh, good. Thank you, I really loved the Gutenberg demo. I saw Morton's yesterday and yours today and I'm really getting excited. So I really appreciate you guys. Cool. I kind of wanted to sort of ask you about some vocabulary you used right at the end of the Gutenberg demo. You said this is true front end editing and we never saw the front end. The front end is the thing the user sees. We never saw it. So my definition of front end editing is editing that happens on the front end, which we never saw. So I just want to make sure that there's not kind of like a move the goal post thing going on here, especially because I think one of the advantages that something like Beaver Builder has is that it literally is on the front end the same way that Squarespace is. So my question to you is what does front end editing mean to you? So I talked about a little bit than this last question. Yeah. Where there is the version of front end that literally means you're on the front end. So that we're serving a dynamic version of it to you that actually isn't what your user see. We're adding a bunch of like controls that allow you to like move things around. And by the way, it's really hard to do that multimodally, which is how all this content is being consumed, right? People are looking at lots of different devices, different TPI's, different shapes, different everything. And that will only grow. Like if you saw Mortens, he's really excited about VR. I was like, wow, this is a lot of VR. We haven't even, Gutenberg and VR has not even imagined to me until that presentation. So these served like the way that the content needs responsive and display different ways does not lend itself well to a pure front end approach. But when you ask talk to users, so although like as developers, we might have a technical definition of like, what's the front end in the back end. A lot of users that talk about it really want a better WYSIWYG. Because our WYSIWYG, as Mortens said in his cool presentation, like isn't actually a WYSIWYG. It's like kind of a visual editor, but actually how that turns into your theme often can be very, very, very different than how it displays in the back end. So maybe we can't call it front end editing because people won't like it. But I do want to bring that distance between what you're seeing when you're in the editing interface and what your users are going to see as small as humanly possible. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Hey, how about to the right here? Hi, I'm Kevin from GiveWP. I'm a plugin developer. Come a little closer. I'm a plugin developer and I have not contributed through code to Gutenberg, but I have been following very closely, testing and involved in GitHub issues. And I just want to say as one of the more vocal critics, I think throughout the past year, what we saw today is really impressive. So hats off to the folks who are actually contributing the code. First off. Second off, I remain really concerned about the extensibility of WordPress from a plugin developers or a theme developers perspective. I've witnessed kind of the needle shift from one end of the spectrum to the other over the past year where our first look at Gutenberg was meta boxes did not exist at all. To this past week where a commit was entered that said a single meta box could undeclare support for Gutenberg which would cause the entire editor to shift back to classic mode. Hearing you suggest the classic editor plugin and different ways to undeclare support for Gutenberg leads me to this idea that we are headed towards a split admin interface with no finality to the transition. Meaning that I don't see a time in the future where everyone will be on Gutenberg. We will always have these people in classic mode and as plugin and theme developers, we will always have to support two different types of users. So my question to you based on that is how do we reach that point where we are past the transition however long it might take where we can not have this box of chocolates effect where you click edit post type and you never know what you're gonna get. Aw. That's a good question and it really gets into more of the human side of it than necessarily technical side. So like you mentioned, technically we've taken different approaches. We have some meta boxes we can kind of put at the bottom. We have some ideas that maybe we should just turn off Gutenberg tolleys as meta boxes like this. There's different ideas. See, think of that as like different things we'll try and we'll pick whichever one seems the least hard but you bring up the much bigger issue which is there's 40 something thousand plugins and themes like at what point do the support for Gutenberg out there matter or not. My hope and my expectation based on how this has worked out with new interfaces in the past like for example, when the customizer came out. Many themes had their own kind of customization interface and that was kind of something each one did its own way much like we have different page builders or different ways that plugins interact by stuffing things in the meta boxes. Over time, once this kind of great kind of unified interface that had this kind of front end preview was added that has basically shifted and it's very hard press to find a theme that has kind of its own customization doing this stuff that's easy that can be done in the customizer doing it in their own way anymore because people expect in the customizer. And the truth is if you're a plugin or theme developer people are gonna expect things in Gutenberg. So you really need to develop it for Gutenberg. And then at some point I'm totally okay if you drop support for the classic, right? And so there will be themes and plugins that say you need to have Gutenberg or newer 5.0 or newer if you want to use this. We already have that existing now like plugins only support so far back in PHP in WordPress. There will be plugins that don't support under WordPress 5.0. So you send a plugin author wants to do different things. As you know, that's not gonna be that much different supporting different WordPress versions where people choose sometimes to go way, way, way back sometimes a year or more, several years and support like WordPress 3.8 or 3.9 and some don't bother anymore. You know, there's lots of APIs and other things that have changed in that time. And at some point you just have to make a cost benefit analysis and do things maybe like Yoast is doing for upgrading PHP and say, hey, if you really want the best of this check out this new thing. If I could quickly respond. Sure. I think this is a different situation because from what I've seen in undeclaring support for Gutenberg it is not up to the plugin developer or the team who's developing a single plugin. Literally, if you have 10 plugins installed and that 11th undeclared support they are going to affect the other 10 that have modernized and adopted support for Gutenberg. And that's where I'm concerned mostly. Sure, sure. And so we'll want to highlight that, right? Nine out of 10 of your plugins are totally Gutenberg compatible. This one isn't. Is there an update available? Is there, can we work with a plugin developer to help them get up to date? So, yeah. You're completely right that one can throw it off. As of this week it reversed to the classic editor when that happens. Don't worry too much about what it's doing today. Think more about how we're going to navigate in this future. And what we want is every single plugin, every single theme to support Gutenberg. So it's basically how do we get from A to B as quickly as possible. And through talks, through documentation, through support, through maybe going in there and actually helping people code up the Gutenberg version of what they're doing. I mean this is an open source community and we're all working together on it. So it will take a lot of work but that's because this is the new interface. When WizzyWig was first introduced there were a ton of plugins that didn't work with WizzyWig. We forget it because it was 12 years ago. So everything works with WizzyWig now. It'd be kind of weird to have a plugin that didn't work with WizzyWig. This will be the same way. 12 years from now we'll be like, wow, there was a time when things didn't work with Gutenberg. Thanks, man. Thank you. All right, to the left here. Hello, my name is Mitch Cantor and I live here in Nashville. So welcome to Nashville first of all. Thank you. So there's an old adage about opinions and that everybody has one. That's only part of the adage, I'm sure. But we're developers, a lot of us are and developers are a pretty opinionated bunch. With what you've shown today with Gutenberg, first of all, it looks fantastic. But how do you and how does your team plan to navigate through all of the noise that comes from all of the opinions that we all have about what Gutenberg is, what it isn't, what it should be? Like do you have any, you talked about it being like on the human side of things in the last question. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about more of that and what you see is how do we as the community, how can we help you best and how do you sort through all of the noise to find what is the best direction for that? I mean that's really the art and science of software development, you know. My personal philosophy there is that even in the harshest, toughest feedback, there's a nugget of something really that you can learn from it. And so any feedback you all wanna contribute, even if it's critical, so I wanna apologize for being critical earlier, that's all right. As a Gutenberg team, as WordPress leads, everything, we'll try to pick out what is going on there and the better we can understand it, the better we'll look at it. If you notice, some people are giving Gutenberg one-star reviews. But every single one of those one-star reviews actually has a response, often from Tammy. The guy responded to one or two. Some were really good. Someone wrote this amazing poem, like the night before Christmas, it's the night before Gutenberg or something. I forget, it was a really good poem. I like one to give the review five stars. And there's some I fundamentally disagree with. There was one, I almost put in the presentation, but I didn't wanna call him out, which I guess I'm doing now. So there's a review that said that people used to work in their cars, now everyone uses a mechanic. Just like people used to design their own websites, everyone's gonna have a professional who shouldn't be doing things that enable people to design more of their own sites. And I mean, I get that, and I wanna have the ability to empathize and understand with what that person's bringing to the table. But, and until I understand it, I can't necessarily disagree with it because I might just be misunderstanding, once I understand it, then you can make the decision. We can say, well, fundamentally, WordPress's mission is democratize publishing. We wanna open it up for the 7.4 billion people in the world who don't have a website yet. And to do so, we're gonna need to make, making it customizable and doing what WordPress does differently than every other publishing platform in the world, a lot better and more accessible. So we're gonna decide to work on Gutenberg regardless of this one star review. Thought about it, thought about stopping after I read it. So that's really all there is, whether it's through the test, through the reviews, through the whatever, however people submit feedback, the team will do its very, very best to learn from it and understand it and then make whatever we kind of discern to be the best decision to move forward. That sounds great. Thank you. Oh, thank you. We've got a few more lefts right over here. Hi, my name is Cheryl and I'm from Charleston, South Carolina. Cool. And I'm about to go there for the first time ever. I've never been. Please come. Two cities I've never been to. We'll be glad to show you the city. We've got a good WordPress users group down there. We should do a meetup there actually. Yeah, cool. My question is about who ultimately do you think is going to benefit the most from Gutenberg? I heard what you said in the last answer and it's interesting to me because in some ways it seems that the average user may actually have a harder time with this, visualizing how to use the blocks. Those of us who do this every day and we understand a little bit more about information architecture. We understand how things fit and maybe what usability is best. I want to understand that average user's experience and are you building for them or are you building for us? We are definitely building for people brand new to publishing and brand new to WordPress. Like that, it's kind of a user core that we're doing a lot of testing with, a lot of learning from and what we want to do is create something that's really powerful. Like you said, there's lots of things you can do but it's intuitive. You think of some of the technology that you love the most. Maybe it's your phone, maybe it's something else. It actually has a ton of really deep functionality and you can mess it up too if you kind of get the wrong way. But because it's intuitive, it provides a path for you to go from like, this is my first time picking up say a touch device to like, oh, here's how I unlock. Here's how I take a photo. Here's how I do every different thing that you do even though there's like literally on average mobile phone probably a hundred different things that you can do not even counting the apps that all have their own interfaces. So we really work on making it intuitive. That said, I think that developers will benefit a ton too. And when I think, you know, one of the personas we've been thinking about is like, clients, people, someone built the site for them and they're just trying to update it and not mess it up. Like the ability for Gutenberg blocks to kind of to basically preload different templates for different pages or blocks or custom post types. The ability for the theme to suggest colors and to keep it so the legibility of the text like we're trying to provide some guard rails as well. So I want to get people a ton of power but also make it easy to do the right thing. Another great example of that is the ID features we've been putting in 4.9. We're letting you actually go into edit the code. So this is more on the developers side of the spectrum of features. But if you make a mistake, we're going to tell you about that and we're going to try to keep you from doing something that's irreversible. I mean, a beautiful thing about everything that's going on here is, and Matias didn't show it, but Gutenberg has sort of a unified undo. And I actually think that the structure that we're showing, although it seems like more, will be more intuitive over time because before we showed something that looked like a document, but when you tried to move around in beds or do certain things with images, did you ever have an image that's right floated and then you're moving it around and it ends inside a link or doesn't and like, you could get so mixed up there and that's what we really saw. And we're trying to make it so that as much as you're moving things around in Gutenberg, there's never anything you can undo and it never does anything you don't expect. Thanks. Thank you. All right, to the left. And then if you aren't standing up, we'll end questions after these kind of four that we got on each side. So bring it in. Hi, I'm Johnny from the UK. Woohoo, UK! Woo! The work on the customizer and editor is obviously amazing, but WordPress isn't just those parts. There's lots of different components. You've got feeds, users, multi-site. Have you got a plan on how to keep those parts not getting stale and people contributing to those parts? Because I contribute a lot to the less glamorous parts of Core and I wouldn't, like, those parts shouldn't get stale and not get contributions just because we are focused on these main focuses. It's true. It was actually one of the things I was really worried about this year because I didn't know what was going to happen with the focuses and basically would that starve things like multi-site? As you know, if you contribute, there have been some really cool multi-site improvements this year. Yeah, I know. They're mine. Oh, thank you. So I think the answer is we keep doing what you did. We're definitely saying no to, like, features outside of the focuses. But that still leaves a lot of room for improving things. And, in fact, coding style improvements that just came in. I see Gary is, like, looking a little guilty there. There's a lot that we can do to sort of clean up things that WordPress does, improve, like, to bring ourselves to our own standards or, like you said, make some kind of catch-and-low-hanging fruit from different areas of WordPress, like multi-site. So the only thing that I ask as people work on these things is that they really try to make as user-centric as possible. The improvements, I love it when we do back-and-improvements to multi-site. I would love to see some of those admin screens become more intuitive. And I bet there's some designers in this room that would love to help with that. Yeah, and we're working on the APIs at the moment. So once those APIs are in, we can do a lot of really cool stuff. Cool. Like, the main stuff for me is, like, performance stuff. That's not really glamorous at all, but it does actually affect users. Like, shaving milliseconds off here on 29% of the web is kind of a big deal. And that's part of the focus as a tool. It depends on how the performance improvement is going to look. And this is the thing. There's a lot of tickets on Core Track that we're saying we're not going to work on this year because they're a distraction. But if there was something that shaves 10 milliseconds off every single page, yeah, that would, of course, be worthwhile, depending on how much it affects otherwise. So I would say that the doors aren't closed for WordPress development. And in fact, one of the things I've been excited about this year is that we had even an increase in number of contributors. And what was it? No, you said 140 new contributors to WordPress entirely in 4.9? Yeah, something like that. So we're still getting new people contributing to areas outside of the focuses. Gutenberg is not counted in that at all, by the way. That's all completely separate. And I think we can keep it going. So, and thank you for your own contributions there. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I think a question from Morden is on the bingo table, so. Hello, I'm Morden from Virtual Reality. Can I talk about something other than Gutenberg for a second? Yeah, just get a little closer to the mic. Closer to the mic, sorry. Last year I asked a question by Proxy about WordPress using its power to influence how the web evolves by having representation in the bodies that make up decisions about the web. And I think your answer was something along the line, so I've just do it. I'd like to continue that conversation. Because we have great people in our community that are working on accessibility that should represent WordPress in the fora that make decisions about accessibility. We have great people who work on GDRP in Europe that should represent WordPress in the fora that make these decisions. We have people in the US that work on political decision around that. But we don't have a methodology for making decisions about what WordPress stands for. So no one can actually represent WordPress in any of these groups. So we have all the power and none of the ability to do something about it. So how do we, as a community, make decisions about what WordPress stands for and then find representatives to front those decisions into the bodies that make decisions that impact us and our users so that we can truly help democratize publishing and do other great things like just bring democracy to the world? Yeah. So first, thank you for the question. I think you're highlighting that there's kind of two issues embedded in there. One, are we, how do we know that we're aligned so that the person doing the representation is actually aligned with something that we can call WordPress? Whether that's the, could be the community at large, although, but we're more of a representative democracy I think so, with perhaps aligned with other leaders. And then two, we don't really have a way to recognize or give autonomy or authority outside of developer roles and like leading releases. And we just kind of just introduced that for designers. We don't have that yet for accessibility and in fact, or many of the other areas that we work on. And in fact, sometimes like, we might roll something back because the committee, like typically how these groups operate is like committee and the committee might agree on something and then someone else like a lead developer might say, oh, that's not actually what we wanna do or what we wanna happen. What I would love, love, love, love, love is for more of this to not be as committee driven as it is today. Because what I've seen happen personally, I'm not gonna call it any of the groups, but sometimes like the lowest common denominator of what can be done. And that's not necessarily gonna move us forward. So to this sense, but a lot of people I think have been hesitant to step up and like say like, okay, I'm the head of XYZ for WordPress. If there were, I could meet with them regularly. We could have like a every month or two meeting and like these sort of things could come up or we could make sure we could put something to some sort of a quorum to say like, okay, so-and-so is gonna go to this meeting at in Brussels, I guess, where all these things happen or whatever it is for whatever kind of area that you're talking about. I would love that. So to this sense, it's been like pulling teeth sometimes to even get some of the committees to elect a lead. So to this sense, we can have more of that. I think that would enable exactly what you're talking about. So I think there is a bit of a vacuum there and it can be filled by people who step up and I would love for it to be. So what are you gonna lead? Besides virtual reality. I'm not touching that. I didn't mean to put you on the spot. Thank you so much. You're making it accessible. Thank you for the question. All right, last couple. I try to do these a bit faster so we can get out. I'm George from Pennsylvania, also from actual reality. And with last year's three focuses being customization editor and the REST API, customization ship two releases, the editor is going to be the main focuses for this release or for this coming year that just leaves the REST API behind. The REST API will be getting some ancillary benefits as Gutenberg develops and starts using it more. But there's one big gaping void in the REST API and that's authentication. And there is no real good way in core currently and my doomsday scenario that keeps me awake at night and leaves me scared is that some app is going to start building a cookie jar to ask for username and password and just do cookie based authentication to grab nonces and then fake the REST API as though it was a browser. What are your feelings on the possibilities of OAuth potentially with app broker versus basic auth versus application passwords versus something custom and actually getting something shipped? Well, first I want to say that I love cookies. So just full stop there. I want that to be on the record. In terms of you nailed it and in your question you kind of had an answer that I expected to be a lot of improvements to the REST API this year as we start to use it ourselves. I don't know if that will be, I don't know if authentication is necessarily the highest priority simply because I don't think that our APIs are good enough that they can really be fully used outside of WordPress because they're not able to be used inside of WordPress either. And then two, some of the predicted sort of we talked about a Cambrian explosion of things built on the REST API once it was in core and it's fair to say that hasn't really happened. Like some of the post people did even some like the example apps like don't even work anymore even though the API is now in core and we haven't seen as much built on it. Again, outside of kind of what I would call the agency enterprise usage of the API which has been really super awesome. All the things I had on slides and stage in previous years was all kind of enterprise-y stuff. If there were to be an app built on, like let's say I'm making super press and I'm gonna use the API to post a WordPress or whatever, I could have a plugin and in fact there's current APIs that would make it easier to install plugins like that would kind of enable some authentication that would be right for my app. And it could be a secret, it could be something that go off, it could be lots of other things. I guess there's a long way of saying that we're probably not gonna work on on 2018. It is not outside of the realm of possibilities and more and more sites being on SSL does open up some things that weren't previously there. But I just, based on the usage, it doesn't look like this is a huge need. Like something with the page builders like there's 20 of them out there and some of them are really big and some of them are full companies like we know this is something that there's a huge need for. Plugins are often a good indicator for that. Based on the plugin use and plugins built on top of the REST API and like doing it off and everything like that. It doesn't look like there's a huge need for this in the community right now. So it's probably best for it to remain in plugin territory for enterprises and agencies and other people to use. Okay. Thank you. All right, we got the last couple. Hi, I'm SJ also from the UK. Ah, UK representing on the questions. Yeah, we're hearing numbers. I was, I've kind of buried my head in the sand with Gutenberg a little bit and then come into this, the presentation was great. So thank you. And I was 90% scared, 10% excited before and now I'm 90% excited, 10% scared. One of the things that scares me is when we look at how the block array is added into custom post types, which is brilliant. Users can still just add to that. So if I'm creating sites for clients, I'm now giving them the onus on the design. Whereas what would be great was a way to limit that so I can create blocks that are in a content, in a custom post type and then say, and that's it. Is there going to be a way to do that? Yeah, Matisse is nodding. There'll be a way to lock it down. Okay, cool. Thank you. Thank you. Wow, that was a quick one. Hi, my name is Ian from Jacksonville, Florida. And as a front-end person, I look at the improvements to the Gutenberg editor and some of it's really exciting, but it seems like there's inevitably going to be a few shortfall areas, for example, determining visibility based on breakpoints or say typography that changes sizes. So your 80 pixel font is not 80 pixels on an iPhone or something, but then getting into the just providing a billion options, that's kind of a slippery slope too, because now you just have this huge thing and you have to be opinionated in some places, not others, but how do you guys envision you're going to draw the line between this is something you need to customize versus this is really something that you're just going to have to figure out your own solution for, for front-end responsive styles. That's a tough one. We're probably going to air a little bit more online people to do stuff, including perhaps mess it up, but give themes and plugins the ability to bring in the guardrails even more. So we'll see. I mean, this is part of the reason that I think we'll learn a lot developing 2018, the theme 2018. For people outside of WordPress that we call the themes of the years is very confusing. They're like, wait, you're working on 2015? What's going on? So I think we'll learn a lot through that and that's one, we'll probably get the most polish there, both by other themes adopting it and by our own usage, particularly around the customization of Gutenberg. Okay, thank you. Hi Matt, I'm Maria from Lawrence, Kansas, and I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about our philosophy of forcing a change on our WordPress customers as big as Gutenberg is making them instead of opting in, having them download a plug-in to disable that functionality, knowing that we have so many themes and plugins that yet to build any support in for Gutenberg in four months' time. I'm wondering if you should just talk a little bit more about that decision. Well, we'll have to figure out, some of this is still to be determined, right? Today, there's a completely opt-in plugin and we want to get that used more widely and widely and widely. So there's that kind of thread happening. At some point, and that's also means that people can start to develop support for it in their plugins and themes. Plug-ins and themes can also update before then to say, turn Gutenberg off. And then finally, we're giving this kind of explicit opt-out that'll turn it off even once it's in core. So what we're trying to do is basically provide a gradual ramp on a few different axes to bring people along with it. Now, of course, it's a big change and this is one of the things that I hope that we will learn from Gutenberg because we're gonna need to make more big changes in the future. Like, to the extent WordPress is still successful today and when I look at other CMSs that have stagnated, I'm talking about stagnating growth but it's because their user experience stagnated. So we need a way to evolve that and this is kind of our latest best practice for how it is and kind of where we're, this is the idea for how it's gonna happen and of course we'll tweak it as we go along to give kind of the gradual ramp ons to lots of different people. And there's also community aspect to it as well. It's the meetups, it's the work camps, it's the developer outreach, it's everything that we're doing, the videos, this being online and tens of thousands of people watching it later. Like, all of this is gonna be part of like bringing the community along for what's gonna happen with Gutenberg. Not unlike when like a new iOS comes out or something, like they present it first and some people watch the video and then like, you know, blogs write articles about it and it might be in the news and like, you know, hopefully we're not in the news with this update. That would probably be a bad thing based on how WordPress gets covered in the mainstream press. But I hope that the efforts of everyone here, that by the time that Gutenberg ships and core, it'll actually feel a little bit anticlimactic because for many people, the future was already there and now it's just gonna be the default. I feel like there's a little bit of a difference when you compare something to like an iOS update. I opt into that versus right now we have automatic updates within WordPress and there's a majority of WordPress customers out there that don't follow along with the community or even know that their theme is retired and that there's no more support for that theme. So I just have a little bit of concern that was echoed a lot in the usability test we did in the last two days. Yeah, and we don't do automatic updates for major versions. And Gutenberg will come out in a major version. So people for those who don't have it configured to auto update, they'll need to click a button for it. But yeah, this is one of the struggles. And that's why, that's why we're trying to provide all these different levers that people can customize and giving as much heads up as possible. When we first started talking about this in January. So by the time it comes out, we'll have been kind of beating this drum for well over a year. And I think we'll have reached, it doesn't mean it'll be perfect, but we'll have made our best darn effort to reach as many people as possible and then be on hand to help folks who maybe are surprised. Like we'll definitely make sure that the forums are well attended during then and we'll maybe even open up a chat or something where people can ask questions. Like whatever we can do to help people, we want to. I mean, that's WordPress's way. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Yeah, clap. You've got the very, very, very last question. Thank you. I'd like to start by saying I'm not that worried about Gutenberg. And years ago we didn't have custom post types. Now they're the norm. And I think if there's a need to polyfill anything between old and new that our community will take care of that, I am a little bit worried about React. And I know there was some talk about having a JavaScript framework agnostic approach. I'm just wondering if that could happen and do we need to worry about the folks at Facebook pulling the plug? Mm. Yeah, I was really worried about that too earlier in the year. As you all know, like we announced we were gonna move away from React and within like a week Facebook changed, took out their patents clause from the license which allowed us, which was really smart of them because WordPress didn't said, okay, well, we've been doing React for a while. It's all this awesome stuff in React 16 that we've built in to Gutenberg that actually makes it more performant and make all this sorts of things. But at the same time as a result of that kind of what is gonna happen, we got some of the lead developers of different JavaScript frameworks. Evan from Vue, we got some of the lead Google folks like all came in and at the weekly JavaScript chats that happened in Slack. And that was really amazing because we went from where like state of the art in WordPress was like, backs, what was it they call back? Backbone, yes, thank you. So long, I forgot the name. To now where we're generally regarded as like one of the more modern open source JavaScript code bases with the Gutenberg project and we're getting the lead developers to actually check it out and offer the help. So right now, Gutenberg is still on React. And so think of that as the de facto to continue and all the licensing concerns that I and many others had were gone. Facebook could of course say that React 20 is gonna add something bad back in but the advantage is now that the GPL version is out there then we can branch from that point. So it wasn't like before where the clause applied to every it's much, much better situation than it was in the past. So and we definitely would fork it if Facebook did anything like that and we would have a ton of support. It turns out because as you saw with the patents thing like it turns out most of the open web agrees with us for how this should be licensed. So I imagine that we wouldn't be alone in kind of continuing the react forth there perhaps even existing React developers would move over. So that's kind of the de facto. We still though want to do kind of the bridges between some other frameworks and Gutenberg. That's nothing to announce now but you probably saw some of the chats and some of the demos that show that you could write something in view and then compile it to Gutenberg or write something in different framework and compile it to Gutenberg. That sort of cross-compiling I think could be interesting especially if it opens up the Gutenberg framework to other JavaScript developers that might not be interested in it as it's currently written or the fact which is already happening that other open source projects might adopt Gutenberg and allow them to integrate it with better without having to use React for their whole caboodle like it looks like we might. So I don't have any like huge announcement there but that's kind of the de facto and the way we'll probably continue. What I will say and what I hope you've learned over the past 14 years of WordPress is that we take these principles very, very seriously and we will fight for them and we'll stay true to them as long as we're alive and kicking as long as I'm alive and kicking certainly. So don't worry too much and I'm looking forward to what's coming. Thanks kindly. Thank you. And with that, we're all done. So thank you Paul. Thank you.