 Howdy, howdy, everyone. Can I say, howdy, DC. Do you have any natural, national harbor people here, residents here? OK, OK. Just checking. Anyone go on the Ferris wheel? Nice. I saw a graphic with a Ferris wheel with a WordPress logo on it. I was like, man, we got to do that someday. Sometimes it'd be a WordPress. Sometimes it'd be an M. Sometimes it'd be an E. Anyway, I'm going to talk just a little bit about WordPress in 2023 and beyond. For those who I haven't met yet, my name is Matt Mullenwick. And about 20 years ago now, out of a single comments on my blog, Michael Littlenly started working on what would become WordPress. And we did the first release, was it May, I think, of 2003? And it's been kind of amazing watching WordPress grow and also growing up myself alongside all y'all. How much has changed over the past 20 years? You've seen me in a variety of hairstyles and beard lengths. I'm now my more conservative, like, trying to look like a CEO look. But anyway, a few weeks ago, we did our version 6.3 release on August 8. Who was involved with contributing to that, by the way? Raise your hand. Let's get around to applause for these folks. Please stand up, actually. Yeah, you worked on 6.3. Quick, quick, come on, come on. Yeah. You saw a few of them, but there were actually over 640 contributors to that release. 207 of them were completely new to contributing to WordPress. And we did about 1,100 features, bug fixes, enhancements, performance improvements, accessibility improvements. It's a lot to talk about, so let's take a quick look at it. So we got a really fun video, a really beautiful one. Some cool music. There are thousands and thousands of little details in there. Like, notice the space theme? Like a little homage to our opening keynote from NASA, which is pretty cool for those who don't know. The NASA website's coming over to WordPress and getting some really cool stuff. My favorite is probably the Command Palette, which is essentially like a command line for WordPress. You do Control-K, Command-K, right? And immediately go and jump to any part of it. It's pretty cool. One of our most feature-packed releases ever. But WordPress never rests. So right around the corner on November 7th, we're going to do version 6.4. We're just coming out. It's going to be our, yeah. We're keeping up our pace of three major releases per year. We tried to move it to four, but it seems like three is the right cadence for us right now. 6.4 is going to be similar to, I think it was 5.6, and that's going to be an underrepresented gender release squad. And there's some cool new features that are going to be in it. First I'll talk about is the new default theme, which will be 2024. This is actually introduced on Contributor Day. We're trying to be tail of the steam, not just for sort of the SMB use case or Site Creator use case, but actually for creators and bloggers in this. We had 31 people contribute to it at Contributor Day the other day. And you can read about the theme. Yeah, that was pretty cool. You can read about it and get involved on the make.wordpress.org slash core P2. Other cool features that are coming up are font management. So what you're going to see here is actually, you'll go, it's got the fonts that are built in. This is a library actually coming from Google right now of other fonts. And when you click on this, what it's actually going to do is import those files from Google, upload them to your site, load them to your site so they can load completely locally, which is something we heard from, yeah. Something particularly our European WordPress community members have been big on. Hot linking from Google is actually good for performance if it's already cached for other people, but then the loading on your own, like no request, go to Google. So people like that. As we heard from some applause, I wouldn't expect any applause on that one. Next up, simple, but I'm really glad we're getting this in the core, which is Image Lightbox. So for those who aren't familiar with it, a lightbox is this idea that it's always never been really great in WordPress. What happens when you click on an image or an attachment? And what we're showing here, I think we're going to change the name because right now it's like called behaviors and that's kind of a weird thing to call up. Basically what will happen is like now on the front end, when you click on an image, it will kind of go full screen and zoom, and then you can navigate with keyboards, it works great and beautiful on mobile, and you can also zoom in further on that. Ta-da! Simple, but you've needed plugins for this forever. And so having like a super lightweight implementation in core is pretty exciting. So that's two of the features we want to talk about. The rest is being defined. So if you want to be part of defining what's in 6.4, please get involved. You can go to make.wordpress.org and join our WordPress.org Slack. You know, we've got different channels for different interests in WordPress, including one that I'm about to announce a little bit later, a new one. But anyway, so with the end of 6.3, we are coming to the, essentially like not finished line, but I'll call it checkbox for the second phase of Gutenberg. For those who don't remember, when we first announced Gutenberg many, many years ago, we said there's going to be four phases of its development. One is the user itself. So taking our old classic document-based editor, which was really hard to like line images and moving beds around. You had to use short codes to like do a lot of different richer functionality and move out all the blocks. So that was phase one. Phase two, which we call customization, is making it so those blocks were usable not just inside a post or a page, but you could actually modify the entire site. And that's your seeing a lot new block themes, that video. You know, you're able to do things now by just clicking and moving things around that in prior years, you would have needed to know CSS or hire a developer or something like that. And that's part of our mission to democratize publishing. WordPress is kind of like the original no-code tool, right? Before we're like, I mean literally when I first started blogging, like I'd like upload files and modify a file and upload it and move things around. And then like the first CMS has automated a lot of that. It's all part of this kind of like efficient curve where things that used to be hard, what technology is beautiful at doing is making it more accessible to a larger and larger audience. Phase three is now what we're heading into, which is actually the phase, I think I've been saying is the one that I'm most excited about because it's all about collaboration. So imagine this now taking WordPress and editing something from being single player to multiplayer. So what you're seeing on the screen here, it's looping, is those two, the little purple and the green, you might not be able to tell, but those actually have names underneath. I actually can't see what the names are. But that's basically two people editing the same post at the same time. Who's ever overwritten someone else? That's what... Thank goodness for revisions. But now you'll be able to, whether it's sharing a draft with someone and getting feedback on it, whether it's collaborating on designing something together. Now, maybe if you're an agency or developer, you can invite a client into it directly, get on the phone with them and talk through it as you move things around. It's so, so powerful what you'll be able to do with this. Again, like I said, moving WordPress from being kind of a single player to a multiplayer tool. Of course, anything that builds on top of Gutenberg, which all the best page builders and everyone is doing now, will get all these features for free as we start to build them in the core. And it's also really cool that just built into browser technologies now. You can do this in a fairly efficient, and in some places even kind of peer-to-peer browser way, which is pretty neat. So it's... We're just now getting started with this. So if you want to have an impact on WordPress, go to make.wordpress.org slash phase three is where we're going to be talking about this. So it'll be all about collaboration. We're actually going to be redesigning some of the admin to modernize it a little bit. The first big redesign, probably since MP6, I don't remember what was that. It's going to be workflows. So like allowing plugins or maybe even some stuff in core to register different workflows. Like, for example, maybe this role can edit the page if someone else has to approve it to publish it. The command palette, revisions, we're going to get really much cooler on revisions. Block library, media library. I'm also really excited about finally looking at the media library. Like in that video, when you saw it, everything was looking really modern until the media picker popped up, right? And they were like, oh, this feels a little, this is a little 2,000. So I'm glad to return to that. And also integrate things like openverse. Those aren't familiar with it. We actually took over the creative common search engine. It's now hosted on WordPress.org and it's called openverse, which is a beautiful library that indexes the whole web to find creative common license content that you can use to integrate with the attribution or not if it's not required. So that is what is coming with phase 3. Looking forward to seeing some of you all on the P2 slacks in the future contributor days as we define this together and start to build it. So thank you very much. That was one of these. Got just kind of two final things I wanted to end with. Oh, that was loud. Thank you, Tyka. One really cool thing happened the other day here at Work Camp US and I wanted to tell a story about it, which one thing that makes not just open source, but I think particularly the WordPress community, really powerful, is how people come together. And you see it even at the booths and at the parties. Companies that in theory compete with each other are spending time together sharing more stories. Often even now sharing code, we all work together on the same common code. And it's kind of a beautiful example of what I think I was originally inspired by open source and I've done my best to try to bring into the world and simplify with my own companies. This idea of sort of like a positive sum capitalism where we can all win together and find areas to work together because we all have so much more in common than we have difference. One thing that has always been a little tricky about WordPress is that it's both a good and bad thing that there can be so many plugins that do the same thing. I say good and bad because that's great because it allows innovation that can happen. You kind of get almost like an evolutionary like natural selection some plugins thrive over the long term some kind of fade away. They inspire each other, good competition actually makes everyone better. Bad sometimes in that as a WordPress user like if you go one plugin you might be kind of locked in to it and you can't interrupt. This was a big part of the inspiration for creating Gutenberg because we were seeing a lot of innovation from different kind of page builders and other things but I started to hear from plugins like SEO plugins that said hey we're having to rewrite our plugin to integrate with 10 different builders can you create some standards in core something that we can all agree on which became Gutenberg and Blocks that everyone can just build on top of and then the data models everything we're calling this WordPress LMS who's familiar with what the LMS stands for it's a lot of people actually more people that the new or democratized publishing mission for those who don't know and LMS is a stands for learning management system and it's a way to basically adopt the content management system for like online courses in ways that could be adjunct to something in person they could have quizzes, they could have different things anyway this week tutor LMS, learn-lifter LMS and Sensei all got together so these are four different plugins that provide LMS solutions and the conversation was around what common data models can we do so it's kind of two tracks one was like within the WordPress world like can we actually agree on like using some of the same SQL formats so like we have common like column names and tables since we're doing some very similar things or we can at least create some abstractions between these different LMSs could we make it so that there's not a lock-in and that users can get the freedom and choice to switch between these without having to port over all their content then second is that are there industry standards I didn't know a lot of this but I learned some there's like something called SCORM I guess there's some other like was it XAPI or like there's a few different things there around industry standards around like what other software might be doing or even some governments like ask people to put their content into and are we as a set of plugins within WordPress again we're always about user freedom and user choice so are we doing everything we can to make sure we interoper those standards have import or export or converters or things like that the group came together we decided to kick it off with a Slack channel so there's now hashtag LMS in the WordPress.org Slack it was kind of fun because it's at the brainstorm stage obviously there's other LMS plugins as well that weren't able to make it to WordCamp or included yet but now everyone involved in this space or who's developing a solution around it can come together kind of agree on some de facto standards we'll turn it into a document on a make blog and then essentially now in the future if you're choosing an LMS plugin they'll probably be like a badge or something that folks who like apply to these standards and have the interop will have that badge and so you'll be able to make an informed choice as a consumer in choosing again freedom is not just always about the license in WordPress we have the GPL license the four freedoms sometimes it's about like the practical interop so very excited to that let's give a round of applause to the folks who came together on that Ryan if I tell you didn't get me thinking about like how can we get this kind of interop in our SEO plugins to build our plugins and probably a bunch of areas y'all are familiar with that I don't even know about like how can we get even when there's going to be different plugins now we definitely want canonical plugins for some areas and we're going to do a lot more of that but where there might be lots of different solutions maybe dozens even how can we get them maybe using some agreeing on some data models or something like that so that there's a more standard and performant way to put all this in it's me this is really about long-term thinking you know like I said we're about 20 years in the WordPress and we're thinking for the coming decades perhaps even beyond how do we create a thriving so go back to Josepha's word community software base something that's always evolving one of my favorite inspirations here is there's a cool foundation called the long now foundation they're involved with you might have heard about this 10,000 year clock so you haven't seen this so cool I actually got to visit it it's like in a secret location in West Texas and they're trying to design something of course thinking on 10,000 years that can survive perhaps even a collapse of civilization so the clock is kind of interesting that it always shows the time when you kind of wind it up so they're imagining like 5,000 years from now so it might stumble across this cave and go through it and like kind of figure out what this thing is and it's almost like a Rosetta stone like way where it like it explains how the clock works and how it kind of ties into some solar energy and stuff but it needs to not be like solar panels because that might not be as longevity the other fun thing that long now foundation does is when they talk about all their years on their website they say like we were founded in 01996 which is really nice right because obviously at some point we're going to need to talk about years and 5 digits not 4 so they're planning ahead it's like for WordPress I remember when we switched from being like int to big int I was like oh yeah now we're ready we got 64 bits of storage now with big int is 64 right who knows my sequel here I should have looked that up before the talk other thing we just did my company automatic on wordpress.com we just yesterday announced a 100 year hosting plan which was yeah thank you this was both a really interesting exercise as a company like what would it mean to provide service for 100 years what's it mean on top of the things we're built on like for example domains you can only register 10 years at a time so what we're doing is when someone signs up for this we're going to register it for 10 years then add a year on top of the 10 every year until 90 then those last 10 years it'll kind of come down hopefully we'll get some renewals on this it got us talking a lot about like what's this for and it was interesting how different people brought different ideas like some people really thought about this is something you buy at the end of your life actually one of the ways I was thinking about it because I've had some more God children being born recently I'm up to 14 or 15 now and I was like okay can I get them when they're born you know I've been buying domains for them I was like okay but how cool would it be that hey now for 100 years you both have a domain and something to run on it it was really difficult to think what this thing should cost and thinking about like both for the known and unknown cost for it we ended up deciding on $38,000 which in some ways is a lot and that's a really nice Camry or Corolla or something in some ways I wonder if it's too low because we try to model an inflation and different cost of underlying things like the .com registration or domain registrations but again what does it look like to provide this service including with support 50 years, 80 years from now with technology we're using we have to do like VR support or Metaverse support but those thought exercises are really interesting it also got me thinking about lifetime licenses which I think we should stop doing the WordPress world also like if you've ever worked with an accountant or an acquirer they don't like when you have those because essentially it's an open commitment including often with support how do you recognize that revenue there's all sorts of reasons that I think offer a 20 year plan or something I think when you're saying lifetime it sort of cheapens the word so if we're really thinking in the long term what promises we're making to our customers I think we should re-examine those practices as well so I'd encourage you all as we're in the United States capital or kind of right next to it but we're going there for the social later the outside about the Smithsonian Museum how cool is that gosh if you have any extra time in the DC area the museums here are really like one of a kind in the world and it's pretty amazing to walk around the architecture the monuments I really admire about the city how there is a lot of honoring for the past and I think from the founding fathers as well like thinking about the long term you know I'll put you another quote from some brothers like democracy it's yours if you choose to treat it well choose to keep it what was that quote I forget it best system as long as you can keep it there's all these sorts of things that kind of show also like the need for iteration they need to be able to patch things like the constitution and you have to get two thirds committers from the states right that's a lot of LGTM right on those pull requests I also think about like more how open source can influence things like how legislation is created you know you hear about how people do scripts or how bills are made and they're emailing around PDFs printing things out at the last minute how much cooler could something like source control or get or something else applied to some of these areas so what we learned in software about working together both in person but also from around the world applied to these areas so think about that long term thinking as you admire the thing beautiful stuff around us at the Smithsonian and hopefully it did explore a little bit later and that's where we're going to end it because I don't want this to be too long term of a talk and thank you we're going to invite Joseph up back on the stage and we're going to do some questions and maybe some answers great job come join me in my office I also have no idea how the Slido thing is going to work and this is an experiment it's much like being at this venue is an experiment one we might not continue but we've got the slide this is actually not the slide this is something else we can't see that thingy where we see all the questions and so this is here so we can see it sorry I'm just doing housekeeping while you all are watching yes so you can scan this QR code or go to slido.com and put in that number with the hash slash pound or no anyone you got it you can figure it out I believe in you it's kind of a cool history that we have 1770 or 776 1776 1776 and I think you can also vote on the questions so part of what we were trying to do with this was allow people like whatever so this is now I won't feel bad if you all look at your phones right now let's see how good this wifi is and kind of vote up the questions because that way one thing we're experimenting with this is it's not just who gets to the mic fat first you're trying to hear what most of you would like to know um okay let's see if this gets to 10 votes I'll answer it oh 13 okay okay it's also here if you would like to see it so first question is do you still blame nason we're gonna have to explain this one answer nason please stand up should I blame you for this question this is this is a fun double entendre as well because I don't know this could have the same command but the SVM you could write SVM blame and see who is responsible or the last person who committed a particular line of code and it's kind of fun to see like oh where did this function come from and the most humbling thing as a developer is when you do that and it's your own name that shows up who wrote this oh me I still have a number of lines in the WordPress code base as well which is both exciting and a little scary but we no longer blame nason for things and in fact I would generally like to announce a jubilee of blame I've just heard a few in some conversations or something like oh I heard you don't like this company or WordPress doesn't like this or that and I would just like officially for 2023 to reset all of that to neutral so if you think I like something or don't like something let's reset that to zero and just build from scratch because you know we're not going to make it another 20 years we're carrying around a lot of baggage right so this is one of my favorite uses of the word jubilee and most of the time no one knows what I'm talking about so maybe it's just me and you on this stage that know who we're talking about yeah so look it up should we go by like top voted one or how do you want to do this however you want to choose you want to take this top one though what is the greatest existential threat to WordPress sure or actually any of these four you want to okay I can take what is the greatest existential threat to WordPress so sorry I'm trying to figure out which hat to have on do I have my admin operations hat or do I have my WordPress community hat okay so here's the thing the greatest threat to WordPress as a community is always whether or not we can still get together and collaborate in an effective way because so much of our community is built on the way we get together and the way we collaborate I really loved at the community summit how we saw people talking through really contentious conversations and still like respecting one another as people for the most part and really like trying to address the root issue as opposed to resorting to just kind of general ad hoc attacks on each other and the way that we're coming back together post COVID and the way that we are kind of looking at the future of our event series the event series does so much work on behalf of this project I've said it a couple of times there's a podcast somewhere if someone wants to like share it so other people know what I'm talking about but it does like 17 different jobs on its own these event series it brings people into the project and it teaches them how to use WordPress it teaches them how to work with each other how to work remotely how to work online like it does so many things and so I think that a little bit the way that we are at 50% reactivation of our meetup groups and I really really encourage everyone to like if you don't know what a meetup group is or if your local meetup group is just not meeting and you can't figure out who's helping them meet get out there and do something about it because this is the lifeblood of what makes this project work and what makes open source work and so that to my mind is the greatest existential threat to WordPress especially in the current climate that we're in yeah thank you what I like about that is the greatest threat I don't think is any competitor it's ourselves which is exactly what you just said I'll jump to a little easier one that we could go quickly a book you enjoyed recently I'll name two Ken Luz paper menagerie one of my favorites all time he was the speaker this morning if you weren't here which I can tell a lot of you weren't check out that video as soon as it's up and of course you can always cheat by going to live stream and rewinding really special talk and a more recent one and actually I thought about him here as a speaker maybe we'll do it at future work him is Will Godaire I think his name is he pronounced called Unreasonable Hospitality and the reason I thought that could be interesting to bring in to the WordPress community is just like we all do service to our customers to our clients to each other to the WordPress users like and it's a book about he's one of the sort of two people along with Daniel Hume behind 11 Madison Park which kind of wrote it's a story of how they rose from kind of like a brassery in New York that not a lot of people knew about so literally being the number one restaurant in the world on the 50 top restaurants list and so and they did that not just through amazing food but also amazing hospitality and one of the first to really innovate on that and I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned for the WordPress community any books you want to throw in there so I'm in the middle of a book right now I have been feeling like I was missing reading but I've been in a reading rut and so if anyone has books to recommend I got out of my reading rut on accident I was going through my library app and accidentally checked a book out so I'm reading it and it's woopsie it's called Eleanor Allefant Allefant is completely fine something it's yeah and it starts out in a kind of dark place but also talks about like the power of community and how one or two people can bring them together past things that they're struggling with I'm only about 40% of the way through but it's nice it was a nice accidental checkout of my book cool if you have recommendations you can just share somehow yeah number one here from Jess what does the future of WordPress look like if search engines move from links to AI generated responses I think about this all the time I've been spending a lot more time in San Francisco I've been talking to a lot of the AI companies open AI I've read Journey who else, Anthropic basically embedding really deeply there because again I think it's the future I told you nine days before chat TBT came out to pay attention to AI the rest of the world since that release that was kind of the what would you call that moment when everyone started paying attention to something maybe the Netscape moment the panic the excitement I'm just saying words that you know I like it so one thing that I'll say from all of those conversations is that the folks making this although these initial versions do kind of like again like it's just giving the whole answer there's no reason to visit the site it's interesting to see the experiments on things like Microsoft's part it's a solution a lot better and it's very imperfect now but I can tell you that every single one of these companies is very much thinking about both how they attribute and then maybe also how they do like micropayments or something like that so like places where content came from or creators and also how they can enable creators to like you know create more and train models on your own stuff it's way better now and so how that could be like a co-pilot or like an assistant editor for you or something like that available on demand the so I think the future of WordPress is actually more exciting than ever because the the places where you refer to or the visit or being an authority about these things something that becomes cited or maybe even directed to perhaps even a future of WordPress looks like where we're providing the API so that's let's say you asked a question to chat GBT it could call out to your website to run an additional query to maybe get results for items in your store or something like that so I think there's actually going to be a lot of integrations and I don't know if it was obvious from that 100 year thing but I think having your own domain is really important and we should all be thinking about like what our homes on the web look like feel like and also like that sort of search for differentiation like it was already a little bit on the social networks I think when people are in like chatboxes all day that's not the final interface for these things and what's it going to look like when maybe you talk to something but then it takes you in a browser directly to something so maybe it's not like you're in a chat box or it's just like a little Siri like icon that pops up on your desktop or something so I think that might be one of the models but again I wouldn't try the predicting thing in AI more than like two months in advance and even then you feel a little like who knows what's going to happen too much yeah let's see when these are anonymous I can't tell who's asking I realize that's the point unless is there someone named anonymous here I know so hi nice to nice to finally meet you oh okay and what was your name Blake so Blake has the accessibility standards question we can skip to that one can we ensure that more Gutenberg developers are aware of accessibility standards well talk to them they're here it's a little bit of a tricky question because it assumes they don't know about accessibility standards and I would actually argue that they care about it quite a bit did you have a follow-up there sure let me try to repeat that so because people can't hear you we have no mics here so let me try to is that alright if I try to summarize so the accessibility team that met at the contributor today felt like the Gutenberg developers were maybe thinking about accessibility later on in the process and tickets were being created and testing after our feature was developed not early enough I will say again that your question assumes that they're not doing this so it's a little bit like when did you stop beating your wife type question and on behalf of the Gutenberg developers I will say they deeply care about accessibility they can name to you all the standards and they're still going to mess it up so there will always be a process so I would say if there are certain things like you literally believe they don't know about WCAG 2.1 or something like that like let's do a session get together and talk to them or maybe like just reach out to the people who you feel like are doing a bad job at this and say hey can we do a zoom about XYZ everyone always wants to learn I will say that coming at it from why are you doing this wrong is probably not the best place to start or why don't you care about this is not a good place to start I would start maybe a little bit more with hey I'm seeing the same kind of ticket come up over and over again how can we maybe get to this earlier or some place like that that was Gutenberg developers are great and we just want to make sure you keep getting greater the other thing you do is become a Gutenberg developer so you know like I encourage everyone to learn JavaScript deeply I think we're 7 years into that now and so like if you have a background or passion for an area whether it's design, accessibility, usability testing like I'd say learn a bit of JavaScript you can actually get involved with these things directly which is pretty exciting alright next up can you speak more about where you see the design of the WP admin dashboard going can I take this one? yeah there are some posts out about it there are some posts and will those be on MakeCore? those are on make.wordpress.org I believe design yep that's a yes on design slash design you can leave out the I believe correct but for me it's really about what I'm actually thinking about most is how much knowledge it presupposes so we have amazing documentation and tutorials and learn and everything like that but it's always someplace else that relies on someone clicking on the help thing or knowing to go to the documentation or something like that and there's so many opportunities to be in line with the interface just a few extra words could be really really powerful or thinking about how we name things so I had a great conversation with Rich as we were going through the slides here this is called behaviors what does that mean the behavior is like when I think of that word what do I think of I think of maybe like a kid getting in trouble at school and then you go into that it says default no behavior and then lightbox each of those what does that mean if you don't know what it means even the word lightbox is kind of a jargon it's terminology as I was going through the slide I made sure to like try to explain what a lightbox was so if you didn't know you would kind of know that means like a little inline thing where you click and it pops up without going to another page so if that's what we're doing when we teach WordPress to someone can we just say that in the original name of it and can we put some of that inline the other place I've been thinking about this a lot that I decided to work on so personally I'm thinking a ton about media and content moderation because I realized that spam is starting to get pretty good I think I got my first LLM spam maybe it was written by those spam cans in the art gallery I don't know but it was a really good comment that was totally contextual it's my blog post and a little unusually long it's like four paragraphs and from an IP address I'd never gotten anything from before I'd never gotten a comment from this person that was a bit spammy and so but how easy would it be if I was brand new to blogging to not really realize that what this was was an automated comment that was just trying to get a backlink to the website so like what could we do to show that comment to maybe show the reputation of the website and to like say maybe hey sometimes people leave comments just to get links like look at this with a second eye see if they have a gravitar or something like that so that particular thing how to get help information into the dashboard in better places for people who are in current need of help as opposed to like trying to figure it out in a handbook came up in the community summit quite a bit and there were a lot of people that were very interested in helping to kind of research that help us get that figured out I think that's a great thing to include in that redesign I heard a yes thank you everyone so think about that as well as you all go through the WordPress interface try to look at it with a beginner's mind and ask yourself or when you're teaching other people WordPress which I hope you're doing frequently like what words do you find yourself using or explaining things and actually a really cool way that anyone can contribute because this kind of like what to call things and what to name things is as who said assignment one of the two hard things naming things caching and off by one errors well like what can we do around that so LMS question long term planning is great and the LMS improvements will be awesome how much support can we get behind a project with the fields API which is making progress do you even work on the fields API at the contributor day with everything around it I saw a hand and a half so maybe that's also something there's also other work camps that contribute today so we could do like a little table on that or something I have to admit I haven't seen the latest with field API so it's making progress I'm not aware of the latest latest this is as you might have seen like Drupal is actually exploring Gutenberg and so it might be actually really cool if Drupal adopts Gutenberg which I think is right now the best thing about WordPress so it's also looking like what's the best thing about Drupal it's doing they have like some awesome custom they call it CCK they call it fields API they call it fields API oh in Drupal it's called fields API now did it used to be called CCK oh it did okay alright I'm just old school I think my Drupal or originally drop.org user number is like in the hundreds or something it was very early on the Drupal front it actually predates WordPress by a couple years So, I'll check that out. I'm gonna tell you a secret, because it's a secret to us, because we can't see what's in here. There are 87 questions in this queue. Oh, yep. We don't have that much time left. We have 35 minutes. And we are not fast question answerers, Matt and I. Let's try to end about five. Okay. Yeah, so let's call it 15 minutes. Just because we've been sitting for a while. I also don't know when I got that text, so it could've been. Oh. We're ending at five. You wanna read this top one? Sure. Guys for developers on smaller agency teams that are having trouble keeping up. I have a top down suggestion and a bottom up suggestion. The top down suggestion is smaller agencies why not have a host your own learning day inside your teams, like inside your company? I know that if it's like three or four people it feels kinda weird, but also like that's the best number of people to learn with. You don't have to feel too stupid because you're not around 150 people on the internet. And yeah, you can learn a lot by just like puzzling through problems together. But then the bottom up suggestion is yeah, go over to learn.wordpress.org. That is the newest extension of the training team in the WordPress project. And there is a lot of stuff that is in small chunks. And so you can see like little bits as you go as you need them just like, I don't know. I wanna call them like tidbits. Morsels of education because I think I'm hungry. But yeah, that's what I would suggest. I know it's hard to keep up with all of it all the time though. I'm gonna suggest a really awesome podcast too. Hosted by someone here on stage with me. Oh, hello everybody and welcome to the WordPress briefing. Weekly podcast. You can subscribe to it in Pocketcast which is open source or your favorite pod catcher. And it's on WordPress.org slash news as well. Yeah, slash news slash podcast. And I have listened to, I believe every single episode. Oh wow. They're short, they're sweet, you get some Josepha and it's a good way I think to keep up with what's going on in the WordPress world. That's true, that's true. Thank you Amy who asked that question. Next up we have awesome Paul. Good to differentiate from all the other Pauls I guess. Actually I think all the Pauls in this room are awesome. If you were starting all over with WordPress and still starting where you did, what would you do differently? The number one thing I would do differently is change the column name of ID in the post table. That's quite a number one, all right. It's capitalized, it's also just ID, it should be post underscore ID which is the convention we took with naming future column names. I actually think maybe our migration stuff is good enough that we could change this now and we've had the database abstraction layers for a while but man that drives me crazy. I love a good, I love a good column table structure. I still love SQL. Something I originally learned, thanks to my sister here, Charlene. She's a professional genealogist but was doing genealogy research more than 20 years ago so before WordPress started and before there was really awesome stuff you could upload your genealogy files to and things and so we made a website, MullenWig.com, still up there that I was trying to post all her genealogy research. It turns out a great way to learn about relational databases is relational family trees. And so you can kind of see me learning SQL on there because it's like here's a page of a person and then here's everyone else with the first name, Louis, and everyone else born in 1959 and everyone else sort of different pivoting and stuff so I think this is a skill actually that would be a good sort of thing. I feel like some newer developers aren't as familiar with some basics of SQL and optimization, learning how to use its plain queries and stuff so maybe a good thing if you haven't looked at that in a while to loop back to. I wasn't there when it started but I would like to add one that I would start. I would start doing the word camps earlier. Ah. I think that the thing that really differentiates our project from everybody else and sets us apart is this community and that is when that all really had an opportunity to bring in non-developers and design and all the things and so I would, I know you did the first one ever so I'm saying please do this back in future you and so yes that's my answer. It was pretty early, 2006. It was pretty early. If you wanna see some of the story of that, check out my blog, ma.tt. I posted a blog post a few days ago called I love word camps, cause I do and that's some of my favorite days of the year and a little bit of story about how word camp got started, the inspiration for the name, everything so if you wanna get some little tidbits of history check that out. As you're choosing the next one I'm gonna tell everyone don't worry we're gonna answer these questions later. Oh yeah, the ones we don't get to now we'll put online, right? Yes, as always. Cool. You wanna read this one, the Darren one? Yes, hey Matt, as you think of the longevity of WordPress what is your succession plan for your leadership and vision in the project? From Darren, thank you Darren. Yeah, my vision is it outlasting me for sure. Someone replied it was morbid but you might have seen actually one thing that as our community has gone longer and longer we deal with all parts of life. We have new babies born, we have people who were babies now start to contribute to WordPress. We have kids camps, we also have some people who we've lost and we now have a page at WordPress.org slash remembers so WordPress.org remembers to honor those people who were members of the community, members of people who contributed, who organized things who were really part of this tribe with people who choose to care about the mission of WordPress, a place where we can have their name, link to their website, link to their profile, tell a little bit about them and when we posted this I said, you know, I'm gonna be on this page someday. So I was like, oh Matt, but I actually meant it in a really positive way and that I hope that hopefully not soon but that someday this page is gonna far outlive me and be something that when we designed the page we actually thought, okay, how do we make this something that can be around for many decades to come. So how I think about it is much how we approach this long-term thinking. So like what are, what's really key to, what's the magic that makes WordPress work? That's right. What are structures that are really conducive to iteration? What are structures that get us kind of wound around our axle sometimes? What does good leadership look like? Where do we mess it up sometimes when we try and do things? Where do we, where has it gone really well? And yeah, that's all I've got for that for it so far. Okay, great. Another AI question for you. Do you wanna do a not AI question? Maybe 10 minutes? We can do it. Well yeah, let's see. Any plans? Think more about it. Do you have any, just more relational? Yeah, we can go through some of these quickly. Any plans to utilize or create prototyping tools such as Figma or Paint Pot in order to get from the design tools straight to WordPress? I actually think, I'm not familiar with Paint Pot, so this is my first time hearing about that. I'll check it out. Figma is really cool. I think just got bought by Adobe. Probably a great tool, but really, really effective. We've been using it a lot. I have seen some like Figma to Gutenberg translators. I think that's gonna be a very cool area. And if we don't, maybe we should have like an importer or a canonical plugin for that in the future, because I think that is really kind of interesting. I also think, one thing that's really cool, particularly because this collaboration features in Gutenberg is you might be able to do some of the stuff directly in Gutenberg, which would be really interesting and really cool as well. So right now Figma is, in my experience, one of the best around this collaborative design editing and you can bring design systems out of the things. But when you can be kind of closer to the code and the CSS and everything, like, you don't need a Figma representation of your design system or a way to translate that into code if you're just able to do it all with the blocks of Gutenberg. So that's how I think about it. Cool, thank you for that question. You wanna read the next one? Do you plan to do anything about making WordPress SQL databases more relational, sorry it moved, have different tables for different post types in the near future? No. Nailed it, next question. A longer answer is something like the Fields API or other ways of leveraging, particularly as like new versions of my SQL or MariaDB, or maybe even canonical plugins for things like elastic search, allow different types of querying. When you think about it, most WordPress databases are not that big. I also think that for plugins that are doing more interesting things, like WooCommerce is moving to the high performance order tables, order system, order, what's the S stand for? Order storage, which is basically like a custom table for orders. There might be data models which are good to move out of the post sort of structure, but it's easy to go over to a table there, like all of a sudden you're doing like different, like what happens to comments? What happens to post meta? What happens to like all the other things that are built on the post? And posts can actually scale to like tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions. So a lot of good stuff fits in there and what's really about to me like the usage model for where you should move it out. This one's good for you, so I'll read it if you want to kick off on it. When we talk about diversity, what about language diversity? We have events in big community outside of the English language. Are there any efforts to improve this? Yes, immediately. So, so I agree that we need to start having more word camps, meetups, all the things in languages outside of English. Fortunately, we currently are doing the, hate to say it, next generation exploration. Oh, what's the house of next generation thing? It's Star Trek. Anyone want to sing Star Trek real fast? Oh, yeah, here we go. There we go. Yeah, so there is an exploration going on about that right now and I do absolutely think that we have space for language centric word camps. We had, I think, one, maybe two during the pandemic and they were really well received, they were really well attended and I think that we absolutely need more of those and so, yeah, I think that we need them and there is currently a discussion happening to advocate for those and I agree, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Nice that we started with a yes after a no answer. Should future work camps have more talks on business and marketing? Do you want to one, two, three it and see if we agree? Sure. One, two, three, yes. Maybe. Oh. Take a box of this. Yes, propose one. So please, don't think that there is like people who are speakers at work camps and people who aren't. We are all potential work camp speakers and each one of you has something interesting to say. Each one of you has a story and I'm sure many of you have beautiful stories about business and marketing. Propose that as a talk. I'd love to see more of it in the future. That was a five minute timer, noise for us. Cool. From Jonathan, how can we attract, I'll read this to you, I answer this one. How can we attract more experts from tangentially related disciplines to contribute and become more involved in making WordPress better? Tangentially related as opposed to the things that it's actually related. What do you mean tangentially, tangentially? Take that call. Oh, I see, I see, I see. Yeah, WordPress as a project and you've said this for years, we have a lot of difficulty getting outside of ourselves. We really love being in here. It's really welcoming. Everyone's super nice. We really want everyone to know how to do everything easily and well and with us. And so it's very difficult to get outside of our bubbles and so we do, I think, lose a lot of that really smart kind of opportunity from people that are in the Drupal community. Although I know that we have like five of you with us. Thank you. Including Abby. And so yeah, I think taking our knowledge that we have from the WordPress project, whether it's PHP, JavaScript, our success with Gutenberg, and taking it out into other communities is a really great way to do that because they don't know how to find us either. And so if we go to them, that's a great way to do it. Yeah, and something I'll personally try to contribute here and you saw some experiments with it at this work camp US was having both Ken Lutox and Simon Willisons. Simon being maybe the first, maybe last speaker that doesn't run WordPress for his website yet. He has a custom CMS on it, it's pretty cool. But someday, maybe. But maybe 10 years from now, we'll be around. Don't worry. So on my part, I do a lot of reading, a lot of spending time in other communities and I will try, my best to try to bring in some speakers from outside and to some of these flagship events. US is probably the easiest, but I'll think about Asia and Europe as well, to see if we can bring us with different perspectives, whether they're tangently related or not. Great. What is the biggest lesson you've learned in your professional lives over the past two years to the two of us? 10 years, yeah. Heart. Oh, sorry, past 10 years, what did I say? Two years? My bad. Huh. I'm gonna start with an answer so you can think. Yeah. All right. One of the things that did not come naturally to me when I started learning, when I started leading, was learning how to keep people with me and with the project that we were working on when we were doing things that were very hard. And fortunately, by the time we got to Gutenberg, I kinda had an idea, because that was very hard for the community. And so I have learned not necessarily how to prevent all of the problems or all the crises, but certainly how to, when you encounter them, because we can't predict the future, what to do when you get there. And it was really basic stuff when I started. It was things like thank people when you find that they're in a really tough time with you, when you are there helping with the tough time, like be clearly there, like say, I'm here, I'm helping. I don't know if I can help, but I'm here to try. And the third thing that was really clear to me later was that especially when I'm the one who created the problem, because I do that sometimes, I have really big ideas. And then I'm like, hey, developers, can we make zebras out of WordPress? And they're like yee-jee. Yeah. They promise a lot of stuff to me, I think, that maybe is not the best. But when I do come to people with a problem that I absolutely am not capable of having a solution for, I make a lot of effort to be available as early as possible so that they have an opportunity to ask me all the questions so they can understand it well enough to make their own autonomous choices as best they can. And that's it, just be clearly there and doing the thing. That's the thing that was the hardest for me to learn was how to help people through difficult times. And especially when I was the one creating the difficult time, because then I just felt bad about it, so, yeah. I think my answer is actually kind of related to that, maybe inspired by that. Around the importance of communication. And for me, that was, I think it's Frank Luntz who says, it's not what you say, it's what people hear. Yes, it's what they receive. And so the importance of like, if someone doesn't understand you, the onus is on you to think about how you communicated it and go back to that. Studying things like nonviolent communication. And also I'll say like, so much of communicating is about listening. And I've been doing a lot of work and listening in the past 10 years that I think has been really renewative in terms of like, understanding better what the needs of y'all, sort of having a pulse on the community a bit. And if you haven't tried meditation, recommend it as great apps like Calm or Waking Up I think by Sam Harris. Like there's a lot of really good ones. It's kind of nice because you don't actually need anything. You can read a blog post about it or book or go to a retreat. There's a million different ways to do it. But all of them I find are great for creating that awareness that allows you to both connect with your thoughts and truly be present and listen to someone else in a way that's really important for communication. So yeah, maybe I'll summarize it. The next hill to y'all is try meditation. I think that was our last question because I think you have some thank yous and goodbyes over on that slide. Oh, awesome. All right, well, thank you, Josepha. Thank you all for the great questions.