 You guys can hear me. Oh, there we go. All right. Thank you I'm probably gonna forget I put this here. So but anyway, all right. Thank you for the opportunity to come Here and speak It's been an exhausting couple days in Athens I have I brought my eldest daughter with me and we already did a lot of sightseeing gorgeous city And I set a new record on my Fitbit 30,000 steps in one day. So I'm exhausted clapping. Thank you so I'm from the US from Atlanta, Georgia I've been married for 24 years and my wife and I have four kids like I said, I've got my oldest here Lily and I've been using WordPress full-time since 2008 I tinkered with it in 2005 Because I needed a blog so it was a good fit I run an agency called Clockwork WP and we build basically marketing websites and we have three developers two designers and a project manager that is running the show Very well where I can travel and take some time off and come here. So it's pretty awesome I'm also an organizer for word camp Atlanta. We have word camp Atlanta coming October, I think it's October 14th and 15th So if you want to come to the US, you are welcome All right setting the scene here How many of you guys were guides gals What not? How many of you guys were developers in the year 2000 building websites? We've got we've got a few so a lot of a few of you are gonna know the pains in the headaches of building websites back then in 2001 I was working at basically a It was basically a phone system company, but because they it was a phone system company they had Fast pipes, you know the internet they had t1s t3s and whatnot and they also did web hosting and they brought me in to help them out with maintaining all of these Websites that had no functionality. They were just static marketing websites Basically, if you buy a phone system, hey, we'll throw a website in there And I just maintained the content so static HTML CSS wasn't even really a thing then it was it was starting, but it wasn't really standardized yet and while I was there working a client came in and said I need a Website that will give me where I can list all of my properties. They owned properties in Colorado And they needed to be able to upload images needed to put the square footage of each property in there. So basically You know looking back sounds like a custom post-type, you know with some some extra metadata But there wasn't a way to do that The developer that we had on staff was too busy. He was doing ASP stuff and So we brought a contractor in and the contractor decided to use this new programming language called PHP and once the project was completed it was handed over to me and I started learning PHP and This was you know pre YouTube at any time. I need to fix something Today I just go to YouTube type in how do I fix this plug-in or how do I fix this even even you know? How do I change the oil in my lawnmower? You know whatever we didn't have those things I would I would go to Barnes and Noble and Which is a bookstore And I got a bunch of PHP and my skew all books and I learned how to program make make the pages that I was maintaining more dynamic and That kind of predated all of these frameworks that we have like Django Ruby on rails things like that all those great Great tools WordPress predates all of that stuff. So you're gonna hear me talk about WordPress kind of in a negative light And it's not because WordPress isn't any good. It's just it was really basic at the beginning So anything I say in here that sounds negative. I've made a living off of WordPress ever since so I'm not I'm not complaining in any way form or fashion All right, so the early years How many of you guys used WordPress before 2005 got I See to that sounds about sounds about right so WordPress was a Or is a fork of be be to or cafe log and it was discontinued by the original developers and obviously it didn't have at least its Source didn't you know die. It turned into WordPress, you know, because of Matt in Mike and what what they did All right, so I don't understand So the first version of WordPress was 0.7. I couldn't find a copy of 0 7 if you go to the website go to wordpress.org you won't see a 0.7 you'll see a 0.7 one if anyone has the 0.7 Then let me know I'd like to check that out to see what the difference is It's probably a typo or something that that that's the difference It's Okay, so I decided I Took a bunch of screenshots instead of trying to set up. I figured here I'm not gonna have a computer where I can give you a demonstration of Of WordPress on a living server So I did screenshots and it makes it probably a lot easier for me to which is good and So just because something is open source doesn't mean that it's gonna be always easy to set up I spent too much time trying to get a version of PHP 4.4 on a on a machine I tried to go with a 2003 Version of Debian which is a Linux distro and I kept failing I would Download an ISO and it couldn't find all the packages. None of the packages. I was looking for I could I just couldn't find it And so I wound up finding a version of Debian on the way back machine Which hopefully it didn't have any viruses or anything in it But I I got it up and running and eventually after about like three hours of Hacking at it. I got WordPress up and running and it looked really ugly like like this. This is what Whoops This is what a Browser look like you know around 2008 ish 2007 on a Linux machine not the prettiest thing in the world So I was able to switch over to use Chrome or Chromium technically and now I've got these Better screenshots, but this is the first version of WordPress. I could get up and running This is what WordPress look like it looked real simple The log in looks pretty much the same as it is now It's a little prettier now, but with the logo We have an updated logo now and the buttons or or the links here are are moved around a little bit But it's pretty much the same Zoomed in version of that When you log into WordPress there is there was no dashboard It was just boom start writing. It was a very simple platform, but Sorry, I'm learning this Hitting keep hitting the wrong button. All right, so you have basically things that you're going to be very familiar with within WordPress because you have post and edit you have This was called team on them on the menu, which now is called users You've got options categories. The template is where you can edit The the wasn't a theme. It was basically the first version of WordPress was a one pager That displayed the blog You have the links here, which actually links has kind of Disappeared it's I think if you wanted to use the links you have to drop a line of Code into your functions up PHP file To have links working so that kind of fizzled in this disappeared We have the my profile and then you can view the site and log out But one of the things that's really cool is that there's other terms that you're going to be very familiar with You've got the title excerpt post The categories, you know the published status all of these things that are the exact same Terms that we use today When you go in you edit a page Shouldn't say page post You just would scroll down on that page and you can start at edit or you can add a new one here When you edit it pretty simple You can drop in an excerpt. You could change the title very similar to what what we have today The delete delete this post is a little little different But overall the terminology that we see in WordPress today is very similar to what we had 20 years ago Your team management which later was renamed to users you can You can edit your users there and this is kind of unique right here. It says to delete a user Bring this level to zero then click the red X so you can edit the user change the level from 10 to 0 and Then a little X mark will show up and then you can delete it and then when you delete that user all of its posts will disappear forever of just like today I had to use not today in Previously I had a client contact me and say the home page is messed up And I said what were you doing that? Well, I was deleting users and I said so you didn't reassign the post to a valid user So that I'm assuming was fixed, you know later because that's a pretty Dangerous thing if you only have one one or two users and you delete your post You don't or you delete that user all the posts are gone We have the options which we still have an options page. This one is just pretty much the time zone how you want the time to to display notice there's no There's no actual time zone. You can't specify Which time zone you're in so I would assume it would have picked it up from the server which I Guess worked back then would be a little problematic now We've got categories. You can add edit remove delete Just like just like we do today and then we have Just built in this this is turned off on I think about like WP engine when you log in to WP engine if you have a site on there by default they have the editor turned off if I if I'm remembering that correctly and Pretty a pretty dangerous feature to have have right there where you can just edit The page because WordPress display just one single page you can edit it right here and notice there's no There's no No head Like WP head or WP footer or anything like that that comes in in the next next version I think in 1.5 and then basically at the footer It just closes so one one simple page to display all of your blog posts, which is Pretty simple pretty basic, but it it got the job done The other feature that we had is managing links Like I said, it's kind of disappeared now. It's a feature that it's still in the database, but it's not it's not They'll built in any more But I thought it was kind of cool that Matt still gave credit to the original Company that or person I guess that that created the B2 Blogging platform and then if you go up here if you hit my profile it would actually do a pop-up and This just kind of really shows the age here. We've got ICQ and AIM and MSN instant messenger and yahoo. We don't see Twitter Facebook, you know the thing the social media links that you would have today In fact, I think a lot of these services are probably dead. I can't tell you the last time I used ICQ It's probably been 15 plus years since I've used ICQ But that was those were the tools we had back then so and that's basically WordPress version 7.01 that's what it looked like and that's how simple it was but it started to me a revolution where Now now WordPress has 40 plus percent of the of the market share within This version you can tell that everything was still prefixed. I guess not everything but most things were still prefixed with a B2 Prefixed so you have instead of a WP dash config dot PHP file. You've got a B2 config dot PHP file the only things that are Prefixed with WP is the WP admin and WP links which the links doesn't even exist anymore And we just have a WP admin If you look at the source code It's kind of funny. This is the install script Which is slightly different than how you install WordPress now actually now I mean how many of you guys actually manually install WordPress now now we have Installers that make it super simple to do But this is what the install script Looks like and I'm just showing the source code here just to show we've got It's messy basically try. I don't know how to say it nicely. We've got CSS Injected in here where this probably should be on a dot CSS file somewhere we also have a closing head tag and No opening head tag and I sat there for five minutes You know before I got in front of a group of people like does it say heads somewhere? I couldn't I couldn't find it So it's kind of the first version of WordPress had incorrect HTML markup oh And then the last thing this is this is actually really cool this Link here that's in the CSS It still works. So they they kept that image Live, you know for 20 years, which that's that's pretty cool I know that's not that big of a deal, but I think it's pretty awesome and then if you If you look at the installs install script and you scroll down a little bit you'll see some pretty funny stuff Things like here on line 158 said did you this is after you? you'll Go to the page and it'll you'll try to put in your MySQL username and password and then when you Hit submit and it works it'll pop up and it'll say did you defeat the boss monster at the end great? You're ready for a step for step two which That just shows that I if I showed that to a client now where WordPress had Comical things in there they probably wouldn't have taken WordPress, you know quite quite as seriously, but I mean it's cute And in a little funny and then you'll also see on the same script We were injecting SQL all on on one page where that should you know in a bigger Framework a more mature Framework you would separate your SQL and your CSS and all that stuff into different different files But this was the first version And then through the years WordPress progressed it was in version one came out in 2004 and we have Basic blogging like we did before but we also have spam protection and In this version we we have everything not everything almost everything prefixed with WP now except for there's a couple RSS feed Files that are still prefixed with Brick B2, but overall it was becoming more WordPress labeled Stuff and this I thought this was kind of cool the admin directory here was There's only files in there There's no directories if you go if you look at the WP admin now There'll be nine directories which probably has there's probably 500 files you know in that directory now because of all the functionality that we have in In 2004 We got the plug-in architecture coming in and the sidebars We're coming in so you'll see in the files There's a WP content directory with plug-ins and one file plug-ins, but we're starting which is good This also in this same year. I'm just gonna read this The market leader in the blogging tools industry at the time was movable type They announced a new license term which were not That's we're not like by many of the users basically it forced it gave WordPress a big push Because a lot of people moved away from movable type and moved over to WordPress So that was one of the first big pushes that that we had and also in this version version 1.2 It this wasn't labeled correctly. It's still identified as version 1.0.1, which is kind of cool In 2005 and this is where I think WordPress started getting a lot more Something that we're familiar with as someone that that has written a ton of things This this part to me was super important 1.5 This is when I first started using WordPress and I was just using as a blogging platform But if you're into WordPress and I'm gonna run out of time here, so I'm gonna I'm gonna skip a couple things That was a quote from Matt basically saying we did this Which is we created where you can have themes and instead of WordPress being on a single page. We now have All of these archives and not archive. So we have all of these different page templates, which as a themeer That comes in super handy because it gives you this hierarchy That I've stared at for hours on end trying to figure out why I'm not pulling in the right archive or template or whatever But so that's that's been in place for 18 years now And this is what the theme looked like in 1.5 the default theme Which that's really what my blog looked like too because I wasn't that creative. I kept it blue and blue and boring in 2005 we got a better Interface we got a text editor Finally javascript was used for the first time on the pages So when you edited a page edited a page it wouldn't you didn't have to reload to see it Which is which is pretty handy and then a kismet was also in this package and I think it's in still in there Today and this is what the interface look like Starting to look kind of familiar And now WordPress kind of as a CMS almost We have here. We've got short codes We have a revamped admin interface the media library is better And this is where I started theming and getting into Really just breaking WordPress going in and figuring out how to do stuff and that's when I started building themes This is the interface that we we got and Looks familiar It's a little prettier than the original one someone spent some time on on theming here This is when I started really using WordPress and this is where I consider WordPress as a Good enough system for me to start building everything on WordPress This is where custom post types came in and with custom post types. We got a Ton of functionality, you know where I could build anything for any of my clients you needed some kind of You need articles you had pages you had Your blog, but I need to do like news articles I could do a custom post type to do that which which gave me Pretty much everything I needed to start really building building WordPress. We also got a much prettier Interface and a sidebar on the left as opposed to the menu being on the top in here and then in 2011 we got an improved media library the flyout menu that we still use today and There's a drag-and-drop upload file for file management in 2015 and I'm jumping pretty pretty fast here But we got the rest API and I use the rest API Not not that often how many you guys edit or use the rest API? That is a much higher number than I expected normally in the In Atlanta when I do a meet-up and I ask people very few people are actually using the rest API We use it regularly at our at our company. So Gave us a ton of functionality in 2018 Version 5.0. We got Gutenberg. So the official page builder within WordPress and Then 5.5 and 2020 we got the lazy loading we got the auto updating for plugins and themes which finally broke something for me for the first time about a month ago, which was kind of annoying but Overall, it was it was working really well for me. It was a bug in one of the plugins and then we got site maps improvement and then 2021 with 5.5 we got a full site editing which I still have yet to use But I'll be using it with a massive project that I'm doing this fall and we're gonna Finally be using Gutenberg to build the whole site And now we're almost caught up, but that that is it so I Am up for questions if anybody has any questions And I said I would forget about my water Thanks now to my mic and I think a round of applause for Aaron, please. That was a great talk So as as Aaron mentioned we have a QA now for 15 minutes So we've got space for questions one question per person Please if you've got anything else you can ask Aaron after the talk Do we have any questions from the floor one right there, please? That was great Aaron. Thank you I'm interested to know what you did for your client with the property when you didn't have the custom post type So that was we built a complete custom PHP Website so You know there was property dot PHP that would do the SQL stuff. So I mean it was Just a lot of HTML and PHP Probably poorly written stuff. Yeah, any time I look at code. I'm even if it's six months ago I mean, that's why I kind of feel bad like dogging on WordPress because you know, I'm I'm Critiquing something that's 20 years old, you know And I look at code that's six months old and I think I can't believe I wrote like that But so that that was just a custom PHP build so I have no idea I quit that job a couple years later And the site was still up. So I don't even I don't remember what it was. I don't have a copy of the source code or anything I'd love to look at it. That would be kind of funny to see Thank you. Thank you. Do we have another question from the floor? I've got a question for you There's one. Oh, there is one over there. Okay, great. That's cool. Let's have that one. Thank you, Connie Is it on now? Yes. Yep. I'm sorry from Finland Can you remember when it was the first time you ever saw anything about security? Mentioned in in any of the WordPress releases. I I think that over the years it has gone from being Not really security aware at all To being awfully bad at security having an awfully bad reputation, but then it has over time now With the plug-in update automatic updates and things like that. It has been evolving To a very positive direction from my perspective, but can you remember from the developers perspective or the the actual open-source project perspective when Somebody mentioned a thing called security for the first time That is a really good question. I Got in 2013 I got about 20 sites hacked and I'm trying to think of What I could have done to It was it was that I won't mention the host host host Hosting company's name But all of the sites got hacked because they had they had something that was not standard and we there was a Animated Pirate skull like bouncing and spinning around on the on on all of the websites on that server But that was like 2013 and I know I didn't have anything like I don't think word fence Did it exist in 2013? You know, I don't know. I I don't remember I Don't remember any anything What it when it comes to that I Really should like go through my email and and find that out. I I don't remember I know that when when those sites got hacked around 2013 That's when I started I moved hosting and I started taking it more seriously But I don't remember from from the wordpress perspective and you know, I don't I don't know so Wish I could give you more so sorry Do you have another question from the floor? One there in the middle, please He's got the mic. Oh, sorry. Yeah, shall I go first? Sorry. You're a lot further from a microphone It's great to look at wordpresses history over the earth and all it's very easy to see all of the things We've gained. Do you think there's anything that we've lost from the simplicity of the earlier versions? spicy question Yeah, that's that's hard So I Once worked on a website and once I logged in I said I'm not working on that site So I can't say I really worked on it there were 104 active plugins on on the site and I said I said I'm not touching it So I I would say that one of the things we've I don't know if we've lost But one of the one of the problems is that we do we have so many plugins that do so many things and people don't Think through a lot of times and it's not at their own I mean, it's not their fault if they have they have a tool and it's so easy to push a button You know to just oh, I need something to add this and this and this and you want to have an all this repetitive You know a plug-in to do one thing, but you know it so I would I would say what maybe maybe we've gotten gotten a little too bloated in the aspect in the plug-in world but You know, that's I don't know. I can't tell all the sponsors here You know that you know that but and it's it's not them It's just we just we have a lot of I think it's users just tend to add add a lot So it's more of a user a user issue or lack of knowledge Yeah, I tend to tell people when we build a website when we build a site We wound up having about ten plugins Ten ten to twelve and I tell people if you wind up having twenty plugins You probably need to rethink What what you're doing and there's probably a custom solution that needs to be built and now when I say custom Probably custom WordPress. I mean because we build everything Within WordPress because again I see WordPress as a as a platform more so than a blogging platform or even a marketing You know tool it's to me. It's a it's a it's a tool to build anything that you you can imagine so I Think we had did someone else had a question in the middle. Okay I'm glad I have a hat on because it's blocking the light Just curious for you being in the game for so long have there ever been times where you thought like no I want to do something else in WordPress Yeah, and I and I've I've I've gone through that actually in 2008. I set up about ten different CMS's and kind of compared The Joomla Drupal concrete five CMS made simple all a lot of them and I wound up WordPress wound up winning And I love it and no, I don't I don't think I'll ever I tell people that There are so many websites that are based on WordPress right now if WordPress were to die today I probably will be able to be an old man that is Fixing WordPress sites because there's so many of them. There's so many, you know, there's gonna be legacy You know stuff if it disappeared today, there'll be legacy stuff, you know That has to be maintained for years years on in And I think I'm too old to change You know at this point, you know, I have so much Vested in the knowledge of WordPress. It's just so much easier to build build things on On WordPress versus I mean like in 2006. I learned some Ruby on Rails stuff Loved Ruby on Rails But it's a lot more it was I was doing websites for like three thousand four thousand dollars, you know And a Ruby on Rails project, you know, it's it's gonna be it's gonna need a lot more You know than that so it was just much easier to use WordPress then but yeah, I don't I don't think I'll ever Veer off and less for some reason it goes, you know, super super crazy You know off but I mean we have we have such a good community where I just don't think it would happen But yeah, I think I'm gonna be an old guy. That's Editing WordPress until I retire so Thanks, that was a great question. Do we have any more questions from the floor? We've got a few more minutes left Well, I've got one there that's all right So over the course you've shown us over the course of 20 years of WordPress back when you know people still had Blog roles and things like that right before Stack Overflow horrible horrible thought But what do you think has been the change with the most impact over that 20 years and was it the hello dolly plug-in? Um Hold on I started I started trying to process my question before I Give me the last part of the question. I was any joking. Oh, you're joking. Okay, I The the thing that changed the most I mean, I know that that Gutenberg's a big deal But again, I haven't started using it I use I use beaver builder to build most of the sites now I'm gonna have an enterprise site that I'm building in the fall where I'm gonna use Gutenberg because I need that site to last me 10 years, you know I I can change out page builders if it's just a marketing site that has little, you know functionality I can change that out every three years, you know when they decide to rebrand or whatever. That's not that big a deal So I think the thing that changed the most. I mean at least for me I know that the the rest API is super important, but that's to me more higher level Companies, you know that that'll be accessing that and to me that the custom post types just has to be the most important thing because that that we we used to go in and If we needed let's say Press releases or something the company had press releases you would create a press release category You would hide it from the blog and you display it on a specific page and it was such a headache To try to hide to make WordPress do what it should you know be doing So I to me custom post types was definitely the number the number one thing in 2010 And that's that's when I I didn't feel bad Trying to use WordPress because it became it became a CMS to me at that point as opposed to a blogging platform so Great. Thank you Do we have any more questions from the audience? Okay, if not, we'll we'll wrap it up there. Thank you very much. Thank you again to Aaron