 which are WordPress, but basically ask anything about WordPress, agency, work, products, product development, Google, things like that. Very mind, everything they say is based on their own personal opinion, it's not on their companies, so just to make sure that everyone's got the same page. I think you're wrong here and wait a minute. And then I think it's too nearly too. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. All right, so I'm gonna introduce myself, I'm the moderator. I'm sort of a hands in, my fingers in many pies, I used to be a developer, I'm now doing regional role with sales and accounting, accounts, so in accounting. And what else do I do? Oh, I do community work too. So I'm gonna ask them a bunch of hard questions if you're the guys don't ask anything. So I'm gonna get everyone to introduce themselves, they only have one mic, so bear with that. Asif, yeah. My name is Asif, I'm CEO of WeDevs, it's a WordPress product company. We created several WordPress plugin serving in a lot of different other functions. And I work very closely in content and content distribution. I spoke about like why the spread and everything matters. And I'm personally working with the WordPress ecosystem for almost 13 years. I started using WordPress since 2004. And I love these conversations, like what we as a plugin business people or plugin developers feel is what this is going in which direction and what we will see in 2018 after Gutenberg. And also maybe the future lies in 2020 or even beyond. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Zion, I wrote you as PHP expert from Singapore. Hi, my name is Zion. As you said, I'm from Singapore. I'm a Zen certified engineer. So I currently a senior software engineer at the startup. We kind of do like mobile apps for clients such as Kofu or Bundonki. So I dabble a bit with other languages like a bit of Android, a little bit of Java, Ruby, but mainly PHP. So WordPress I use mostly on a personal basis. Some years back when I was doing freelancing, I used WordPress for my clients as well. Next, we have Moriyama Mayuko from Japan. Hello. I'm my own Moriyama and I'm a freelance web developer and I work by myself. She does a lot of community work like mentor's work camps. She helps meet up, survive and grow into something bigger. She travels around Asia to make sure that everyone gets to help the deserve as much as from the foundation as possible. Did I get it? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. So Jenny. Hi guys, I'm Jenny. I think among all the other people here, I'm probably the most beginner when it comes to WordPress. So personally, I'm a blogger as well. I like to blog about my travel journey and I just recently moved to WordPress. But I know that's not interesting. But professionally, I work for Google. I work with a lot of web publishers, particularly for actually for the whole Southeast Asia, but particularly for Indonesian Philippines. And if I can say 70% of my publishers are using WordPress. So yeah, that's me and WordPress. It's your choice. Thank you. Thank you. I guess that leaves me. That leaves me. Just listen to her, I guess. I'm a former freelancer. I was gonna say reformed freelancer. I've been working with WordPress basically since 2008. And I built a lot of websites and now I help other people build Red Splice as a project manager for Human Made. That's a lovely description. So they're here to answer any of your questions about agency, products, WordPress, maybe how Google works with WordPress, how PHP handles WordPress, definitely development to products, to community staff, well from the hard topics to the user topics. And project management, definitely. So if you've got questions about a JavaScript that might work too, within WordPress. So, anyone has got any questions? Yeah. There's a mic coming to you. Hello everyone. Is it on? Not yet. Hello. So I want to ask that for a blog to be very famous and to earn money, should it be a business blog only? Or it can be like a story, poems or a philosophical kind of a blog? I don't want to answer that question. So can I repeat, your main goal is revenue, is that true? Yeah, I mean so, if it has to get famous and well noted. So there's a lot of pathways that you can do. When if your goal is revenue, there are certain, depending on the pathway that you want, some publisher they look for niche topic. They are currently underserved. So in the way that they don't really have much competitor, they have the market share for that topic. And then we'll be even a plus if that topic is the kind of topic that is bidded by the advertiser. And you can make significant amount of money out of that. And there's also publishers that write out of their hobby. So because their quality content, even though the topic, even though the vertical is, has a lot of competitors, but because the fact that they're passionate about it, they are an expert on the topic, people still choose for that website. And there's also people who wants to easily get a lot of page views. So even though that topic probably are not bidded by the advertiser that much, so it depends on what you like and what you think is your strength. If you feel that your strength is building exposure, then getting a lot of page view to get a lot of revenue, probably the good pathway. But if you think that your strength is a certain particular topic that maybe quite niche, still create for it anyway, because there might not be much competition, people are looking for it, there's a demand for it. And even best, maybe advertiser actually bidding for it. So I hope that answer your questions. Okay, thanks a lot. Welcome. Follow up answer? Yeah. So let me talk from the content perspective. Just two weeks ago in Wartcam, Ahmedabad, I had this session. Actually the title of the talk, people will explain the title of the topic was like, we all say the content is the king, but if you don't know the distribution, you will not actually reach anywhere. So content is very important, it's very creative, it could go to a long length, but at the same time you need to understand your demography, you need to do everything right in terms of the description. So you could create your first blog post, know what you will read it if you don't distribute it properly. And there are so many lies, there are so many wrong information online about SEO. So that's very important to getting found online. So the important part will be like, instead of trying to cheat Google to rank better in search, it's very important to do it properly. So you could really write for normal people, not for the boards, not for the Google board and other things. So that will be the main goal. I have a question with Rajini. Can you please help me with this question? You know, look into Google AdWords, right? You're able to see the CPM rate and all the demand. That is a good, like, because the lady asked us, asking how to get famous and revenue. Is that a good data source or to check whether the topic on niche? Because you know your Google Ad was quite powerful and they've got the niche here, they've got the keywords. So do you recommend that to check for the niche, to research on the niche that we should go into? You think Google AdWords for AdSense? When you, I think it's a reverse way of, like, you check the demand for. Well, if you have an AdWords account, you can always do that or you can even use the Google Keyword Planner that I think our friends from Damien, Damien Oh was sharing. But in case you were wondering, is there like any tool to specifically looking at the RPM? We will say no, because the reason why its demands and supply is the one that determine the revenue per impressions, right? So if we state A, currently there is no demand and people hear about it and then people write about it, suddenly supply increase, it's just like stock market, the price will decrease. So that's why it is something that is really dynamic, I would say. So again, one thing that I will emphasize and one thing that maybe I really like about Damien Oh's presentation is that first, always focus about the users and then write something that you're really passionate about, not for the short term, but for the long term. Because if you're always looking for the content that has a high RPM, it takes some time for you to create that content to get the traffic. And then maybe if let's say the RPM happened to drop, you haven't get the yield yet, you won't receive anything. So always have the right motivation first. Thank you. I have a second question for, I have a second question for Dee, who is also expert in the project management. How do I utilize Google Apps for like outsourcing, offshore outsourcing? This is a more direct, more targeted question. Do you think a Google Apps, no G Suite, right? There's a Google G Suite. Have you experienced in outsourcing offshore with G Suite? Do you think it works? Have I experienced outsourcing using G Suite? Yes, Google. No. What software do you use for, don't mind you share, what software do you recommend for your projects? Okay, now that's a question I can answer. It varies from project to project. So for some clients, we're using Jira, which is, so we're working at an enterprise level and that Jira is great, but it's huge and heavy and difficult to configure and kind of a pain. So it does all of the things that we need it to do. It's just difficult to get there. So next level down, we use Zen Hub, which is if we're working on a software project and we're using a repo in GitHub, Zen Hub is a layer over the top of that that helps add project management tools and that's really, really useful. It's free if you're doing it on an open source project, you pay per user if you're doing it on a private repo. But that's really, really helpful and in terms of using Kanban boards and all that kind of stuff, Zen Hub's got you covered. And the third one that I also use is Asana. That is free for a small, small agencies. You can invite clients into that so they can actually, you can use it as an issue tracker. You can, they can actually use boards because we use Kanban and Scrum boards to manage visually your projects. So those are the three, Jira, Zen Hub, Asana. There are so many out there, you just often have to find the one that works for you but those three are really good places to start. So I'm gonna ask a question to Zion. So I've seen that WordPress is not viewed as the best software. Even by the people who are writing PHP where WordPress is strongly based on. So how does the PHP community view WordPress in Singapore, Zion? You know the answer. Yeah. I'm gonna ask him. I don't really have a concrete answer to this. So we know that WordPress powers about 27% of the websites in the world. And what problem is we do not know how the distribution is like. Is it mostly in the US or in Europe or in Southeast Asia? For example, in Japan it's quite easy to check the stats because you probably use Japanese translation and you'll be easy to check. Okay, so many users, so many WordPress sites in Japan but also in Singapore. Now in Singapore, unfortunately, probably there's kind of mentality where you want cheap, good, fast. So in hot game we call it IPI-CIO. So basically sometimes we have more users and probably developers or want to be developers, probably some second-school kids say, okay, let me just download WordPress and I will set it up and then, okay, I'll set it up for client and I'll earn my pocket allowance. So the WordPress is intimately linked to PHP. So let me talk about PHP also. In developers eyes, PHP, since I have a bad impression, when you mention PHP WordPress, people say, yeah, no good. This is because PHP and WordPress is easy to pick up. Now let me give you an analogy. Give a ballpoint pen versus a Chinese calligraphy pen. Brush, brush. Now ballpoint pen is very easy to use. If you pick it up, you'll start writing. Anyone can do it, even a two-year-old kid. But the two-year-old kid handwriting will look terrible but there are some people who can actually use a pen to create artwork like Zentangle so they can create masterful or masterpieces. Whereas for a Chinese calligraphy brush, by the time you can even manage to write legibly, you'll look as if it has a certain sense of quality. So people say, oh, this is a very good instrument I should learn calligraphy brush, but if the person using the brush doesn't upgrade himself, doesn't continue to improve or learn, his standard will stay there. Whereas a person using a ballpoint pen, if he continues to improve himself and to pick out new skills, new design patterns, and to learn from others, his penmanship will look much more better than the person using the brush. So, and the question is if in, let's say in your childhood years, you are told that you had to use a calligraphy brush to pick out writing instead of a ballpoint pen. How many of you will actually give up? So it is a question actually, because PHP and WordPress is so easy to pick up and everyone's picking it up, so they are varying standards of quality. So it leads to this impression say, oh, so many PHP websites, PHP powers about 82% of the websites in the world, but some of them got vulnerable attacks, but we do not know the developers behind them. So the key thing is actually a programming tool like PHP, CMS at WordPress is ultimately a tool. The key thing is about problem solving, solving a problem, so you choose the correct tool. So actually the question how the local PHP developers are thinking about WordPress is, yeah, they are just using it, I would think superficially, no one is actually doing like deep work, or like the US, the United States, the White House, they are using WordPress to power their website, not so for the Singapore government. You don't really see a big WordPress agency in Singapore actually serving enterprises, or then like probably freelancers and probably small companies. Ah, okay, no, his company is quite good, yes. Okay, yeah, but that's a great answer, lovely. Okay, so this one is gonna be a longer question, sorry, go ahead. I have a question for Jenny. Yeah, so this is on AMB. It's all gonna be about SEO, right? Yeah, so I know that Google is increasingly integrating the AMP with the search results, right? So basically the sites are opening up within a Google shell by default, and you will have to make an extra click to go to the website itself. Is that a way to, because I know Google does it, you don't have a control over when Google does it to your website, is there a way to opt out of it, meaning that not open inside the shell but open your website instead? Is there a way to do it? So first thing first, let's take a step back and see why is that done so. So the reason why it's open on Google shell because it's enabled the AMP catch to happen, so it makes the website to launch almost instantly when user click on the Google search result. And of course, as a developer, you have the right to remove it. All you need to do is that, you just need to break the link between Canonical with the AMP HTML but I strongly not recommending it because it defeated the purpose of you having an AMP website. And also just want to highlight, just in case you are not aware, even though they go to the Google shell, actually publishers have the credit to that traffic. And then you can still see the analytics content if you use AMP dash analytics, just less a normal thing that you see on Google analytics. And then also, actually there's a lot of feedbacks from you guys as well to make it easier to go into the Canonical page instead of the AMP page. And in fact, Google has been doing a lot of adjustment to that since January 2017. If you share the page, you can quickly go to the Canonical page. And if you're sharing that page to your messengers, to your email, the one that's being shared is actually the Canonical page instead of the AMP page. So to wrap up, it's possible to do that. You just need to remove the link between AMP and the Canonical, but it will defeat the purpose. I hope that answered the questions. Thank you. So my turn, right? So I want to know a little bit about the WordPress communities in the various countries. I purposely make sure there's Japanese, Blangaday, Singapore. Well, she was born in Indonesia, and Australia. Yeah. So, okay. So tell us a little bit about the WordPress communities in your country, starting from Mayoko, but this is a long topic. I want it in 10 sentences or less. Tell me, tell us a little bit about the WordPress communities in your country. Is it a question? Yeah, there's no question. Just tell me. Yeah. Community? Yeah, how would you describe the Japanese community? The French community? Yes. Yes. Where can I start? I already talked today, but we started translation of WordPress over 10 years ago. I didn't, I didn't started WordPress at that time, but I heard the story, and they started first word camps like to Sazang 8, I think. And we had word camps this year, and there was 800 people. And yeah, so community is... Thousand, I think? Eh? Thousand. Yeah, Tokyo, yeah. And Kyoto also had word camps, and I heard 350 or something. So yeah, we have two word camps this year, and in this room, I can see a lot of book authors and plug-in authors. They also come to this word camp. So yeah, our community has a lot of, yeah. How many percent of websites WordPress in Japan? Yes. I saw their stats about CMS website, which use Japanese. They use 80% WordPress, yes. So it's a lot, and... It's basically our base in Asia, WordPress. And whole WordPress user, 6% use Japanese version. So yeah, it's... Can we just say thank you to the definition of WordPress? Yeah. Yes, yeah. So if you realize there's this little creature thing that looks a little bit like Pikachu, but it's not Pikachu. And every country and every word camp, we create one based on the local city. So the one this time we have, well, it's based on our theme, which is towards the future. So it's a Roboto Wapu, so we've got a sticker. And they have made a Kenshin Wapu, well, Makawapu and so on. But the designer came from Japan, the first ever, the original Wapu, yeah. Cool. What about you, Asif? 10 sentences or less. Bangladesh has a very big WordPress community. I remember like in back in 2014, Wadcam San Francisco, I spoke about our community and why I am involved in WordPress that much. In that time I shared an stat that in 2014, only in August, there was over 40,000 WordPress programmer only from Bangladesh. So WordPress is extremely popular in Bangladesh. If you ask me the same question, like how many percent is, I would say probably over 90%. We have successfully popularized WordPress in Bangladesh. We have successful WordPress meetup groups. In some of our meetup, we have like over 400 people. And because our venue could not support that, so we had to limit in 150 or something, we have not had any Wadcams yet. We are trying to work on that. I applied for almost four years ago. We have some issues and going back and forth. I hope like it will happen very soon, maybe in 2018. Yeah, they're all helping. And we have a lot of like plug-in developers and especially theme developers, developing themes in theme forest. And there's a good analysis like in the US, if you go to a bank, if you ask a banker like, do you know WordPress? Most of the people will not. But in Dhaka, if you go to an educated person who understand web, if you ask him, do you know WordPress? They will know, yeah, I know WordPress. If I want to make a blog, I will make it to WordPress. So WordPress is very popular in Bangladesh. And we are looking forward to have a good Wadcams in the future as well. Awesome. That's pretty cool. You should teach us. Yeah, actually the organizer of the WordPress Singapore Meetup is standing at the workshop. You will actually be answered the question better. So actually I attended, started at 10 meetups about two years ago when I was doing freelancing. And I also started helping out with engineers.hg, our, also in guys who are recording the work cam this year. So sometimes I had to record the WordPress Meetup. So compared to the other 10 meetups in Singapore, WordPress Meetup actually has a kind of good mix of developers and what we call lay people, non techies. So yeah, some people who are starting their blogs, who are going to do business, you want to do e-commerce, you want to find out more about WordPress. So usually the numbers, think about 20, 20 plus, is that correct? Yeah, yeah it's nothing, so it should be correct. Oh, sorry? The numbers usually about 20 plus, right? Or 20? Well, I'll say 30 is a nice number. The biggest we had was 80 for Meetup. But that's because it's SEO related. Yes. All right. Thank you. Yeah, I'm nervous now because I will be very honest with you guys, this is the first work cam I ever attended. Yeah. So I did mention to you guys that I moved to WordPress recently. Do you want to know why? So in a Google's perspective, I just had AMP Roadshow Indonesia where there's a lot of website owners. When we asked who use WordPress, 50% raised their hand. So that's like a benchmark. And then I personally work with AdSense Publisher, meaning that publisher that monetized their content with Google AdSense. And about 70% of my publisher actually using WordPress. And that motivated me to move to WordPress. Nice. And did you move from blogger? Confidential. Because that would be tricky. Oh, I work for Google, but I don't blog on blogger. No, I work for Google, but I use Macbook. I'm a New Zealander and I live in Australia, but I've lived there for so long and most of my WordPressing has happened in Australia. The WordPress community, much like the population of Australia is actually not huge and is spread around the main centers. So we have WordPress meetups in all of the main centers, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, where I live, God, Adelaide and Perth. And we have at least one or two word camps every year. Next year, I believe there are gonna be word camps in both Sydney and Brisbane. We keep getting some pressure to have a word camp in Melbourne. If you wanna help me organize that, go right ahead, because I'm not gonna organize it on my own. So, and there are WordPressers, it gets competed a lot with by Adobe in Australia, I think, in a lot of cases, certainly at the kind of scale that we're operating it. So, yeah, but the community itself is really active and engaged. We have about 2,500 people on our mailing list in Melbourne, but the number of people that show up to a meetup varies between kind of 50 to 60 month by month. Thank you. Yeah, so we got two, we got actually no time, but I'm gonna take two more questions from the crowd. You just have lesser time to eat, but I bet most of you are very full from lunch, so I think we'll find that. So, anyone wants to ask any questions? Preferably not SEO related. Yes. This is probably for Xion, Xion. Okay, WordPress started when PHP was version four point something, and then it got stuck with version 5.6 for a few years, and recently people have been, we have seen increased adoption of version seven. How would this affect WordPress users and also developers, and how will it affect the near future of WordPress? Okay, talking about PHP 7, so WordPress has kept itself up today, so moving to PHP 7 would be no problem. PHP 7 versus PHP 5.6 itself has a two times increase, even let's say just by changing the PHP version, you're not changing your code, you're just changing the PHP version, your code will run at least two times faster. This has been tested even in WordPress, even at Magento or other popular CMS systems. So for PHP 7 by itself comes with a lot of nice new features, error reporting, and catching of errors, syntax parsing. So actually, a lot of vulnerabilities have been patched, of course, it's still ongoing. So one thing is PHP is here to stay. If you get a domain hosting, let's say, with our own domain name, let's say, WorkCam.com, you can't default with the LAMSTEP, Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and that doesn't cause anything extra for you to upload PHP file or set up WordPress. So going in the future, actually, this is good. There was some time where people think that PHP is dying, so even Facebook came up with a new HVVM for PHP to kind of, because they find PHP insufficient, but with PHP 7, now Facebook says that, okay, HVVM, we can kind of retire it, we probably use it internally, so some of the features have already been merged in PHP 7, so it's a good way forward. So WordPress is based on PHP, and of course, this will be WordPress in the future as well, thanks. Yeah, so I'd like to add a little bit of that at the WordPress.org level. So we have been engaging the web posts around the world to make sure they upgrade from 5.5, 5.6, or worse, to 7. Honestly, there's no reason not to upgrade, because WordPress is incredibly backwards compatible, and when we do patch, we make sure it still somehow works for older PHP versions. And if you're still on 5.5.5, that's not supported anymore, it's insecure. If you're on 5.6, that's almost gonna be not supported, so. So yeah, it should move to 7. Like, you know, you update your apps, right? Update everything, yeah. So, should I not update everything? No, no, no, I would say that I've gone from 7. something to 7.7, and the site breaks. 7.1? I can't, whatever, so I've gone from one to the other, so I'm on 7. And I go to the next one, and my site won't load, so I'm like... Probably one of the bad plugins. Well, it's a thing or a plugin, so then you have to kind of do all that. So, what I'm saying is, don't do it live. Yes, good. Do it, do it, do it. Yes, we should upgrade, but don't do it live, do it in staging before you actually go there. Agreed, very strongly. So, last question. All right, then I get to ask mine. So, tough one. Where do you think WordPress will be in 2020? I want a one-liner, I want a big paragraph. Everyone give me a one-liner. Who's ready to speak? The dashboard will be customized. People will create, and like Team Developer will create their own dashboard, so it will not look like WordPress. The team will be almost plugin, or like it will be more like base builders. So, what piece will be very different in 2020? Awesome. He's basically taken off your answers. Okay, my answer will definitely be the WordPress REST API. It opens up a lot of new possibilities. So, right now as a developer, instead of coming out with my own custom database, my own custom CMS to power my new mobile app. So, right now I can just write an Android app and iOS app that actually is reading off the WordPress REST API. In fact, actually there's an app on App Store called Nomad Base. So, first version was done using React.js, and the second version was done using React Native, and they are actually calling the WordPress REST API. So, it's running a WordPress backend. So, you don't need a techie guy to run SQL statements to key in data into a database. You can have your marketing personnel just going to the super user-friendly interface in WordPress, key in your data, and it automatically appears in your app. Simple and easy. Thank you for advertising my product. Yeah. Yeah. You actually have to do it in a circle? Yes. I made them do it. Okay, but I didn't want to explain what Nomad Base is. If you are traveling and you're a developer, writer, whatever, you want to meet people who travel as well, that's an app for you to meet them. It's not for dating, right? It's just to meet working friends. Okay. There it is. Just in one, two, three, four. I was thinking, 2020 WordPress? Yes. Okay. From translation view? Sure. There are a lot of, like 10 years ago, nobody considered about translation, but now we have a lot of language, like 180 something, I forgot, but maybe, maybe. I'm not sure. Google is, please. So, yeah. So, yeah. Now, most theme or plugin is not translated yet, but we want to translate 100% then for most language, then so, you know, for people who don't speak English, it's more than English speaker in the world. So, if we want to make WordPress barrier-free, so we have to do that, I think. Nice. So, you think that 2020 translations would be close to 100% and like a Japanese person, instead of downloading the 10 teams that are translated, you can download 5,000 teams that are on WordPress.org. Big job, depending on you. And I think we have Jenny and Dee. I think in 2020, I see huge potential for WordPress to scale because I see a lot of entrepreneurs, content creators that are currently offline, especially in emerging market, they start to look into Go Online. I see WordPress as a huge potential to enable them to do that easily. Thank you. That's a really good way of looking at it. I see, because so much of what I do is at enterprise level, I see there being more events and things happening for WordPress at enterprise level, not just smaller, medium business. So, I'm hopeful that in the next couple of years, certainly locally in our kind of regions, not just in the US, we'll see more and more conversation happening there and see more and more adoption of WordPress at enterprise. Nice. That'd be great. Yeah, in the US, they have a work camp for publishers. Maybe one year, we'll do it like a work camp for banks, publishers and so on. That'll be super awesome. Cool. So, that's all for the AMA. They are still around, catch them and ask them anything. Try not to, you know, about WordPress. It's not just all about SEO. All right, so thank you for attending. I'm gonna hand it back to Xiao. And thank you, speakers. Thank you, Dee. Thank you, Jenny, Zion, Asif and Michael. Okay, so right now we'll go for tea break. We'll come...