 There's a $10 billion ecosystem surrounding WordPress. How do you reconcile all of the volunteers giving so much of their time to the community without pay and the business of WordPress that makes so much money? I think that the way... hmm, let me restart that. I open my browser to a choice of search engines that look up menus of almost anything I can think of, whether it's my projects on Egypt or Andrew playing games. It sounds complicated, but really it all happens behind the scenes, so it's easy for you. And you're right. You can find anything from planning a vacation to MTV or real-time live audio. The net is fabulous. Now, maybe you've read or heard about the Internet, but you're still not exactly sure what it is. Well, if that's the case, don't worry. In no time at all, you'll be able to impress everyone with your amazing techness savvy. What about if I want to do my own homepage? Now that's a big project. You better get someone to help you. It's a piece of software that allows people to produce and publish websites on the Internet and do so at a very affordable price. And its value is to be able to make publishing and Internet publishing open to everyone. With WordPress, it is open source. So from a legal point of view, from a copyright point of view, from a software freedom point of view, you can change every line of code. You can redistribute it. You can fork it. You can modify it. You can delete it. You can do really whatever you like. And regardless of what the developers or the creators want you to even, you know. You know, a lot of people who haven't seen it probably don't understand it. They kind of feel that if you release your wares to the public, then you're giving it away. I mean, how are you going to monetize it? How are you going to make any money doing it? Open source is a methodology for software development that literally depends on a critical mass of humans. And the more people we have contributing to WordPress, the open source software, the better the software gets for more people. WordPress is made by hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world. And most people think WordPress is made of code. And it's true. Obviously it's a software. So it's made of code, but it's made of so much more. Your WordPress is a set of code. It is a website. It is a service. It is all these other things. But it's also an idea. An idea that brings people together. Something we can believe in. Something that gives hope. And something that we can influence. And I think especially in today's day and age, when there's so much going on in the world, something that we can believe in and can make the world, leave the world a little bit better than how we found it. Make a dent in the universe. Try to create the web that we want. Our loved ones or our future progeny to grow up in is a sign to be a part of. This community is not made up of a group of paid individuals. They're all volunteers. And so a lot of people think, why do you do this? What is it about this community? I think a lot about what motivates someone to participate in our program as a volunteer, whether it's day of staff, organizing team, speaker, etc. Some people come to us because they are so grateful to have this free software of WordPress and want to give back to the effort that makes WordPress possible. A lot of people come to us because they believe in the mission and they want to further it. A lot of people come to us because they realize that working within our program is a great way to grow their skills. A WordCamp is a conference that is completely centered around WordPress. So if you go to another conference, you're going to go to a conference that has all different kinds of topics. But when you go to a WordCamp, it's two full days of everything related to WordPress. We're happy to chat about anything and have a good camp. Everybody here is volunteering, is that right? Everyone here is volunteering. Now I should say that our lead organizer, her volunteer has been a 40-plus, maybe even a 60-plus volunteer job for at least the past three weeks, probably even more. We are volunteering, but at the end, volunteering almost turns into that full-time job. And so because of that, the volunteers either work for themselves and have their own company. And so they take their valuable time and give it to this initiative, or they have very understanding and supportive employers who understand the value of community and who understand the value of this event. And by doing so, they then allow all of us to just give everything we have in these final stretch to this event. I've gone to a lot of conferences, and those are called conferences, and those are called industry events. This is called a community. There's a difference based on that. You go to an industry event, you go to a trade show, it's about business. You go to a WordCamp conference, it's about the community, what people have or what they do. I think it's the idea that you can create as you will, and you can work with people at things like WordCamps and Meetups and through the contributor teams. And I think it just makes people feel at home and welcome, and I think it's just something that everyone is looking for, a place to belong. Every person in the community has this commonality of being open and wanting to help others without fear of hiding what they're working on or without fear of competition. As you'll see in this community or maybe as you have seen, there are people that work for various web hosts that are all very good friends. There's no sense of, you know, we're better than you or we don't want you to succeed. Everybody kind of helps each other. I mean we hear that in natural disaster, the community was so great everybody stepped up and helped each other. And I think that's kind of human nature except when you get into the world of business or I want to sell this and make money or I need to do this to put food on the table. In spite of all that, when you come to a WordCamp it's so inspiring to see the openness and the willingness of everybody to help each other. I just got there and I was like, all these people are here to make a piece of software that is used by other millions of people. This is a community that really thrives on openness, collaboration and including more people than they necessarily need. So Matt, there's a $10 billion ecosystem surrounding WordPress. How do you reconcile all of the volunteers giving so much of their time to the community without pay and the business of WordPress that makes so much money? I think that the way hmm let me restart that. So WordPress is built on the GPL which provides the four freedoms. One of the freedoms says that you can charge for things. So although we distribute all the WordPress stuff for free if you want to take it repackaged and charged for that's totally fine. So when you look at the $10 billion a year flowing through the WordPress community it's built on things but it's also people building e-commerce stops and selling quilts or selling photographs or selling anything else. So it's enabled by WordPress and we have this thing we push called Fire for the Future which is the idea that if whatever you're getting out of WordPress if you can put 5% back into essentially things that benefit the community not just you it avoids the tragedy of the commons this sort of thing that is common in WordPress and in lots of things that everyone kind of overmines a shared resource and then it dries up it doesn't get the investment where they're caretaking it needs to be truly sustainable. I think 5% is actually a good rule of thumb and that can be given back in terms of time money donations it's just basically saying 5% of the time or 5% of my resources I'm going to put back towards things that benefit the world and that I think if the whole world did that it would be a much better place. You want to keep doing it isn't it time to exit you know let someone else step in and do all of the work aren't you ready to let go? No I'm not because if I wasn't doing this I would be missing it because I really enjoy it I have fun there's a great sense of accomplishment whenever you work with a group of people and when you put together an amazing work camp and it has nothing to do with any kind of recognition any kind of business decision it really is about this is truly what I enjoy doing it's a hottie. It's a community over competition right it's like how can we build this thing that everyone has a piece of the pie everyone has a way to impact the world with their thoughts and their beliefs and I think that's why I feel passionately about it I like the idea that everyone is welcome and everyone can create and everyone can change. WordPress is a tool it's a canvas a blank canvas people can paint on it something beautiful or they can paint something very hateful and ugly I do believe that as humanity becomes more connected as we interact with each other more that does start to break down probably the biggest myth in modernity which is that we're all separate because we're not and the more that people get in connect with their fellow humans and other things in nature we realize that we're all part of the same system all part of the same thing the actions of one impacts everything else in the system whether that's the planet climate, nature, animals space who knows where it goes it's a work in progress we can't tell you everything about it because it's changing every day that's right in fact the best advice we can give you is get on it and start exploring let's go I've seen some familiar names there I was produced by Mark Monder and Kathy Zanz you might know from some of their wordfence work but I thought this was a beautiful contribution to the WordPress world and they're actually going to be submitting it to festivals coming up so hopefully this can make it into the south by or one of the other great festivals if you have any pull with any of those please get in touch with Mark or someone but good illustration as well of the different types of contributions so when I saw a preview of it, that's my first time seeing the final, final, final cut I thought, wow, could we re-former that? I stated the word, that mechanical so thank you all for joining that so to officially jump in out of St. Louis I'm told that this place is also called the Lou is that something you all say do people from the UK look at you funny funny? this is actually not my first time in St. Louis I was back here for a happiness meetup in 2011 which was my first exposure to City Museum and of course I'm familiar with the St. Lunatics and other culture ambassadors you have out there in the world though I was not aware that St. Louis hosted the World's Fair in 1904 and in fact many amazing technological innovations have come out of here including the wireless telephone x-ray machines electric street cars and the first prototypes of personal automobiles which back then were both gas and electric so it took like 100 years to come back to the electric so let's see if we can have the event here and also look at where WordPress has been and where we're going to go this event was brought to you by 47 organizers 122 volunteers and 90 speakers yesterday and today this event was also brought to you by the sponsors that make it so the ticket is so inexpensive thank you to Bluehost, WooCommerce, Jetpack and Google so as we head into the final months of 2019 with actually our earliest work camp US in a while it's good to take the time to reflect on everything that we've worked together on collaborated our accomplishments and just everything that's going on with this year we've had two core releases so far this year the first WordPress 5.1 named for Betty Carter included the first iteration of the site health screen which one of you might be familiar with that's a few fans the idea behind this is that again WordPress is all about empowering users and we wanted to put the information and the tools in the hands of users as well to keep their site running in tip top shape as we power an ever increasing percentage of the web it is our responsibility and behooves us to try to make sure that portion of the web is safe, secure up to date and running the latest and greatest stuff so this allows gives people information they can either use themselves or get in touch with their support posting or things like that we had a lot of developer experience improvements in 5.1 including the CRON API this is kind of the thing that runs in the background of WordPress that makes actions happen at certain times so let's say you schedule a post have you ever wondered how that actually gets posted at the time when you schedule it we have kind of a weird CRON thing built into WordPress we've enhanced it now so that advanced hosts or have a lot of CRON scheduled tasks can hook into that and make it more efficient we also for the multi-site fans added a site meta feature which gives developers a more performant way to store arbitrary data as opposed to just dumping everything in options like we used to 5.2 named for Jaco Pastorius came out in May this one was pretty exciting because what you see on the left there is the old widget screen on the right is the new widgets all available within Gutenberg which also means that you can edit them in line and see exactly what they're going to look like in the real-time Gutenberg interface we also had an iteration based on feedback from you all saying that there were a lot of blocks good problem to have so we made it for yourself or for your clients you could hide or show certain blocks we have a block manager and then finally you shouldn't see this anymore WSOD stands for the white screen of death I guess originally it was called this because as a play on the blue screen of death but basically what this means if you visit your site you see this there was probably some sort of PHP error or something that is preventing your site from loading and unfortunately that makes it also hard to fix your site if it's airing out so now when something like this happens particularly from an auto-upgrade or a plugin upgrade you get a special email with a link that lets you basically navigate to a URL which deactivates the plugin before it loads and allows you to then turn it off and get back into your site so again this is just an example of something coming up from users coming up from the support forums that we've identified as common barriers and our user experience and did a lot of work to try to rectify WordPress 5.3 is coming out on November 12th so just around the corner this is not a pre-announcement of the jazzer but it is out on the day so you will see what jazz person is named for but it is a very very exciting release for a number of things we have over 150 block editor improvements so some of you might not know but the version of Gutenberg that's been shipping with WordPress 5.2 is a few months out of date now and there's been lots of updates since then as I will talk about more later but I'm very very excited to get in the hands of our water audience it's also coming with a new default theme this is 2020 it is a Gutenberg first beautiful CMS powered theme with an original design contributed by Anders Noor and then of course it's spanded by the 2020 team it is really slick I have switched my own site MA.TT over to it and it really is one of the power of Gutenberg so I highly encourage checking it out if you would like to get involved in some of the final I guess we're basically done but if you want to see the code behind and some of what went into it you can check it out on GitHub as well in the vein of improving things for administrators making WordPress easier to run for everyone we've put in a little screen that just kind of verifies your admin email which is separate from your user email when things broke but we found that a lot of people had set up that email when they first started and never looked at it again so now about every six months you'll get like a little hey is this still your best email type screen again these things seem simple but it's a foundation on which we can build a lot else on because now we can start to make it more things dependent on that admin email then also 5.3 is going to have some more developer stuff there's going to be so much Gutenberg we'll talk about that later there's going to be some update component fixes that probably at least three people here in the audience know well let's raise your hand if you know what those mean ah pretty savvy audience that's at least 40 and we of course update to be compatible with the latest PHP 7.4 which is of course faster and better than ever it was an off-store year where we raised the minimum PHP version of WordPress we ended support for PHP 5.2 to 5.3 and I have an interesting stat that for people running WordPress 5.2 which is our latest stable release 83% on PHP 7 or later so we are seeing people who are updating WordPress are also updating PHP which is very exciting however as we were digging into these stats we found something else which is about 10% of all of WordPress is we're tracking are on older versions of PHP so we think this might be contributing to some people being sort of stuck on some older versions of WordPress that it seems that they are running a higher percentage than a general population of older versions of PHP which we track going all the way back to 5.0 right now so we still have a lot of work that 10% of the WordPress is on the world still on a too old to upgrade PHP ends up being a lot of them you could call that about 3% of the web so it sort of woke me up to the fact that we're going to need to really dive into these and work with the web host and the people, excuse me, hosting them try to get in there to get these on the latest and greatest while this has all been going on there's been a ton of fun stuff happening on the mobile side of WordPress which is a crucial important for user adoption part that sometimes we forget about in the day-to-day development so of the 38 core blocks that are in Gutenberg, we have now ported 10 of them to mobile and we got Gutenberg on mobile in the first place so congrats to that team so the block editor is now available on both iOS and Android devices including one additional block coming out and the release coming out on Monday we are almost done with offline support which means you will be able to blog and use the WordPress app on a plane, train or automobile when you are not connected or maybe even at a conference like this and we have dark mode done on iOS and that will be coming to Android in a matter of weeks of course the people side of WordPress as we just heard from that the open film is one of the most exciting and the events and people side of WordPress has had an exciting year as well in 2019 there will be 141 word camps those are the big ones all over the world 34 of those in brand new cities we also have this new thing 17 of which and one of which tomorrow called kids camps which is events adjacent to word camps designed specifically for our younger contributors in fact I believe at this camp we have one of our youngest here at WorkCampUS one of our youngest speakers ever we come from that yeah 4 at what age let's call it 14 or 15 so very very excited for a new generation it's a little scary to also think that they weren't born when WordPress started I know if that made any of y'all feel old it definitely made me feel a little advanced we've had over 5000 meetups the WordPress meetups are the more monthly events happening all over the world in almost every city and 16 do action charity hackathons this is where WordPress volunteers and community members come together and create websites for nonprofits and set them up to have a beautiful WordPress this was also a year when we started bringing more of the people's stories to the WordPress.org blog our new site so the icon on the left is here at WordPress if you haven't come across here at WordPress before I've been checking it out and maybe you might even have a story you want to share there WordPress is a community site which highlights the journeys of how people came to WordPress and the effect it's had on their life and the fact they've had on WordPress as well we started highlighting one of these per month on the WordPress.org blog and it's been really really exciting to get to know more of the people behind WordPress and in fact many of them are stories that are new to me as well so it is a must read for me every month there was a bittersweet part or a sad part of 2019 as well that we did lose some community members notably Viper 007 Bond also known as Alex Mills who's a long time contributor, friend and colleague I also recognize that many people might have lost other folks in the community so I did want to take just a brief moment of silence to remember and thank those who are no longer with us Alex was an amazing contributor to WordPress a great friend, a great colleague we are automatic is putting together a scholarship to parallel the Kim Parcell Scholarship that's been going on for a few years now that brings them to WorkCamp US and this will be targeted at a plugin developer who hasn't had the chance to visit WorkCamp US yet and so there will be a full scholarship, full ride for them and the beautiful part of this is actually Alex's story mirrors that quite a bit he was telling me where he was a little bit more introverted but he found out there was going to be a WorkCamp nearby to him even though he'd been a big contributor he had never been seeing the events and that was part of what allowed him to blossom into finding a new set of friends a new community, a job at automatic kind of everything that changed from in that kind of last decade it has been a very very eventful 11 months we've had lots of ups and downs that's what this graphic is illustrating and but we've had thousands of people come together as well I do want to rewind a little bit and talk about where we were just about a year ago so close your eyes and imagine that WordPress 5.0 probably the biggest change we had ever made to WordPress in its 16 year history came out the day before WorkCamp US started in Nashville we had people coordinating work from airplanes there were impromptu groups of core developers testing and packaging the release and the hallways the polyglots and marketers were scrambling to get everything ready and of course we had that snazzy release video that was a pretty controversial year that year we came together and decided to make this big change because we wanted to first disrupt ourselves we wanted to empower more WordPress users to realize our mission of democratizing publishing we wanted to make the web a more open and welcoming place but you know Gutenberg got some feedback these are all real tweets or quotes from articles I don't want to pile on to the Gutenberg hate but come on this is nowhere near ready I think it's safe to say absolutely capitals hate the Gutenberg editor on WordPress now in a lowercase p it says pour salt in the wound Gutenberg is just plain terrible and barely functional a design should make my life easier not harder and finally don't update the WordPress 5.0 you know there was lots and lots of feedback on that and I think we learned a lot both in the process but also in how we can communicate change better in the future although there are no changes on the horizon as big as Gutenberg was you know think of that as like you know on batter swing with a couple of bats before they go up to the mound and now have really good practice for any future future changes we want to make I think that we also have a great opportunity when we make big changes in the future sort of build that trust in the conversations around testing using GitHub for development things like accessibility so I understand why we had a lot of this feedback but we did get through it together so thank you we have had since that 5.0 release 20 releases of the Gutenberg plugin so the pace of iteration of Gutenberg has kept up and I'm also very very proud to say because there was some discussion around contributions that the number of Gutenberg contributors since 5.0 has grown from 200 over 480 over develop over a doubling year to year I'm also very very excited to say that even as WordPress becomes more advanced we incorporate new technologies and all learning JavaScript deeply is that we're going to have the most contributors we ever had to WordPress ever this year so in 2018 we had about 594 contributors this year so far we're at 1122 unique contributors thank you also thank you for clapping allows me to take a drink if you want to throw some more in there the current release version 5.3 coming out in November 12 is set to have the most contributors of any release in our history by over a hundred people I'm also happy to say that the adoption of Gutenberg is going fantastic we have 2.7 over 2.7 more sites using Gutenberg than not and this is actually probably undercounting because we're subtracting everyone using the classic editor from this but of course those of you who might be using the classic editor know by the way classic editor is a plugin promoted very heavily with an upgrade to 5.0 that allows people to still use the old editor as well as using the new editor but it actually classic editor doesn't turn off Gutenberg allows you to toggle between them so you can decide on a proposed basis what you want to use so we believe some interesting number I don't know how many it's that thing but interesting number of the classic editor users are actually also using Gutenberg as well we just passed 2 days ago 50 million posts made with Gutenberg and that number is going up fast we're seeing over 270,000 per day and again this is a subset of the posts that we're tracking this is only folks running the Jetpack plugin that we get this stat from so there is even a larger that is the floor of whether that number actually is so to look at where Gutenberg is today and to talk about some of the development and work we've been putting into it first and foremost I want to talk about performance I am so proud of the team for this graph so what you see on the left there is the average seconds to load from version 5.0 then all the way on the right is release candidate 2 of version 5.3 so we've halved the time it takes to load Gutenberg and the posts and edit screen we also one of the things that we noticed when we first launched is that the actual typing lag all the complex things we were doing in Gutenberg was fairly high so that has gone from 170 milliseconds in 5.0 now down to 53 milliseconds again down by 2 thirds in terms of the speed that's going in there we put in some fun user enhancements so for example when we first launched when you move blocks around which is what you're seeing on the left they just pop around we've added motion so now you can see what's going on it just feels a lot better and of course this also respects the motion sensitivity settings which you can set on your browser for accessibility we added a typewriter mode so this is pretty fun because like a classic typewriter it keeps your vertical place as you type this avoids jar and jumps or cases of typing near the bottom of the screen just a much more pleasant editor experience and something that now I want from every single editor I use we added block previews so what you're seeing here is now when you because the blocks when it was just the icon in the name you'd never know we recreated a little bit of the mystery problem we were trying to solve so what the block previews do is show you right next to it exactly a preview of what the block is going to look like and it allows for more explanation so if you were clicking on something and you're like what is mationary which is a fair question to ask it'll show you that that's actually all these cool tile galleries kind of Pinterest style galleries we created a quick navigation mode which helps with both usability and accessibility for you to be able to navigate through blocks with a keyboard and you can press escape to go into that navigation mode what is coming for Gutenberg because I'm even more excited about the catch up that we're doing in version 5.3 this is the simplest thing but wow we actually found some stats on what people were searching for for Gutenberg blocks and one of the very very top things was social icons these are like the NASCAR stickers of the web they're everywhere but you can now add icons any place you can put a Gutenberg block and we created a really nice interface for doing so a huge project that we've been working on is taking the navigation menu so this is what previously was an entire screen inside of WordPress with its own everything that's what you see on the left and making it an inline Gutenberg block that still supports all the same functionality and even adds some new so what you're seeing there is a color picker which previously wasn't even something you could do with the old navigation editor by the way you might notice we've renamed it from menus to navigation this is going to make all the restaurant users WordPress understand a lot faster real issue we've run into in testing we've created the ability to do gradients in Gutenberg in a gradient tool this was actually pretty fun because it's a fairly complex interaction but we were able to put it together in an exciting way so you can create blocks like it's 1999 again that of course pairs well with our multi-button block these seem basic but these are things that we were running into quite a bit that people were asking for we are very now far we're now a year into the idea and the reality that there's going to be a thousand block blooming so people are creating blocks left and right and it's really exciting to see what's going on so one of the things that I'm most proud of the team of for doing as well says they have a block directory so what this is is that you're going to be able to install blocks in the block directory completely in line so what you just saw happen right there was what was happening in the background rather is someone typed in a block they were looking for they didn't find anything it called out to the centralize wordpress.org block directory they clicked add it and what happened was essentially like a plugin got installed activated in the background and the block was available to insert completely instantly, completely in line with no page loads or anything this is also really fun because as the block directory grows to incorporate hundreds and thousands of blocks you can use those building blocks just in line as what you're doing we're also going to expand this to include patterns block patterns are what we're calling collections of blocks so if you can imagine like a testimonial pattern or slider type things basically collections of the basic building blocks that take the most common patterns that you see on websites all over the world and make them accessible to install with just a single click the idea here and what we're really trying to enable with these fundamental building blocks is that you could look at any website in the world and build that inside of wordpress with just a few clicks it is coming on the community side of things we've also seen some pretty cool examples this is the mortgage bankers association a site built by RT Camp and they created a block template for the newsletter functionality so what's actually happening right here is they are building an email newsletter in line with Gutenberg give a quick call out to wordcamp phoenix any folks from phoenix here nice which also got a little call out in the film also made me realize how weird the word phoenix is when you look at it it's like the word weird you're like ah is that oh or either this is a hundred percent blocks and in fact many of the work camps including work camp us are now building their entire sites just using Gutenberg and blocks nine publishing is using the interface and two room two news rooms for different mail outs they're doing for Gutenberg they estimate that they are saving 15 hours a week for editors across both newsrooms when they implemented this Gutenberg interface finally pragmatic created a plugin which takes a client created word documents not wordpress word and associated images imports the content directly into Gutenberg editor and using a combination of core and custom blocks basically makes it ready to go into their publishing system which again super super cool we'll do a quick round of applause for these folks building the and also for deciphering the word document format it's impressive in and of itself last year remember it actually came up in the Q&A I was someone asked what percentage Gutenberg was done and I say we were about 10% done I'm very excited to say that we're now about 20% done so the important changes and part of why we we made the investment in Gutenberg was this is the fundamental foundation that we're going to build the next decade of wordpress under and so we'll do about 10% per year but already as we get to 20% it is incredible humbling and awe inspiring everything that people are able to create with what's in there already to give a quick reminder there are going to be four phases of Gutenberg we are I would say on the tail end of the easier editing phase this is where we're tackling all the usability problems we had in TinyMCE and our former editors where people having trouble manipulating embeds, short codes, images basically getting the layouts and formatting that they wanted with the old editor we have increased that usability tremendously and the Gutenberg team still does one usability test per week and posts them at least once a month to the make blogs showing kind of the progress of those kind of real world not people who are in this room people new to wordpress how are they able to use this interface we're currently in the thick of the second phase, phase two which is all around customization to give you a little update there we have completed converting all the widgets to blocks block customization navigation menu, which is in the plugin but it's going to come in core the widget block screen and customizer widgets panel with block support we are finishing up a block pattern directory and implementing full site editing you like how I slip the biggest thing there just as a final bullet point but it is coming along and there is a light at the end of the tunnel as a quick reminder the final two phases is going to be collaboration which is where we take everything that you see in Gutenberg and make it so that you can real time co-edit with anyone else who is editing the same things that you are and also think a lot and invest some development into the workflow around changes and sharing changes, previews, etc and then finally last we are going to tackle the babel fish problem and have multilingual support core to wordpress and core to Gutenberg and you are of all you get super excited about that we are still at the very very beginning of this journey we have been doing Gutenberg for about two years now there are 47 releases prior to 5.0 coming out we have 20 since then but it is the community all of you that really make wordpress great it was so interesting how quickly in that film I went back to that same word community there are so many parts of how you can get involved with wordpress and I want to talk about some of the ways or some of my suggestions for if you are watching this other than a thousand people here in this room or the many on the live stream or the folks who are going to watch this later ways that you can get involved and being a co-creator of wordpress first is helping be the change and you might have heard before every single talk we have given that tomorrow there is going to be a contributor day so if you are able to get to one of the big word camps there is typically a contributor day afterwards and what this is is kind of like the real life version of what we have online so instead of going to a make.wordpress.org p2 and seeing what is going on there will be a physical table for all the people who are passionate about localization, all the people working on the editor all the people working on whatever that is and you can walk over that table and be part alongside the people who make wordpress I love this concept and it is one of the most powerful things in the world with every bit of technology that you interact with every day someone made that and with wordpress which many of you interact with every day it is probably someone sitting here in this room and you could very easily become one of them so go by the contributor day to get involved another fun thing is the Gutenberg plugin is still there so when people upgrade to 5.0 we turned off the Gutenberg plugin for them automatically because we had I think over a million testers before but about 270,000 people have turned it back on this means that they are getting those weekly or fortnightly updates to the Gutenberg plugin before those things get shipped into core so if you would like to see the latest and greatest of what Gutenberg could be and there is a very active feedback channel there for reporting bugs, basically if you would like to help define what is coming next in core Gutenberg install this plugin it is also neat because it kind of gets you the latest and greatest before the core release comes out we have also been doing a lot of experiments with beta plugins to allow us to test features before they go into core pretty small still a little over 100 sites running it but I would like people to check out and participate with is design experiments so this is where we are actually able to make user interface changes to WordPress in a plugin before we put it into core and can get feedback and also do user testing on this basically one of the best things we learned from Gutenberg is that we don't need to be beholden to the core release schedule which at our best is three times per year to be able to rapidly iterate and get changes in the hands of users users are the oxygen for any software and without it you don't really know despite whatever planning which you might do you don't really know how people are going to use and interact with the software so it's really really important I want to highlight this fun tweet from someone who actually reinstalled the Gutenberg plugin as Hannah Smith said I installed the Gutenberg plugins today which upgrades the features that ship with core I was curious to check it out OMG, exclamation point, exclamation point it's like a million times better if this stuff goes in the core we're all in for a treat well done to all the contributors so you can be like Hannah and have there are three exclamation points in this tweet which is pretty impressive for 280 characters that's a high percentage of exclamation points the rest of the characters in the tweet we need more blocks so the most exciting way is to expand the kind of window of what people are able to do with WordPress today is creating more of those blocks so if you're building sites for clients or friends or yourself and you find yourself needing something that Gutenberg doesn't yet support and you have the technical wherewithal you've learned JavaScript deeply and are able to build it share that please particularly if it's JavaScript only you can go in our block directory like the people using the canvas of WordPress are getting new colors and textures and paint brushes they can use and the things that get created are so inspiring also if you have that technical wherewithal or know a lot about WordPress think about helping teach to change so every single person who contributes to WordPress pretty much at some point had someone else help them get involved that's part of why we have the contributor days that's part of why we make all of our meetings open and we can put all the notes on P2 and try to hold the whole development of WordPress as open as possible is that teaching aspect it's really one of the only places in the world as well you can work alongside developers who create the software that runs a third of the web and so if you want to learn better PHP or better JavaScript I can think of no better master class or real world studio if you're interested in learning more hopefully you made it to the get involved booth which is here at the event but if not come to contributor day tomorrow so we'll be happy to walk you through things or check out make.wordpress.org because we all make WordPress together sharing your knowledge can also come through events and meetups this is a map of all the meetups happening all over the world it's like even Greenlands not Iceland though what's going on as you can see all over the world there is probably a WordPress meetup near you and if there's not let's say you're in Iceland you could start one and these are really fun ways to bring community together and also allow you to experience the best part of WordPress which is the people the software is pretty good but the people are amazing and in 2020 we're also going to redo our regional events WorkCamp US and WorkCamp Europe and we're going to add a new one which is WorkCamp Asia for the first time these regional events are fantastic for bringing together contributors in particular so you get a lot of the local WorkCamp organizers all the meetup folks come to these regional WorkCamps and can really share and learn at a very very high level so it will be in February and this first year will be in Bangkok, Thailand so if you've ever wanted to visit there good excuse to and WorkCamp Europe is going to be Porto oh my god that's right I love Porto Porto in Portugal also where Port is from if you ever enjoyed a good Port so check that out and WorkCamp US will be right back here in St. Louis I might need to come a week early just to go to like City Museum every day I did not realize there was a roof which makes me wonder I was kind of wondering if my sister actually makes me wonder how many floors in between where I got to and where the roof was that I missed oh my goodness we've apparently had more posts and tweets and Tumblr posts and WordPress blog posts everything this WorkCamp that we've ever had and I've been following it as well the WCUS and it's been really really fun to kind of live vicariously through parts of this event I was at but did not see why are we doing all this we're trying to help open the web there is a very natural pendulum that swings both in societies technology and in the web between open and closed and as it swings back towards open it doesn't happen for free doesn't happen automatically it happens through a lot of hard work from people like here in this room creating the type of web that we want to live in and we want the people going to kids camps and their children to live in we are putting together for WordPress a few two final things first is now on workpress.org slash news we are doing our annual survey which is a very exciting way to show for our corner of the web what is going on and the technologies and things that are happening we are also translating this into I believe six or more languages so we'll be able for the first time or for a better than we have in the past get feedback from the non-English parts and then finally a little surprise announcement for y'all is you saw a lot of talk for five for the future just to briefly reiterate five for the future is this idea that WordPress is a big part of your life try to think how you can take five percent of your time however that might be defined could be money, resources, colleagues whatever it could be to put back into the comments so that the kind of core WordPress which is again built by people here in this room can grow and get better and be something that sort of we can benefit from in future generations can benefit from too so WordPress.org slash five you can type the number or spell it out we now have a directory it's actually I believe came up in a question maybe last year it might have been word camp here which is is there a way we can highlight the people who are contributing that fire for the future so what this allows is either for individuals or organizations to pledge and show everything they are pledging and committing to WordPress and you can browse them and then of course if you are ever trying to hire an agency or a web post or something like that definitely take a look at the fire for the future page to see which organizations back to WordPress and try to vote with your wallet to support the folks who are really making sure that WordPress can continue for many years and decades to come that's all I got actually wait there's one more thing are you ready for this so this entire presentation was actually in Gutenberg so this was all on a web page and in fact the speaker view which I'll bring over here is another web page and this was all edited see if I click this what will happen all edited inside of WP admin to Gutenberg also, kind of amazing it didn't break right let me make this full screen again bring this window back I lost it speaker view I'll bring that back full screen and this code is all on github we'll be releasing it can we give a quick round of applause stand up if you were working on this there was so much code happening till about like 25 minutes ago I am impressed and amazed that that came together so well so congratulations on that alright now really we can go to question and answers so just a quick sort of guidelines for here we'll have two mics up here in the front so you can kind of walk up a lineup and we'll get to them a light will briefly shine on you when you're going to ask your question and say your name where you're from and try to make it a question hello Matt Ryan Kenny from Miami as a volunteer speaker who supports WordPress and our shared mission to create a more open and accessible web I'm concerned because I don't believe that we currently have a stated accessibility policy community code of conduct conflict of interest policy code of ethics diversity and inclusion policy or privacy policy between the foundation so my question is two part the first is between foundation would be responsible for assisting us in creating and enacting those policies and the second part is how is we as a community how can we help make this happen and try to enact some of these policies over the next 12 months that is a good question thank you one thing I do think we do have some of those policies in place like definitely we have a privacy policy so we do have some of those already maybe we need to make them more discoverable but it's published I'm a core contributor for privacy and we've been working as a team on it but I don't believe that it's been finalized and published yet let's make sure it should be in the footer of WordPress.org but I believe we've had one of those for a little while for the others I would say that the first priority is always making sure that what the purpose of each of those policies is that WordPress is embodying and I'm very proud of the improvements we made to all those areas in the past year and beyond especially particularly accessibility and that is in spite of there being a policy or not we've tried to enact bigger changes in WordPress in a policy first way in the past and to be honest it felt nice but it didn't always make things actually change so when we've said it must be XYZ or something like that or just maybe had it as a broad policy like I think we did one for accessibility on the theme directory once didn't have the same impact as when we actually built the tools or worked alongside folks to make the changes so I do think about that I also think about how can we make all these policies that be about things that we want people to do not all negative framing I was a little, it was pretty noticeable when you came in here some of you might have noticed the first three things you saw when walking into WordCamp US were costumes weapons and Dakota contact I was like whoa like little placards for those following along the home they were like big black and white placards saying what wasn't allowed mostly I think we've always done really well in WordPress where we don't try to enumerate every possible thing we don't want people to do but really talk about the principles that we want to create together and I would love for us to also evolve how we present ourselves at WordCamps to incorporate more of that well thank you in terms of those other policies let's talk about tomorrow contributor day so we can sort of dial in which ones are there versus not and talk about what might be a good process for getting the rest out there perfect I look forward to that thank you Matt thank you so much see you then we're going to bounce to the left in Canada and I was really happy to see a number of security talks this year and there was one this morning on auto updates where I learned that there's like 80,000 plugins now for WordPress which is awesome but I work for Sikuri and we know that a lot of sites get hacked through plugin vulnerabilities not through core vulnerabilities so I'm curious about the future of auto updates for plugins but my main question is most users don't know this so how can WordPress in the community better inform administrators or maybe even email somehow notify them about security risks of delaying plugin vulnerabilities the potential risks of breaking sites with auto updates and some alternatives like virtual patching that is a super good question and one of the things that is one of the nine focuses for the year I think it is super super super important we're laying some groundwork so like that admin email I just showed will allow us to more we want to use that to message people not just about core like we traditionally have but also about the plugins they're using so that is part of the reason for getting that in and sometimes we have to build the foundation before we build the house on top of it so that was one of the things that we realized we didn't really have a good up to date version of over time you know very much the hill that we're or the mountain we're trying to climb in the distance is that you just log into WordPress and it's safe secure and you get the latest and greatest and you shouldn't have to think about whether something's a plugin whether it's in core, whether it's part of your theme whether you customize your theme but then there's a security update to a different part of it like we need ways to handle all of these possible cases and update at least for sites that allow us to set the file permissions as such as many sites on the web as possible I would like to call out and thank the web host here so almost every major web host certainly all the ones that we promote do automatic updates of core for both major and minor releases and that's been fantastic both for us because that means people are getting the latest and greatest WordPress but also for them because that means the sites are less likely to get hacked or compare a four year old version of WordPress to like today's proprietary alternative the other thing that I'm starting to see more adopt we do this on WordPress.com lots of other hosts are starting to do it too it's auto updating those plugins so if you are a web host and you're not auto updating plugins yet figure out how to make that opt out and get as many of your sites on the latest versions as possible it is true that most vulnerabilities we've seen and certainly the ones that have affected most sites have been in plugins and themes and themes are particularly hairy because people might have customized the code there but these are it's all just code and so for sites that give us the permission to modify these things by the file permissions I think that we'll be able to tackle it it is really really impressive what we already have for those of you who are at the auto update panel we had Nathan and a few others there we forget that it wasn't that long ago, five or six years ago that everyone had to update their WordPress manually and we now get over a 99, usually 99.9 and 99.5 auto update rate and allows us to get usually like 60% plus of the WordPresses in the world on the latest version within a few weeks which is not as good as iOS and Android as a true platform which WordPress really is it is an operating system for the web that's going to power so many things that we know now and so many things we can't even imagine yet it's really important that we invest in that auto update mechanism so thank you it's our great place to contribute especially if you work on security stuff how about over here hi Matt, my name is Monica I'm from Yoast and from the Netherlands and so at Yoast we're really into Gutenberg and we're making Gutenblocks we have a lot of schema updates in Gutenberg but our research shows that only half of our customers use the block editor and that's hard because that means that we have to basically maintain two products and I'm wondering if you know how we can convince more people to start using the block editor because there is a lot of negativity surrounding it and we're trying to be supportive but it's hard to get there and I saw you post some of these steps yes, it was the post with the most comments we ever had I believe you're assuming that every user of classic plugin is not using Gutenberg, correct? no, we did research within our audience and asked them what are you using, classic or the block editor and half of them answered we used the classic editor so more of a survey? yes I know surveys aren't all but still it shows that a lot of people aren't using it so we have about, just by the numbers we think, like I said almost three times as many are using Gutenberg than not so we think only about 25% are kind of using the classic editor of people who have updated and not all of those are using the classic editor all the time some of them are switching between Gutenberg and some of them are below that are still on there I think the way that we get people on is first improving Gutenberg there's been so many changes if you're one of those people who's not on Gutenberg yet that's okay, we're still making it better but I would encourage you to take every couple months like every two or three months every major WordPress release, try it out again and see if the things that frustrated you have been addressed two, I think it's blocks so you notice how on that tweet about how I really want this cover block I do believe that block first adoption will really help things and so as, for example in Yoast, if I'm just making things up let's say you had a really cool new feature that was Gutenberg only, that would be a great reason for people to upgrade though I say that knowing that you all have done as much to contribute to Gutenberg as like anyone else in the world so actually a quick round of applause because pound for pound Yoast gives more back than us anyone I know a lot of that's due to you so thank you so I think that is what's going to drive it along but also let's recognize that we're only a year in we've got 75% that last 25% will probably it'll be like a parabolic curve but I do think that I mean we still have 10% on versions prior to 5.6 of PHP so I do think that will kind of asymptotically approach like 85-90% and that's the point when as plug-in developers I would say you can really focus on Gutenberg first for everything I just hope you're right I would be very surprised I mean we'll check this next year we can update all these stats I'd be very surprised if not 90% or more of all new posts going into WordPress next year were Gutenberg so but we got a lot of work to do because think of it also some of the stuff around the corner like real-time co-editing I could see that being a really compelling feature for people that'll help them make the leap to Gutenberg and of course in Gutenberg you can still use a classic block so you can actually still have almost exactly the same interface inside of Gutenberg so there's lots of reasons for you to upgrade thank you thank you very much let's see over here I'll also check time, alright Hello, I'm Milana Zapp from Serbia so I'm raised, born and raised in communism and now we try to survive democracy and me too, well the second part so looking at open-source project the idea to me is closer to communism but I wouldn't advise applying that but also democracy doesn't work so I'm thinking yeah so my question is looking at WordPress I don't see any system there and I wonder when will we see something that we can identify as a system for making plans making decisions what are the names something like that that's a good question I'll take at face value all your value statements of different political systems and say that WordPress is going to look different and maybe none of the political analogies directly apply because it is software there are other open-source projects that have some kind of system and it works I think we should call what we do the WordPress system when will we see it it was actually one of the I know the WP Governance Project one of the great outcomes was how decisions get made the team structures for doing so the good news is that basically everything except choosing the jazz name for a release happens in a Slack or P2 or GitHub or track channel somewhere there's a contributor to WordPress who I was talking with and they were like what happened about Page got made and the secret process I wanted to be part of it and didn't realize that that all just happened on track so almost everything you see happens as part of an open process so there's a lot of transparency so through the actual organizational structure I think that it's changed in the past it will change in the future depending on who's contributing there's strengths and weaknesses and what all organizational structures are a series of trade-offs so what we're trying to optimize for prior to when I took back over we would say that for each release there was a release lead that had ultimate authority including over myself for what was going to be in that release and the buck stopped there for everything and what we were trying to do there was increase the sort of flexibility that release leads had because we had gotten to a space where releases were a little more incremental and want people to feel the autonomy to do bigger things so I would say that kind of like an outfit you try on the outcomes that you're looking for and these different organizational structures we'll try different things for different parts of WordPress the key that for everything we do I think will be that transparency and of course that we're open source at the end of it so that the product is something just like that film was Creative Commons it's so cool that whatever we create as a community is available to the community as well thank you so much if you have any good words for that too like what is kind of a transparent do-walk or see or something like that all of these words have trade-offs so Hi, my name is Paul Wilson I'm from Hawaii I actually came here on another conference but I think most of your Southern California automatic employees were on my same plane and I learned about this word camp so I jumped over to here so but I teach digital entrepreneurship at a university in Hawaii and WordPress historically has been the main thing that we go to so I have two questions that deal with that in particular first is the bullet point I want to make sure I got it right from your presentation implementing full-site editing that kind of slipped in there at the end and I feel that's what's really been eating at WordPress's market share as you have Wix, Weebly, all the other ones are really students gravitating more because they like the customization of being able to edit full-site without being restricted to themes and so my question on that one is we've seen acquisitions in the past such as WooCommerce where you brought them in and we've seen tools like Divi Elementor, PageLayer that already have all of that in place is that something that you guys would consider to help make it more competitive and make it more realistic for people that are just getting started where they can customize without having to be locked in theme-wise. Totally. So a good way to look at it there's probably at least 25 that I looked at of these page builders that would each have its own data model each way of doing things for solving this problem that you said and part of why we started in Gutenberg was to provide them kind of like a common rails that they could all build on top of so page builders I don't think are going anywhere but they won't need to reinvent the wheel of the basics like the core CMS stuff that will now be handed inside of Gutenberg they can build on top of that and create lots of cool things outside of there the full-site editing is basically the realization of the original promise of Gutenberg which is what we wanted to do was take all these different concepts that you would learn in different places around WordPress and make them all blocks so you could learn a block once and you knew that anywhere and what we're doing with the customization phase is breaking out the post box so right now all those blocks we showed by default you can just have inside poster pages we want you to have that in headers, footers, sidebars, whatever you want so we're doing a lot of the work there to port things over there's some more that needs to be done the navigation block is still not finished it's a very complex interaction but certainly by this time next year and hopefully in the early part of next year we'll have it so your students and yourself will be able to take like I said look at any site on the web and just using some blocks maybe the 2020 theme be able to recreate that so that is 100% where we're going we're not, as far as I know not going to acquire any of these plugins but you also don't need to because the plugins are going to continue and they're now going to be able to move faster and work together more which is also something we hear users say because in the past like choosing one of these is almost like locking yourself in to a particular way of doing things if you want to use a different theme or something else that's not compatible you're still locked in so this is a very user-centric model of trying to solve this problem for the entire work-press ecosystem so on the second we've got a lot of people waiting so we're going to jump to some other questions can I ask real quick on the question, I'll let you jump over to it thank you for your time hello hello and you've got the mic I do, hi Matt, Michelle Ames from GiveWP and WP Coffee Talk and I would like to lighten this up for just a quick second and ask you a fun question I ask every guest of my podcast what's the biggest mistake you've ever made with WordPress and what did you learn from it and what's your proudest WordPress moment ah the biggest mistake is a longer a longer story but there was a hot nacho episode is what it was referred to hopefully most people in the room haven't heard of it a few have but super early on with WordPress it was basically like completely unfunded and I'd like run out of money we were getting a harder designer to redesign the logo actually Jason Sanamaria who did do the logo we currently use but then ran out before he was going to do phases 2 and 3 which were redesigning the website and the WP admin anyway long story short like someone paid me to put these links on the website were totally spammy but it was kind of before web spam was a thing and also might have inadvertently like didn't invent but certainly popularized a way to hide content using CSS that Google was not yet aware of and so that was definitely the worst thing I've done to WordPress and the web my initial penance for that was creating a kismet which was to create something to fight web spam especially which I understood the people were doing there but then hopefully the 15 years of WordPress following that and one of the I get incredibly proud every time we come together for these big work camps US Europe and last year having 5.0 ship and being able to talk about it and see how the community came together and I mean that really was the biggest change we made in our 16 year history and this idea of going from kind of a document model to a block model of editing is it's impossible to overstate how important that is to the future of WordPress so seeing how that came together and how we iterated in public how it was all that happened definitely one of my proudest WordPress moments fantastic thank you thank you I'm Wolf Bishop I'm with WP Top Hat and I live right here in southeast Missouri so kind of home for me I'm going to kind of screw up the trend that she just tried to set up with a bit of a more controversial subject okay there's one of the greatest things about WordPress is the fact that it's released under the GPL which means we can use, redistribute change plugins themes anything that's released under that license as much as we want either for free or profit and we love that about it this has brought about a trend of growing trend of companies known as GPL clubs which redistribute plugins either free or for profit and there's a lot of controversy in the community about this some people are absolutely for it and others are definitely against it and this kind of attitude is mixed between both plugin or developers as well as end users I've spoken to developers who support it developers who are against the same with end users so I think the community might like to know what is your official or unofficial opinion about these types of companies sure first and foremost I'll say it's allowed by the license so it's something that is there's no other cases I'm aware of like that's the license when we create GPL software it's explicitly with that freedom and we couldn't prevent folks like that from doing it without taking a lot of freedoms away from everyone here in this room so it's one of those uncomfortable almost like the first moment in the bill of rights like sometimes it's uncomfortable but it's really really really important my personal view on it is that you know the customers there will get what they pay for yes they can get 100 plugins one it's weird to pay them in the first place they're price sensitive but they're not supporting any of those developers they're not practicing fire for the future in their own case by voting with their wallet for the software that they use to support that I mean I've started now where I pay for stuff I don't even need to pay for you know donations or patreons or stuff like that just because I want to see more of it in the world how you spend your money is just as important as how you spend your time and any other resource you're supporting a certain amount of you you're going to encourage more of whatever you're paying for it to happen so if you're seeing companies like some of the ones we've mentioned today that are giving a lot back to WordPress doing a GPL creating great user experiences supporting Gutenberg all that sort of stuff even if you don't need to maybe just pick up their yearly license or something and think of that as a way of supporting more of what you want to see in the world and you know for these companies that are kind of taking lots of people's work but not really giving much back either to those who are to core I would say to say that I'm from a different generation from most of the people in the room so my question to you is how do you think WordPress or how do you think WordPress is going to be adapted by the next generation of kids in K through 12 schools or how do you think you're going to change WordPress so that way kids in kids through 12 schools will want to learn WordPress and want to join the local WordPress meetups like how they joined robotics and different things thank you well first thank you I believe you were one of the speakers that's work camp right? very modest so the example that you're setting is something that inspires so this is going to be on YouTube later and boys and girls maybe of your generation will see you here asking a question being a speaker at work camp in front of a thousand adults and it's kind of beautiful when I got started WordPress I was 19 and you know the old comic in the New Yorker like on the internet no one knows your dog I would think like it's great on the internet no one knows that I'm a 19 year old kid who doesn't have a comp side degree and is learning a code people just were looking at the code I was creating and we started working together and were able to create something that became a community, product that powers a lot of the web and I'm still excited to work on every single day when I wake up so those examples being out there I think really helped the hero press stories probably need some more younger folks on hero press you know just kind of get more of that out there kids camps I think will help and finally you know we need to oh this isn't finally we need to make WordPress easier and more accessible that will help with younger generations as well as older generations and the last plug I'll put in there is something that happened this year it was automatic which is my company it bought Tumblr and we announced that we're going to switch all that to WordPress so there's going to be half a billion more WordPresses in the world as a younger audience on it as its primary user base and so I'm very very excited as you know it's not going to be the first year but probably the second or third year as those become WordPress on the back ends tumblr.com can be like a react front end talking to the WordPress API and it can have a different user interface on top of that and those folks much like before WordPress there was a generation that learned to code you know CSS from MySpace and things like by going where there's a lot of activity happening already and it's a pretty fun site as well the customization and the path we have there could allow them to graduate to be WordPress and maybe graduate being someone as cool as you talking at work camps someday thank you so much I'm at Becky Davis from Chicago and I've been doing this a long time I have sites that are out there that are 6 and 7 and 8 years old and I'm still maintaining them and they have thousands and thousands and thousands of posts in multiple languages and you want me to switch over to Gutenberg are you kidding me I do but you don't have to so my real question is I've heard rumors that the classic editor is going to die in the future please tell me that's not true what did we officially announce for a classic editor 2022 yeah that's not cool well there's a lot going to change between now and 2022 in the world in general like we'll all be like doing work camp on holograms or something so I think it went from Gutenberg release we said 4 or 5 years that we announced at that point that we were going to continue to maintain the classic editor plugin in reality in open source when things have usage it gets maintained and so classic editor still has a couple million users by 2022 guess what it's going to keep going guess what we're going to still work on it if it makes you feel any better again but we don't want to promise that it's just because that doesn't encourage what we want to happen which is people start to adopt and so hopefully some of those sites that are 6 or 7 years old maybe as you start to update them for a new design or something else that could be an opportunity to also bring them over to Gutenberg or maybe that's something their users can add in like I've definitely by the way I have word presses there 16 and 17 years old and it's been kind of fun to go back and see like things I used to have the custom code or have a lot of HTML and custom CSS I can now recreate in Gutenberg that's a little bit of work but it's also really it's kind of interesting and I learn as I do it and I know it's going to be forward compatible because Gutenberg 100% is the future of WordPress so if you were to ask me 20 years from now is this a classic editor? I mean I hope not but only because no one wants to use it so sometime in between there it's usage will dwindle to the point where it'll maybe either be a niche plugin or not something officially supported it's still open source so that still means that people will be able to customize however they like there's people who only post a word press using a command line so use that as an example of some pretty niche things can still be actively supported and maintained but I do appreciate if at some point in the future you take a look at Gutenberg again and try it out I'm trying to play with it on new projects but on projects with thousands of pages how do I transfer that there's no script for that we should make a script for that then thank you alright we'll do the last couple maybe two or three what's up Matt hey my name is Christy and I have a question for you you are a CEO so you know or you have consultants that know that a key component of any successful project or organization is good stakeholder management so this idea that in any group we have a ton of people and a lot of the time most of the time they have competing interests if we have buyers and sellers the buyer wants to get the most money and we have to find a place in between I think we could argue that the WordPress open source project has even more stakeholders than the traditional corporate structure that maybe has employees, buyers, sellers shareholders I'm curious what we're doing in 2020 and beyond to bring all of the different people with different motivations together in the WordPress project to work towards a common goal the questions that we see here demonstrate I can probably list about seven different kinds of stakeholders with different motivations different incentives different things they want to see how do we get everybody working towards that same goal of what we saw in the video which is making the project and the world a better place that is a good question and I am so relieved you defined what stakeholder management was because from over there I'm like man I'm a terrible CEO I have no idea what she means by that you got to thank Andrew Nason for that one because he texted me and said what's your question and I said it and he goes you got to define stakeholder management thanks Andy yeah so maybe not the most corporate CEO ever in terms of but I do think about that problem quite a bit which is there are so many people with different types of interest different incentives, different motivations different things that are important to them special interest within WordPress and it can be cacophonous sometimes right like all the voices in the room I also think it's part of what makes WordPress beautiful and exciting is that those voices occasionally come together and create like a chorus where we can all go in the same direction we're never going to make everyone happy and not everyone's ever going to agree with all of our decisions I'm sure there's many things I presented today that a lot of people would strongly agree with or say it would be bad for the web which is opposite of our goals but what we do try to do is put our philosophy out there of what we're trying to do the web that we want to see and the things that are really core to us that came up in an earlier question things like transparency and open source you know get on the bus and we'll take this journey together if not guess what it's open source you can create evil press or something and can? sure it's open source you can fork it you can change it you can take the code you can not fork it you can use it for whatever purpose you like and so you're not forced but if you do want to be part of this what I would term more the community of people contributing to WordPress we do have to think about how we present things so it's state of the word but it's also what happens in meetups what goes on the blog what gets translated into the 50 plus languages that WordPress is translated into it very much is a global and multifactorial problem that is part of the fun of it I was listening to a I think it was a podcast with this guy that does the documentaries like Vietnam Jazz Ken Burns right the one that has the awesome pan effect how cool that he has effects built into iMovie like to be a director to have that your name and the effect someday and he was talking about they have this neon sign in their editing room and I'm going to butcher it but I think it said it's complex because he covers these really interesting rich stories for everything there's kind of a surface story like the kind of tweet version that you can say about what happened and gosh something like the civil war or music called jazz but the reality is it's really really complex and I thought about getting like a neon thing that said that from my office after I heard that podcast I think it was a podcast he recorded Tim Ferriss if you want to check it out so thank you for your question thank you hey Matt my name is Jeremy Ward I'm a senior back-end engineer with Web Dev Studios and I was excited to see your presentation today and was aware of the decision last year to upgrade the minimum version of PHP and it's great to hear 83% adoption I believe you said it was 83% of people on WordPress 5.2 are running PHP 7 or higher right exactly and that's awesome the goal for this year as I understand it was to get the minimum version of WordPress onto 7 plus and of course I think it's next month that security updates for 7.1 end I'm just wondering if you can elaborate on like the 10% the laggards the ones that are still on the old versions and the conversations that you are planning on having with web hosts to get them up to date so that we can push everything forward sure so one common piece of info that a lot of people don't know is that web hosts that were running older versions of PHP that the PHP project itself was no longer officially supporting we're still getting back ported security fixes usually from third-party companies that they would subscribe to or things like that although 7.0 will no longer be officially supported by the PHP project it's a little bit like when we say we don't want to support old things they just don't want to have to deal with it they want to focus on making it a new thing but there are web hosts and they'll be those people will still have PHP security updates so it's not actually as end-of-life as the PHP project would like you to feel in terms of what we need to do to pick up those old people not old people people on old versions of I made a generational mistake there people on old versions of PHP is we got to work with a host you know it's really something where you know apart from a small hand-filled that might be running like servers in their closet and on their home connection like pretty much everyone runs WordPress on a web host on a server image on you know the great web host that sponsor work camps and so one thing we're looking to start doing is start identifying which host or have those older versions and just use that to talk to them they might not even know themselves that they have still have half a million WordPresses 5.6 or something so if we can expose that to them and kind of offer the best practices of what we've seen folks do to upgrade by the way this is also an area where I've seen direct competitors host that compete with each other for the same customers actually help each other out and open source their scripts and things that they used to do upgrades we hosted some amazing stuff there so we can bring these folks along but it's not the end-user that probably needs to hear at this point because they've been seeing the notices and everything for a while now it's that we need to start working with wherever they're paying to host their website great thank you we're going to end on this one I apologize I know there's a few more questions but I'm very cognizant of time and for the folks that didn't get to it come on up afterwards I'm happy to talk to you alright so you've got the last question please introduce yourself you're the celebrity that was on that video right now I just want to go and turn down somewhere because it's a bit embarrassing hi Matt my name is Francesca I'm the WordPress community manager at SiteGround and right now I serve as the release coordinator for WordPress 5.3 hopefully yes November 12th right? November 12th I'm just a shouty bossy lady everyone else is doing the work but one thing that I do not bossy you have executive management skills thank you I'm also a good listener so one thing that came up over the past few months in conversations with many different people involved in the release is that they feel it will be great to have a calendar of releases a year long calendar of releases so how do you feel about having a calendar for 2020 for the next because you said yourself three releases at best every year so how do you feel about having a calendar for 2020 this is a good one to end on let's do it yes sure thank you there's no reason not to we do kind of a version of that earlier in the year so we might as well map it out as long as people realize that those dates might move you know they say the going on is about like musicians leave complicated lives developers leave complicated lives it depends who's bossing them around but oh maybe the releases you leave will be super on time who knows we'll get that in there and the place that we should have that and we have had it a little bit more in the past I guess we just fell out of updating it would be slash about slash roadmap and that shows the dates of previous releases the jazzers they chose and then we've previously showed some of the updating ones but I guess we fell behind there so let's fix that up a contributor day that will be done as we wrap up just very quickly I would love to invite all the organizers for WorkCamp US this year to the stage really quick so if you were involved and organizing come on up quickly maybe not too quickly we did was it WorkCamp we did have an injury when the organizers were coming up at a previous one so come up carefully come on keep coming alright wait for everyone to get here oh come on from this side too oh my goodness look at this look at this is this the 47 that we talked about earlier just about I'm glad we had it ram that's awesome alright we're missing one so can we do a quick round of applause for putting this together thank you so much alright let's go thank you all so much for an amazing state of the word I'll see you next year