 Hello. Hello. Good morning everyone. Thanks for the intro, Tom. My name is John Blackbourne. I am one of the core developers of WordPress and I've been involved in the project for around nine years now. This talk, by the way, is going to be a little bit short because I'd really like to get some questions from the audience, so please don't feel afraid to step up to the mic and ask questions at the end of the talk. So WordPress is a teenager now. It's 13 years old and the software that it runs on, MySQL and PHP, is even older. 1995, these are introduced. So WordPress developers, we're working with technology that was first introduced 21 years ago. So WordPress is mature software, but what do I mean by that? Well, WordPress is well-established. It powers over 25% of the web now. 40,000 plug-ins available in the plug-in directory. We've got thousands of themes available. WordPress is proven. It powers some of the largest websites in the world. And it's stable. WordPress has a commitment to backwards compatibility that probably isn't matched by any other open source software project in the world. The core WordPress software evolves. It doesn't change too quickly. But the internet is a fickle place. Proponents of more modern software might call it old. They might call it bloated or boring or some other words that I can't really say upon stage. So if this is the case, or even if it isn't, how can WordPress continue to move forward? How can it compete with much more modern PHP and JavaScript frameworks and all of this other new software that is available on the web? Well, let's start by looking at a few places where WordPress is already doing this. For responsive images, they're not too new, but good support in browsers is relatively new. Now WordPress 4.4 introduced responsive image support natively via the source set attribute. This means you get responsive images for free on your WordPress website without you having to do anything. And due to WordPress's popularity, this actually had a measurable effect. This is a chart from Google Chrome's feature reporting tool for the source set attribute. This point right here is when WordPress 4.4 introduced support for the source set attribute. And due to the popularity of WordPress, it had a big impact on the usage of source set right across the internet on the Chrome browser. It's still relatively low, but it is climbing at a considerable rate. The REST API. I'm sure many of you heard about the REST API. It's in WordPress Core now, the infrastructure for the API. The aim is to provide a modern, powerful, and JSON-powered interface to all WordPress websites. The WordPress REST API will probably become the largest distributed API on the internet. And HTTPS work is ongoing in WordPress to improve support for HTTPS, which the web as a whole is rapidly moving toward. And that will enable us to then start looking at HTTP2 features such as pipelining and maybe even some server push. So from a technical point of view, WordPress is perfectly capable of implementing modern user-facing web technologies. But moving WordPress forward isn't just about its technology. There's a bigger picture to think about. It's made up of many parts. So let's take a look at some of these parts. But first of all, just before that, I'd like to ask the question, what is WordPress? If we think about the answer to this question, it will help us identify areas where WordPress can improve and move forward. So the description from WordPress.org is suitably vague. WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. So I guess that means you can use WordPress to build whatever you like on the web. WordPress's mission statement actually is more representative. I think its mission statement is to democratise publishing through open source, GPL software. And what that means is WordPress provides the opportunity for everyone to be a publisher through the use of free software. So with that statement in mind, let's take a look at some areas where WordPress is moving forward well. Localisation and internationalisation. This is probably one of the most important areas where WordPress can increase its reach throughout the world. Probably the area where it can grow more than any other. If WordPress doesn't speak your language, then it's hard for WordPress to democratise your publishing. Now, if we increase the number and the quality and the ease of use of translations in WordPress, then this is really key to moving the WordPress platform forward in terms of its reach throughout the world. We're doing quite well at this. Hands up anyone who attended or was involved with the Global Translation Day back in April. Yeah, quite a few people. The Translation Day was great. We had over 30 events around the world which came together to teach people about internationalisation and localisation. We had live training sessions and in-person meet-ups. Lots of people learnt how to translate WordPress. We do local WordPress word camps and meet-ups. Many of these now include non-English tracks which is a great way for non-English speakers to get involved with WordPress. Of course, we've got localised versions of the WordPress.org website now in many languages and that includes the localised plug-in and theme directories. Similar to localisation, accessibility is an important part of enabling as many people as possible to start using WordPress. Now, the core coding standards for WordPress were recently updated to include this accessibility statement. All new or updated code released into WordPress core and bundled themes must conform with the web content accessibility guidelines level AA. This is really good news because typically when you improve the accessibility of a piece of software you don't improve the accessibility just for people with disabilities. You improve it for everyone. You improve the user experience. You improve the user interface. Reminding developers of this is really key to improving the software and moving the platform forward. By the way, level AA of the guidelines there, they're really simple. They're not complicated. It includes making your navigation easy to use and consistent, not using things like title attributes. It's actually a really simple standard to adhere to. We're doing quite well in those two areas, but let's have a look at some areas where we're not doing so well. Developer relations. Actually, I'm going to start with Drupal here. The lead developer of Drupal recently wrote an article called Why the Big Architectural Changes in Drupal 8. There's a choice quote here. The reason Drupal has been successful is because we always made big forward-looking changes. Modernising its code base is Drupal's way of maintaining relevance and pushing the platform forward. But if you read this article, it turns out...