 Good morning, everybody. Have you all been having a good time at War Camp San Francisco? Yeah? It's not been bad, not bad, not bad. Before we get started, I would like to give a heartfelt thank you and round of applause to our headline sponsors, Automatic, Dreamhost, and Bluehost. Without their help, we wouldn't be able to do what we do today. So thank you to all of them. If you get a chance to, please go down by their booth later and say thank you in person. I think it'd be really meaningful to them. Alright, so the state of the word. This is the yearly address that we give to talk about where WordPress has been, where it is, and where it's going. My name, as Jane said, is Matt Mulling. I'm a co-founder of WordPress, the founder of Automatic. I've been doing this about eight years now. Just to get it out of the way in the beginning, yes, the hair has changed. This is what I looked like last year, what sort of elisted more of like a kids in the hall, news radio type feel. But according to Jane, this new look is more this guy? I can't even sing, I don't know. I mean, Barry Gibbs, it also inspired the attendees of WordCamp San Diego a few weeks ago to create a new tagline for WordPress, which we are seriously considering adopting. So easy, a caveman can do it. Well, I've been thinking about more about that, more than just that. I've been thinking about WordPress all day every day. The growth, the innovation, the evolution, where we're going, and that's really what I want to talk about. Sort of what we are, we'll have three sections, what we are, who we are, and sort of where we're at and where we're going. This time last year, we released version 3.0, named for Filonious Monk. Picture it here, smoking tobacco. Include a number of great features, including one of my personal favorites, the admin bar. Post formats, which allows you to have different types of post types in your themes. We introduced the 2011 theme, which was our first default theme, well, our second default theme in six years, and also the first one with a responsive design, meaning it works great on any size screen, as seen here. We also started putting some more customization stuff in 2011, including great headers like we did in 2010, but new features, like, for example, to allow you to randomize the headers, or show different ones on different pages. You guys asked for a faster and leaner user interface. We've done that with significant speed increases in WordPress 3.2. Also, you asked for an optimized UI. Get out of our way while you're doing things. For this, I actually wanted to rewind. We're going to take a trip back in time, very Gibbs style. This is the very first WordPress 7.1, .71 screen. We'll go through the world here. 1.1, 1.2. If you can see between... 1.5 added some color. Ooh, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2. Not much changed here. If you look between these, pretty much all that changed is we had a little something on the buttons there. See the gradient? That was hot. Redesign number one, redesign number two. Refresh, redesign number three. And finally, the right screen has gone all the way to being something that literally can disappear to get out of your way. My second favorite feature currently in WordPress. There's been an innovation loop. I like to say that innovation in core gets innovation in plugins. And there's been some very cool stuff happening in plugins and themes the last year. The shell theme is one that I really like. You can see it uses post-formats very interestingly and actually has a cool horizontal design that can go back and forth. So things like the on-swipe plugin, which creates a tablet-formatted version, almost flip board-like of any blog, any WordPress-powered blog in the world. So things like JobRoller, which is running a theme from app themes, it's running on Woo themes, which really uses WordPress not as just a blog or CMS engine, but actually as an application platform that they built something completely novel on. And then finally, this just came out a few weeks ago. You guys seem press work. Basically a new theme framework that in addition to having, you know, sort of all the HTML5 goodness and everything, actually takes it so you have front-end editing. You can go to the front of your theme and drag and drop widgets around and move the content area. It's a lot of fun. On the plugin side, we saw some innovation in caching. Supercache and W3 Total Cache are doing great. SEO is doing well as well. We got WP SEO and the all-in-one SEO pack. Blog's more backed up and secure than ever. It's like a buddy for backups and vault press for both security and backups. And something that we started talking about first in March at South by Southwest. One of the things that has aged me quite a bit this year is we've been working on feature parity quite a bit. Automatic has. Between the two things we call WordPress.com.org. This has manifested itself in a plugin we released in March called Jetpack, which shows part of the vision but not all there yet. But the idea is that once you're in WordPress, you're part of the family. There's been trade-offs between the two. Whether you want to host it yourself and have complete control, you lose some of the social features or some of the community features. You shouldn't need to. And that's what's going to be happening this year, hopefully. It's a cool concept called Desire Paths. It's probably an urban myth or legend, but the story goes that there was this university built and instead of putting sidewalks between the buildings, they left it all as grass and basically they saw where the grass eventually got worn in. And that's what they paved. The cool thing about this is that it wasn't where they necessarily going to put the sidewalk. Sometimes at Desire Paths, this is called Desire Paths, and it leads you in unexpected directions. I've also heard this called Paving the Cow Path, which maybe means that people at the university were cows. I don't know. Maybe it was Aggie University. But plugins and themes are the manifestation of Desire Paths within WordPress. We look to them to see what's going on. We create APIs to enable what we feel are the best adjacent possibilities in plugin and themes. Plugin and theme authors take this in ways we would never imagined. And then we go back and make new APIs so it can do the next big thing. And this sort of virtuous loop is, I think, what's really driven a lot of the innovation in WordPress the past year and what you guys have already benefited from. I want to jump over. We did something this year. The first ever WordPress survey. And normally surveys aren't, like, exciting that you talk about. But this was pretty neat because it was almost like a census. It was like the very first time we really looked at WordPress users and said, but what are you doing? What's going on? We haven't really had a lot of insight. We had over 18,000 people respond this year from literally all over the world. I love this slide. Let's zoom in a little. We'll go to Cameroon first, which is right there. Don't worry, I didn't know where it was either. Well, we got the big arrow right over there below Nigeria. And we have a fellow there who took this survey named, Joel Mayer from Cameroon. He's a singer and songwriter, JoelOnline.net. In addition to being a singer and songwriter who built his own website, he is building sites for the Cameroon Association for the Prevention of Blindness on a volunteer basis. Over in Greenland, we have Christian Sorensen, who is apparently revolutionizing the Nook Greenland Web Market by using WordPress to create businesses better than the businesses, websites better than the businesses they've ever had. He said his business is going fantastic. And then there's someplace so small, you can't even see it on the map, the Maldives? We just got the English versus the American people here. This is an especially cool story. It's Mohammed Yassif. And he has three blogs, actually. One for the blog of the boy right there named Yafao, who is a child with cerebral palsy living in the Maldives. Second, the association for the disability, the A in disability is capitalized in development. And finally, his personal blog is running on WordPress. You know, as I mentioned, a few people were building sites for other people, some non-profit, some for-profit. 53% of the people are about 9,500. Self-described themselves as building WordPress-powered websites. And 36% of that, or about 3,300, were actually described themselves as solo entrepreneurs or owning the business that they were building the websites for. So the 53% included people working for companies that build primarily WordPress websites. So it was literally all over the world. But last week I happened to be in St. Louis at a work camp there. And I got to make two firms that were doing some cool stuff with WordPress. The first is called New Concept. And the fellow in the middle there is Brett Coleman. And he's been doing websites for a long time. But he's recently started using WordPress to build them. And his business has gotten better. It's to the point now where he now employs his wife and his sister full-time, which is very neat. There's another interesting company there called Go Brand Go, also in St. Louis. They started nine months ago. The company was founded nine months ago. There are already almost 15 full-time people cranking out about two websites per week for clients around the St. Louis area and more. Two a week. That's pretty cool. Let's do a quick little survey here. Who here has more than one WordPress website? Raise your hands. That is pretty much everyone. Keep them up, keep them up, keep them up. Wave them like you just don't care. No. More than 10 websites, keep your hands up. More than 20 websites. More than 100 websites. More than 10,000 websites. If you still have your hands up, you either work for WordPress.com or you're a spammer. We found, from a small percentage of the people, we didn't want a double count. So we only counted people who said they were either a solo entrepreneur or the owner of their business. So from about 6,800 people who met that criteria, we had over 170,000 websites created by them. The average of about 25 per person. So those of you who had fewer than 25 websites, you need to get cracking. They're below average. Now, you are great. We also had some free-form questions. I like this one. What's the best thing about WordPress? We're feeling down that day. We need a little boost. Number one thing far and away, ease of use. 400 developers use this exact phrase. Everybody digs ease of use. By the way, bonus points, if you're getting the references of the albums that we're referencing in all these slides. Here's some quotes from there. Ease of use in the five-minute install, which is 30 seconds on my hosting provider. Maybe Bluehost or Dreamhost. Flexibility for the developer and ease of use for the consumer through the dashboard. Ease of use for my id10t customers. I'm not sure that means. Something wrong with this keyboard. Maybe you left the num lock on. So this was all developers. Users also loved it. A full 20% of users use the exact phrase ease of use or easy to use in their responses. The exact phrase. In fact, they were so prevalent that of the 25,000 words that were in all of the free-form responses, 2,500 of them were exactly easy or ease. 10% of all words in their responses were that. Other big thing, who can guess what the number two thing was? Community, of course. Community of developers all helping each other. It's an all-around awesome package from the product to the community, and it works. It's updated often. The community provides tons of additional functionality and answers. Who here has ever been on the WordPress.org forums? Just at all. It's pretty much everyone. How cool. I always like asking that, because that is, in fact, how I got my start with B2 eight or nine years ago. You don't need to know a lot to participate on the forums, as evidenced by how little I knew when I first started helping people on the B2 forums. But literally, I had just sort of stumbled across, the movable type thing was kind of hard. I stumbled across B2, which is the predecessor of the WordPress. I had some questions on the forums. Someone answered me, because I know someone asking something that I already figured out. I thought, well, I could answer this. I don't know a lot, but I could answer this. And that really... It was all downhill from there, actually. To here. But it's a good point that it's one of the best ways to get involved. If you're thinking about... I've met a lot of people this weekend who said, I'd love to contribute more to WordPress. Hanging out in the forums and just sort of looking for someone is a fantastic way of doing it. So we also asked people what the number one complaint was. We wanted both sides of it. And there was a similar to the ease of use dominance. There was that... one word that kept popping out. I love this slide. Plugins. People listed the... Plugins not working. Having to upgrade plugins. Plugins have security problems. Finding the best plugins was one that came up quite a bit. We now have over 15,000 plugins in the repository. A number that we're very proud of because I believe it simplifies the breadth and depth of the ecosystem, development ecosystem around WordPress. But you don't need 15,000 plugins. You need one that you're looking for. Or two that do the job. I think the only person who runs 15,000 plugins is maybe Mark Riley. He insults every single plugin that gets submitted to check it. But you don't need this. So it's hard to find these things. And I think it's important today that part of the sort of year of improvements we've made to WordPress.org, we started digging into plugins and themes and seeing sort of what was making it so when you search that there were so many results and it was hard to pick through them. There was a bunch of results. There was a lot of stuff out there. So we decided to institute a new policy which is if a plugin or theme hasn't been updated in two years, we're not going to take it down. We're going to start hiding it from the search results both on WordPress.org and we have 18 in WordPress years. This is actually a really long time. When you think two years ago we were on like version 2.8, that was one of those funny looking designs in the middle before the current good one. We feel like this is an ample cutoff. It's ample time. And in fact, one of the oldest plugins that people actually used, Mark Jacobs subscribed to comments, actually as a result of this policy has finally been updated. So round of applause for Mark. I'm going to share with you what's lately. It's called How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brandt. Has anyone read this book? Okay, cool. It basically talks about how buildings evolve over time. How things, buildings, and he has a lot of amazing pictures. You can kind of see on this title of drawings or photos from buildings 100 years ago and then at different points how they changed, how the owners changed them. There's a cool quote in the beginning in 1896. He said, form ever follows function. Form follows function. We've all heard that a thousand times, right? Well, buildings, it's not quite right. So let's jump ahead 40 or 50 years to one of my favorite pundits, Winston Churchill. He had an awesome quote. He said, we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us. Kind of beautiful. I love the turn of words there. Stuart Brandt actually posits that neither, well, both were almost clairvoyant in their predictions of how cities were going to evolve. Neither was entirely right because what happens is that we shape our buildings and our buildings shape us, and then we shape them again. Or as Stuart Brandt puts it, function reforms form perpetually. We're going to come back to this. I think this is a great analogy for how open source and WordPress works. There was a period in architecture where people didn't do this. And the buildings were, it's a period actually called brutalism. Terrible name. Known for its pillbox-like parking lot structures that their greatest sin wasn't being ugly as this is not the most attractive building. Most of them have been torn down by now. It was big in the 60s. One of the most outspoken critics of brutalism was actually Prince Charles. But for the inflexibility for the fact that they were designed that the architect knew what was best for everyone who was ever going to live in that building. And so the usefulness of the building didn't last longer than the building itself. So while we're talking about ugly things I would like to take a small interlude into the Fogo. Who knows the Fogo? Like the devil, it takes many guises. This is the first ever recorded instance of the Fogo on the interwebs that we are aware of. It later evolved blue gradient with a little bit of a twist. We thought it would be gone but it kept sticking around. That's the sticker version. Perhaps you favor a painterly flourish in your Fogo. And then it got so bad that the Fogo was actually abducted by aliens. It was like Independence Day or something going on there. I had no idea what's going on. But this is a Fogo. And there's some percentage of you in the audience let's be honest. I'm not going to make you raise your hands but you say that looks like the regular WordPress logo. So how do you spot a Fogo? We have this handy guide. So the Fogo on the left is short and squat. You can tell by the top of the W there does not make it to the beautiful serif that is the signature of WordPress's logo. We're on the right. You have this tall, graceful, elegance actual WordPress logo as designed and imagined by Jason Sanamaria which is what you should look for. If you ever see a Fogo every year I make kind of a request of the WordPress community. A year or two ago is we want to stamp out the lowercase P in WordPress. Well this year my request is we want to stamp out the Fogo. The Fogo will be a one term logo. Sorry, that was bad. So if you spot it email the person using it the reason this happens is that when you Google image WordPress logo the Fogo is pretty much like five of the top ten results. So if you see anyone using it be sure to ping them vigorously. We make some predictions every single year. Last year I made four predictions and it's always good to keep us on us to loop back on them. First we said there will be more mobile apps for the win. WordPress is now available across basically six platforms and eight sort of device profiles screens small and large from the web OS to the iPad and doing all these mobile apps and every single one of these is open source by the way on every single platform has allowed us to experiment with what we would otherwise imagine because we were able to build something from scratch. So for example the approach we took to WordPress on the iOS which was our very first mobile application was rough in the beginning getting better was different from one of the most recent which was the Windows Phone 7 which actually has some really interesting interface things going on. Second prediction further humanize the WordPress experience. I remember exactly what we were talking about here but I do have one favorite example do you guys ever know is this when you log in and you put in the wrong password shakes his head and says no you cannot, I shall not pass this is an example we wanted to add a little bit of a human element to the WordPress interface. Another example we talked about earlier is the ZIN writing mode not in the ZIN writing mode itself but watch very closely here you're typing this is riveting actually the mouse is about to come in boom. See how it faded in there watch it's about to fade out this is the things that we get really excited about in WordPress core. You will not believe the number of iterations we get down to the millisecond level of testing how that should fade in and out just to create the exact right feel where the mouse was on the screen how close it should be from the top should it do it when you're in the text area everything these are the things that we positively obsess about to try to create the most elegant user experiences possible in WordPress that hopefully you never notice. Third prediction inclusion of core plugins not so much we talked about doing core plugins basically the idea was a canonical we talked about two things really one that we were going to go back to WordPress.org and spend a release cycle focused on WordPress.org website and making that more useful for you guys and that's actually been a huge success it has vastly improved lots of little things we haven't redesigned it but lots of little things have gotten better in the past year and so thank you to Otto and Nace and everyone who's worked on that but core plugins were the idea that we'd have sort of a canonical set of functionality like we'd say podcasting is really important we create a plugin to do that the core team would create a plugin to do that and it ended up that that was a little bit much to bite off so it did not happen but our fourth prediction as I said that more than 8.5% of the web which was the number last year will be on WordPress and we'll go up and we'll look back to that first we're going to talk about Kinyahara does anyone know this, recognize this man he is the art director of a Japanese company called Muji a firm known for its functions where the form follows or function follows form form follows function right till we get back to that reform forms function perpetually I'm going to mess that up just warning you now this is called Muji which makes beautiful brandless products like a beautiful messenger bag that has no logo it just works he gives a really interesting talk he has this concept of sort of western versus Japanese design that I think also illustrates some of the approaches of WordPress to design versus other social media platforms he talks about this German knife which is a beautiful knife but it's fun to make fun of the Germans it's ergonomic which is beautiful and works very well affords a certain usage you know exactly where you should put your thumb on that knife and you can use it much like some social media platforms today afford certain uses like a Twitter or Facebook affords a certain way for you to use it and that is sometimes in line with their customers and you are not the customer of Facebook because you don't pay anything to Twitter or Facebook because you don't pay anything you're actually the product the customer is the advertisers so over time they afford or want to encourage might be in the interest of those customers not you he contrasts the Japanese knife which is empty not empty in the sense that it's undesigned or it's not thought through but empty like a bowl or a room that can be filled a million different ways that the knife and its simplicity can adapt to many different forms of use however it's wielded whether make sushi or chop vegetables you can hold it in many many ways and I think that this is actually a great analogy for how WordPress works where we have the plugins we have the core adapting to the plugins which can adapt to the core and we iterate the things we iterate the features and the functionality and the interface to use it exactly like you want to it's almost like in the software world we can switch between the Japanese and the ergonomic knife we can adapt to exactly how you're using it WordPress can be used for anything like this beautiful Wu themes tumble log that's kind of fun but really the only limit is your imagination that we all know probably in this room there's more unique uses of WordPress I know I love this thing as there are people it's it really can adapt to whatever you're going to use it for and I wanted to show a few examples of this of WordPress in action both to loop back to some things we talked about last year like for example the number 10 website here this is a big thing Cross-State Atlantic Ocean we have TechCrunch redesigned I think we have some TechCrunch people here Boing Boing also redesigned and switched to WordPress from movable type we've been getting huge adoption in the government sector the consumer financial protection burial Bureau consumerfinance.gov we've seen WordPress I talked about it used as an application we've seen it actually used as a game company from the official company for the website behind Bioshock and SystemShock games has anyone played those? few? oh cool it's terrifying the website is not that scary it actually did some really cool stuff with achievements you can unlock different achievements on the website and the way they did their forms I found really really cool SpaceHack I love this the idea of open sourcing exploration and getting different people trying different ideas with it this is a lot of fun BMX it's a beautiful beautiful site we have artists adopting WordPress like Shepard Ferry manufacturing quality descent since 1999 open source cousins like Mozilla we're a big fan of everything they do there they're switching a lot of websites to WordPress Oregon you can ride bikes around I don't ride bikes but I thought this was pretty cool you can actually map out different routes and this is all using I believe WordPress custom post types to do this and one of my personal favorites JZ has relaunched his website thelifebuttimes.com and it's every single square there is actually a different post it's really neat and when you scroll down it kind of brings you down you should check out the site it brings you down a little bit and then there's the navigation it's actually sort of a mini part of these squares not for a third part what's next jazzville straight ahead what is coming in the WordPress world well the thing that personally I'm most excited about that's coming in WordPress is the capabilities afforded by new browsers with html5 and css right now we have a completely vulcanized experience I'm proud of our six platforms that we're on in mobile but each one has a different interface a different sort of way that you use it and in fact none of them probably have your custom fields that you're using none of them have the plugins the menus that plugins have added but with the advance of mobile browsers and html5 and css we can create adaptive designs talk about that more in a minute the second super trend that I think is going to happen this year is the marriage of the reading and writing experience writing and consumption actually those are the same thing reading and writing experience for WordPress right now WordPress is one of the better authoring platforms that we will continue to iterate on but to read blogs if you're not interested in only the WordPress point it it's not a great place to go right now and WordPress 3.3 which is the next version trying to anticipate some of the questions here there's three things that we've identified as some of the fun things that are coming one is we want to take a look at making the admin responsive responsive design for the WordPress admin interface so the idea that it can work beautifully on all sizes of screen large and small second we're going to take a look at what we call NUX a chance for a new user experience or the opposite of SUX the idea here is that you know we have added some incredible amount of websites over the past year people are coming to WordPress for the first time and it's almost like if you were playing BioShock and being dumped on like the 15th level when you first come in I mean the dashboard is very very intimidating so we've started to look at what we're going to go through for the first time like do what the documentation and some of the excellent books out there do for WordPress and have like something that says hey if this is your first time click here and you can take a little tour or if you're one of the people that's on your 25th you're perfectly average you're building a 25th website you just close it right immediately and finally which you guys have asked for just a little bit it's better media handling I think that the social story is not finished like the adoption of Google Plus in such a short amount of time it definitely says there's room for new entrants there but there's something I really really like about Google Plus which is there they did a lot of innovative things in the interface but I really like their image thing this is uploading images in Google Plus like you're dragging and dropping from a desktop right into this area and boom that's super cool if you could do that, would you guys like that? maybe not the sharing part it's funny when Michael Pick was making this I got like 14 invitations to view this album there's three of the albums that we talked about some of the slides were based on actually this is an example of DesirePass manifesting themselves is the things that you guys have said over and over and over again are things that you want to experience in WordPress I want to loop back a little bit to some of the survey stuff we talked about where we as a community and how we're using the platform it's an interesting thing as I travel the word camps around the world people always tell me come up in their site that they built a WordPress website we customized it so much you wouldn't even recognize this I started to hear this more and more and more but I wasn't sure we now have statistical confirmation that the majority of people 65% say they customized WordPress to be completely unrecognizable so I wasn't just making this up a lot of you are doing this this room has customized WordPress to not be recognizable it's actually a little bit more than 60% it's a good thing that we did not survey just this room however only 4% customized the admin actually kind of like this we work really hard on the admin there are plugins out there that like move the navigation to the top or do different things but it actually breaks some of the WordPress way that if for example you set up a WordPress site for someone change the admin they go and get WordPress for Dummies the book nothing is actually going to line up so it's actually I like that people aren't customizing that too much we did a straw poll last year we asked whether people are using WordPress as a blog as a CMS for both so who first who is using WordPress just for a blog with your hand who is using it just as a CMS who is using it both as a blog and as a CMS so we found a full 92% of the people who took the survey using WordPress as a CMS it's an incredible number three years ago this may have been 5% I would say that the transformation to WordPress as a CMS is nearing full penetrate like full we're almost done which is pretty exciting so only 8% are using it just for a blog we also asked I thought you guys would be interested in this what are the hourly rates how much do people charge per hour to build WordPress sites we got a huge range from $5 to $2,000 per hour it's like building websites for Elliott Spitzer or something I don't know we took out the outliers on both ends we found these averages an average of 58 and a median of $50 it'll be interesting we're just starting this number we're going to start doing this survey every year I'm very curious to see what this number moves over time as WordPress sites become more CMS-like, more complex and what you guys are able to do becomes more advanced we had a full 2800 people that said they were making their living from WordPress about 16% of the people who took the survey that's more people than are employed at many web companies I mean it's actually kind of amazing when you think of the number of jobs being created by WordPress and we don't know what this actual number is we don't know how many people didn't take the survey so hopefully over time we'll get a little bit better sense of that if you are not currently making your living from WordPress but you would like to there are some great resources you've got jobs.wordpress.net CodePoet if you're a hiring consultant WPcandyPros is a great place to list yourself WooJobs, WooThemes has a great job board of course automatic always hiring WordPress growth in the first two days of 3.2 we had over half a million downloads of the software the fastest velocity of upgrades and downloads of WordPress ever this was WordPress 3.2 Gershwin we've now passed over 200 million plug-in downloads and to go back to the 8.5% prediction from last year WordPress has now reached 14.7% of all websites in the world but we dug in and we actually found a cooler stat that has not been published before so this is the first time this is going to be talked about so we worked with some outside firms to look at active new domains in the US and basically all new domains being created and we found that out of every 100 domains that were created new domains, active domains 22 of them were running WordPress which means our adoption in new websites is even higher than our current existing market share so this means that the direction that is not just growing but it's accelerating so as I like to say at the end of these the state of the word is strong next I'm very very excited about what's going to happen in terms of where we're going the APIs that we're adding in 3.2 and 3.3 and how that's going to influence the plug-in and theme developers in the room I think that we're going to create an open source spectacular of these desire pass and virtuous cycles between the plug-ins and themes that hopefully when we gather here again next year word camps are really you think you're at a word camp right now you're actually at a family reunion it's so fun to just look around the room and see so many familiar faces so many people that have been here you know the numbers on the badges some people have been involved with this for 8 years and we're growing something we're growing something that is not going to be around just this year and next year but hopefully for decades to come and setting it up in ways and that's all I got