 This is the state of the word. My name is Matt Mollick. I'm a co-founder of WordPress. Nine years ago now, co-founder of WordPress with a fellow named Mike Little over in England. And I've been doing this ever since. If you had asked me nine years ago, could I have ever predicted that we would all be in a room like this today? Not in a million years. In fact, in 2006, there was just one word camp. That was the first ever word camp, and it was right here in San Francisco. Not here in this venue. We weren't that fancy yet. We were over at the Swedish American Music Hall. You guys know that spot? I see those San Francisco people in the audience. And it was planned with about three weeks' notice. You can believe that. Last year, there were 52 word camps, about one per week, all over the world. This year, there have been 31 so far. You like the WC there? With over 10,000 attendees. And that's just so far this year. There are 44 more scheduled or being planned. So we'll come out of this year, recording the plan with 75 word camps, and about double the number of attendees. So huge, huge, huge growth, especially in the word camp phenomenon, which I'm very proud of, very happy about. And like I said, nine years doing WordPress. This is the sixth time I've stood in front of you guys to talk about the state of the word. But probably the first time, and the time I'm most excited and comfortable to present some of the things that have been going on. I read this book earlier in the year, had nothing to do with technology. It was called Mindless Eating. Does anyone read this book? Is that a curiosity? Handful over there? It was funny. So it's not actually a book about food as much, although that's all it talks about the entire time. It's really a book about people and the human condition and human behaviors. I love food because it's part of sort of, it's intrinsic to the human experience, right? It brings us all together. But what Brian talks about in the book that really struck me was something called the Mindless Margin. It's also not a diet book. But what he does talk about is that most people who overeat, don't overeat by a ton. They overeat by about 100 calories per day. We're talking about a cookie here, like one sixth of a Snickers bar. But 100 calories per day over the course of a year adds up to 10 pounds. And cumulatively, over the course of many years, that can add up to a lot. On the other end, less than 100 calories a day is below the threshold of what most people even notice, but can work the other way, losing 10 pounds per year. Of course, there's a lot more to it. But I thought of this when I asked around. These are some of the people I reached out to asking in preparation for this about a month ago sort of what have been the things that have most excited you around WordPress in the past year? What are you most proud of? What are the things that you think are making the biggest differences in people's lives? And what came back wasn't the big headline things. It was a lot of the little things. And it really struck me because it's very true that we're not... We're a product of our habits. We're a product of the things we do every single day. And you can see it at WordCamps. There's less trash around than at other conferences I go to because the WordPress type of person sees something standing there or sitting there and they pick it up and put it in the trash. I mean, that sort of little bit accumulates into a lot going on. And actually where people said the most was around.org. And I wanted to highlight some of these to start with because we haven't talked about this a ton. But there's been some very cool improvements to WordPress.org over the past year. The first and one of the ones I'm most proud of is actually plug-in headers. So this is kind of what plugins used to look like a year ago. In fact, this is better than they looked like because this includes some of the design improvements for the design with the download buttons and everything. But we just added the very simple ability for people to put headers at the top of their plugins. Just the idea... I mean, we've had this functionality in WordPress for how long? Four years? Custom headers? Five years? Now, but just a little bit of that design aspect, going on WordPress.org spruced it up. It allowed people to make their plugins their own. We added some smaller things, like favorites. You can now, if you're logged in, create a bookmark list of your favorite plugins. And we're even talking about making those available within a dashboard. So let's say you're starting a new blog. You can go directly and say, show me my 10 favorite plugins. Install them all at once. That'd be pretty cool, right? But the highest impact change of all the things we did, you could blink and you would miss it. It was this. See, we had a little thing to the support side, on the sidebar of the plugin page that just showed, well, we did a few things. We made it easier to create form threads from the plugin pages and for those to be tied to the plugin itself. We added, as a tab at the top, a support tab that showed sort of like a little... like each plugin had its own little form. And then we put this in the sidebar, showing how many threads there have been in the past two months and how many of them have been resolved. This resulted in a huge, huge change. In fact, in the past three months, we launched this in May, in the past three months since this has happened, there have been more form topics resolved, more support threads resolved in the WordPress.org form than the entire year previous. This is not... It's not one huge thing. It's not like one person went in there and answered tens of thousands of things. It's thousands of plugin authors becoming more active and more engaged with each of their plugins, which is making a huge difference to you guys, the users of all these. So, very excited about that. Even though it's not, it's not even something you guys are going to clap for. That's such a little thing. But it is the little things. Thank you. WordPress is a result of a thousand of these little details that I think really make it what it is. Another thing people talked about a lot was unit tests. I chose a special picture for this one. The idea, we now have over 6,000 assertions. Do you guys know what unit tests are? You see some heads shaking. Do you want to know? Basically, the idea is that you take a piece of code and you say, if I give you this, I expect this. And then every time you make a change, the code base, you say, hey, here's what I gave you. Do you still have the correct answer? It's like testing the code over and over again. And if the answer changes, you're like, huh, maybe there's something wrong there. Quick aside, might get a water? And then the final thing that people talked about being proud of in the past year of WordPress doing was actually the same we did on SOPA. For those of you who saw this, there was some legislation coming up in the United States. Thank you. That had implications for freedom of speech online, particularly for service providers. And thousands of thousands of sites, including WordPress, Wikipedia, thousands of sites on WordPress.com, blocked out in protest. And the legislation was reversed and they went running with their tails between their legs. It was incredible. I've been to Washington a few times since this happened and it comes up every single time. Politicians are used to people, you know, writing letters or doing the phone calls that they ignored or just everything. They were not prepared for what happens. And so I think it's pretty exciting that the Internet was able to come together. And there's been a lot of good stuff after this of Internet people coming together. But moving forward, I think there's still a lot to do on WordPress.org. For example, in the plugin directory, I want to make it more Amazon-like. Right now, plugin ratings are five stars, but you're kind of just, like, squinting at that last star to see what the rating is between four and five. You know how it is? Like, most things are between four and five. That's the really terrible. So we're going to make that more obvious. And like Amazon has, you know, show how many stars there have been at the different levels. Let you click on that and see perhaps reviews of people from those different levels. Make it easier for plugin authors to respond to those reviews. So let's say someone says one star. It doesn't work on my blog. What if that one star can be turned to a five star by just, like, a single change or a single, I think that feedback mechanism is really important. Are there plugin authors in the audience here? Raise your hand if you're a plugin. Whew, lots. Would you do that? Yeah. Well, so working on that. And then actually most importantly is taking everything that we've done, and this is important for across WordPress. The plugins are themed and bringing it to our international communities. I'm going to talk a little bit more about international coming up. But international is where the bulk of the growth is coming and downloads and everything else is associated with WordPress right now. But we haven't been sent on our laurels for Core. And Core, there's been lots of fun changes, including some of the things I talked about last year. Anyone remember what NUC stands for? Opposite of sucks? New user experience. Around the new user experience in Core, we have this new welcome screen. When you upgrade, you get sort of notes about everything that's new there. Some of you probably have seen these, the tool tips. Especially great for new users to introduce features or to just sort of show them around. Added the ability to embed tweets in WordPress, which a lot of people have been having some fun with. And then media uploads. This is a big topic from last year. You can now drag and drop uploads into the thing. You can drag and drop 100 things or one thing. I got so used to this, I forgot this happens in the past year. Like, did we always do that? No! And then finally, one of the coolest ones is actually the customizer. So the idea that you can edit your blog while looking at it and sort of this interactive front-end editing that I think you'll see a lot more of in the coming year. This resulted in, we got about 44 million downloads of the past year, several per seconds, which brought us to a total of 145 since WordPress started. So about a third of our downloads were within the past year. The things are still growing really, really fast. So, good job. Thank you for clicking that button over and over again. And also, the downloads don't actually count when click install is coming from web host or when click upgrades coming from web host. So this number, I think, is actually, I expected to actually go down over the next year or two simply because more and more WordPress users are going to be on that sort of auto-upgrade system. So we'll actually probably should start working with web host to figure out a way to count those better. So what's next? You guys want to see some of 3.5? Well, there's nothing to see yet. If it was ready, we'd release it. Come on. But I can't show you some previews, including one thing that is very, very close to being ready and that you'll be able to use soon. That's the 2012 theme. None of you have seen this yet. Oh, some of you have seen this. It's open source. Basically, the idea, we now have a new default theme for WordPress along our, it's our third annual default theme. So we've been keeping up almost with doing a new theme every year. And if you want to hear more about this, Drew, Drew, are you in the audience? Woo-hoo. Everyone say hi to Drew. You should stand up. I know that. Okay, now you really see Drew. Drew was part of the team that did this. And if you love it, he's going to be talking about it extensively. Everything he did to design and the process and everything about it later this afternoon at 3.40? Yeah. So check that out. 3.5, we're going to have full retina supports. You might notice that you probably see me at previous work camps. I had a laptop that had this special W that glowed instead of the Apple. It was pretty cool. I love the retina laptop so much. I've given up that W laptop. So we got the big sticker there. There's a big sticker. It's amazing. Those of you who, who's on a retina MacBook already? One, two, so actually about 10% of the audience that looks like, that's impressive. That's above the general population. But it's going to be like, you know, at the first work camp, we asked about mobile phones and half the people at Nokia's. You know, a couple of years from now, the vast majority of us are going to be in retina or high DPI displays, and it is just a completely different experience. If you're a developer, I'd recommend it as an investment. And this is actually not just the best laptop, but the best computer I've ever owned. And I used to be that guy like buying all the parts and putting the computers together. I like this even better. Then we're working on some of the same things that we talked about before. Coming back, continuing iterations on them, including NUCs. These are some wireframes around things we're thinking about with a new welcome screen, perhaps even making it permanent, because we found in tests that people are using the welcome screen, not just when they're new to WordPress, but they're using it as like a full navigation. We're talking about media. So these are, again, wireframes. So nothing there yet. But the idea that you could upload multiple images simultaneously and select images to be in a gallery. So galleries don't just have to be the images that are attached to the post. It's actually possible today, but there's no UI to it. There's lots and lots of exciting stuff happening here. Actually, if you wanted to follow along with both of those, they're currently being discussed on the make.wordpress.org slash UI, make.wordpress.UI blog. But there's a saying in software, because you can have three things. You can have features. It can be stable and secure, and it can be on time. Pick two. We pick two. We're, of course, going to keep our commitment to being secure, stable, and bug-free release. People have gotten very used to upgrades of WordPress being things they don't even think about. Hosts are starting to do them automatically without even asking you. I love that. So we need to maintain that. And we've said that 3.5 is going to be available on December 5th. Mason and Coop are leading 3.5, and they've committed to that, and I 100% believe it's going to happen. So that means that if we need to, we're going to cut features. But if you are excited about what you've seen, I would like to introduce you to a new section of WordPress.org, which is the Get Involved tab. You've visited WordPress in the past few days. You've seen this. And basically, the idea is it's a new top-level navigation item that takes you to all those make blogs. You probably didn't even know some of them existed. There's a blog dedicated to plugins. There's a blog dedicated to accessibility. I could see one dedicated to education in the future. Basically, all the subtopics of WordPress that lots of people are working on, this is our new collaboration space. And it's been there, but it's been somewhat of a silo. It's been kind of set aside from the rest of WordPress. So now we've unified the navigation to bring it together. In fact, under the core part of it, Make WordPress Core, is this new thing called the Core Contributor Handbook. Has anyone taken a look at this yet? It's actually going to be a big focus of the Dev Day tomorrow. It's going to be a lot of hacking on the Handbook, which I love that at Developer Day, we're going to be working on words as opposed to WordPress. That's actually pretty exciting, because it's really important to get people involved. The idea is that this will be a field guide to step-by-step everything you need to know to be one of the people that I'm about to talk about on stage. We have a lot of new folks involved with WordPress over the past year, and I'd like to take this moment to highlight them. Save your applause to the end, because there's a few of them, but let's all thank John Cave, Helen, Christy Burka, Sergei Berke-Beryokov, sorry, Sergei, Dominic Shilling, Aaron Campbell, and the recent rock stars, Max Cutler, Kurt Payne, Amy Hendricks, Marco Hengen, George Stephanus, Stas Suscove, Chelsea Otacon, and John Blackburn. Round of applause for the new distributor. If these guys can do it, any of you can. It is easier than ever to get involved with WordPress, and so I highly encourage of you if you've ever thought about it. I actually tell people it's the best way in the world to learn some of these things as well. You can't walk up to Google and say, hey, do you mind if I like hang out with your top engineers and maybe exchange comments on my code? But if you submit a patch to track, that's exactly what happens. Some of the best PHP developers in the world are going to look at your code and give you feedback and tell you what they think and tweak it with you, and you'll be able to work alongside them. And outside of open source, there's really not any other opportunities like that. So definitely take advantage of it. I'd like to loop back. This year, last year, I stood on stage like this and made some predictions. And you guys, in saying what you'd like me to talk about, have repeatedly said you want those predictions to be reviewed. Thanks. It's way easier making them than doing them. But so, we talked about three major things last year. That was creating parity between WordPress.com and .org. Mar... Maraging? What's the word? Marrying. Yes. Maraging the reading and writing experience. And then mobile. So I want to cover each of those. So feature parity between .com and .org. Basically, this is the idea that there's features that are really important to everyday engagement with WordPress, particularly integration with social networks like Twitter or Facebook that aren't doable within the shared hosting model that WordPress normally works in. Or when they are doable, it's tricky. So what we started doing was creating a plugin called Jetpack that brings all those features that we already do on WordPress.com to .org. Because you all have it. Who has had a friend who's ever been confused about the difference between .com and .org? Who's that a family member? A spouse that's ever been confused. You can't learn this by house most of it and it is confusing. And there shouldn't be a trade-off. You shouldn't be a second class citizen on either of them. This has been going very well. In fact, the numbers I want to talk about is Jetpack got to a million downloads in its first 13 months. Over the past four months, it doubled that. So the adoption of this is going really, really accelerating and a lot more of the features are coming to it. There's the four horsemen I talked about. Subscriptions. Email subscriptions. Post my email. Publicize and stats. There's the four big things that we get people when they're moving from .com to .org. Say they really want. We've got two of them now. We're going to have the last two by the end of the year. So I'm very excited about that. Second thing is reading and writing. Better reading and consumption. Basically the idea that when you write or to get people to blog more, they should read more. So two things that we did and this is also being experimented with on WordPress.com is we created this very, very simple posting interface. That's one tab away from reading. The idea that when you get a new blog, this is where it sends you next. It says, what are you interested in? What do you like to read? And then there's a reader that you can read either on mobile or the desktop that shows you all the latest and greatest stuff. And actually coming to the iPad soon, but I'll talk about that in a minute. This has been huge. We've had over 350 million blog posts consumed through this interface since it launched. And the stats we're getting back from it is when people load this, they're far more likely to interact. They're far more likely to like a post or re-blog it or create a blog post from this. We all know this because this is how every other social thing in the world works, right? When you load the homepage of Twitter, what does it show you? It shows you all the tweets. It doesn't just show you that one box and nothing else to do. When you load the homepage of Facebook, when you load the homepage of any of these, they show you what else is going on the network. And I think there needs to be a place that emphasizes blogging for this because Facebook and Twitter, well, Facebook particularly tries to keep you within its garden, right? It penalizes links going to other places or they want you to go to those news things that tell all your friends what you're reading. And then Twitter is also going different directions. So I think it's important to be something that emphasizes longer form content, the heart and soul of what blogs are. And that's what this is. And then finally, the thing we talked about was mobile. You guys remember this slide? It's kind of funny because two of those platforms aren't around anymore. But mobile has been going super duper well. We actually just passed, just a few weeks ago, five million downloads of the mobile apps. So a round of applause for the mobile team. I think that's amazing. And I'd actually like to give you a preview of what is coming on the iOS app. Never, literally never before seen. Unless you like downloaded and compiled the iOS app. Moving to more of a panel's interface for this. So basically the idea that there'll be a slide over that can bring, and if you notice this is starting to look a lot more like the core WordPress admin menu, that brings everything that's going on to your blog. You can write at post, swipe to moderate. If you guys haven't noticed this yet, it's really nice when you're viewing your comments. You can swipe and see everything. And basically just completely revamping the interface to make it a lot better. And then most importantly, all this is coming to iPad. So look at that. Isn't that a beautiful cat? But the interface has been 100% redone to take advantage of the iPad and touch gestures. The idea that kind of like the Twitter for iPad app that you can just slide around everything that's going on and post native to tablets. I think that tablets are super-duper important. The writing is on the wall. Ten years from now, there will be a content management system and a blogging tool that is tablet native that the majority of users use it on a tablet and that works as beautifully or better on a tablet than it does on a desktop. Whether that's us or not is going to depend on how much attention we pay to these new platforms because I think it is true that the majority of the way people interact with the web is going to be through phones and tablets. And so this is actually a challenge to you guys. There hasn't been a ton of community involvement with the mobile app stuff so far even though they're all open source, they all have tracks, they all have logs and everything's out there. I encourage you, if you're fascinated about this, also a really good way to learn how to develop for mobile platform, get involved with this because more and more as a percentage of WordPress users are going to be using WordPress through this as opposed to our desktop interface. Cool. Is there anyone who does any mobile development here? Just out of curiosity? Yeah, that's actually we had maybe 10 people raise their hand in a room of 700. So that's about where it is right now. If you're a web developer, I would highly encourage you to start working on mobile because a menu item, is it a menu item in the Get Involved? It should be. Make it so. I bet by the end of this talk... Auto. There'll be a menu item there. Well, enough about us. Let's talk about you guys. We did the survey again this year. Remember last year was actually a big part of the talk we did the first ever survey of WordPress users and said, what is going on? This year, we actually had 27,000 responses up from 20,000 in the past year. So it's actually a lot of people. You know those polls that you see in the news? Like, so-and-so has this many approval rating. They usually talk to 1,000 people. Tops. So we got 27,000. Granted, it might be a sampling bias. But from literally all over the world, we had 158 countries as part of this and going back to international, two-thirds of the responses came from outside the U.S., which I thought was really cool. We had responses from Cayman Islands, a very nice tropical place to do WordPress. Seychelles? Have they been outside? Yeah? Has anyone been there? No one? Oh, nice. How was it? Did you take the survey from there? And most interestingly, and I don't know how I feel about this, but we had one response from North Korea. Or, as it's known, the Democratic Republic of North Korea. So I guess they're interested in democratizing publishing there as well. This person did not leave an email with their survey response. It might have been like a proxies boob or something just messing with us, but I thought that was pretty funny. But here are the results. Remember that WordPress as a CMS thing? Guess what? It's still going. We went up the 66% of respondents who said they were using WordPress just as a CMS, not even as a blog. So obviously, that is a number that is growing and will continue to go up. In fact, it's a number I'm probably not even going to talk about next year, because it's just such part. It's just so ubiquitous. The number of people not using WordPress as a CMS is going to be more interesting than the number that are. We'll ask those people to raise their hands next year. But even, I also think we need to shift this question a little bit, because, for example, my blog, ma.tt, everyone check it out, I would say that I use WordPress as a CMS, but if you visit it, it really looks more like a blog, and most people will call it a blog. But I consider it a CMS because I'm managing pages, I'm doing galleries, and doing other fun stuff on it. So I'd actually like to shift this question a little bit to really get an idea of not just what developers are doing, but actually what kind of sites people are creating. So we'll try that next year. But something new we did ask this year is client types. So of the developers that answered, who are they working for? And we have this crazy overlapping Venn diagram to illustrate that. So the moon on the right is actually the big blue thing is small business individuals. The purple and pink thing is nonprofit government and education. That is huge. That's way larger than I would have bet. And then the white thing, you see on the top right, there's a white thing, is large businesses and enterprises. And they overlap. There was a lot of overlap between them because people could choose multiple ones. But getting this data allowed us to extract some interesting secondary results from it of what people are doing. And also some pretty interesting stories who some people I want to highlight now. First up, I love his hair. This is Jeremy Ferguson from the Accolation Sustainable Agriculture Project. They're using post types and customizations to present farm-to-school lesson plans, sharing all over the country. Albert Yaa Upoku from Ghana is doing hop-a-wed solutions. They've created over 50 websites for clients in government and education, 48 of them with work bus. We didn't ask about the other two. But Albert, if you're watching, Katya Kitahari doing the hack lab down in Brazil. They've also done over 50 websites, mostly for businesses and governments. And this is actually the company that she built doing it. And I don't know who the guy is third on the right, but 1,000 people just saw you with your eyes closed. Take a better picture next time. We'll put you on stage again. Joss Ketzner from Scottsdale Convention and Visitors Bureau for Arizona. Probably not the easiest job in the world. They started using it in 2008 and they've completely revamped their entire website on WordPress and they say it's attracting more people to Scottsdale or Arizona. Eric Juden from Maryville University. They changed all their staff and student blogs to WordPress. Jason Kemp from New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand. Over 250 websites in New Zealand and one in Senegal, West Africa for mostly education in private sectors. So as you can see, the non-profit, to me the most exciting thing was the non-profit government and education use. Particularly governments. Again, I've said I've been spending a lot of time in Washington. It pains me as a taxpayer when you see some of these websites that they spend millions and millions of dollars on and they look pretty crappy. You are really not in your head up there. You work in government? You look at them a lot. Oh, that's even worse. What'd you do? Wrong. No, I'm kidding. It's a travesty and we know that for a couple thousand dollars you can build an amazing, beautiful WordPress website. In fact, we know exactly how many thousands of dollars because we got it from the survey. So on average, the sort of small business website, we said the average response is about $2,500 to build a site. On the non-profit side, government and education, people responded it was about $2,000 to build a site. So thank you for discounting your rates for non-profits. And then on the large business and enterprise, people said it was on average about $4,200 to do a site. Again, these are the averages or the medians or the modes. Medians. There you go. And if you don't know the difference between those, you should go back to middle school. I should go back to middle school. But the most exciting number we got out of the survey this year was actually the number of people who are either fully making their living from WordPress or making a good chunk of income from it. So last year, that number was 13,000 of the survey respondents. This year, it's 20,000, which increased both as a percentage and an absolute number. So we have 20,000 people we talked about or the 27,000 who took the survey who are making money from WordPress. That's incredible. How many people here are making their living or money from WordPress? Is that how you justify the $20 ticket? It's expensive. That's really exciting. That was, I mean, people watching live stream didn't see that, but that was like 90% of the audience. The ecosystem building around WordPress is incredibly powerful. And I think one of the hardest things for our competitors to match because we're not just one company making a lot of money off this. We're thousands and thousands of small businesses and companies and web hosts and media organizations building and profiting from WordPress and all putting a little bit back in the pot. And, you know, it's almost the opposite of the tragedy of the commons. It's the wealth of the commons. And I love when that works. So we looked at some sites. I wanted to also show sort of an example of other things that WordPress can do because every year I think it's interesting to sort of take a step back and see how are people actually using WordPress? So these are some new sites that we've never talked about before. Subliminal projects, which includes art from Banksy. Everyone else is using WordPress. Cool LA gallery space. This is the many faces of. So that's hardthrob Leonardo DiCaprio and they do this for lots of different people that works of art in and of themselves. We have musicians using it. In addition to Jay-Z, we've moved on to Bruce. Bruce. Come on guys. You could have better than that. The Rolling Stones. That's a racy picture there. We have lots of events going on including 2012 Democratic National Convention. Ted X is around the world. Bonnebrew. I thought this was really cool. Anyone go to Bonnebrew this year? No one went to Bonnebrew. Wow. Well, they use WordPress. Just log in, add yourself. And then actually one of the more probably journalistically important events this year was the healthcare decision coming out of the Supreme Court. I know if maybe you follow this story, sure. But the major media got it wrong when it first came out and there was a blog called the SCOTUS blog that sort of did a deeper analysis of it and really dug into the number or to the verdict and was right before the media was. That is amazing. Probably that blog had like this traffic before then. This traffic on that day. It probably won't have like this traffic after that. But that's the beauty of blogging, right? It brings the original sources. It brings the people who are most familiar with any given topic, the primary sources to the story. And we saw that happen over and over and over this year. And I think we're going to see more and more of that. That's pretty exciting. We saw causes. Charity water, one that I haven't been personally involved in a big supporter of. They're bringing clean water to, I think, now hundreds of thousands of people across the world. Sama source, bringing work to people around the world. We have the IFMR, which is this is actually an Indian nonprofit. Free speech debate. Magazines, including VDV. We got the LeBron. Oh, sorry. This is sports. Sorry about that. LeBron James, representing the United States and the Olympics right now. King James. And One Blade magazine are cool examples that could check out of word presses going on. By the way, after these, when we post it, we'll have links to all these. So if you want to check them out. And then finally, food dining and fashion. Three of my favorite things in the world. We have people from Alabama to, this is actually in France. And then finally, the Jersey, wait. I can't, threefffashions.com doing it. But we've seen a lot of these sites before because they're using word presses as CMS. And as we know, the vast majority of everyone who knows what they're doing with word presses is using it as a CMS. But what's most exciting is people using it from apps and apps. So I'd like to show some of those. Because the growth of word press has been largely a transition from being a blogging platform, which is how we started and sort of our original heart and soul. To being a CMS, call that the second phase of word press. So the first four years were all about blogging. So the next four years, call it 2007 to 2011, were about being a CMS. And in my opinion, the next four years are going to be about word press being an app engine. Being sort of a framework that's used for applications that may not even look like a blog or a website, but look like something else entirely. Like a map for Husker bars. Or this one, which is actually pretty cool from the University of Washington. So what they've done is every single building there is a custom post type. And when you click it, you can filter them through categories, taxonomies. You can click on them and get more information. Here's another example of a similar thing going on. This is from Katia down in Brazil. These people are using word press in a way that doesn't look like a blog at all. It looks more like Google Maps. Or this one's actually really beautiful, by the way. Good job, Katia. There's this... Oh, the second thing I want to talk about is this happening for second screen experiences. So do you have guys like Breaking Bad or Mad Men? So a few. Have you ever done the thing where they'll ask you while you're watching it, like what do you think of what so and so did? You think Walter should shoot the guy? They have these second screen experiences that are basically different points during the show. They do have a second screen is that apparently most Americans now when they watch a TV, that's not enough, they have a second device. They're also watching. Often the iPad or a mobile phone. And the idea that you can kind of do both at the same time is revolutionizing TV. Remember Interactive TV? Bill Gates in like the early 90s, talking about that. It's happening and it's partially powered by word press. They're using scheduled post and custom post types to have these things being pushed out. Pull Daddy to do the surveys. It's pretty exciting. We can jump through this. But how this all comes to an end is that last year when we got on stage we had about 14% the top million websites using word press. Today it's 16.7%. And that's you guys. I think it's 100% of this room, right? Any spies? But although we've been successful, there are still lots of challenges ahead. And I think that we should not become... One of my favorite books is called The Halo Effect. And one of my favorite quotes from it is it says, nothing recedes quite like success. The more successful you are, the harder you need to work and the more that you need to push to continue to grow. And so I want to talk about some of the things that I don't think we're doing well yet in the word press world. And I think that we need to pay special attention to the next year. One is media. So there are some amazing things happening around the uploads coming in 3.5. And I'm actually pretty excited about this. But I think that we really need to just stop being scared of it and look at media as a first class citizen within WordPress. Galleries, zooming in on photos, commenting on photos, tagging things. Face tagging is kind of not a small deal. You'll notice that Facebook has, I think, more photos than every other photo site combined in history with that one simple feature. We need to think about these things. So whoever wants to see better media in WordPress say, I. All right, it's unanimous. Whoever doesn't say nay. Okay, unanimous. I think we need to be careful about having timely releases. So just like I said, we're committing to 3.5 on December 5th. I think that going forward, we need to continue to be vigilant because it's so easy, because especially since we're not a commercial project or a nonprofit community, open source project, it's easy to want to set that one more thing into a release. And that one more thing turns into another thing. It turns into another thing. And through no faults. And then it takes longer than we thought. And we can end up a month or two or three behind. Our average for the past couple of years has been closer to two releases per year than three releases. And I'd like to get us back to doing three releases per year. On the UI side, I think we need to do a lot more testing. Yeah. Amen. Just the idea that it's been a little while since we really looked at some of the fundamental things going on in WordPress. Dave Martin is a new contributor to the UI group. When he started working on it, I didn't even think that the welcome screen was something that we should look at. I had completely forgotten it. Why? I know how to use WordPress. I haven't looked at the welcome screen in a little while. As many of you probably have not. But there's some tests. And he actually did something very cool where he did user tests that sort of did screen captures and audio of people actually using WordPress for the first time and going through the thing. And all those videos are online. You can watch them on the Make UI blog. It is... Well, I recommend having a drink nearby. It's at one point one of the most exciting things and one of the most painful things you can watch. Just someone... Because it's almost like those horror movies where you're like, you know, don't go to the house alone. Don't go to the house alone. You're like, the button's right there. Just click on it. Please. But it's not them. It's us. Right? We need to put the button in the right place. We need to build the fence around the house so that axe murderers don't get in. Whatever it is, we can fix these things. But I think we need to have a regimen of testing every single thing that we put into WordPress. Not... I'm not saying that we need to A-B test or multivariant every single thing. I just think that we should watch more regular users using these things for the first time. Something I'm very excited about in addition to the Get Involved coming up towards the end of the year is the Community Summit. Is anyone here attending the Community Summit? Or... Nice. So basically the idea of bringing people not just in the core but around all the areas of WordPress, around translations, internationalization, the forums, the documentation, all the things that make WordPress that you guys said in the survey is what you appreciate most around WordPress.org. Together. And talk about things in a more holistic way because previously we've done summits for the core developers and the core team but I think it's very important for us to start thinking about all parts of WordPress, particularly the international side. There are currently not enough international contributors to WordPress. We have an imbalance where two-thirds of the survey respondents are coming from international but it's a much lower ratio for people that are active in core development. So I really want over the next year to get more folks whose native language is not English and who use WordPress primarily in different language as part of the core team because I think that'll really help us clean up the international sides of it. We need to keep iterating quickly on things. This is not just shipping a version one but shipping a 1.1, a 1.2, a 1.3, coming back to the things that we've already done and making them better. Updates, updates, updates. Martian, Martian, Martian. I want a world... You know what I'm most jealous of? What software I'm most jealous of in the world? Who can guess? Chrome. You guys knew it. I used to be jealous of Firefox because they had the extension manager and you could click a button and they would all update and then Chrome came and just like blew it all away. They said, we're not even going to tell you what version you're running. You're just going to be on Chrome and it's going to update in the background all the time and it's going to get better and faster and more secure and guess what? All of your extensions are going to do the same thing and you're never going to think about is this extension compatible with this version of whatever? It just will all work. And who would like that experience in WordPress? It's hard. But I think we can do it and the reason we should do it is not because it's easy but because it's hard. We need to figure out plugin compatibility a lot better. We need to know how plugins work with each other and how they work with WordPress and we need to do that before a release comes out. We need to shift it to where you don't think about WordPress 3.5, 3.6, 3.7. I love five years from now. We're just saying you're running WordPress August 5th. Or I guess that's tomorrow. So August 4th. You just load up WordPress and you have the latest and greatest. We work with hosts and actually a lot of hosts including dream hosts, blue hosts, GoDaddy are shifting to a model where they actually do opt-out upgrades as opposed to opt-in or manual upgrades. And this is probably going to be the biggest shift that's going to happen for WordPress this year. So basically the idea that if you did a one-click install of WordPress it will just keep your site up to date constantly unless you specifically click some big scary buttons and say I'm going to open the door or let the axe murderer in and not update my WordPress. And that is going to be huge. We can't, because of the technicalities it's tricky to do that in core. It's tricky to have core update itself but the hosts have sort of the root level file system access to really make it wonderful. I'm excited about that. I think we need to keep striving for simplicity but be careful about becoming simplistic. WordPress users are some of the best and brightest people in the world. I'm not just saying that because some of you are here. We shouldn't dumb down WordPress to try to appeal to a larger audience. I see startups, I see other platforms with that over and over and over again. I think we need to embrace the intelligence of our users and their ability to do powerful things while at the same time taking them on that ramp. So basically the idea that we don't need to dumb down WordPress and we don't even need to you know hide features but what we do need to do is sort of give you those beginner levels. Last year we had some speakers on games. This year we have speakers on habits near talk this morning. I think the key here is that when you start up, you know, I'm old, super Mario. It doesn't put you on the boss level at the very first time but in WordPress historically we dump you on the dashboard you know when you first start using it and there are in addition to the welcome screen there's about a hundred other things you can click on that page. It's like the boss monster. So we need to hold back the WordPress