In Torino / Turin this year I decided to give a slightly different talk than normal, building on my post I did for WordPress turning 21.
And here’s the Q&A, where I got challenged and accepted to do a speed build. 🙂
Category Archives: WordPress
WP21
It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’s work on b2/cafĂ©log.
There’s been many milestones and highlights along the way, and many more to come. I’ve been thinking a lot about elements that made WordPress successful in its early years that we should keep in mind as we build this year and beyond. Here’s 11 opinions:
- Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.
- Blogging, commenting, and pingbacks need to be fun. Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better. Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog.
- Wikis are amazing, and our documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.
- Forums should be front and center in the community. bbPress and BuddyPress need some love.
- Every plugin and theme should have all the infrastructure that we use to build WordPress itself—version control, bug trackers, forums, documentation, internationalization, chat rooms, P2, and easy pathways for contribution and community. We shouldn’t be uploading ZIPs in 2024!
- Theme previews should be great, and a wide collection of non-commercial themes with diverse aesthetics and functionality are crucial.
- We can’t over-index for guidelines and requirements. Better to have good marketplace dynamics and engineer automated feedback loops and transparency to users. Boundaries in functionality and design should be pushed. (But spam and spammy behavior deserves zero tolerance.)
- Feedback loops are so important, and should scale with usage and the entire community rather than being reliant on gatekeepers.
- Core should be opinionated and quirky: Easter eggs, language with personality even if it’s difficult to translate, jazzy.
- Everyone developing and making decisions for software needs to use it.
- It’s important that we all do support, go to meetups and events, anything we can to stay close to regular end-users of what we make.
A bonus: Playground is going to change everything. What would you add?
Fun fact: On May 27, 2003 I blogged “Working backwards, earlier tonight was great. Put WordPress out, which felt great.” as one sentence in a 953-word entry written from the porch of my parent’s house where I was accidentally locked out all night until my Dad left in the morning to go to work. Had no idea WordPress would be as big as it is. Earlier that night had set up WP for my friend Ramie Speight, and done some phone tech support for another friend Mike Tremoulet I had met through the local blogger meetup. My friends from high school all had their own domains with WP and that feedback loop was magical for shaping the software.
On StellarWP Podcast
I’m still doing some podcasts as sabbatical-Matt, especially with the WordPress community which for me isn’t really work, it’s building relationships in our community of practice. If you know me, I can wax poetic about WordPress for hours! It’s what I do for fun. Here’s my first post-sabbatical interview with Michelle Frechette. Another unusual thing about this interview is I was quarantining with Covid!
State of the Word 2023
I was really impressed with the warmth of the WordPress community in Madrid, Spain for State of the Word this year. The in-person crowd had a ton of energy, and we had tens of thousands stream it live on platforms like Facebook and Youtube. If you missed it, and want to hear about all the fun stuff that happened in WordPress in 2023 and what’s coming for the future, here’s the video:
Chorus and WordPress
I woke up this morning to a lot of people sending me the link to today’s Axios story reporting that Vox Media (which includes The Verge, New York Magazine, Polygon, and many other outlets) is moving from its proprietary CMS, Chorus, to WordPress VIP, Automattic’s open source solution for large publishers.
This is very exciting—not just for the obvious reasons, but because I’ve been a fan and reader of Vox since they started. As a tool-maker, one of the greatest honors is when fantastic people choose your tools to practice their craft. I’m also sure their feedback will make WordPress better! Vox Media folks, if there were any Chorus features you loved, drop them in the comments and we’ll make sure they can become a plugin or get baked into WP core. And if anyone has built amazing features in other CMSes you’d like to see in WordPress, we’re hiring!
As I said in my recent conversation with Dries Buytaert and Mike Little celebrating WordPress’ 20th anniversary, and with a hat tip to Fight Club, I believe that on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of proprietary software drops to zero. I don’t fault anyone for starting a CMS—I’ve been guilty of that myself a half-dozen times, not counting WordPress—but while something custom-built may seem better for your needs in the beginning, that never lasts. Unless you invest heavily in engineering (like tens of millions per year), the steady improvement of a healthy open source community, like the tens of thousands of developers working on WordPress every day, will eventually catch and surpass any proprietary system.
Not all open source projects achieve the famed positive flywheel; it takes decades, and most will fail in the process. The ones that reach exit velocity, though, become part of the fabric of civilization. At that point, it makes more sense to build on top of them rather than recreate the wheel. You’ll still get where you’re going, it’ll just be a smoother, faster ride.
(Midjourney prompt: A chorus of people using WordPress.)
WordCamp Europe Keynote
I had a great time at WordCamp Europe in Athens this year, here’s the keynote “Variations on a Theme” with presentations from Josepha Haden Chomphosy and MatĂas Ventura, and Q&A from all three of us.
WordPress & AI
I did an interview with Jamie Marsland where we talked a fair amount about AI.
WP20 & Audrey Scholars
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on. There will be celebrations in cities around the world, please join if there’s one happening near you.
Twenty years later, I am proud and humbled by what the community around WordPress has created, and jazzed about what we will create in the coming decades.
I’m also excited to mark this milestone by publicly launching the Audrey Scholars program. It is, like all things, an experiment, but I’m curious to see how it unfolds and perhaps one day an Audrey Scholar could even take the responsibility of leading WordPress, when my capacity to do so has passed.
State of the Word
A few weeks ago, but what feels like a lifetime ago, I was in New York City with a few dozen extra special people from around the WordPress world. Alongside Josepha and the community we presented this review of how WordPress did in 2022, and vision for what’s coming:
Celebrate by Writing
My birthday is coming up soon so it’s that time of the year when friends start reaching out and asking where they should fly to and how we’re going to celebrate.
After a good run in the post-vaccinated-and-boosted part of 2020 that felt relatively “normal”, including traveling almost 200k miles, I’m going back into a pretty locked-down state of things. Omicron has just been catching too many friends and loved ones, even with fairly careful measures and testing. So what’s happening on January 11th?
What I’m asking for my birthday is for people to blog!
Whether professionally on WP.com, socially on Tumblr, or privately journaling with Day One, there’s never been a better time to stop being a passive consumer of the internet and join the class of creators.
Write for a single person. Share something cool you found. Summarize your year. Set a blogging goal with reminders. Get a Gutenberg-native theme and play around with building richer posts. Start a nom de plume. Answer daily prompts on Day One. Forget the metaverse, let’s hang out in the blogosphere. Get your own domain!
If you’re a close friend that feels intimidated by the software at all or that you don’t know where to start, I’m happy to hop on a Zoom to go through everything on a screen share. That will also be a great learning for me for places we can improve things, which is also a fantastic gift!
Saving the Internet
David Pierce wrote a deep profile, over 4,000 words, for Protocol and asks the question in the headline, Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?
Which brings to mind Betteridge’s law of headlines (nĂ©e Hinchliffe’s rule), “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
I can’t save the internet. But you know who can? A movement. A community of like-minded individuals, unified by a common philosophy, and working together to create tools of freedom.
It’s a human right to be able to see how that technology works and modify it. It’s as key to freedom as freedom of speech or freedom of religion. So that is what I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting for.
Working together we’ve created something special, unlike anything the internet has seen before, and I’m excited to continue.
Thank you to David Pierce for taking such an in-depth look at the history of WordPress and Automattic and talking to dozens of sources. Thank you to the people quoted in the article: Scott Beale, Om Malik, Toni Schneider, Russell Ivanovic, Deven Parekh, Paul Mayne, and Anil Dash. Thank you to Arturo Olmos for the photos, and Odili Donald Odita for the amazing painting behind me.
State of the Word… in person!
Update: Here’s the recording!
I’m very excited that we’ll be broadcasting the State of the Word “live from New York City” this coming Tuesday, December 14th! There will be a very small “studio audience” of community members there in person.
Recording the solo version last year was actually one of the hardest things I’ve done in a long time. It’s funny, with a live audience I can comfortably present for an hour no problem, but recording that 25 minute presentation, alone in a room staring at a camera, was an excruciating process over two days and dozens of takes. I got the advice afterward that even if you’re just staring into a camera, it can be helpful to have an “audience” of a few friends in the room.
Even more than that, though, I’m positively giddy to see some of my friends from the WordPress community in person for the first time in several years. Please join via streaming on the 14th, and also there will also be at least 20 watch parties around the globe if there’s one in your neighborhood. Looking forward to catching up, celebrating the community’s accomplishments over the last year, and hopefully raising a torch for our march toward freedom on the web in 2022.
WordPress 18
Today marks eighteen years since the very first release of WordPress. I consider myself so lucky to have co-founded the project alongside Mike Little. Who could have imagined that our nights and weekends hacking on blogging software, a fork of b2/cafelog, could turn into something powering over 40% of the web? Or that nearly twenty years in, it would be getting better faster than it ever has been?
I blogged these anniversaries when WordPress was five, ten, fifteen, and last year at seventeen, but as the project reaches an age that, if it were a child, it would be heading off to college, I’m uncharacteristically at a loss for words.
The overwhelming feeling is one of gratitude, so I want to say thank you to every person who has ever been involved with making WordPress as a contributor, a community organizer, or as an end-user of the software. It’s amazing what we can accomplish when we work together.
New WhiteHouse.gov
After you’ve watched the amazing poem from Amanda Gorman, check out the new WhiteHouse.gov that re-launched today using WordPress & Gutenberg with a number of cool features including dark mode, text zoom, a totally responsive layout, and a Spanish version of the site. The site is clean, fast, and accessible. It’s exciting and an honor that the online home for the Executive branch is on Open Source software, and I’m proud WordPress can carry the torch that Drupal lit in 2009.
Besides Gutenberg, poking around I noticed a HTTP header and HTML comment encouraging people to join USDS, and this great #46 easter egg in the theme file:
Anyone notice any other plugins? I haven’t spoken to him directly but I’d be shocked if Nacin wasn’t involved with this one. I’m also curious if any of the WP agencies were involved, it has touches of 10up but I don’t see any mention of it on their site or Twitter. Hoefler&Co credits Wide Eye Creative with the design.
I noticed a few people happy that some previous pages and files on the old site were returning 404 errors, like the controversial 1776 report, but on this I think the webmasters of the United States of America should demand better, since Cool URIs Don’t Change. Previous websites are all saved by the National Archives, but there doesn’t appear to be any sort of norm for automatically redirecting links that went to any subdirectories or addresses under WhiteHouse.gov.
There are WP plugins that could help, like Redirection, but also perhaps the root domain itself could always redirect to a subdomain, like 46.whitehouse.gov, so we’d have a consistent domain and permalinks for everything, and then each new administration would get a new subdomain.
State of the Word 2020
This tumultuous year, two things really helped me get through it: my colleagues at Automattic and the community of WordPress.
At the end of the year I usually deliver a speech to the WP community we call the State of the Word, that celebrates what we accomplished the previous year and shines a light on what we could focus on in the coming year. There’s always a great energy in the room and I love mixing with the audience before and after the talk. This year we did it online, which meant we could produce the talk a little more, and we made extra time for the Q&A afterward with answers not just from me but folks across the community.
One thing I’ll call out WordPress 5.6 had an all women and non-binary release squad of over 50 people, a first for WordPress and probably any large open source project. Also the market share of WordPress grew more in 2020 than it has in any year since it started being tracked!
If you’re curious about what’s next for WordPress, check it out:
Celebrate Seventeen
May 27th, 17 years ago, the first release of WordPress was put into the world by Mike Little and myself. It did not have an installer, upgrades, WYSIWYG editor (or hardly any Javascript), comment spam protection, clean permalinks, caching, widgets, themes, plugins, business model, or any funding.
The main feedback we got at the time was that the blogging software market was saturated and there wasn’t room or need for anything new.
WordPress did have a philosophy, an active blog, a license that protected the freedom of its users and developers, a love of typography, a belief that code is poetry, fantastic support forums and mailing lists and IRC, and firm sense that building software is more fun when you do it together as a community.
We have relentlessly iterated across 38 major releases since then, and here we are.
If you’d like to celebrate with me, put on some jazz, eat some BBQ, light a candle for the contributors who have passed on, help a friend or stranger less technical than you build a home online, and remember that technology is at its best when it brings people together.
State of the Word 2019
In case you missed it, here’s the first-ever State of the Word… designed completely in Gutenberg:
WordCamp US was a fantastic experience, as always. Thank you again to the hundreds of organizers and volunteers who made it happen, to the thousands who attended, and to the city of St. Louis for hosting us. We’ll be back there again next year.
And special thanks to this next generation of WordPress contributors. So exciting to see KidsCamps continue to expand and thrive:
As you can see, my site is now featuring the new WordPress Twenty Twenty theme. And for more coverage from my State of the Word, check out the recaps from WP Tavern and Post Status. Here’s my full audience Q&A below:
You can see my previous State of the Word keynotes here.
The Web Turns 30
“Vague, but exciting.” Thirty years ago yesterday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted his original proposal for an information management system to his boss at CERN — what would later become the World Wide Web (and, it turns out, a huge influence on my life and career).
To help celebrate, I tweeted WordPress’s contribution to the web’s grand timeline (above), and I got to participate in The Economist’s Babbage podcast looking back at the pioneers of the early web. Listen to the whole episode below:
My TED Video on the Future of Work
I was thrilled to participate in TED’s new video series, The Way We Work, and not surprisingly I made the case that distributed work is where everything is headed.
It has over 130,000 views already! What I really love about this video in particular is that we get into the specifics of how a company can start to embrace a culture of letting employees work from anywhere, even if it started out as a traditional office with everyone in the same place. Automattic never started that way, so even as we’ve scaled up to more than 840 people in 68 countries, there’s never been a question — it’s now built in to our entire culture.
For distributed work to scale up, it’s going to require more CEOs, workers, and managers to test the waters. Any company can experiment with distributed work — just pick a day or two of the week in which everyone works from home, I suggest Tuesdays and Thursdays, then build the tools and systems to support it. Yes, that may require some shuffling of meetings, or more written documentation versus verbal real-time discussion. But I think companies will be surprised how quickly it will “just work.”
If the companies don’t experiment, workers may force them to do it anyway:
Journalism and Newspack
WordPress.com is partnering with Google and news industry leaders on a new platform for small- and medium-sized publishers, called Newspack. The team has raised $2.4 million in first-year funding from the Google News Initiative, Lenfest Journalism Institute, Civil funder ConsenSys, and the Knight Foundation, among others. We’re also still happy to talk to and engage other funders who want to get involved — I’d love to put even more resources into this.
It’s been a difficult climate for the news business, particularly at the local level. It also breaks my heart how much of their limited resources these organizations still sink into closed-source or dead-end technology. Open source is clearly the future, and if we do this right Newspack can be the technology choice that lasts with them through the decades, and hopefully our 15 years of growth lends some credibility to our orientation to build things for the long term.
Here’s Kinsey in Nieman Lab:
The goal is to both make sure that the catalog of publishing tools as well as business tools they need to be able to run what one hopes is a sustainable news operation are addressed simultaneously. It’s not simply a CMS for a newsroom, but a full business system that enables publishing and monetization at the same time.
–Nieman Lab interview
As you have come to expect from Automattic, everything will be open source and developed to the same standards WordPress itself is. We’re working with Spirited Media and the News Revenue Hub on the platform, and we will likely look for even more partnership opportunities from across the WordPress ecosystem. If you’d like to invest or get involved, drop us a line at newspack@automattic.com.