But now we enter the Q&A portion of theState of the Word. By the way, if you
wanted to hear more from me: photomatt.tumblr.Doing a podcast on distributed.blog
which is like talking about distributed work. I'm @photomatt on the
legacy social networks. And my blog isma.tt. If you wanted to see the T.S. Eliot
poem that I referred to earlier, when Isaid they should have sent a poet in
I just posted that I think last night. How the Q&A portion works of this
is that there is no screening. There'sno - we have no idea what's about to
happen. But luckily, in this room, wehave a lot of answers to things far
beyond what I'm aware of. And if youhave a question, I think this is the
spot to go to, right? So, please, come onup. I guess I should have given you a
little more warning that we were aboutto do this. But anything that's on your
minds, we can talk about? Michelle? Yeah.Do you mind grabbing the microphone for her?
Michelle Frechette. I'm here with Post Status today> And say where you
came from just so everyone kind ofaround the world can hear.
The other side in New York, not very far. I livein Rochester. So first, I want to thank
the open source project for takingseriously my article on accessibility
issues that I encountered at WordCamp.US. And my suggestions, I put some
suggestions in there that have beentaken seriously like creating a new
section for the WordCamp OrganizerHandbook, and creating an accessibility
team for WordCamp US 2023. So kudos toyou and those who are making web
accessibility decisions, more than justthe web accessibility, but the community
accessibility in all ways. So I wantedto thank you for that. But my question
is unrelated to that. So last year, atState of the Word, you announced the
Photo Directory, and which I was happyto give a bunch of photos to kind of seed
that and get that going. We now haveover 5,000 - probably close to 5,500 photos
in there. And we have severalmoderators. We're working real hard to
get those published. So if you'vesubmitted, we're all here right now.
You may need to wait a day or two, butwe'll get to this. I'm going to call it a
successful campaign. In a year, to haveover 5,500 photos is amazing. And those
are all in the Creative Commons. So people canuse them however they want. They don't
have to attribute it to us. It's justreally wonderful. But the question is
where do we go from here, right? So wehave a lot of people who have been
putting photos in. I don't know that alot of people know about the
directory - you can take photos out anduse them however they'd like. So what
are the steps to getting people tounderstand that they don't have to go to
Unsplash, they don't have to go to Pexels orwhatever - they can come to WordPress for
those things? And then is there a wayfor the people who are contributing to
have an idea - not necessarily like wheredid your picture get used
because you just download them - but howmany downloads for pictures? And how
successful is what we're doing? Youknow, if I'm contributing 200 photos
are they just sitting there, or arepeople using them? I know that's a
lot of questions.
No, that's a fantastic idea.
It is, right? You can you credit me whenyou actually make that work.
We just did. Yeah, it's true. One ofthe best things about contributing to
open source is the idea - I still imaginethis, like lines of code I've written
are executing hundreds of millions oftimes per day across like millions of
websites. It's like one of the funnestparts. And we do have tools, for
example, the Plugin and Theme Directory,that sort of say how often things are
used, which is a contributor. Or - andthere's no reason we couldn't start to
increment some stats, at least for howoften a photo or something from the
Openverse is downloaded. Yeah, that's how Igot into the API. Again, we won't know
exactly how it's being used becausethat's all run locally. We don't have
any tracking. I think that'd be prettyexciting. One of the other things I like
as we start to embed more of thisis that we can sort of automate the
giving of credit, whether that'srequired or not by the license. Like if
you insert a photo, it could have a little caption, like "Photo by so-and-so."
You know, that sort of thing,which I actually think is a pretty neat
also incentive. I know, it's always fun -I've licensed a lot of my photography
under the GPL before. And it's beenbuilt into themes and other things. And
it's always kind of exciting for me to visita website and like, "Oh, there's my sheep."
A famous one from the Twenty Tentheme. So yeah, it's very satisfying as
a photographer. My work's now out there.So yeah, we should definitely do that.
Thank you for the suggestion.
And then how do we get people touse it and know about the Directory was
the other question.
Oh, using the directory, I think we need alot more stuff on there. So I think
that relative to Unsplash, or Pexels, or Shutterstock, or something
like that, our library is still relatively small. So I think combining
our library with the Openverselibrary that, like I said, has millions of
things there, will make it just a lotmore compelling. That when you search
there's always something there forwhatever you might be searching for.
I think we also need to figure out how tohave people in it. Right now, as you know
we don't allow faces or anything likethat because there's additional laws
and copyright around having alikeness of a person in a photo that
isn't really well covered by like, evenCreative Commons licenses. Like a model
release or something. And we're stillnavigating what that would look like.
When I think about what might be comingnext there, I think some of the AI stuff
we talked about could be reallyinteresting. So for example, there's
models that create faces that don'texist in real life, which is great
because then there's no person that'sbeen affected by like the reuse of their
likeness or something. So perhaps that'ssomething we start to do is you can
upload a photo of a person, and we'll beable to create a fake person that
gets overlaid over the face. And thenthere's no, you know - you don't have to
license your own likeness to be used inthe world. So that could be one thing.
And then also just using all the libraryas like a starting point. So whether
that's Stable Diffusion or something elsethat we could build in, these open source
models that you can start to modifythings, just using commands, prompts.
I think that would also get people to usea lot more. We already have some - like
built into Gutenberg is duotone, which changes the colors of photos. So
we can do some stuff with CSS to stylethings, blur them, do other stuff like
that. But what if, you know, you reallyliked that photo I have of the sheep, but
you wanted to be cows instead. Intheory, this is something you'd call one
of these models, or tell one of thesemodels. Like take this photo, replace
the sheep with cows. And it does it. It'skind of wild. We should try that actually
with that one. See if it actually works.But that is where these models are
going. And like I said, they are gettingbetter so quickly.
The models that GPT3 - ChatGPT is basedon 3.5, so like a middle one. The next
versions of this are going from hundredsof billions of inputs to a 10x on that.
Like a trillion plus. That will just improve the quality that much more.
So that's what I think could be next there.> Thank you.
I'm gonna add a tag. I'm going to add aquick tag. Josepha, in case you forgot
me. We also - when Openverse came overwith us - did a little bit of research
about how to do provenance with theCreative Commons folks to see how that
can work in kind of an open source, CClicensing setting. We haven't done a lot
with it. But it's we're aware. We'rewe're looking at it. So.
I'll finally say, just like we wantGutenberg to be a gift to the web and
used places more than WordPress, Openverseis a completely open API. And so is
our directory. So if other CMSes -whether that's open source ones, like
Drupal or Ghost or something, orproprietary ones - they want to build in
the Openverse, that is completely opento them, too. Again, it's part of like - as
we are trying to create the web that wewant to exist, it's going to be more
than just WordPress. And we want to makethe tools that we're creating available
to others as well. All right, thank you.Next question?
Hi, Allie Nimmons. I'm here from Austin, Texas.I think I can speak for everyone here
when I just say thank you. To you, to co-founder Mike Little, and to everyone
else who followed for this big,beautiful, amazing thing that has
changed my life and changed, I think, alot of our lives. As a community member,
I really enjoy looking at how we - all ofus, everyone watching and listening - can
improve, patch, grow all of these ideasand systems and practices that make up
this community. And a big part of that,for me is being uncomfortable and brave
in addressing challenges, problems,doubts, and struggles that we might have.
And as I grow as a community member intoa leader in this community, I find
myself inspired by people like Josepha,who are able to do this elegantly and
wisely and kindly. And so as our mostvisible leader, what do you think is the
biggest challenge that WordPress isfacing right now? And how can we as a
community of people begin to or continueto lovingly address those challenges?
That's a tough question. I think whatreally strikes me about it, we have a
lot of teams that work on differentparts of WordPress. There's like an
accessibility team, a security team, atranslation team. And part of what I've
begun to appreciate is in kind of thesystem's thinking of addressing the
problems that WordPress is trying toaddress, like creating, basically, an
operating system for the open web thatyou can build anything on top of. How
every single part of that's important.And sometimes some of the struggles we
have is one of those teams being like,"Hey, we're not getting enough attention"
or "Hey, we messed up on accessibility" orsomething like that. And it's true. Often
maybe we didn't give enough attention toone of those areas, or we didn't have
our security program covering enough of the plugins or whatever it might be. But
each one of those is almost like its ownlinchpin that's supporting all the
others. It's like a lattice-work, wherethey're actually all quite
important. And part of what I think isso important about us having a broad and
diverse group of contributors is thatwithout one of those, the whole thing
would collapse a little bit. And wecan't pay attention to just Core
and ignore the plugin infrastructures orsomething like that. So a little bit, we
do shift attention and give moreattention to some things some years and
kind of move around a little bit. But asmore and more people get involved with
WordPress, the nice thing is that wekind of work on them all at the same
time. Divide up the problem essentially.In open source, there's a saying
"With many eyes, all bugs are shallow."Basically, meaning that any one of
this would be overwhelming for any onedeveloper, myself or whoever it is. But
when you get people specializingin lots of different areas. It's
almost like an economy works, right?Where, one of my favorites - I
think it's Adam Smith, who spoke about inthe Wealth of Nations, the idea of a
pencil, and how simple pencil is. Butwhen you think about everything that
goes into making that pencil, literallyno one person or no one company
could have done it. There's the littlemetal thing. How is the metal found? The
eraser. The lead. The shaping. The machinesthat shape it. The distribution. Tow it
was distributed to stores and everythinglike that. When you start to think - a
pencil, even if it was maybe like acraft pencil. Maybe a single person
the final putting together of the pencil.All the things that went into that
including the feed and shelter of the personwho made it, is like tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of people. Supplychain lines that go across everything.
Something that's also been on people'sminds now a little bit as supply chains
are getting disrupted or got disruptedthis year. So I think about it like
that. So thank you for that question.That's a tough one.
Thank you so much. > Appreciate it.
Come on up. Come on up.
Hi, my name's Laura Byrne. I'm just fromacross the river in Montclair, New Jersey.
We had WordCamp Montclair last year. I think we were one of two
North American WordCamps last year. We'regoing to have it again. And one of my
favorite things we had at that camp iswe had folks from the all women release
squad, do a panel. We had Josepha. We hadMichelle. Ebonie Butler, and I am
forgetting someone. Courtney! Thank youso much. She's in the room. She's gonna
kill me. I'm sitting next to her. Thisis very embarrassing. So anyway, try to
dig myself out of this hole. So I thinkthat really squad was phenomenal. Can we
do it again? > Sure. Absolutely.
When would you like to? > I don't know. I'm thinking
2023. Maybe the second half of 2023? Sounds like a really good idea.
What do you think?
Yeah, we could totally do that. We just have to plan for it, I guess.
So let's start. > You're on? Are we on?
It's definitely one of those things. Sofor those who aren't familiar, each
release of WordPress has kind of adifferent team that comes together that
is in charge of it. So essentially, I'mlike the lead developer of WordPress.
We're really, it's kind of like we'repassing the torch from different folks
which allows different teams to havelike an impact. And we did this
experiment with an all-women release leadsquad. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. And
what's that? And non-binary? Thankyou. So that sort of experimentation is
I think part of the beauty of it. Likewe all get some practice, like creating
a WordPress release, releasing it,getting it out there. And folks
can bring different aspects.That's part of why we name - if you don't
know, we name actually everyWordPress release in honor of a jazz
musician. And part of the fun thing forme is looking at the characteristics of
a release and which jazz musician kindof matches that or complements it.
Or whose life story might, like, bepart of that. Actually, if you go around
and look in the office, the records thatare in some of the conference rooms
here, they're all the jazz musicianreleases. Thank you, Tino. Thank you, Pablo.
And thank you, my friend, Marcos. Wehave a professional jazz musician here
actually. Marcos Varela. So yeah, thankyou for the suggestion. We'll do it.
Thank you. And one last plug. WordCampMontclair is happening in June 2023. We
would love it if you might come. > Oh, cool.
Right across the river you said. June 2023. And I guess we had two WordCamps
last year. The slide said one, sohe must have had at least two. Yeah.
Cool. Well, thank you for that fact check as well.
Great. Thank you.
I love New York. It really is like oneof the great cities of the world. And so
whenever I'm here, I get really inspired bythe energy and everything. The shops.
The small businesses. Like, man. Alright, thank you.
Hey, good afternoon. My name is RyanMarks. I'm with Pantheon and I'm here from
Tuscaloosa, Alabama. So two yearsago, with the release of WordPress 5.6
we introduced beta support for PHP. A week ago, PHP 8.2 came out.
And at the end of November, PHP 7.4 end-of-lifed. We currently have only beta
support for WordPress on the supportgrid - on the support chart. All of the
"Yes"s have asterisks with beta support.So what's the plan to get us to
full support? The request - the postfrom the Make team two years ago said
there was a call for all plugin andtheme developers to become compatible
so that WordPress could be fullysupported. What's the status on that?
And at what level does all themes andplugins need to be fully supported or
compatible for WordPress to be fullycompatible?
Cool, let me make sure I'm understandingthis. So basically, you're saying that
the new versions of PHP 8, our sortof support - like how WordPress core
supports them is still beta?
So all of the PHP 8 columns, and> Where are these columns?
They're on the Make site. For the supportedversions of PHP and WordPress, there's a
grid. And all of the "yes"s for all ofthe PHP versions are "Yes*." And at
the bottom, it says beta support. And soit's - for enterprise companies who are
looking to use WordPress. Today,WordPress is only available in beta.
Gotcha. Do you know - because I know wehave a lot of sites running WordPress on
PHP 8, too. Do you know what this might bein reference to? Or anyone have an
answer? All right, right back there.Let's pass the mic. And Barry, we are
running WordPress on a ton of PHP 8 -or PHP 8 on a ton of WordPress sites
right? Oh, and you have an answer. Okay. Well, let's get both.
So Jonathan. I work a lot on Core. Corecontributor. So the changes in PHP 8
are pretty foundational. There's alot of really far-reaching changes and
to properly support them is a lot ofwork. And so all of the unit tests for
WordPress core will pass on these but wecan't really speak for plugins and
themes and how they use these featureson PHP 8.x. And so we can't really say
"Yes, we fully support PHP 8.1, 8.2"because we can't vouch for every plugin
and theme. And so it's a real gray areawhere it's difficult to really own that
and confidently say that, even thoughour contributor teams have put in the
work and they have made Core itself -running on its own - 90-ish percent
compatible with these versions of PHP 8,with the exception of 8.2, which
just came out. We're still working onthat one. Does that answer your question?
And Barry, did you want to add anything to that? Let's get
the mic over to you. Let's get the - yeah.
Yeah. So I actually think that lack ofPHP 8 support, whether it's like in
practice or in theory, is reallyimportant for WordPress. And so I
actually asked about this today, becausewe still have all these asterisks and
beta tags next to it. And it's not onlyPHP 8.2. It's - PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 is all not
officially supported by core WordPress,not plugins and themes. So apparently
and I'm actually going to talk to thePHP team - PHP core team - about this
because part of the difficulty is thelack of backwards compatibility
maintenance between PHP versions, butalso there's not really a compelling
reason for folks to upgrade to PHP 8. Sothose two things together make it hard
to upgrade. But in Core, we do need to do a better job of having
complete PHP 8 support, at least in Core andalso in these - what did you call them?
Not community plugins, but canonical plugins. > Canonical plugins.
Yeah, canonical plugins. And Tanya Monkassures me today that it is a
top priority for her and her team in 2023.So hopefully that means in January.
But yeah, we do, we do need to - andI heard it was something with
the requests library? Do you know about that?
Oh, let's - because some people not herecan't hear.
Yeah, so I heard there was kind ofa second party library.
So it's something that was imported into WordPress that we didn't
write, but we, I think, are one of thefew folks using it. So we kind of
maintain it. There were some issuesthere. And I think that's why most of
those asterisks are there. But we do, likeyou said, have thousands and thousands
of sites running successfully on PHP 8,PHP 8.1 with tons of
plugins and themes. So it works inpractice, but I think in theory, it has
these asterisks next to it which we needto resolve as soon as possible.
Could be a fun thing for Playground aswell. So people could spin up like a
copy of their site in the WASM versioninside the browser, and then test things
out, see how it works. Although therecould be other problems introduced by
that because it's not using MySQL, which is the standard backend of
WordPress. It's using SQLite and sometranslation layers for that. So.
Yeah, it's interesting. And so the good news -it sounds scary when PHP says we're
end of life-ing PHP 7.4. Even thatterminology - end of life - you don't want
to "end of life" your website. But inpractice, what happens is every major
web host essentially continues tobackport security fixes and other
things so that older versions of PHP,even though they're not officially
supported by the PHP core anymore,effectively get their life extended by
quite a bit. So it's not yet end of life.
Including Automattic. So we have a PHP 7.4fork on GitHub in which we
have backported not only security fixes,but bug fixes from PHP 8 releases.
That's available - that's on GitHub, soanyone can use -
Anybody can use it, anybody can download it, and we're committed to maintaining that
backport until there is significant adoptionin the WordPress community and
other PHP projects in order to kind ofofficially "EOL" 7.4 and move
forward with the 8 versions.
Cool. "EOL", the nice way to say end oflife. So that is continuing to go on.
I will say that PHP 7 was one of myfavorite releases ever. Like, it doubled
speed a couple of times. It wasreally amazing. The PHP project 8
has gone a slightly different direction. And I think they're going to
have an adoption challenge, just ingeneral, not just from WordPress, until
they add some more compelling features,as you said, and maybe work on some
backwards compatibility. So perhaps itcould also be something that as we
co-develop and contribute and give feedbackthat in their PHP 8.3 or 8.4, maybe
they can do some things that'll make iteasier, not just for us, but for the
entire PHP community to upgrade. Cool,thank you for that.
Just giving you a logistics check. Our livestream shuts down in 12 minutes.
Okay, 12 minutes. So we got a couple morequestions. I'll try to go through these
a little faster. And if you have one, doyou mind getting up or getting in line?
Hi Matt.
I work with you on Tumblr. Zandy Ringfrom Olean, New York.
I have questions from the internet foryou. On the legacy websites. Legacy
social. Will WordPress be a thing afterthe entire focus is moved in Gutenberg?
That's from Arlind Nushi on YouTube.
Ah. So will WordPress still be a thing?Yes, more than ever. So we talk a lot
about Gutenberg because, like I said,it's something that is transforming
WordPress. Like I said, when we startedit, it's basically the biggest change in
WordPress' whole history to go to thisblock paradigm. But it's enabling
all the core things we do in WordPress.So we're essentially using these
paradigms of Gutenberg to create thenext generation that hopefully makes
WordPress more radically accessible,particularly the folks who might not
have as much ability to code. Which isalways something, like I said, we want
WordPress to be radically accessible,regardless of technical ability. So if
we want to democratize publishing, whichhas been our mission for 20 years now
we need to make it easier to use. Andthat is what Gutenberg does. So, yeah.
More WordPress than ever. And WordPressnow, I believe on the W3Techs, is over 40%
of all websites and built with - whichis what we're switching to - we're at like
a 33% or something. I think I spoke lastyear - W3Techs is going or the data set is
changing. So a third of all websites arerunning it. And that's about more than
10x the number two in the marketplace.Which is pretty exciting. It's the
power of open source.Thank you.
Thank you. I'd like to just note for everyone that the rest of these
questions will be posted on a .org blogpost and answered there as well.
So cool. So if we don't get toquestions, we'll answer them
asynchronously afterwards. This line is now longer than ever.
I'll try to go quickly.
Hey, Matt. Courtney Robertson, GoDaddyPro Dev Advocate and co-rep right now of
the Training team. Two years ago, duringthe Q&A for your State of the Word
address, we launched Learn that year.Last year, we shared a lot of stats
about it. We heard more today about it.I am really passionate about working
with anyone that wants to learnWordPress on getting them into the
job market and the things that are onour WordPress jobs board. So that
question said, things like certificationsare starting to come up again. Our
community talked about it and visited itin 2015. Myself at the time, I was
opposed. And that tune has changedbecause I saw how hard it was as an
educator to find ways to get peopleadequately trained for jobs and also
seeing so many jobs being posted, peopleapplying and they don't have the skills
with WordPress. They might know theother programming languages. Can you
speak a little bit more about whycertifications are something on the
roadmap for Learn?
Sure. I'll say that my thinking on thishas evolved as well. Maybe it's a similar
direction to yours. Typically, aroundcertifications, it just felt like a lot
of overhead to do. Like, what does itmean to be officially certified on
WordPress? And also changing every year.Like, WordPress is evolving so quickly.
What does it mean? How do you updatethat? But now, exactly like you said
I feel like, as there's more demand forWordPress developers and experts ever
having some sort of standardizededucation that they go to - not unlike
many professional organizations. Like ifyou're a doctor or pilot, it's kind of
an ongoing training. It's somethingthere's being able to fly the plane in the
first place and then there's likeongoing training that you go through
every year. Real estate agents. Many professional organizations have
this. I guess, mostly, I just want tofigure out how we can do it in a
WordPress-y way, right? There's probablysome de minimis costs because an
exam needs to be proctored or somethinglike that. But we want to make this
content, training material, everything asradically open as possible. But I
think we can do it now. So there are some -we're in two ongoing conversations.
I think it's fine for there to be sort offor-profit things doing this and we
can point to some of them, especially ifthey're aligned with our ethos and
philosophy. And then also, hopefully,there's lots of nonprofits around like
re-training people and others. Maybe wecan partner with some of them as well to
point to. Thank you.
Hi, Matt. Oops. My name is Bud Kraus. I operate as @joyofwp. And first
I'm up here because I want to - when I wasup here last year and everybody saw me
around the world and said, "Hey, I saw you on State of the Word." So I decided I would do it again.
Hi Mom!> Exactly. But in all seriousness, I do have a question.
And that is, what do you see as the future of themes? Because with Twenty Twenty-Three
with all this design agnostic, with stylevariations, and I think you even
alluded to the fact - like one theme. Arewe going to get to the point where
there's a universal theme. And that'sit. And that's it!
That's it. That's a great question. Ithink we're essentially going to have a
bifurcation of themes. So they'll beessentially, for most designs and
most standard themes, I can see those being built on maybe one or
two different themes. Like maybe it'sa create block theme. Maybe it's
something else that comes up. But like,pretty well standardized. I think
there'll be some other kind of communitythemes that might do either
weirder stuff. I remember we'vehad a command line theme before or
something else. So there might besort of more radical designs that
happen. And then, I guess where the realbifurcation will come is - there's of
course, some themes, like let's say Divi orothers, which are on the surface themes
but are really almost like entireapplications embedded. So they're using
the distribution and kind of thebundling of themes to include basically
a bunch of plugins as well. And otherstuff. These are really, really popular
and actually do a lot to bring peopleonto WordPress because they bundle so
many things that otherwise you mighthave to cobble together or assemble like
a bunch of different plugins and things,to do. So I think those are going to be
around for a long time, becauseessentially, they're almost like
applications being bundled. They'reusing on the surface themes, but they're
really something else. And perhaps weneed a new name for those as well. Just
like we're starting to differentiatebetween community and commercial
in the directories. Perhaps those we need anew word for because it's really the
kind of like a theme plus an app that'sbundled as one. So a thapp? I don't know.
We'll think of it. Sometimes naming isnot my strong point. Come on up.
Hello, I'm Nev from Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania. This might be a crazy
question, but the discussion about GPTearlier had me thinking about this. When
I owned an agency for eight years, thebiggest problem we had our clients that
didn't have a big budget was content.Getting the website written. We would
call that the build-to-launch gap. Now,I'm thinking for like a mechanic who
builds his website, gets it ready, butdoesn't know what to say about an oil
change. And if he goes to GPT and says,"What are the benefits of getting your oil
changed every 90 days?" Would there beyou know - then he can get his website
launched a lot quicker. Would there beany way or any thinking about
integrating GPT with WordPress to get these websites launched quicker?
Totally.
I think - so right now, these modelstypically are expensive. Like every
query costs like a couple pennies. So it might be something that is
more like integrating API's withcommercial services. You know, whether
that's from WordPress companies or likemore broader ones, like OpenAI. And I
think there's some specifically aroundcopywriting. Like Jarvis is one of
them? I'm forgetting some of the namesbut there's already some. They have
taken these large language models andapplied them to creating copy for
marketing pages or something like that.Now, if websites were just being written
by these things, I think that would bekind of boring. Because they have a
style of writing, which is like - themore you read it, you can kind of
recognize it. And they're even talkingabout embeddings some fingerprinting and
things so you can take part of text andidentify whether it's generated by GPT
or some of these others. But I think ifthat is kind of like a creative grist
that perhaps inspires you to rewritesomething or something like that, that's
pretty powerful. So again, I think justthe AI created stuff has one level of
coolness, but ultimately is not likeraising the culture. And what humans do
does do that. But there's sometimes thatsort of blank canvas problem, or
writer's block. Like you're just staringat... you're not sure where to start. So
if we can combine this both for maybegiving you ideas where to start to write
and edit something, and then finally onthe back end, helping you edit.
There's been tools like Grammarly andother things, Spellcheck, obviously,
that have certainly improved my writing.And the next level of those where you
might be able to say, "Hey, I wrote thisessay, how can I make it a little bit
shorter?" Or, "How can I make this a littlepunchier?" or something like that, and you
can get feedback where it analyzes yourwriting and maybe helps you iterate and
improve it. I think that's actuallypretty powerful. So there's these
studies where they would show like justhumans playing a game like chess, got to
a certain level. Just a computer playingit, got to a certain level. Eventually
the ultimate level. But for a while, thehuman plus the computer working together
where the computer would suggest somemoves and the humans would choose them,
which they call Centaurs -- you know,the kind of that combination human horse
type thing -- is the most powerful, and Iactually think that's the future of
these creative works as sort of Centaur creation. >Thank you.
We'll make these the last three. Yeah,three in five minutes; we got it. Cool.
> Challenge accepted Josepha. MicheleButcher Jones, I'm sponsored by Pagely
and from Carbondale, Illinois. Forthe first 20 years of WordPress, it's
been rather easy getting like theolder Gen X generation, the Millennial
generations, coming into WordPress, andhelping contribute, build, and everything.
And... but now in a way with a change of...for myself having a Gen Z daughter, and
then the Alpha generation, they'reseeing more of wanting to be more of a
influencer when it comes to tech anddifferent stuff like that, then actually
like work on code and stuff. And asone of the front people pushing for the
KidsCamps, and to bring them in toWordPress that way, and then also with
our training that we're setting up. Butwhat are we really doing and thinking of
the future of keeping the incourse ofthe younger ones and younger generations
coming?
Yeah. You alluded to it, but I thinkeducation is so important. And we need
to get into schools at every singlelevel -- elementary, middle, high school,
college -- and teach these skills. Becausewhen you learn these skills, they
actually are lifelong skills. When youlearn a little bit of HTML, a little bit
of CSS, that get... this gives you, muchlike learning instruments or learning
something else, like a language, you canuse the rest of your life, to be
creative and express yourself. And sortof learning a little bit how computers
work, I think is in many ways, like anew type of literacy, that just opens up
entire worlds in a really powerful way.Two, we need to make it easier to onboard.
And things like Gutenberg, everything wejust talked about, I hope will help a
lot with that. And the third thing,which is a little bit kind of a side
personal projects I've been working on,you might notice I've got the double
verify checkmark. That's a little homageto... We launched on Tumblr, this thing
where for $8 instead of one check mark,you can get two. But Tumblr is something I've
been working on a lot personally. And soAutomattic a few years ago acquired
Tumblr. I've been functioning as the CEOof that since February. Tumblr is social
blogging, basically. So it's... a coolthing about Tumblr is over half the user
base is under 25. It's more female thanmale, and more mobile. And it's doing
50... 100,000 signups depending on the day,every day. So, a ton of new people are
coming in, and it's really fun. So weare transitioning Tumblr to be powered
by WordPress. So it's not there yet, butyou'll be able to use Tumblr, like a
social network on your phone orwhatever. But the sort of... what we call
the web network. So like where youhave a subdomain or custom domain on
Tumblr, that'll all be like WordPressthemes. So what I'm hoping is that
Tumblr can actually provide on ramp foran entirely new generation that has like
the fun blogging aspect that's verysocial, so you can learn that part. But
when you're ready to like expand yourweb presence or portfolio or have a
store or something like that, then whenyou learn that you'll actually be
learning WordPress, and that's a skillwhich you could take to any web host, to
any sort of like part of the wholeWordPress ecosystem. So, I'm hoping that
can be a new onramp as well. That justkind of something personally I'm working
on, and with Automattic. So thank you.>Thank you.
Hey, Matt. Robert Jacobi from Cloudways. Idid buy my two check marks, so...
You're double verified! >...double verified. Inspired by the Pantheon question
and PHP? Will there ever be a backwardscompatibility break if there is a technology
sufficient enough to accelerate theWordPress ecosystem?
Hmmm...backwards compatibility? So, yeah.So, Gutenberg is a backwards incompatible
change. And remember, in previous years,when Gutenberg was first being
introduced, there was a lot ofresistance to it. There... there's still
some. It's getting better. Peopleare really opened up to Gutenberg. It's
on like, the majority of new sites andeverything. But I would talk a lot that
Gutenberg was something new to learn, itwas a completely different tech stack,
and all the plugins and everythingare going to need to be updated. But I'd
say it's #WorthIt. Right? Like it'sa big change, but we think that this is
worth doing. And we don't do it thatoften. It's the biggest backwards...
Basically, you can run a theme writtenfor WordPress from 2005 on WordPress
6.1 today, 17 years later, and it works.
>Which is why I think it's not like thatkind of break. Like, you would say that
WordPress 10 can't run on anythingexcept PHP 4000?
Yeah. We'll see. Yeah, never say neverand we'll see what is coming, and new
versions of technology. There'sdefinitely features that, for example,
require a newer browser in WordPress, orthings like this web assembly language
that allows the playground feature. Likethat's not going to be supported in, you
know, Internet Explorer 8 oranything like that. So, we are
definitely saying like newertechnologies. But we try to make that a
progressive enhancement. So saying...Like, for example, some of this new
stuff, like the block interface is waymore complex. So if you're using like a
screen reader to interact withWordPress, there's a lot going on. And
if you just want to do a post, maybethat's too much. So we always have like,
the Classic Editor, if you want toswitch back, or alternative ways of
posting to WordPress, whether through API'sor other things, so that there's more
then one way to do it. And depending onwhat sort of like you need to do,
there's many ways to post, many ways toedit, many ways to do everything,
including all these API's, both the XMLRPC and the REST API that are built in.
So... but never say never. We'll see. >Thank you, Matt.
Thank you. Last question.All right. Hope it's good.
We'll see. We'll see. Mike Melanson. I'mwith the GitHub, The ReadME Project.
Cool. When you were talking earlierabout Project Gutenberg, I was
remembering the beginning of this year,there was talk about the Block Protocol
from Joel Spolsky. Yeah. And youresponded that you guys were interested
in helping out with that, partakingsomehow. I'm curious, what's happened
since then, if anything?
Yeah, so Block Protocol. And JoelSpolsky is like, an incredible
developer, if you're a developer,or I guess he's a leader now, his
Joel on Software essays, is one ofthese books that's like a little older,
but so timeless. In New York City, Ibelieve, as well, and was part of
creating Fog Creek. What else did they do?Glitch. What's that? Stack Overflow. Oh,
yeah. How'd I forget the big one?! So, so much.Sometimes developers don't like to work
together on the same thing. And so it'spart of why there's like two hundred
CMSes and stuff like that. Like,sometimes there might be a stylistic or
technical change that when you look atit, you say, "I can't use this thing
that exist. I'm going to start somethingthat's different." And I think that's a
little bit what's happening withGutenberg and the Block Protocols. And
so as we've gotten involved -- like, we'redefinitely communicating as the
projects -- but they feel like there'ssome things either choices in Gutenberg
or ways we develop things that just areincompatible with how they see it
happening. We'll see where that goes inthe future. Like I said, Gutenberg,
we've tried to make CMS agnostic, so itcan be embedded in anything and reskined,
like you saw with the Tumblr example. Itcan be totally different. And everything
we're doing is open. So I would hopethat wherever they end up, Gutenberg
blocks could maybe be embedded, ifthere's a translation layer or something
like that, in their editor. And youknow, it's totally fine for there to be
other editors. If we can do somethingfor users where if they copy and paste
or just some sort of translation layer,I think that would be really ideal, and
where I hope we end up well. One of the coolthing is about there being more than one
thing, like multiple editors as well, ismaybe they create something really cool
that's open source, and they were like,"Oh, let's bring that over to Gutenberg."
So the innovation can flow both ways,and sometimes maybe that's only possible
if you're starting something fromscratch. So they're open source. They're
doing open protocols, everything likethat. So I consider them like a cousin
project, and I hope that we canintegrate more in the future. But if
not, that's okay, too. Maybe this willjust be an alternative ecosystem that
can experiment with new ideas, or maybethings we would say no to, they can try
and then we see how it's adopted byusers. Cool. Well, thank you so much.
We're going to end there
if you're here in New York, we'll now go,we'll have some snacks, and just hanging
out. We'll be pretty open if you want tostay for a while. And for those of you
tuning in online, thank you so much forgiving us part of your day. See you next
year, if not before.