State of the Word 2014

Yesterday I delivered the State of the Word address to the WordPress community, and the video is already up on WordPress.tv.

Here are the slides if you’d like to view them on their own:

If you just want the bullet points, here are the big things I discussed and announced:

• There will be 81 WordCamps in 2014.
• This was the 9th and final WordCamp San Francisco in its current form. We’ve maxed out the venue for years, so next year we’ll do a WordCamp US at a location and date to be determined.
• Milestone: 2014 was the first year non-English downloads surpassed English downloads of WordPress.
• 33k took our survey: 7,539 (25%) of survey participants make their living from WordPress. Over 90% of people build more than one site, and spend less than 200 hours building one.
• We’ve done five major and seven minor releases since the last WCSF, and have had 785 contributors across them.
• WordPress market share has risen from 19% in 2013 to 23% now.
• We now have 34k plugins and 2.7k themes, and have enjoyed record activity on both — including plugins passing 1,000,000 commits.
• 16 releases of our mobile apps, Android and iOS.
• Code Reference launched.
• 105 active meetup groups in 21 countries, with over 100 meetup and WordCamp organizers present at the event.
• Internationalization will be a big focus of the coming year, including fully-localized plugin and theme directories on language sites and embedded on dashboard in version 4.1, which is coming out December 10th.
• Better stats coming for plugin and theme authors.
• Version fragmentation is a big challenge for WordPress, only a quarter of users are currently on the latest release.
•  This is also a problem for PHP — we’ll be working with hosts to help with version fragmentation, as well as to get as many WordPress sites as possible running PHP 5.5 or better.
• Showed off 2015 theme.
• We will be testing a workflow for accepting pull requests on our official WordPress Github repository before the end of the year.
• For the first time in 11 years we’re switching away from IRC as our primary communication method. We’ll be moving to Slack, which has helped us set up so that every member of WordPress.org can use it. (During the keynote address the number of people on Slack surpassed our IRC channels, and is currently over 800 people.) Sign up at chat.wordpress.org.
• Five for the Future, with Gravity Forms and WPMU Dev committing to donate, and Automattic now at 14 full-time contributors to core and community.
• We need to work hard to harmonize the REST API plugin and the WordPress.com REST API.
• The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing, which means access for everyone regardless of language, geography, gender, wealth, ability, religion, creed, or anything else people might be born with. To do that we need our community to be inclusive and welcoming. There is a sublime beauty in our differences, and they’re as important as the principles that bring us together, like the GPL.