It’s so exciting to see what the creative minds like Nick Hamze or Tammie Lister are doing with Automattic’s AI vibe coding tool, Telex. Tammie is doing a Blocktober, a block every day this month of October, you should follow along.
Category Archives: WordPress
Fight For Open
Sometimes the battle for open source and freedom can take on very prosaic and practical terms, but the wins can benefit everybody. To give an example: In Beeper we need more memory for showing notifications, because we support end-to-end encryption for networks like Signal, but Apple’s default was to only give 15 megabytes — barely enough to do anything. The previous CEO of Beeper, Eric Migicovsky, started a lobbying effort with the EU’s Digital Markets Act on behalf of the team to give third-party apps the same memory limits that Apple provides for their own apps, which is 50MB instead of 15MB. (And up to 250MB on their higher end devices.)
Today we’ve gotten a notification that as part of iOS 26 update Apple has shipped to 2.3B devices around the world, our memory limits issue has been addressed globally, for every application developer, and some interoperability requests we had for SMS/RCS have been addressed for EU users. Kudos and huge thank you to Apple for giving us all new capabilities to build amazing experiences for users on par with what they seek to deliver themselves. If you want to geek out on this, check out the technical deep dive that Beeper just posted.
BTW, if you haven’t heard of it yet, Beeper is an Automattic product which aims to democratize messaging, just like WordPress democratized publishing for the world, by allowing you to get all your messages from friends across 11 different networks, like WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter/X, Signal, Discord, in one single inbox. The new version we launched in July does this in a completely secure way that’s local to your device, so the same encryption, privacy, and security each network provides is maintained.
Om 59
I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, Om Malik, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he’s a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others.
Om was one of the earliest users of WordPress and he was one of 8 people who came to the very first WordPress meetups at Chaat Cafe on 3rd street in San Francisco in 2005. (You can tell what an early adopter he is because he has the username “Om” on Twitter/X and Instagram and WordPress and probably more.) We had connected on the WordPress support forums when I helped him get set up around the 1.0 days. After I moved to San Francisco to take the job at CNET he connected me to people like Phil Black, Tony Conrad, and Toni Schneider who would become, respectively, an investor, board member, and CEO of Automattic. These are folks I still work with and consider close friends today. As a journalist, he had a keen nose for BS and made sure as a naïve 20-something in SF I was connecting with quality people.
Since we met we’ve both had a shared love for photography, and I’ve seen Om blossom into an amazing photographer with a really unique style and approach, in fact you can even buy some of his photography prints.
Over the years, we’ve dipped in and out of shared obsessions with cameras, watches, shoes, fashion, and design. We have a fair number of matching things in each. In photography we’ve shivered in minus thirty weather in Antarctica and Jackson Hole at odd hours to catch a special shot. We’ve traveled to Europe and Japan dozens of times, being very early (pre John Mayer and Kanye) to brands like Visvim. When I wear something like a bespoke, hand-made piece from 45R to speak at WordCamp US, he recognizes it off the cuff and even knows the one store on Crosby Street in New York where you can buy it. He is a tastemaker and an aesthetic connoisseur in every area he’s interested in, from food to coffee to pens, and everything in between. Sometimes we’ll start a journey together, for example, trying nice pens, and years later, I’ve moved on and he’s gone deep into collecting dozens of them, being in obscure forums and Reddits, or attending events like the SF Pen Show last month.
When you walk into a coffee shop with Om he doesn’t just know the barista’s name, he knows their dog’s name and the story of every person working there.
I’m 500 words in, and I still haven’t even scratched the surface of describing Om’s journey, from growing up in Delhi to becoming a journalist for a Japanese publication in New York, a book author, party promoter, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, photographer, and explorer. If you want to understand the AI bubble we’re in right now, you should read his book Broadbandits on the crazy telecom / Enron bubble. This is a long way to say, happy birthday Om!
Five Publications I’d Love on WordPress
When WordPress started in 2003, I never dreamed it would power over 40% of websites, nine times the number two CMS, but I wrote on a notecard a list of five publications I admired and respected so much I wanted them to run on WP someday. In the interest of sharing your dreams to help them come true, here they are:
And one bonus: Houston Chronicle. (Gotta root for the hometown.)
There has been uneven progress toward this over the years; we’ve gotten some of the NYT and all of the New Yorker at one point, only to have them revert under new CTOs. Also, there have been some unexpected huge wins, like when Vox Media retired its proprietary CMS Chorus and brought over amazing publications like The Verge and New York Magazine. For any projects related to these publications, including trials or micro-sites, I’d be happy to provide my feedback on architecture, design, and opportunities, and contribute Automattic and VIP resources wherever they could be helpful.
I believe the most crucial aspect to get right for these customers is real-time co-editing, which is on the Gutenberg roadmap and shipping soon. If I were writing this list today I might choose some different targets.
Harry Mack
I love the culture of freestyle rap, it’s so inspiring to see how people can create such rich poetry riddled with allusions and puns on command. Last week I got to meet Harry Mack and see him improvise live and it totally makes sense that he has a jazz drums background. If you’re not familiar with Harry Mack, this is a good example of him taking three words: Imported, Lurking, Automatic and freestyling with them. (BTW, if you noticed, we finally got the domain spelled correctly.)
There is a video chat site called Omegle that paired you with random people, and Harry would record these encounters, such as this cute one with girls from Sweden who gave him the words Cartoon, Titan, Death. It’s awesome to see him meet Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.
For some fun WordPress rap history, check out when Childish Gambino referenced me in a rap he performed on Tim Westwood back in 2012.
Telex Remixes
Telex has launched a new design and a gallery of some interesting examples. It’s really cool to see what people are starting to do with Telex, it really gets back at the fun of hacking and coding at the beginning, when a computer does something for you that makes you gasp.
My colleague Eduardo Villuendas has been making some cool music with it.
This really gets to my vision for Gutenberg to be a builder that anyone can use to create an incredible website, like legos anyone can assemble anything they imagine on the web. This is why I said Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress.
- Jeff Paul made a game of Pong.
- JuanMa Garrido made a mermaid diagram. (Which I have never heard of before.)
- Marko Ivanović did a beautiful dot art thing.
Hat tip to the Gutenberg Times. As I said in 2022, you need to learn AI deeply, there is so much fun stuff happening. Berkan Cesur even likes it on Reddit.
Nick Diego writes how Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block developer.
Post-Earthquake Tea Grit
The 4.7 earthquake definitely disturbed my sleep last night, so it’s nice to have a Cuzen Matcha shot and some Harney & Sons Paris tea to wake up and get me through the day.
Speaking of spilling tea, I had a great conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan of the storied VC firm Kleiner Perkins where we got to chat about the hero’s journey of entrepreneurship, my earliest “Hot Nacho” WordPress scandal and the context of current battles, 996 work, jazz clubs in San Francisco, and more. Kleiner never invested in Automattic (I don’t think we ever pitched) but I have always had huge respect for John Doerr, Brook Byers, Bing Gordon, Mary Meeker, Ilya Fushman, and Mamoon Hamid, so many of the people at KPCB. You can watch on YouTube or listen in Pocket Casts.
MCP Everywhere
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. (The joke is the S in MCP stands for security, but that’s another post.) They say to think of it like “like a USB-C port for AI applications” because it allows interoperability between AI chatbots and other tools. Here’s some of the MCP stuff happening across the Automattic solar system:
- Core WordPress now has an MCP Adapter that uses a new Abilities API to do CRUD and more operations across WordPress.
- Woo’s core MCP is coming in version 10.3 in early October, though Lawrence Sinclair already spun one up on Github.
- Here’s how to set up Clay’s MCP so your AI can ask things like “Who are my contacts at Google that I haven’t spoken to in 6 months?”
- Beeper’s MCP implementation lets you query your entire message history across iMessage (on MacOS), WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Instagram, and many more with natural language.
- Day One has a community MCP implementation from Kevin Davinson.
When nerds start connecting things, interesting stuff happens; that’s been my entire career, so while none of these have made it into a critical daily workflow for me, I’m curious to see what people come up with.
Weekend YouTubes
One of my favorite YouTubers is Charles Cornell (WordPress-powered!), who creates great videos that break down the music theory of various things you’ve heard, such as this adorable one featuring SNES soundtracks or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I first came across him reacting to Jacob Collier in 2020. Once I got super-into Severance, his breakdown of the spooky music is great. It’s also interesting to see that the YouTube community is going through its own version of fair use and copyright, trademark, etc., enforcement, which he discusses here.
Sam Altman is always interesting to follow, and it’s interesting to contrast this great interview he did with David Perell on writing with this very direct and awkward one with Tucker Carlson. I have immense respect for anyone who enters the arena and engages directly with journalists or critics, rather than hiding behind PR agents or lawyers. Given the current blood feud, it’s fun to go back eight years and see Sam Altman interview Elon Musk, long before any of the AI stuff blew up they were both terribly prescient.
Ray Dalio is always a gem and he went on Diary of a CEO. Theo Browne has a good take on what it means to vibe code. Kishan Bagaria discusses how Beeper is going to reach 100 million users. The story of how Atlassian took a non-traditional enterprise path with Jay Simons is great. Not a YouTube, but don’t miss Bret Taylor on The Verge. Check out Adam D’Angelo at South Park Commons.
And finally, I’ll say that YouTube Premium, which turns off all the ads, is probably one of the highest value subscriptions you can have. Many of these are essentially like podcasts, and from a product perspective, I think we need to figure out how to sync and allow seamless movement between watching, listening, or reading transcripts in Pocket Casts (Automattic’s open-source podcasting app). We support video podcasts, but there’s no good way yet to have a Whispersync-like experience between video, audio, and a transcript.
Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most significant and far-reaching allegations in the case and with today’s decision the case is narrowed significantly. This is a win not just for us but for all open source maintainers and contributors. Huge thanks to the folks at Gibson and Automattic who have been working on this.
With respect to any remaining claims, we’re confident the facts will demonstrate that our actions were lawful and in the best interests of the WordPress community.
This ruling is a significant milestone, but our focus remains the same: building a free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem and supporting the millions of people who use it every day.
It’s been a busy (and tragic) week but one of the more interesting things to launch was the Really Simple Licensing standard. I have a lot of scars from the web standards wars, so I’m hesitant to dive back in, but this is from a lot of the early Web 2.0 people, as TechCrunch writes about.
As it happens, James LePage of Automattic has spun up a WordPress plugin for it, so that was fast. Now the thing to figure out is distribution and adoption.
Account for Externalities
When I studied economics, one of the concepts that struck me the most was the concept of externalities. This International Monetary Fund post explains it well. In short, externalities are costs or benefits of an economic activity that affect third parties who did not choose to incur them, leading to a divergence between private and social costs or benefits. They’re spillover effects—positive or negative—that the market price fails to reflect. A classic example is air pollution from a factory, where nearby residents bear health and environmental costs not included in the price of the factory’s products.
Open source is full of externalities. On the positive side, adoption creates ecosystems of developers and provides many paths of distribution. On the negative side, there’s often underinvestment in the very projects that sustain the ecosystem. I have a lot of empathy for why, when open source meets finance and private equity, things can go sideways. You can look at a business built on open source and see seemingly amazing margins—efficient R&D that compounds in a DCF model. A percent here or there over many years really adds up.
My plea to investors in open-source businesses is this: when a business is built on top of open source, incorporate a restorative investment percentage back into the projects critical to the end-user experience of what you’re offering customers. In WordPress, we call this Five for the Future, but it doesn’t have to be five percent; it could be 0.1%. Plan for it when modeling your expected IRR hurdle from an investment. Then, a few years down the line, when the small percentages start to add up, you won’t face a big catch-up or gap.
This underinvestment is itself an externality. It doesn’t appear on the balance sheet, but it can manifest in black swan events, such as security breaches or remote code exploits. Technical debt is one of the largest unaccounted-for externalities in the world today. Engineering, in the long run, is primarily a craft of maintenance rather than creation. The bulk of the cost of something comes from its upkeep over time.
PostHog
It’s always fun to see someone pushing the limits of the web experience, as I reminisced about Flash and Dreamweaver the other day. The new website for Posthog is a delightful rabbit hole to explore, akin to a Meow Wolf, with meticulous care and craft applied to every corner of the product in a way that is both fun and playful. They even have their own version of pineapple on pizza.
What I want to enable with WordPress is the ability with thousands of plugins and themes for people to have unique, funky experiences like this on their website, while still providing a content structure that’s legible for interoperability and hacking. Major kudos to Cory Watilo and James Hawkins for coming up with this.
On WP Product Talk
I had a great chat with Matt Cromwell and Zack Katz on WP Product Talk today, mostly about the intersection of AI and WordPress, give it a watch!
It’s New Apple Stuff day, so the headlines are being dominated by that, but it’s worth taking a step back and paying homage to the site that has been the front page of tech news for two decades now, Techmeme. I’ve been a daily visitor since it started, and I appreciate how they pair the algorithm with a light human touch to provide a wide overview. (WordPress-powered!) Fred Vogelstein at Crazy Stupid Tech has a great review of how Techmeme started and evolved.
A few interesting reads or listens:
- The Next Thing You Smell Could Ruin Your Life, a deep dive into chemical sensitivity and toxicant-induced loss of tolerance, or TILT, by Lexi Pandell (WordPress!) at Wired.
- IRL Brain Rot and the Lure of the Labubu, by Kyle Chayka at New Yorker.
- Simon Willison’s Lethal Trifecta talk, on the myriad security issues that arise when combining LLMs, prompt injection, MCPs, and more.
- Daniel Stenberg, a lead developer of the open source utility Curl, talks at FrOSCon about how AI reports are gumming up their security workflows. (YouTube, 53 minutes.)
- Daniel again (on his WordPress-powered blog) discusses a version of their maker/taker problem, specifically the 47 car brands that use Curl but none that sponsor it.
- Fernando Borretti’s Notes on Managing ADHD.
- Good Taste Is More Important Than Ever, by Nitin Nohria in The Atlantic.
Breaking Ribs
Chris Young, who is otherwise famous for being a co-author of the 2,438-page cookbook Modernist Cuisine or centrifuging steaks and drinking them, is one of the friends who, over the years, has told me I have to watch Breaking Bad, the TV show. When I was in Marrakech for a few weeks earlier this year, and it was a million degrees outside, I cracked and started watching, and I see why people say it’s one of the best shows ever. I’m only up to S2E4, and I see why everyone loves it, including that it is sometimes unintentionally hilarious, but I had to stop because it was getting a bit too dark and bumming me out before I went to bed.
However, I’m glad I made it through that season and a half of Breaking Bad, because it has given me the ability to appreciate this homage Chris has done, attempting to use science and chemistry to cook ribs in an apartment oven just as well as you could with a smoker. If you live at the intersection of Breaking Bad, BBQ, science, chemistry, and cooking, this is the video for you. And now, this makes me want to order some Pit Room in Houston. (WordPress-powered!)
And if you haven’t yet, you should buy one of Chris’ Combustion Predictive Thermometers (here on Amazon).
Are you a WordPresser?
You might be a WordPresser if…
- You like to have freedom and control over all your software.
- You don’t mind taking a bit more time to invest in tools that give you agency.
- You like inserting little opportunities for joy in everyday interfaces.
- You want future generations to grow up with a free and open web.
- You like to tinker, hack, mod, customize, and share what you learn.
- You are impeccable with your word.
- You think software should have a little soul in it.
- You love giving other people superpowers, teaching them not to need you anymore.
- You appreciate a good plan but want to be able to color outside the lines, or completely reimagine the canvas altogether.
- You think technology is best when it brings people together.
- You get excited by updates.
- You want your corner of the web to truly be yours, not generic or commoditized slop.
- Your friends come to you to learn about new stuff.
- You leave things better than you find them.
- You fix things as you find them, it’s never someone else’s problem.
- You know a single comment can light up someone’s day.
- You’ve gotten out of the house to meet other people into WordPress.
- There’s a Wapuu item or sticker somewhere in your life.
- You “view source.”
- You know the difference between owning your content and being a digital sharecropper.
- You’ve drunkenly registered a domain, and have more domains than websites.
- You’ve snuck an easter egg in a slug.
- You have a Gravatar, and it’s also a museum of all your email identities over the years.
- You think code can be poetry.
If you identified with two or more of these statements, I am afraid to inform you might be classified as a WordPresser. What did I miss?
The New Yorker is always good, but they’re having a bit of a victory lap as they celebrate their centennial. This article on the vaunted fact-checkers is such a delight, with so many in-jokes and back references it’s hard to keep track.
When I started WordPress, I wrote down five publications that I hoped someday we’d make software so good they’d adopt it. The New Yorker is one of them. If you enjoy words that make your brain tingle, make sure to also follow Automattic’s publications, Longreads and Atavist.
Summer WordPress Update
I’m still buzzing from an incredible WordCamp US this week, from contributor day to the closing party the vibes were right and it was amazing to connect with fellow travelers in the journey towards creating a more free and open source internet.
Before our open town hall Q&A I was able to make some fun announcements:
- Traffic to WordPress.org is up, and we’ve brought the plugin queue from months to basically a few days.
- Previewed Block Comments and the upcoming Command Palette feature in 6.9.
- Shared some fun AI experiments, including Felix’s AI chatbot demo, Automattic’s new Telex block creator, and more.
- Got to announce details for the next two flagships:
- WordCamp Asia 2026: Mumbai, India, from April 9th to 11th.
- WordCamp Europe 2026: Kraków, Poland. June 4th to 6th 2026.
- WordCamp US 2026: Phoenix, Arizona, from August 16th to 19th. 😅
Give it a watch!