Tag Archives: sotw

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:

State of the Word 2019

WordCamp, WordPress,

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.

State of the Word 2018

Over the weekend I was in Nashville with over a thousand other WordPress enthusiasts. I met a ton of people, learned a lot, and was able to share the annual State of the Word address with the audience, which is a big summary of what WordPress has been up to and where it’s going. This year we covered user testing, Gutenberg, 5.0, the future phases of Gutenberg, all the latest and greatest blocks, new minimum PHP requirements, the adoption of 5.0, and some event and community updates. You can also see just the slides. The Q&A is here in a separate video.

If you’d like a text summary and commentary on the speech, Post Status and WP Tavern both have good write-ups.

State of the Word, 2017

I really enjoyed connecting with the WordPress community in Nashville this previous weekend. On Saturday I delivered the State of the Word presentation alongside Mel, Weston, and Matías. There’s always a post-event buzz but I definitely noticed a change in tenor of people’s thoughts on Gutenberg after the presentation and demo. The video is above, check it out when you get a chance.

State of the Word, 2016

The full video and Q&A from 2016’s State of the Word last week in Philadelphia is now online. This year was especially exciting because it wasnt’ just a look back at the previous year, but sets out a new direction for where WordPress will be in 2017 and beyond.

If you want just the slides, here they are:

Like every year, there was a ton of help bringing this together. Mark Uraine led the slides, and at various points these folks pitched in as well: Mel Choyce, Tammie Lister, Michael Arestad, Ashleigh Axios, Ian Dunn, Corey McKrill, Martin Remy, Josepha Haden, Alex Kirk, Marina Pape, Alx Block, Cami Kaos, Matias Ventura, Donncha O Caoimh, John Maeda, Barry Abrahamson, Nikolay Bachiyski, Chrissie Pollock, Sam Sidler, Boris Gorelik, Dion Hulse, Brooke Dukes, Sarah Blackstock. I also got input and suggestions from Petya Raykovska, Tony Perez, Joe Casabona, Helen Hou-Sandi, Jon Bossenger, Jason Cohen, Daniel Bachhuber, Drew Butler, Ryan Boren, Andrew Roberts, Joost de Valk, Stephane Daury, Dion Hulse, Gary Pendergast, David Bisset, Ryan McCue, Alex Shiels, Brian Krogsgard, Joe Hoyle, Sean Blakeley, Andrew Nacin, Mark Jaquith, John Blackbourn, and thank you to Rose Kuo for inspiring the poetry theme which featured prominently this year.

Tavern and Post Status wrote up the talk itself. As a follow-up I did interviews with both to expand on some of what was discussed in the speech. The Post Status one is now up and you can watch it here:

State of the Word 2014

WordPress,

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.

3.6 and State of the Word

WordPress

3.6 has been released and has a groovy video to go with it:

It’s been a busy week, WordCamp San Francisco 2013 went off without a hitch. Here’s the State of the Word presentation, which covered quite a bit of material and talks about the plans for WordPress 3.7 and 3.8:

And here’s the question and answer session:

There was a pretty good summary of the presentation in infographic form. A bit more about this next week, and some more announcements in store as well.

State of the Word 2012

Events, ,

I had an amazing weekend at WordCamp San Francisco hanging out with hundreds of WordPress users from all over the world at the main event and the dev day afterward. Then on Sunday I was humbled to be featured on the cover of my hometown paper the Houston Chronicle in an article David Kaplan wrote following the 10-year high school reunion I went to (PDF).

If you wanted to catch up on the State of the Word address I gave on Saturday, the video and the slides are now online, or you can watch it embedded below. The slides are on Slideshare.

It was a pleasure meeting so many of you, and I hope it’s not next year before we meet again. Thank you to Michael Pick and Pete Davies for helping me out under tight timelines again.

State of the Word 2011

WordPress

Just in case you missed yesterday’s State of the Word presentation, it’s now available on WordPress TV:

The slides are also available on Slideshare.

Here are some key takeaways from yesterday:

  • We had over 1,000 people attending WCSF and many more watching the livestream, making it the biggest WordCamp yet.
  • The survey of 18,000 WP users revealed some interesting data, like a median hourly rate of $50 and that 6,800 of the self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally.
  • WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade velocity ever.
  • WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and 200 million plugin downloads, and we’re doing a lot of work to make the plugin experience more seamless.
  • 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world use WordPress.
  • 22 of every 100 active domains created in the U.S. are running WordPress.

In true WordPress fashion, we’ll be open sourcing the raw survey data so people can slice and dice it their own way to find interesting trends or patterns, like breaking down the hourly rates by geography.

Special thanks to Pete Davies, who was responsible for the survey and helping craft the narrative of the keynote, and Michael Pick who did the same and also designed all the slides and animations you saw. Michael is going to prepare a blog post with all of the inspirations and allusions in the slides for those of you curious about the story behind the design.

Update: Raw data and a few other updates are now available on WordPress.org.