State of the Word 2025  ## Metadata - Author: [[WordPress]] - Full Title: State of the Word 2025 - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [WordPress, AI, open-source, community, WordPress-6.9, State-of-the-Word] author: Matt Mullenweg, Mary Hubbard source: WordPress / YouTube reference: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q] date created: 2025-12-04 14:30 --- # 🏷️ Title: State of the Word 2025 ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - [WordPress 6.9 "Gene" Release](https://wordpress.org/news/) - [AI Experiments Plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/ai/) - [WordPress Playground](https://playground.wordpress.net/) - [Learn WordPress](https://learn.wordpress.org) - [TBPN Interview Segment](https://tbpn.com) - [Telex AI Block Builder](https://telex.automattic.ai) ## 📝 Summary - **What happened:** WordPress 6.9 "Gene" released live at State of the Word 2025, marking the first on-stage release in the event's history. The WordPress AI team shipped all four foundational building blocks (Abilities API, WP AI Client, MCP Adapter, AI Experiments plugin) within six months of formation. - **Why it matters:** WordPress maintains 43% web market share while pivoting toward AI-native architecture. The Abilities API creates a unified registry enabling AI agents to interact with WordPress sites programmatically. Educational programs expand contributor pipelines globally. - **Key stakeholders:** Matt Mullenweg (Automattic CEO), Mary Hubbard (WordPress Executive Director), James LePage (AI Lead), Felix Arntz (Google/WP AI Client architect), Jeff Paul (10up), Universidad Fidélitas, global contributor community of 921 contributors to 6.8. - **Risks and tradeoffs:** Dependence on proprietary AI providers balanced by model-agnostic abstraction layer. Plugin ecosystem security requires AI-assisted review scaling. Collaboration features may shift expectations toward real-time multiplayer editing. - **Bottom line:** WordPress positions itself as AI-ready infrastructure for the open web, shipping foundational APIs that enable plugin developers and hosts to embed AI capabilities without vendor lock-in. ## 📖 Main Content WordPress 6.9 "Gene" represents a pivot release focused on collaboration and AI foundations rather than flashy end-user features. Named for jazz pianist Gene Harris, the release brought 340 enhancements from 900+ contributors, with 230 first-time contributors joining. The AI team, formed just six months prior, delivered four core building blocks ahead of schedule. The **Abilities API** functions as a unified registry of WordPress capabilities that both humans and AI systems can query and execute. Think of it as a menu of actions—create post, update settings, manage plugins—with standardized inputs and outputs. This pattern mirrors WordPress's hook system but designed for agentic workflows. The **WP AI Client** abstracts away provider differences. Developers write prompts without specifying whether OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or a local browser-based model processes them. Site owners configure their preferred providers; plugins inherit that configuration automatically. Felix Arntz architected this layer to remain agnostic as the model landscape shifts rapidly. The **MCP Adapter** connects WordPress to Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, enabling tools like Claude, Cursor, and VS Code extensions to manipulate WordPress sites through natural language. The adapter pattern means WordPress can pivot to successor protocols without rewriting integrations. Market share held steady at 43% of all websites and 60% of the CMS market. Japan emerged as a standout, reaching 58.5% of all sites and 83% of CMS usage. Japanese became the second most-used WordPress language, with non-English sites now exceeding 56% of installations. The plugin ecosystem grew to 60,000+ approved plugins (68% increase in approvals year-over-year) with 2.1 billion downloads projected by year-end. AI-assisted plugin reviews reduced the queue from weeks to under seven business days while expanding coverage to plugin updates, not just initial submissions. Educational programs scaled significantly. Learn.wordpress.org served 1.5 million users with 32% longer engagement times post-WordCamp US. Campus Connect beta launched with Universidad Fidélitas in Costa Rica, integrating WordPress contributions into academic credit systems. Youth Day Nicaragua tripled attendance to 75 participants aged 8-20, with peer-led sessions teaching WordPress fundamentals. WordPress Playground reached 1.4 million uses across 227 countries. The CLI reached stable release in October with XDebug support, AI-assisted development options, and compatibility with 99%+ of the plugin directory. Collaboration features shipping in 6.9 include block-level notes (comments attached to specific blocks with email notifications), improved drag-and-drop for intuitive block manipulation, and a global command palette accessible across all admin screens. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:01:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=76) Mary Hubbard Opening - First Year as Executive Director - WordPress runs on people who show up, not just servers - Traveled globally learning from contributors since Tokyo 2024 - Students accessing WordPress tools and building faster than imagined - Communities resolving disagreements in the open, collaborating across time zones #### ⏱️ [00:02:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=155) WordPress 6.9 Announcement - First live release at State of the Word - 6.9 described as fast, polished, built for collaboration - Progress you can feel when you publish, not just read from changelog - Shipping faster, listening better, building for teams #### ⏱️ [00:03:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=193) AI Team Formation - First dedicated AI team created inside WordPress project in 2025 - Building tools that support contributors and site builders, not replace them - AI agents and MCP integrations central to strategy #### ⏱️ [00:04:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=249) Matt Mullenweg Introduction - Automattic celebrates 20th anniversary - WordPress entering third decade - Original screenshot shown—started with single blog post - Over 40% of the web today runs WordPress #### ⏱️ [00:05:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=358) Market Share Deep Dive - 43% of websites, 60% CMS market share - Shopify at 6.8% as #2, billions spent by proprietary competitors - Japan: 58.5% of all websites, 83% CMS market share - Japanese now second most popular WordPress language - 56% of WordPress sites now non-English #### ⏱️ [00:08:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=518) Top 1000 Sites Growth - 49.4% of top 1000 websites use WordPress - Up 2.3% from previous year - Democratizing technology: same software for small blogs and enterprise sites #### ⏱️ [00:09:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=565) Ecosystem Growth Metrics - 60,000+ plugins (68% increase in approved plugins since 2024) - 2.1 billion plugin downloads projected by year end - 1,500+ themes released this year, 14,000+ total - 74,000 combined plugins and themes - 40% adoption increase in block themes, 1,000+ block themes now - 921 contributors to WordPress 6.8 #### ⏱️ [00:10:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=637) WordPress 6.8 Performance - 79.5 million downloads since April - Up 13% from previous year - Each download represents choosing open source #### ⏱️ [00:11:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=660) WordPress 6.9 "Gene" Details - Named for Gene Harris, jazz pianist known for warm, soulful style - 900+ contributors, - Summary: State of the Word is the annual keynote address celebrating the progress of the open source WordPress project and offering a glimpse into its future. This year’s event takes place on December 2, 2025, at 8:00 PM UTC from San Francisco. From local stories to global growth, WordPress leadership highlighted the platform’s strengths, roadmap milestones, and vibrant community. Watch with us as WordPress enthusiasts and newcomers from around the world came together for this unforgettable annual celebration. Learn more about State of the Word 2025: https://wordpress.org/state-of-the-word/ Chapters: 00:00 Intro 04:09 Keynote 25:40 Education 31:26 Campus Connect 35:24 Community Achievements 41:34 WordPress 6.9 51:31 Keynote Continues 57:29 AI Panel Discussion 1:22:11 Thanks 1:23:49 Q&A 1:49:06 TBPN Podcast 1:59:22 Outro - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q&t=2s All right.Hello everyone.Hello.Thank you.Thank you all for joining.So whether you're here with us in person or tuning in from across the globe, welcomeand thank you for being a part of this. WordPress doesn't run on servers; it runs on people who show up.And that's you.This is my first year serving as the executive director of the WordPress project,and I stood in front of you last year in Tokyo.And since then I've been listening, working, traveling, and learningfrom contributors around the world. And what I've seen has only deepened my belief in what this software can do.I've met people using WordPress to unlock new careers.I've met contributors who started a single translation or forum post that endedup, or are now leading major pieces of the project in LATAM, Europe, and the states.I've seen students get access to WordPress tools and start buildingfaster than we could have ever imagined. I've watched communities build in public, resolve disagreements in the open, andcollaborate across languages and time zones.And it's not always easy, but it's working.And what we have is more than code; it's momentum and it's culture. And it's a system that lets people learn by doing and lead by showing up.And today's a big day.Uh, it's the first time we'll be releasing a new version of WordPress live at State of the Word.Woohoo.Yeah.So stay tuned for that, and we'll let you know exactly when WordPress 6.9 is officially out.We'll dive a lot more into that later, but I'll say this now: it's 6.9 is fast. It's polished and it's built for collaboration.The kind of progress you can feel when you publish, not just read it from a change log.WordPress is shipping faster, listening better, and building for teams, not just individuals.And speaking of progress, 2025 has been a year.AI and WordPress have really started to change what's possible. Earlier this year, we created the first dedicated AIteam inside the WordPress project.They've been working hard on tools that support contributors and sitebuilders and not replace them.Some of them are here with us today, and you're going to hear more about their work later in the show.But at its core, WordPress is still about freedom.It's not just software freedom.It's built on the freedom to publish, to build, to learn, and to participate from classrooms,to corporations, from Lagos to London.WordPress is powering ideas and unlocking possibilities for millions of people.It works because it belongs to all of us and those who contribute.And now, I'd like to welcome someone who's been contributing for more than 20 years,as Automattic celebrates its 20th anniversary and WordPress moves into its third decade.I'd like to welcome Matt Mullenweg to the stage. Thank you, Mary.Yeah.Oh, howdy, howdy, everyone.Howdy.What a special spot to be enjoying.After Tokyo, I was like, I don't know if we can top that, but,you know, this is not too bad.So thank you all who are here today.Thanks to those, you know, at the warehouse and other places in the watchparties all around the world and everything. So, ah, gosh, it’s so good to be back.Like, you know, to think back, this was an original screenshot of WordPress.You know, it launched. WordPress started with just a blog post, you know, that I posted.Then Mike Little commented on it a day later. By the way, it’s a belief that publishing shouldbe free. You know, over two decades of it, experimenting, shipping, scaling, and it still feels like we’re just getting started.There’s so much left to do. Like, our mission is still going.Um, I never imagined from that first blog post, those first couple of blogs thatreally I had to set up for my friends because no one would download the software.Um, that would be over 40% of the web today. Um, also Automattic, you know, the for-profit that I was lucky to start with some folks,is now 20 years old. It’s very exciting to be able to sort of build a company that tries to showhow conscious capitalism, like how for-profits and open source can work togetherin a way that makes both better.In a way that’s not about trading off open source ideals but actuallyembracing the nature of open source as it grows and scales. So let’s zoom out a little bit to see what the community’s built over the past year.So in the big picture, we’re at about 43% of websites and about 60% of the CMS market.That number has held steady.When you think about operating at scale, half the web, steady, a massive amount of infrastructure.When you also think of all the billions of dollars.So the number two here is Shopify with 6.8.So think of the billions of dollars of advertising, marketing, R&D, and engineering that’s being spentby all the proprietary companies that are trying to lure people away from open source, essentially. And so with open source, we have the ability to give people freedom, agency, independence.It’s a creed, it’s a way of living that gives people more agencyand it’s serving as a counter to the more proprietary forces that take awayyour freedom in the world and software. Um, you know, some people ask, like, is 43.3% where we're gonna hit?I do think that there have been some headwinds, but, um, it's interesting to look in certainmarkets, like Japan, where actually, if you zoom in, um, we're now actually 58.5% of allwebsites in Japan, 83% of the CMS market share.Which is, I guess it was good that we were in Tokyo last year.Um, I think that what happens is that, you know, when we do a good job of listening to ourusers, serving our community, and, you know, being, uh, responsible to our core values, thatopen source software earns the right to become sort of a default that people like to use.And instead of building yet another wheel, we can say, okay, let's, you know,share these sort of primitives together and then build interesting stuff on top of it. Um, it has been a global shift in the adoption of WordPress, which is interesting.Japanese is now the second most popular language used in WordPress today, the first languageother than English, which has also been very fun to see how Japan has really risen up.Uh, so as we move the sort of state of the words and WordCamps allaround the world, it's fun to sort of activate the different local communities.It's not just about Japan.Um, this is also the first year that we clicked over to where over 56% ofWordPress sites are now in non-English.So where, uh, we have a good market share on the global web, but I thinkalso what's so powerful about this sort of community approach of WordPress is that itcan be sort of everywhere, everything all at once, you know, to reference the movie.Um.Where we're breaking some new ground as well and getting some new, uh, uptickis actually in the top 1000 sites.So one of the magical things about WordPress is that the democratizing technology can be used for a small individual blog,which has a few posts, but also powering some of the top websites in the world.And we are now at 49.4% of the top 1000 websites in the world, which is up 2.3% from last year.So we're trying to democratize the web, take this technology that the biggestsites in the world can use, but also make it available for the smallest sites for free. Anyone can download it, run it with Playground; you can even boot it up in your browser.And, um, we're trying to change how things are being built as well.So the health of WordPress is really in the ecosystem.And like I said, the core software is cool, but what's really amazing is what's being built on top of it.So we're now at over 60,000 plugins, which is up 68% of approvedplugins since 2024, where we saw 3,900.So the rate of approved plugins is going— we're at 2.1 billion downloadsof plugins by the end of the year. And, uh, looking at the theme side of things, there's been over 1,500 themes released this yearalone, bringing us over 14,000 themes total.So you add it all up; there are 74,000 plugins and themes available to make WordPress as individualand unique as every single person in the world.And here in this room, we've seen over a 40% adoption in block themes, which—we're over a thousand block themes now. And finally, with contributors, we're looking at our mostlatest releases; we've reached a peak of now 921 contributors to WordPress 6.8.So that's the pipeline, the future of the project right there.Our first release this year, 6.8, Cecil racked up 79.5 million downloads since April,which is up 13% from what we saw last year.Every one of those downloads represents someone choosing WordPress, choosingopen source, and choosing to build something, which is very exciting. So that brings us to today; the launch of WordPress 6.9, which is called Gene in honorof Gene Harris, the amazing pianist known for his warm and soulful style.We had over 900 contributors to 6.9; 230 of them were first-time contributors,and that led to 340 enhancements and fixes for a really stable, jam-packed releasethat we'll dig into a little bit later. But we have a few of those contributors here today who have flown in from all over the world.And, uh, we're gonna do—I’ve got a little button here; we're gonna do something we'venever done before, which is actually do the release of WordPress live with all of you today. So let's get everyone up on stage.Warm up.All right, so I think if I press this button, there'll be a little countdown.Let's see.5, 4, 3, 2, 1.Thank you all.These are like the hidden heroes of WordPress.They don't get on stage as much as I do and things like that.But, um, this is, and you know, this doesn't represent everyone, but it's so exciting to beable to have some of the folks, uh, that lead the releases, that do the hidden work of shippingsoftware to 40% of all websites several times.Usually three times per year with, uh, you know, auto upgrades goingout to millions and billions of sites. We'll maybe check in on the download counter a little bit later to see how it's going.So thank you.All round of applause for the 6.9 leads.And where did y'all come in from?So we got Florida.Where else?Massachusetts.Massachusetts.Spain.Spain.Chicago.Canada.Canada.Nice.All right.Um, so, uh, this is what the flywheel of open source contribution looks like.You get contributors, users, creators, you know, we're going from strength to strength if thereThere were 2 billion plug and downloads, with countries like Japan contributing in the 80th percentile,remaining imaginative about what's impossible and what's possible, one line of code at a time. But what happens when you take these different approaches that we're all applying?And of course, it couldn't be a presentation in 2025 without talking about AI.So in 2022, actually before the release of ChatGPT, I asked theWordPress community to learn AI deeply.What I didn’t know then, and what no one realized, was how crazy the next couple ofyears would be. We’re actually just a couple of days away from the anniversary of, I think itwas a few days ago, when ChatGPT was launched.It was kind of funny.There’s a tweet from Sam Altman saying, "Hey, we built this little thing,you can chat with it, check it out."The capabilities of these models are kind of insane. So we've gone from the launch of ChatGPT to now having image models from Google.Has anyone played with Nano Banana?Yeah.Like things that I remember from the nineties, like buying the Photoshop books and spending hours just to remove the clouds or add clouds to a picture inthe background were part of one of the tutorials.All the tasks that used to be so manual, zooming in, going pixel by pixel,now you can literally just talk to the image and say, "Hey, add some clouds, move this around."The things that LLMs have become amazing at are kind of insane. And obviously, humanity is beautifully flawed.It's kind of amazing that we've created a form of coding that is just like us—non-deterministic.The magical aspect involves language translation.We now have real-time language translation in AirPods, and we also have image generation.Some of the coding innovations are pretty amazing.So with AI and WordPress, we’re trying to take an approach where we’reEmpowering and not replacing people. And I really think that humans and AI working together are going to enable so much of what we’re going to see.So we’ve got a little bit of a video here right now showing how to usethe anthropics model context protocol or MCP, which launched late last year.Basically, it connects to a WordPress site.And I think I have to click for this to play.Okay, here we go. So what’s happening now is I want you to provide a concise overview of what did it say?Helpful information about my site, helpful information about my site.So it reads the site, talks to the MCP server, tells it how many activeplugins, how much space it’s using, and gives me information about my top post and the topviews and what I should build more about.So it’s hitting Jetpack stats and gathering all the stats. And so the AIs can now interact with your blogin a way that’s pretty exciting.Um.So the MCP adapter that’s coming to WordPress allows us to connect to all thedifferent AI systems out there.And it’s our first application of our new Abilities API. We’re going to have a whole panel on AI in a little bit.It exposes these AI abilities externally in a standardized way, so any MCPcompatible tool can understand and use them.This adapter pattern means WordPress can participate in AI workflows withoutduplicating logic or creating separate integrations for every AI platform. So you can now connect a WordPress installation to popular tools like Claude Copilot andmany other platforms that support MCP and MCP aside over in the terminal and IDE.Claude Code, Cursor, Klein, and others.To change code for the good means you can refactor projects, search codebases, and automate task runs with W-P-C-L-I, alongside the AI agents. These LLM CLI and development environments sync up with legacy automation, right?Test and deploy a plugin.Now it generates, integrating generative AI with classic commands.We’re bringing the best of both worlds and a whole new scale and velocity.So Josh just happens chat interfaces, C or IDs, and WordPress integrations. This summer, I got early access to comment.Perplexes adjunctive browser gave me my first brain-explode moment.I talked about it at WordCamp US.And now, ChatGPT, you know, OpenAI has released their version of it.Um, you can ask it to do things in WP admin. So this is an example, and this is actually one of the things I’m not sure how things are going to play out, whether how much of AI is going to be embedded in the app.Probably with things like image editing or translation, and how much is going to be sort of an agent that exists at your operating system or browser level, has context of all your files, your data, your everything like that, but then can operate on the website. This is an example of again, with not MCP or any other integration, just browser control, um, from OpenAI's browser, uh, doing all these things inside of WordPress, which is kind of insane.Um, now, one of the most important ways I think we can help AI and WordPress work together is actually in the realm of benchmarks and evaluations. So see, a big area of investment that we’re going to do in 2026 is creating some benchmarksand evaluations that all the AI models can test themselves against for doing WordPress tasks.And that could be changing plugins, editing things, or with some of thesebrowser agents perhaps actually directly manipulating some of the interfaces. So let’s get a little more hands-on.Let’s show some actual things, shipping in the WordPress space, real tools, making real impact.So Hostinger launched Kodee.Their AI assistant lives right inside of WordPress. You just can describe a site idea, and 60 seconds later you’ve got afully functional WordPress site.It's not a template or a site.It actually writes your About page, your blog post, and troubleshoots errors automatically.This is from one of the hosting companies that’s a big supporter of WordPress, Elementor, andwe actually have the CEO of Elementor here today,Kioni and Miriam coming in from Israel.So it doesn’t just replace designers; it accelerates them.Their AI co-pilot suggests entire sections, and they actually have threedifferent forms of AI they’re going to be doing.We had a great meeting yesterday talking about all the fun AIstuff that Elementor is investing in. Um.So, we’ve got AI and Jetpack too.Now, when you’re writing in Gutenberg, you can ask AI for a comparison table.You can ask it to adjust tone or edit your text.There are all sorts of exciting things happening.Yoast is using AI for keyword clustering.You know, things that you used to have to pay, like, thousands ofdollars to do, are now right in the interface.And automatic. WordPress.com.We’ve built the AI site builder, sort of a big sky project, which you can describe what you want to do.Again, seconds later, it builds a fully functional site for you.When it works, it’s magical.Sometimes it gets things a little bit wrong,but the models are getting better every couple of months.So everything that you use is the worst version of it that you’re ever going to see.Just imagine this getting better and better and better.It’s a bunch more like AI engines and AI-powered tools to turnWordPress into automated conversational platforms.You have e-commerce stores now generating better product images and other things. So there's so much happening.And I do believe that AI is kind of the biggest technological revolution I've seen in my lifetime.It's on par with electrification.Think of it as affecting every single industry, every single business; everythingin the world is going to be influenced, augmented, and accelerated by AI. You know, for us, I'm very excited about where it can help us automate things interms of plugin reviews, theme reviews, translation, validation, and theme security.So, there's so much that we've invested in, particularlywith the plugin; we'll talk a little bit about plugin reviews in a bit.But we're now able to do things, you know, because although there are a lot of contributorsto WordPress, it is a relatively small number of people supporting a lot of software.When you think of how many countless millions of lines of code are across that 74,000plugins and themes and WordPress core itself,AI being able to help us scan that code, find vulnerabilities, and fix thingsis, I think, going to really accelerate the security ofthe web and the speed of our developments. I sort of dropped that word "camp us" a few months ago, regarding the Telex project.So if you haven’t tried this out yet,Telex is something that can create really interesting Gutenberg blocks.You go in, you tell it something that you want, and it builds it.It can even build an entire Doom game inside of a Gutenberg block.You can see it at telex.automattic.ai.I'm going to share a few real-world examples from my friend Nick Hamze, who isusing Telex, not just as a demo tool, but as a backbone to a fully working shop.Something that he did is create a pricing comparison tool.Telex is working here,having generated this entire pricing comparison tool.Again, something that a developer used to have to manually create. This custom is now just, you know, again, what we saw in a few seconds.Uh, generating very rich interactive web elements.Um, the header block of his IZZ is g ym.com, which I guess is like a store that he hasthat pulls data from Google Places, giving real-time hours, a map link, an open and close status, just like the big chain stores,but it’s for his little micro business.It's got a carousel partner.Logos.This was built with Telex, no hand coding.Uh, a uniform post grid created a block, so every postcard on the homepage has the same height.Um, this calendar integration.So with Telex, he was able to build something that pulled in his Google Calendar data andwas also optimized for mobile usability. And finally, Allego price calculator.So I guess part of his business is buying and selling people's Legos.And so he's got something in there where you can kind of put your Lego in thereand it'll tell him what price he'll buy it at in discounts and, you know, um.So again, these are things that you used to have to hire developers to do.Custom software like this would have cost thousands, tens of thousands ofdollars to build even just years ago.Um, we're now able to do it in a browser for pennies.It's kind of insane.Um, if you want to check out some other cool things that have been happening, we haveTammy Lister, who's actually here today.Hi, Tammy.Uh, she did something very fun called Block Tober Fun, which is every single day in October,she built a new block using Telex, including a playable ASCII version of Tetris, a block that’san actual terminal window, a roadmap, block matrix effect, and a trick or treat block for Halloween.So, democratization of technology is not just about Smart AI,it's about letting people do things, have access to that sort of creative energy.And I’m so excited to see because every single one of us has that sort ofUnique spark has our unique ideas, and seeing that unleashed is going to be a very, very,very exciting time to be alive. So, WordPress is about community, and so much of what we do is,about training the next generations.As we create these new capabilities, how do we teach people to use it?So, we’re now going to talk about some education.I’m going to invite Mary Hubbard up to talk about some of the things we’ve been investing in toinvest in the next generation of WordPress.Fantastic.Around a pause from Mary.Thank you.Thank you. It’s great to care about all the progress and our ecosystem and howAI amplifies what’s possible in so many ways we couldn’t have imagined where weare or even where we’re headed with this.But behind all the tech, it’s people and who they are that make WordPress happen oneday, one release, and one event at a time.And WordCamps are one of the most important ways that we bring people together to share, to learn,to celebrate what the community makes possible. Oops.This year, we broke some pretty amazing ground with 81 WordCamps spanning over 39 countriesorganized by over 5,200 volunteers and reaching over a hundred thousand people in person.Yeah.Yes.That’s unreal.And we actually still have 16 lined up, so before the end of the year, we’re going to take it to 97. Wow.So that’s before you factor in WordPress TV or social media and everyother way that folks can tune in.And so it’s quite a leap from last year. So growing from the number of events by over a third in a single year is absolutely incredible.So hats off to everyone involved in making that happen.And these aren't just conferences.We know that they're where community happens, where contributors meet,and where connections really turn into action.And WordCamps are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to bringing folks togetherto learn and to make stuff with WordPress.And of course, not everyone can get to WordCamp, right?So that's why it's so important that there are more ways to connect and to pick upthe platform and run with it from anywhere. And that's where learn.wordpress.org comes in.learn.wordpress.org served more than 1.5 million users this year.And the engagement quality improved in a very meaningful way.After WordCamp US, the average engagement time per user increased by 32%, which tellsus that students and contributors are spending real time learning, not just passing through.People aren't just showing up; they're sticking around and they want to learn, they want tobuild, and we're making sure that they can.wordpress.org reached more than 113 million users, and the new users grew by 38%.So that tells us the top of the funnel is expanding.The more people are discovering WordPress for the first time.Right?And so the data shows us something that's very important, and users are landingon wordpress.org at a very high volume.And they're comparing platforms.They're looking for documentation; they're searching for a way to enter the ecosystem, and the path is not always clear.And this is exactly why education matters.learn.wordpress.org, the WPCC, WordPress Credits, and our student organizations are giving people a structured way to go from a curious visitor to a confident builder.And once people reach the right resources, they stay and they learn. And the opportunity now is to close the gap between discovery and participation.So the work that we’re doing in education is positioning WordPress to guide new users fromawareness to skill, building to contribution.As we improve navigation and simplify the experience, which is fantastic, wenow have an even stronger system that turns interest into long-term involvement.We are making progress, and the data shows that growth is at the edgeof our ecosystem. Now we need to channel that growth into participation. That’s how we’re making it possible for anyone, anywhere to learn,master, and contribute back to WordPress.What excites me so much about how education is changing is what is possible for WordPress andhow we can bring new people into the platform, educate, train, teach, and engage with the community on campus. Campus Connect started as an experiment, and it’s already expandedacross universities around the world.Students are learning WordPress, shipping real work, and earning academiccredit for contributing to open source.They’re not just future contributors; they’re contributing today. Education gives people the skills to use all the new toolsthat are emerging in the ecosystem.As Matt said, it’s like a piano.For years we had one octave, and now we have eight.AI and new abilities open up more keys, more range, and more capability than ever before. But you still need someone who knows how to make music, someone who understandswhat a site should be, what businesses need, and how to turn intention into execution.That is why these programs matter so much.They prepare students not just to use WordPress,but to think, design, and build with a purpose. The work used to be long hours of manual effort.Now the work is understanding the goal, shaping the idea, and knowing which keys to press.The jobs don’t disappear; they evolve, they shift.Campus Connect and WordPress credits give us a pipeline of people who can thrive in that world. Humans still build the web.We are just giving them a better set of tools and a clearer path to get started.And WordPress has been investing heavily in global education, and these programshave opened the door for institutions to join us in creating a direct pathway forstudents into the open source ecosystem.A university in Costa Rica is a great example of what can happen when a university stepsinto opportunities that WordPress has built. Okay, I’m gonna try very hard here.It's Fidélitas Universidad.I tried.University in Costa Rica is where we launched the beta, and they’vebeen an incredible partner to us.To tell you more about this and how we’ve come together, I’d love to inviteStephanie Garita Johnson from the Universidad Fidélitas to the stage to tell us about it.Thank you.No worries.Thank you so much. Universitas has been committed to WordPress and its global community for years now.Long before we signed our agreement with the WordPress Foundation this year, we were alreadydeeply involved in the ecosystem, hosting WordCamp San Jose and creating community spacesthat brought students into the conversation.This year, we were excited to host WordPress Campus Connect San Jose in September.This event was part of the broader academic engagement model to WordPressand brought together students, faculty, professionals, and international contributors. It is trained to play a role as a partner in connecting academia with the global open source community.From that experience, came the WordPress Fidélitas Club, a student-led initiative that spans learning opportunitiesand prepares a new generation to participate in the global ecosystem through hands-onlearning, leadership, and collaboration.After signing our agreement with the WordPress Foundation, we took the next step formally. Integrating WordPress into our academic program for our computer system engineering degree.This established a STRUCTOR model for a student to participate in the official WordPresscredit process where they earn recognition for real contributions, whether it becode, design, documentation, accessibility, any and all of the essential areas.This aligned perfectly with our STEM model, which prioritizes hands-on learning, appliedresearch, and solving real-world problems.WordPress has become a platform for developing digital skills, technologicalentrepreneurship, and upward contribution right within our academic environment.We’re proud to boldly bridge the gap between the global WordPress community and the newgeneration who are creating the web of the future.I’m excited to see this impact spreading across Latin America. From this process, we gained key learnings that confirmed the academic and institutional value.What worked especially well was the early and sustained engagement of students fromUniversidad Fidélitas, combined with faculty guidance through clearly structuredmentorship and contribution pathways.The integration with the official WordPress credits empowers students to make realcontributions to the ecosystem while developing applied leadership skillsand global visibility in a collaborative open-source development environment.Some students also recognize that a stronger personal organization of their timewill allow them to participate with greater continuity, showing their awarenessand ownership of their learning process.This feedback from the mission reflects how rewarding the experience has been overall and reinforceswhat is so exciting and worth striving for others.It demonstrates that academia can become a trusted gateway into theglobal open-source contribution, unlocking inspiring opportunities for students togrow, lead, and contribute to the future of theweb from a deeply satisfying and educational space.Thank you so much for having me here, and back to Matt.Thank you.Thank you. That's amazing.All righty.Uh, it’s amazing to see how WordPress is becoming generally multi-generational.We now have parent and child contributors, you know, it’s fun to see the kid campthings that happen at different work camps and, um, you know, as we just heard from Stephanie,like kids learning workforce at school, they’re teaching their younger siblings and it’sbeautiful because this is a skill that you can take with you for the rest of your life.You know, something that you can use in school to make money, to do creative projects, all sorts of things. Um, you know, the unexpected ambassador to all of this has been WaPo, which we gotfrom our friends in the Japanese community.For those who don’t know, it was the WordPress mascot.It was born in Japan in 2011.And one of the best gifts of a local community to the global WordPress community.Word regions all over the world have made WaPo their own, and kids absolutely love it. It’s funny because I always say, if anyone had asked me to approve this, I would’ve never approvedWahoo.But Wahoo just happened.He’s actually GPL and, uh, so it’s totally open source, and it hasbecome a sort of global phenomenon.And also amazing because at the core is people not just taking theoriginal WaPo, but making it their own.And there are now thousands of variations. Uh, we’re actually going to bring on a cool little WaPo museum on wordpress.org that we’regoing to try to spin up next year to just document all the different ones all around the world.Um, and that’s even before you could ask AI to make new Wapos; all theones so far were manually created.So if you’re here in the audience today or you’re listening, like, um, consider teachingthe younger generation about WordPress, uh, consider how you can bring them on. Um, you know, while all the competitors in the marketplace have, you know, grownoften through spending, you know, getting countless millions or billions of dollarsin marketing, WordPress hasn’t had that.It’s really been, you know, peer to peer, person to person, word of mouth, peopleusing it, learning, telling, and trying and failing, and then bringing other people along.It’s not unlike how I got started. Uh, my very self, where the predecessor of WordPress was called B two.I started using it and, um, I had a question in the forums, so I went to theforums, asked a question and ’cause I was breaking it, I didn’t know how to use it.And then one day I went to the forums to ask a question.I saw someone asking something that I already knew,even though it was brand new.So I thought, oh, I’ll reply to this person. And that was sort of my first little entree into contributing to an open source product,which of course later snowballs with the code.And now all this crazy stuff we’re here today.So it can start with just the smallest step and you never know where it’s gonna lead. So I want to mention Youth Day in Nicaragua.So Youth Day in Nicaragua is what happens to give young creators the keys and just let them go.Back in October, 75 kids, and I mean kids ages 8 to 20 showed up in Manna Mangu to build the first WordPress sites. Regional volunteers helped out, but the sessions were actually run by teenagersteaching other teenagers, which is kind of like the future right there.The whole day was hands-on, no boring lectures or PowerPoints like we’re doing here.They sat down, picked the project they cared about, and built it. So the peer-led sessions met 16-year-olds who’d done this before,showing the 10-year-olds how to pick a theme or out a contact form.That kind of learning sticks.And very similar to what I was doing when I was 17, 18, 19.You know, it’s exploring on the internet, asking questions, but thenAlso trying to help other people. As I learned, the attendance tripled compared to the 2024 pilot.They got 75 participants when they were hoping for just about 30 and word spread.Kids were telling their friends, and this is now becoming a little bit viral. Oops.I think I get this.David Gonzalez volunteered and created a video game kind of Mario bro style,with WaPo as the main character.The WaPo's name is aptly named Game P.You can follow the link and play it right in your browser.This isn't just a one-off event anymore. People are now using WordPress as an entire development platform, and it’s fun to see.I know for many of us who got started in computing, gaming was one of the first things we did, right?And so, being able to actually have fun and play games with WordPress is pretty cool.I think we’ve got a little video here. Again, this was built at the use day.I have to say, when we were starting WordPress's blogging software, I never imagined this.A CRUD application, right?We wrote some text in a box and we posted on the webpage.Now it’s being used as a platform to build things like Game P. So, you know, we’re just getting started with this.This program is brand new and I can’t wait to see what people start to build and what they start to learn. And, you know, embracing open source technologies is the development framework, PHP,all the things that we've known to love.You know, part of the things about WordPress versus other development frameworks is it's sort of accessibility, the way it kind of makes sense.You can, you know, it's kind of easy to use, uh, from Costa Rica to Nicaragua, dozens ofother places; the momentum's building worldwide.So it's, we had a couple of pilot programs turning into genuine movements.Next year's gonna be wild.We're looking at expansion in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, andramping up things in the states. So speaking of foundations, 6.9 is how it's all about.How are we doing on timing with the podcast, by the way?We're good.We're good? Yeah. Um, there's a whole lot of API action going on, some AI developments.We've got AI agents and MCP, the builds, API, HTML, API BlockBuildings, API Interactive, API. So 6.9 is really bringing a lot of foundational work.And to tell you more about that, let's hear from our lead architect.Let Matias Ventura.So, howdy.Thank you, Matt.And hello, everyone. I wish I could be there in person.Let's dig into WordPress 6.9. Last year in Tokyo, we looked at what wasnew in upcoming through four lenses:write, design, build, and develop.Let's revisit them today to see what's new.We have a lot of beautiful additions to the writing and publishing process.First up, let's talk about collaboration, which is a big part of our current roadmap. WordPress 6.9 introduces notes to the block editor for the first time.This allows authors, writers, and collaborators to leave comments and feedback directlyinside the editor while working on a post.It has a beautiful design where comments are attached to specific blocks.When you select a comment, only the block is highlighted and therest of the content fades away.Since these are also built as comments behind the scenes, you can receive emailnotifications when new notes are added in the spirit of the features.This was truly a collaborative effort in itself with work from Fuel, Multi Dots, Automatic,GoDaddy, Human Made article, as well as a contributor sponsored by LU Hosting, Jar Kinta.And finally, this is just the beginning of a full set of collaboration features that willmake WordPress a true multiplayer experience. Let’s also highlight one of my favorite small features.WordPress has always been about the potential of human expression.Now this is extended to math notation.You can now write beautiful math using blocks or through inline formatting.It all renders nicely and preserves the LaTeX formatting.You can access it through a popover and the preview renders beautifully. Now, moving into the sign, this WordPress release introduces several new blocks and design tools.Let's focus on just a few of them.First,there's a much better experience when using drag and drop, bringing a moreintuitive and direct manipulation of blocks.It works across all sorts of block types, so you can drag a list item toreorder a list without having to hand down the drag handle in the toolbar.It's overall a lot more intuitive as you can manipulate the objects directly.For example, it makes it that easy to put images side by side and construct galleries.You can drag the images themselves, no longer requiring to find the drag handle.It's overall more visual, more intuitive, and more reliable. Another small but big win is that gallery blocks now support aspect ratio attributes, so you canmake all the images fit together seamlessly.There's also a new typography option called stretchy text, which automatically adjusts thefont size to fill the dimensions of a container.This is done through the interactivity API, and it updates in real time as you type.It's perfect for hero sections,call-to-action areas, anywhere you want text that really fits the space. Another new block that had a lot of popular requests is the accordion block.It supports inner blocks for infinite possibilities and is built withinteractivity API for the best performance.You get a lot of options to customize whether the accordion is open by default,whether and where to show an icon, along with many of the usual styling options.This was a long-requested feature by FMO Source and creators. When it comes to building size with WordPress,there are also some incredible refinements and additions.Up until now, the command palette was restricted to editor context.It has now been made available across the entire admin experience, so you cannow access it from any part of your site. This allows quick navigation between admin screens and is a step towardseasier management of WordPress.Since the command palette is meant to be powered by abilities, it would also allow triggeringseveral different sets of commands directly from anywhere in the WordPress interface. For a while now, container blocks have supported the ability to restrict whatblocks can be inserted in a given area, but it requires diving into code to set it up.Now, this is available directly in the user interface, giving real control for site creators.You can provide highly usable flows without needing to create entirely custom blocks. There are also important enhancements to the usability of the navigation block, includinga prominent edit navigation call to action when selecting a header or any templatepart that contains a navigation block.There's also more customization options for sub-menu opacity, whichPreviously, it required adding custom CSS. And finally, the page creation flow is also improved with more clarity over whether apage is going to be drafted or published.WordPress 6.9 also brings the ability to hide blocks entirely from the front end.That means you can draft different designs or come in with new information directly in theeditor and only show them when you're ready.And that's really just the start for a future, which would support conditional displayof blocks to allow for better responsive controls for hiding and showing blocksbased on screen size to broader controls for block visibility like login and logout use.And of course, plugins will be able to extend and register their own conditions.Finally, the Block Bindings user interface has been upgraded to improve how differentdata sources are displayed in the editor. Users can now easily switch between sources as well as binding attributes with a single click.Developers can also register their own custom sources.This is part of making Blocks a lot more powerful and connected to the data structuresof WordPress and its plugins by default.Let's now look at some of the developer tools shipping with WordPress 6.9.The new abilities.API sets in motion a common pattern that the entire ecosystem can adopt.This API creates a unified registry of functionality that can be discovered, validated,and executed consistently across different contexts, including PHP, the REST API,endpoints, and future AI-powered integrations.This common language will power the evolution of the Command PAL and is beingrapidly adopted for AI-driven workflows.The HTML API continues to enable new ways of reliably working withand modifying HTML code server-side.This effort is cutting down the complexity and the cost of modifying HTML within PHP.The safety and accuracy of the HTML API enables server-side rendering and interactivity,API, and brings dynamic content to GEMR. With block bindings, it is a valuable tool for developers, aiming for performance and reliability.Finally, for developers, theme authors, and block authors, the interactivity API is maturingwith smoother routing, better state management, and more performant interactive blocks.This means you can start building rich interactive user interfaces that match the state of the art,but without a trade-off of full JavaScript stacks. In terms of the broader WordPress ecosystem, this is a step closer to an interactive block islandlens architecture, similar to modern frameworks, but baked into WordPress native tooling.It reduces fragmentation and provides a standard interactive frontend.API WordPress core is already using it to power multiple features, includingsome of the new blocks highlighted today.So that wraps up some of the main WordPress 6.9 features.I'll pass it now.Back to you, Matt.Thank you everyone.All right.And I've heard that the stream is back online, so sorry for the technical difficulties. Um, so that's 6.9 through the four lenses we discussed: writing,designing, building, and development.But there is more.Oops.So previously the plugin checker was a plugin that we had to help plugin authorsapply security measures, look at things, and sort of do it before upload.But now with AI, we're going from doing 10 reviews in 10 minutes, and we can do them much faster.So we're seeing about a hundred more submissions to the plugin directory per week than we did in 2024.So before, we had this huge queue; as I talked about at State of the Word CampUS, we had a backlog of plugin reviews, but we're now under seven business daysfor getting new plugins up in the directory.This was a volunteer crew from all over the world.Now with the plugin checker, we are making the process much smoother. Updates to plugins are also being checked, where before we only checked new submissions.Basically, we're going to be able to upgrade the code quality, security, and everythingof every plugin in the world, which I'm sure you read in the news.Whenever you see a headline in the news about a problem with WordPress sites,if the news site is good, they say it's a WordPress plugin.It's usually not core.We are human, so we'll have problems—knock on wood—but typically aroundthose 60,000 plugins and themes, that's where some combination of themor some smaller one that maybe has less resources or more newer developersis where some of the issues come from.Using AI and education, we're going to be able toreally upgrade the security of the web, which is kind of exciting.I really appreciate all the contributionswe're getting from Google and other places to help us do this. As I've said before, I want WordPress to be the gold standard of dataliberation and interoperability.One quality of life improvement we're shipping with 6.9 is the WordPressimporter, and it's the author mapping step, which now includes a new checkbox thatlets you turn URL rewriting on or off.Checked by default means that during import,the system automatically updates the old links they used to have to manually search and replace,taking the old site URLs with the new ones.So everything works seamlessly once the content is live, and we're goingto continue making investments in data liberation and improving importers. I want WordPress to be the place where you can take content from anywhere, and thenonce it's in WordPress, as you know, for the rest of your life, you'll be able to getit out into any API, any export—anything.It'll belong to you.Last year, we spoke about what to do with WordPress playground. Playground has been updated with a new file browser.So you can now create, edit, and test files directly from your browser.There's also a visual gallery of blueprints that are great starting points for different types of sites.So think of this almost like a recipe.You can take, again, just a link.You can take a set of themes, plugins, customizations, everything,and apply it to a WordPress playground.And again, playground is the thing that allows you to boot up an entire container of WordPress in your browser in seconds.Again, things that before used to require a server, set up a cloud, or set up databases, and everything like that. WordPress Studio, which is the open source development app based on playground,now includes blueprints as a starting guide.And now we have a command line interface, the playground CLI,which reached stable in October.This includes new features for developers, including XD bug support and options for AI-assisted developments.With all the WordPress recommended PHP extensions and MySQL emulation now in playground,it now supports more than 99% of the plugin directory and even supports PHPMyAdmin,Composer, and Laravel, which is very cool.Blueprints can now load files directly from GIT repositories, even private ones.So you can bring private GIT code right into the playground.The all-new, all PHP blueprints do P-R-C-L-I commands that can run everywhere youcan run WordPress. Since the last Day of the Word, you used playground 1.4 milliontimes from 227 countries to showcase your plugins, try code changes, and teach others.And we've now translated playground docs into six languages.Oops.And now something I'm very excited about for plugin authors.When you release an update, there's now a 24-hour safety window before it reallyChoose sites with auto updates enabled. So if your update goes live immediately, anyone checking for updates canmanually grab it right away.But for sites with automatic updates enabled, there'll be a 24-hour window.So that way, if something breaks, you can hear about it from early adopters, people who update manually. They can give you the feedback.And it's the first step towards what we want to get to, which is percentage-basedrollouts, something that app stores like the Google Play Store and iOS Store do.So you'll be able to roll it out to, say, 10% of sites, 20% of sites, 50% of sites, and so on.So again, we're improving things for plugin developers.Some applause from the plugin developers here.Um, again, we're auto-updating code across millions of sites and veryheterogeneous environments, everything from Raspberry Pis to big cloud servers, like Google or AWS.And so, running WordPress in all these different environments, there are lots of edge cases.So giving developers the tools to be able to reliably ship software to all thesedifferent places is going to be so, so, so powerful.We'd love feedback from the community to make this even more useful.So there's a lot to be excited about. And, uh, one of the things I'm also excited about is using AI more thoughtfully.So we're actually going to pull up a little panel here.We've got James LaPage, who leads AI at Automattic.We've got Mary Hubbard, Felix Rnz from Google, and Jeff Paul from 10 Up.I’m going to join; we're going to do a little panel on WordPress and AI, the path forward.So,actually while you're up here, Matt, I brought you a chair so you can join as well.That's a little last minute.But since Matt did such a great job with AI, I asked him to join.All right, thank you. So I mentioned a little earlier, we actually launched the WordPress AIteam in the project earlier this year.And so you're looking at the majority of the folks that are helping out, leading the way, and in general, the new tools are landing every single week.I want to jump right into the panel.I think everyone has talked enough.So the first I'd like to ask you, James, there has been a lot happening in 6.8, and a lot ofthe AI work has actually landed alongside 6.9.Can you just fill us in on what's actually shipped and what are thefoundational pieces of AI for WordPress? Yeah, go ahead.Well, first off, hello everybody.Great to see y'all.Um, there has been a lot going on in AI and WordPress for a while now.So quick history lesson;the core AI group was created and announced about six months ago.When we were created about six months ago, we published a strategy called AI Building Blocks, and that represented the work that we wanted to do moving into the future.But that strategy was something that we put together informed by years of thought and effort into AI.Matt mentioned Learn AI Deeply in 2022.We then moved on in 2023 to begin officially messaging around AI through the project.We also tracked where the industry was going and what was happening in terms of AI models, what their capabilities were, and what theywere good at and what they weren’t good at.So when we were announced six months ago, all of that thought and effort went into that announcement and went into the work around creating thisstrategy, this roadmap of building blocks.To directly answer your question, the building blocks, we have four. And when we announced six months ago, I did not expect to say that all four aredelivered for 6.9, but they are; they are.Um, thank you.Incredible work from the team.Yes, yes.And we should absolutely direct those applauds to the contributors and theteam that actually built all of this.So to go through these four, we have the abilities API, which was mentioned a few times in thepresentation, and that is this unified registry of logic that allows both humans and AI systemsto understand what can be done on WordPress.Um, and it gives basically a list of what you can do and how to do it. Here's the information that we need,and here's what the expected outcomeof running a single ability is.And that's really exciting.In isolation, you can use it to go and create a whole bunch of different thingslike commands for the command palette, REST API endpoints, CLI, things like that.For WordPress, you can basically box up a bunch of these abilities, give it toan LLM and say, "LLM, go run these things."Go. I want to do something.Go read through this list and choose the right ability for the job.And that in isolation is an agent.So we've made it very easy to build agents into WordPress and around WordPress.The second big package is the WP AI client.I always mix these up.This is something that allows us to immediatelyand directly interface with LLMs from WordPress.And Felix actually architected most of it, so I'll let him speak more about it.But, uh, something I'm very excited about is that it just released a version 0.2.0 yesterday,and that includes direct support for abilities. You want to create those agents I just mentioned.We also have the MCP adapter.Matt mentioned during his presentation version 0.3.You can use that to take all your abilities, connect it to a third-party servicelike Claude or OpenAI, and have an AI pilot your WordPress website through thisabilities, adapted out through this protocol.The adapter pattern is really exciting to me because it's very persistent.It means that we can expose things out to MCP, but if MCP changes and we don't like it anymore, we can easily adapt to another protocol. Then finally, all of this surfaces in the AI experiments plugin, which is a representation fordevelopers on how you can use these blocks, but it's also something for end users to actually useAI features in WordPress, powered by the blocks that we've created. It is now on the WordPressplugins repository, and I'll let Jeff speak more about that; that is a big milestone.So that's what is in 6.9, and that's what we said we were going to do, and we didn't expect to do it all by 6.9, but we did.So here we are.So, let's talk a little bit about the PHP.Do you want to add and talk about what you've architected?Uh, yeah.So I mean the WordPress AI client, whatever you call it, allows you to communicate with any kindof generative AI models with a uniform API.What that means is, whenever we use, let's say, ChatGPTor Gemini app or whatever, there’s some AI model running or some group of AI models in the back end.All of these are from different providers, right?Like you have Google as one of the popular providers, OpenAI or Anthropic; these are just a few examples.There are dozens, several dozens, of different providers that have AI models.In practice, many of us have some preference for various reasons. That's why we use that one all the time.'Cause that's the thing, like all of these, all of these cloud-based providers, they arestate of, they provide state-of-the-art models.They're super capable at solving any kinds of different tasks or doing complex research for us.Um, they are proprietary though, and they're paid.So we, as WordPress, as the open platform that we are, we cannot, we cannot, and we should not, like,um, promote any particular one or even enforce it.So what this WordPress, that's where the WordPress AI client comes in and it providesan abstraction layer where you can, as a developer, just prompt AI and you don'tneed to worry what model is running behind.So, and the way that this works in practice is that, um, once this is available, when this is available on theWordPress side, the user can, for example, configure whichever AI provider they want to use, or they can provide, they canconfigure multiple AI providers and, um, yeah. And then things just work like the plugin developers, plugin developers that wantto use this AI WP AI client, they can, uh, they can simply write a prompt.And let's say for example, um, let's say for example, you wanna have one of these promptslike generate the post-it based on this post content, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?That could be a prompt that you wanna have for like a title generation feature.Um, and what happens under the hood, that's, that's really like this prompt is really whatyou need to provide.And what happens under the hood then is that the AI client checks which models,which providers are available on the concrete WordPress side that this is running on.And then it also determines which ones are best suitable to respond to this particular query.So that way things remain really agnostic, and like the site owner controlswhich models they want to use and the plugins work no matter which models are configured.And that's important.Yeah.That's important, uh, for us to remain open and also to remain adaptableto whatever are the latest models and the latest different provider models thatYeah, people want to, people want to use. Great.And so Jeff, you’ve been more involved on the agency side of building things.So what experiments are you seeing in the wild right now?Sure, there are some things that are predictable, like chat-based search,to parallel something that might be, you know, a historical Elasticpress-based search.There are things that have been technically and highly manual, like content distributionand translation out to, you know, multi-site or different WordPress installs.Um, and then things like leveraging in-browser and local models that are private, that are moreaffordable, compared to cloud models,as well as for the WordPress project that are more aligned with the licensing of the project.So those are some things that we’re seeing. And then, in terms of something that is really relatively newand in line with WordPress 6.9 is leveraging the block notesand providing feedback on content and suggestions,like accessibility recommendations or aligning to the tone of a certain brand.And having those in notes aligned in the editor is something that is literally just beingbuilt right now and is pretty exciting to see people leveraging stuff that has just been shippedin the last six months with this team, as well as what’s coming in 6.9. So, really bleeding edge right there.Pretty exciting.I’m still blown away that the team started six months ago.It feels like it’s been much, much longer,but AI, I’ll say it’s like dog years.Yes.Like one month in AI is like a year in normal development time.You say six months in for AI time, that’s like six years.Yeah.And how, and so, I mean, that’s a great point. How is this team and how is WordPress going to stay, like, I guess not even keep up, but surpass? Like how is WordPressAre we going to continue to push the boundary and ensure that we are on the forefront of AI? That's a good question.It really stems back to creating the foundational pieces of WordPress to buildAI and then seeing what the ecosystem does.If you look back to WordPress itself, it provided the frameworks to create plugins, and thenyou ended up with humongous e-commerce solutions and learning management tools — things thatI bet Matt did not expect to blossom here.Oh my goodness!The stuff we saw, I think it all comes back to each of us, right?Because what is WordPress?It's created by each of us — some of us here in the room, people all around the world.And so that whole learn AI deeply thing.Um, I don’t even think I need to ask it anymore.Like, just everyone’s going to end up doing it.And so I don’t worry about it causing a surpassing; I think it’s actually going to embed, youknow, at every single part of everything we do. It's going to be, you know, changed in sometimes small,sometimes big ways with people using AI tools. That could be even just little things like helping you filter yourspam better on your email or like, you know, just helping you at some part of yourlife, and then that gives you more time to do a little coding or something like that.But it’ll start to again, be persuasive and ubiquitous.And I love that you brought up the open-source models.Something I wouldn’t have predicted was, you know, with thecountless billions being spent mm-hmm.And the huge — it’s kind of amazing seeing all the biggest companies in the worldspending the most money we’ve ever seen.Huge parts of all of GDP growth.It’s coming from the investments in these data centers and other things.Um, I kind of assumed that open source was going to be, you know, years behind. In fact, we've seen some of these open source models catch up pretty quicklyand, in fact, with a deep seek release.Yes, just the other day.Um, you know, the benchmarks can sometimes be games. So, you know, benchmarksversus real-world use or whatever.But, um, testing very, very well.Um, so the models out of China, France, and other places in the world, um,that are open source with open weights, a lot of exciting things are happening.Um, so I’m very enthusiastic about both the depth and the credible thingscoming from the frontier. Mm-hmm.Investments.And when you think of some of the smartest minds in the world, they are now working on thisproblem combined with kind of like, you know, the open sourcecreating some ubiquity, low cost of access, maybe creating some innovations which thenfilter back into some of the frontier things.Um, this sort of feedback loop of having the whole world working on the samething at the same time is pretty exciting. And it's something we've seen only a few times in history.You know, when you think of how the world came together to address COVID, orother instances where everyone kind of worked on a similarproblem, like, it will be interesting to see what happens.Yeah. To add to the open source models, there's very encouragingdevelopments happening there right now.Like in, um, Chrome and Edge already have built-in models.Yeah.In the browsers, though, that’s going to be really powerful once this is fully rolled outbecause it will mean that anybody using these browsers will just haveAI models without any configuration.And these AI models are free to use, and they are more privacy-friendly becauseYou don't send anything to any cloud. And that's also something that we are actively working towards to support inthe WordPress AI client and all these surrounding projects to keep things open-minded.We have client-side models that are local to the user's machine. We have cloud-based models, and we can also do hybrid approaches.Where maybe, you can use a cloud model for one task and the client-side model for another task.Or you could arrange it so that if a cloud model is not available for the task, I use a client-side model.There are different ways to combine them.And I think the way that we are approaching those foundational blocks really sets us up for being flexible and adaptable for the future.Like those models move so fast, and the different technologies around them move so fast.Like James already said, if MCP at some point becomes the gold standard for the long term, maybe then we're already set up.If tomorrow something new comes out and the ecosystem shifts towards it, we have the abilities API, which is our own foundational building block.We didn't develop against some very specific technology.Mm-hmm.And that's gonna be the same with the concrete models.Those two building blocks, the abilities API and the WordPress AI client, really allow us to remain agnostic and adaptable. Yes, I love that.'Cause it's continued flexibility.I also think if you asked me two years ago if WordPress would have first-class tooling to build AI and agents, I'd be like, I don't know.But now it's a lot different, right?Yeah. It's just a blog.Mm-hmm.We do have that, and it sits directly beside content, which is king in the AI era.So, it's really fun to see.Not just these come together, but actually build with them and contribute to the AIexperiments plugin and just see how easy it is.It's awesome.Well, then it's great to talk about vision and what your long-term plan is, butI think for people in this group or even people watching, what are we doing for 7.0?Like, what's the immediate next step? I have to open my notebook of 7.0.I mean, right.What are we thinking about for?So, there are a few things coming in the near future and the long future, and I’ll cover both.Um, near term, the abilities API is going to continue to improve.We shipped this server, half of it, but we're shipping this client half of it in 7.0.And that gives you complete coverage of the entire software of WordPress.It allows us to easily, in the future, interact with AI browsers more effectively.Um, it's pretty impressive.But we’re also introducing a sister API that sits beside the abilities API, and that's workflows.And you might've actually seen an Easter egg in the code snippet from Matiasthat said workflows abilities are awesome.They're individual units of what you can do on a WordPress site, but they canbecome really powerful when you string them together and you have more determinism.And I know that when an email happens, or when an order happens inWooCommerce, I'm going to send an email.These are two abilities.I string them together, and they run on a trigger or they run when I command palette them.Um, and that API is going to be a very, very powerful and interesting one. It will also be able to be adapted out.Exposed through MCP, and really create a foundational piece of WordPress to do automationsand some really interesting stuff with AI.We also have the WP AI client, that exciting thing that Felix mentioned coming to 7.0 as well.And the plumbing to interact with AI will be a core piece of WordPress, which means thateverybody who builds these features, everybody who builds plugins, can build in a unified way.And that allows us to easily plug into providers like Google, but also easily have ahost or an agency offer a provider of their own.Any plugin that uses this API will immediately have AI.So I don't want to completely say we're democratizing AI, but we are democratizingaccess to AI through this inclusion.Well, it's fun because you're bringing kind of like the ethos of WordPress.With some of this new technology.Yes, exactly. So we can kind of like, you know, provide the access.It's kind of cool how a building's API has a lot of parallels to the sort ofplugin hook and filter system.Yes.Which was kind of the big innovation of like WordPress's plugin system.So it feels like a next generation of that.Yeah.And it's also the big three, actions in WordPress, you can trigger workflowsand abilities through actions as well.So I think there's a lot of new and old merging together.It's really exciting to me. Finally, on my list is the, and Jeff mentioned this, but the overlap with collaborative editing.That's a very big cornerstone feature of WordPress 7.0, phase three.When it was designed, we didn't necessarily design it with the intention ofAI being the way AI is today, but there's a very natural and helpful overlap therewhere collaborative editing means there are other entities sitting next. To you on a page helping you edit and create.And we always expected it to be people.Right?Again, when we announced the Gutenberg roadmap, I thought collaboration wasgonna be people; it might be robots.Exactly.So I think that's a really good, also, um, roundup of how WordPress wants to empower people.It's not that we're gonna just add sparkle buttons everywhere.We're gonna do some crazy stuff here.It's more that we're gonna build into the way you interact with creating content,with expressing yourself digitally, and give you more power, more control, um, andmake you more effective at creating. So that overlap with collaborative editing through block notes, and the actual collaborationaspects and suggestions are a lot coming in the future.There I can see really clear coverage there.I can also go long term if we want.I'd love to hear long term.I think that we have the time for it too.Cool.Let's go a little, what are you thinking, a little longer term.Um, and Matt, feel free to jump in and interject, but everybody feel free.I love WordPress.WordPress has been around for 20 years, and we want it to be around for the next 20 years.And the next 20 years looks like WordPress remaining what it is today,which is the center of the Open Web.That open web is going to change.It will move, shift, and change as AI changes the way people consume content and create online.But I do expect the open web to be something that can be a cornerstone feature.I mentioned before that content is king.Um, AI needs content to run well. We don't have open AI robots flying around reporting the news.We have to report the news.Um, we have to manage the content.We have to create and express ourselves digitally.I was thinking a few days ago, the act of writing and publishing is almost more important now with AI because I want my thoughts.I want who I am and the story of how Abilities API was created, which I published on my blog.I want when people ask that to chat GBT for it to show up.Um, so creating these fundamental systems allows us to create a piece of software that does also adapt with the open web and remain that central place that humans express themselves.And that's what we expect to continue pushing towards with 7.0, but also into the future as well.And introducing these foundational fundamental pieces to go and build really interesting and expressive solutions for you in a unified way. Um, I have two asks for people, especially developers and hosts.Um, we have introduced these blocks to be used, and the people who operate within WordPress are the plugin developers, and they are the hosts.And for the plugin developers, we really ask you to take a look at these abilities and use them to create AI features yourself, but also expose the existing functionality of your tools out to the AI assistants that are coming.WordPress, the ones that can already interact through MCP, um, use the blocks.Go and use the WP AI client to go build AI features into your software.And for the developers, really track the WP AI client, or for the hosts, really track the WP AI client. Um, I can easily see a world where all hosts, and I know that three major hosts already will provide bundled AI credits into their plans, which means that you will have AI out of the box for any plugin that uses this API and interacts and says, "I will fall back to whatever provider's available."And that means AI can become a commodity and it becomes something that everybody can use; everybody has access to. And it really pushes us back to plugins extending WordPress, working with AI and not beingthis core primary feature, but just something that supercharges the way we work with WordPress.So those, those are the two asks there.The final ask is for everybody to go try the AI experiments plugin.It's on the WordPress repository as of yesterday.So wordpress.org/plugin/ai.Um, that's a representation of features that you can actually use,but also the blocks working together.And that will be a way we deliver really impressive features into the future.You can also contribute to that as well.So those are my asks.Those are fantastic.Ask few, do you have anything that you'd like to say? Uh, not final, final thoughts.Not much to add.I mean, yeah, try out the abilities API and the WPI client.Let us know if there is anything not working well for you.Um, break things, try crazy prompts.Um, and I want to add again to the Abilities API; I really want to emphasize that theAbilities API helps us facilitate AI.And this is an AI panel, but the Abilities API is relevant for pretty much any plugin.Uh, even if you're a plugin developer, you don't care about using AI, you still would, youstill might want to use the Abilities API to expose your features in this standardizedway that the Abilities API allows you to do so that any AI integrations in WordPressthat someone else builds can use that. And that makes your plugin better for the ecosystem, and the global command palettethat was mentioned here will use Abilities.Oh yeah.Right.And Jeff, any final thoughts? Uh, just that there's, you know, more coming in the experimentsplugin for, uh, non-technical users.Things that are table stakes functionality like excerpt generation, image generation, alttext generation, uh, slightly farther future things, uh, like design and layout assistance. Uh, so kind of like how Telex likes to build blocks.Also being able to do that in the site editor with templates and patterns.Um, and then for developer experience, sort of tooling, uh, there'll be abilities explorers.You can, uh, see the inputs and outputs of the abilities that are, uh, live on your site.Uh, there'll be an MCP demo to try and play with, uh, the tooling there.Uh, and then also, uh, an AI playground just to kind of test out how prompts work withthe different models you might be using.So some things that are a bit more technical that are coming, some thingsthat are a bit more, uh, table stakes.And then, um, some, uh, things that are in the not too far future, but coming.Great. And then Matt, you've already said today, learn a couple of years ago, learn, learn deeply.Mm-hmm.What would you say some today from the, not just the community, from the developers, fromeverybody, what would you say your final thoughts?You know, nothing to add.Y'all put it so beautifully, and so just thank you all.Yeah. Thank you.Thank you everyone.So at this point, thank you.Thank Matt.Yeah.All right.Thank you all.You know, I learn so much from all the people who work in WordPress, uh, every day. And, you know, you see it on the panel.One of the coolest parts about getting involved with WordPress or any open source projectis you get to work with all the other cool people who are contributing and doing it.And you'll become someone who learns and gets to, you know, um, get very, very inspired by sort of my colleagues, both on the volunteer and on the automatic side.Um, every day.So we've covered a lot today.So, like we said, with AI, I think that we're gonna be able to, not replace, but literally augment so much of what we're doing.Um, you know, the AI client, the abilities, API, everything we've been working on, um, youknow, very excited to see what we're doing. Um, we're gonna break for just two minutes and then head into Q and A.Does that sound good?All right.I've been doing this since 2003.Some of you were in the room in Tokyo last year.Some of you were at the first WordCamp San Francisco in 2006.A few folks here, and we planned with like two or three weeks ahead of time.Um, some of you, some contributors to WordPress weren't even born when WordPress 1.0 came out, which is really wild to me.Um, but I just wanna say thank you.You know, phase three is here.We've got blocks, themes, collaboration, you know, perhaps going into multilingual soon.But we'll see.Ah, if you're not a Make team yet, please get involved.And I just wanna say thank you all.Alright.All right.All righty.Uh, what's that? What does Matthew McConaughey say?Yeah, McConaughey.You say, "All."All right. All right, all right.All right.So now for my favorite part of every State of the Word, WordCamp, or anything,which is the question and answers.So we've got some mic runners around here.We're gonna run around the room, so if you have a question, let’s open this up.We took a little break so you can think of questions.Wait, no one wants to be the first one? Hey, Matt, Robert Jacoby Blackwell here.Uh, I have a question about how we’re just getting faster and faster now.We have more endpoints and things to connect to with AI.And now we also have wonderful single points of failure like CloudFlare.How is something like CloudFlare going to impact, in fact, get in the way of havingAI do those things that it wants to do?Huh?I’m not sure the connection between CloudFlare and AI; could you explain just the edgecaching and all of that and how that could maybe impact agentic work and all that? Oh, well, I think, you know, anytime you have a service as powerful and successfulas CloudFlare gets adopted, and so inevitably when, like any internet service, you know,something happens, you really notice it.Like when AWS East 2 goes down, you’re like, "Wow, so much of the web happened."But I think also what happens is every time this happens, we learn from it.And both, as you know, consumers of these services, you develop moreelegant failovers.And of course, you can imagine all the engineers at the company where somethinghappened to fail, which again, is gonna happen to all of us at some point.Um, you know, learn from that. And so I think in technology we always try to make new mistakes and just sort of see, like, uh,so every failure, every edge case, everything that you never imagined is just anotheropportunity to find that new itch case.And then once you build the resiliency around it, hopefully, you know nothing happened.You knock on wood for a little while, you think, you thank the DD to like, you know, belike, wow, uh, by the grace of God, go us.It didn’t happen to us this time.But then, you know, you kinda see what the new pro, the new bottlenecks are, and thesethings are being scaled and adopted so quickly.Like the amount of traffic flowing over the internet, the usage as you talkedabout that we’re gonna have with LLMs.Um, so I guess to more go to the point a little bit, although, you know, the frontier models and everything,um, have incredible capabilities, um, with things like the, you know, the AI. Uh, sort of abstraction layer we built in WordPress.Um, you could have failovers.So if you’re calling one model and it’s not returning in time or not returning a result, youexpect, you could fail over to a different model.Or as you know, Felix brought up, you know, some of these things that are gonna berunning directly in the browser or others.Um, my expectation is that, you know, you don’t need to call like the multi-gigawatt,you know, XAI data center, you know, with nuclear power plants powering it to like maybecheck your spelling or something, you know.So I imagine that in the future we’ll actually have hundreds, if not thousandsof different specialized models that might be tuned for different things.In fact, in some of our work at Automatic around like a site builder, like we’re findingthat models that are tuned specifically for logo creation are the thingsthat can be essentially fine-tuned or smaller.They’re cheaper to run, sort of less memory, etc.Um, can do more specialized tasks.And so, you know, again, thinking of them like little robots that can be specialized,These agents that you might call for different things are going to talk to eachother. They’re going to interact with them. And I imagine, not unlike when you load a WordPress page, it's makingdozens of database calls and calling different functions and everything like that.That's computing the future.As we use our devices, they’ll be in the background, like dozens if not hundreds ofdifferent models running to do different things.You know, listening for when you say, I’m not going to say the catch word because I’llactivate it for everyone. You know, the hey, whatever, or whatever the thingsthat activate the different voice assistants are.And so, yeah, that’s where I think it’s going.Cool. Thanks.Thank you, Robert.Hey, Matt.Um, I really love the collaborative commenting and everythingin the editor that’s coming up.Um, I think it introduces a whole new dynamic for WordPress.Could you maybe give us an idea of where that could be going in the future?What other multiplayer real-time things might be coming?Ah, well, yeah, so for those who don’t know,the collaborative editing is basically, if you use Google Docs or Notion orone of these sorts of things where editinga document becomes multiplayer.I love putting it in a game analogy.In WordPress, you’ll be able to see people editing things and moving them.We’re doing this just inside of Gutenberg right now, but I could definitely imagine a futurewhere you could think of the entirety of WP admin and all the things plugins are buildinghaving some sort of way to have states or streaming updates.Now it does, if you moderate or remove stuff, it’ll bring something new in, but IDon't think it brings like a new comment in. But for things like the P2 theme for WordPress, you know, you sort of have a real time whenyou load a page in P2, which is just kind of like collaborative, like,think of it like a collaborative real time blog built on top of WordPress.When a new comment comes in or an edit, it streams live.So you kind of get this more interactive way of having a conversation.You have to reload the page or get a notification.So, um.Now there are probably different parts that could be better or worse.Like, you know, Bo, who, for those who don't know, leads the WooCommerce project, whichis this little open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress, which is now, um, I thinkrunning on 8% of all websites or something. 8.9% of all websites are running WooCommerce and it's doing tens of billions of sortsof goods and services sold every year.So you could imagine something like an orders page, something like that, like amerchant sort of watching new orders streaming in real time could be kind of an exciting place.And, um, so what I hope is that as we develop these things inside Gutenberg, we can createthe abstractions just like we have with AI that allow other developers to tap into some of this.And then, as we mentioned, the AI panel, like the idea that perhaps some ofthe collaboration or feedback might be coming from specialized agents.And there are some very cool things I've seen that the name is escaping me at the moment,but like, uh, where you can kind of have a website design and it can, you know, anagent that comes in and says, "Here's some accessibility tips," or "Here's some, you know,copy design tips," or "Here's some layout tips."Um, you could imagine like sort of different bots, maybe,maybe different flavors of bots coming in and suggesting different things for your site.So, cool.Thank you.By the way, just to give a heads up, we're going to do something very unusual, uh, for this.So has anyone heard of TVPN? It stands for the technology business, uh, podcast network, I think.Um, so imagine like ESPN, but for tech.So every day they do a three-hour live stream, which is these two guys, Jordan and Jordy, um, sort of do like A-E-S-P-N style where they'll bring people in.The GitHub conference the other day, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, he didn't go on CNBC or Bloomberg; he went on TBPN.So we're actually gonna patch in TBPN.So we'll have about 20 minutes where it'll connect sort of our audience to this broader, it's kind of the new hot show in tech. Uh, so we'll, it's an experiment, so we'll see if it works.And, you know, internet hopefully stays up and everything, but it should be kind of fun.So we'll have some questions from them, uh, that we're kind of switching to maybe, you know, talking about some WordPress stuff for a more mainstream audience.So that'll come in a few minutes.All right.Uh, I think we got, let's go over here.Oh yeah.Uh, wait for the mic and please introduce yourself.Oh, I'm Ray King with a domain registrar called Pork Bun.And I'm wondering with all the changes we're seeing, which are monumental, I think in this period of time, how you feel domain names will continue to play a part in identity for people on the web.Oh, that's such a good question and I'm glad you asked it.'Cause you and I are probably both domain name enthusiasts.Um, you know, when you think about DNS and the domain name system, which is at the heart of the open internet, is one of the most incredible systems that we've created in the past 40 or 50 years.And the cool thing about a domain is when you own a domain, it's like your real estate on the web. It's the thing that truly belongs to you.I've said before in previous talks that, you know, it's great to be a subdomainor subdirector in someone else's domain.And you know, we offered that on wordpress.com.You can be username.wordpress.com, that's free, but at the end, you're kindof like a digital sharecropper, right?That doesn't actually belong to you.It's more like renting an apartment in someone else's building, and if they decideto kick you out of that building someday, or the building goes out of business,all of a sudden your URL goes away.As we've seen countless times with services like GeoCities and othersjust disappearing from the internet. And, you know, luckily we have things like the Internet Archive projects.Shout out to archive.org, which tries to, uh,you know, which the WordPress Foundation also donates to, and we just launcheda very cool Internet Archive plugin.So check that out.So there's now a cool new official plugin developed, you know, with support fromAutomattic and the Internet Archive, that'll actually automatically scan all yourblog posts and update links that break and update them to anarchive.org link on the Wayback Machine.So visitors to your blog post will now see like a snapshot of what you werelinking to at the time, even if it goes away.But, um, to go back, like when these things go offline, um, you know, you don'thave any recourse.So now the plus or minus the domains is like they expire at wordpress.com.We now offer a hundred-year domain plan as well as a hundred-year hosting plan that does some thingsto ensure the continuity of that.But there still is a way of maintenance.And I'm curious about the future of seeing ways that even if the original ownerIf a domain is no longer paying for it, perhaps other people could gift or donate. We actually have a feature like this on wordpress.com, where if for some reason, likea site owner is no longer paying for their plan, you could sort of gift them a plan.So having a way that important books keep getting reprinted or things, um,ways that we can keep domains online.And you know, I've been around the internet long enough that I have had friends thathave passed, and their domains have gone to disuse or, even worse, get snatched upby a domain squatter or something.So, um, that's the one thing I'd like to see improved in domains in the future.Uh, but I think it is a very important system and everyone in here should get their domain.If you have a kid, buy their domain. I have some friends here who had a beautiful child that has as their gift when they wereborn, I was able to get them their first name.com.So, uh, she's not using it yet.She's how old now?Four.So, you know, not using WordPress yet, although hopefully, she'll come to some WordCamps in a few years.You got mine, the AI assistant, I think we're going to jump in a little earlier now.Oh, nice.With the AI assistant, she might start playing some things or buildingsome games or things like that.Like I could totally see her.She's a very precocious, smart little girl.Um, but I hope that someday, you know, she might have a site there or use it for hersort of portfolio or even just having like alittle Lincoln bio type site, you know, justa little place on the web that belongs to you.So when people search, they're not just seeing your profiles on different social media,but a place that actually belongs to you.My sister, that's your domain. Charlene dot Mullen weight.com has a nice little one-pager.It's like a little bio linking to a few other places and things she does. I think every person onthe internet should have one of these. Actually, Gravita, which is the globally recognized avatarservice built into WordPress and other platforms.We now support domain mapping.So it's a very, very simple way to create a nice one-pager with somelinks, and, you know, you can link your different verified social media profiles.You can link to, sort of, crypto wallets, all sorts of different things,all on one page, and now you can map a domain to it.So I'm hoping also to see domains get built into more things. I love the new services like Blue Sky, which actually allow you to map a domain.Here's a username.So on Blue Sky, I am at Matt, which is kind of fun.So, you know, seeing this sort of globally recognized namespacewhich is actually about to open up again; we're about to have some new TLDs.So for the first time in how many years?Uh, since 2012.The last round of new TLDs was in 2012.TLDs were established after the dot.So originally, there was .com, .org, .net, and a bunch of country ones.Then, in 2012, there started to be all these new ones.Like .blog, which is one of ours.But, you know, .engineering, .lawyer.AI is actually a country, a very lucky country.What is it?Anguilla.So there's like .tv as well that happened to be a country code,but you know, there are all these other ones, and now in 2026, there's going to be a new round of these new dot somethings.What was nice about that is, as you know, some of the good ones got taken early on. Um, so opening up these new name spaces and also people getting normalized to usethese other dots, some things I think are really, really cool because everyone shouldbe able to have a memorable domain name.Cool.How are we doing on timing with the podcast and everything?We’re almost ready.Almost ready? Yes.Cool. So maybe time for one more quick question.Yeah.Hello.My name’s David Prager.I work with Automatic.Um, so I was thinking about what James, the page, was saying about content and humanscreating content and everyone has a blog.You’ve got to go create the news; you’ve got to pedal your wares and pedal your services.But the age of the agentic web is kind of changing some of that.People used to talk about SEO, and now you’re talking about how do you get discovered byall these frontier models, and how do you see website creation, website design asit relates to how people will be using AI agents to do some of their bidding for them? Ooh, this is a very interesting area where I think we’re just at the very,very beginning, so interrupt me when we need to switch over.But, um, there’s some fun stuff happening here.I think, uh, PRA Al’s new company called Parallels, which is sort of thinking aboutlike what it looks like for an AI-driven web.So, and we’re seeing it in our traffic patterns.Cloudflare’s talked about this; I think I’ve talked about it publicly before, where theamount of traffic coming from AI bots crawling is now dwarfing some of the human traffic.And this is just with some of them doing the indexing of the web, much less sort ofthe real-time interactions that’ll happen. Like when you, you know, ask your chatbot to do something and then it visits a website can, whereThere are new things around, like checking out and commerce being integrated directly with AI. Um, so, you know, in WordPress, we were sort of vamping on some of thethings thinking about for the future.One thing I've been wondering about is, a cool feature of WordPress is actually every webpagethat you visit actually has, um, if you sort of twiddle the query string, you can actually get,a feed representation of that, and it kind of goes through the feed engine of WordPress.So you can get an RSS2 version of it or, you know, an Atom version or SS9.2 or whatever.And it basically allows you to create a different representation.So you've got kind of the HTML page that gets served to humans, but, uh, Bach could, intheory, connect to request a sort of XML version.Um, you know, something that we could add to this feed engine is a markdown version. Some people started to experiment with this where you essentially get either with a sort ofvarious HTTP headers or requesting a .md version of a webpage could be something that,um, is sort of smaller and easier to parse.So there's often, with a lot of the AI models, there's sort of thesecontext windows or token lengths.So essentially, distilling down the sort of meat of a webpage or a blog post.So it's sort of like the barest form, which markdown is a beautiful sort of text version ofum, could essentially allow webpages to be ingested by AI tools in a more efficient manner.And, uh, something I could definitely see being built into 7.0 or 7.1.This is kind of just an idea right now.It's more in the notebook phase.But, um, something I've been noodling on is how we can sort of make different,representations of websites accessible.Um, and of course, this all needs to be balanced with sort of like different websites mighthave different monetization or business models.You know, uh, I'm very much in the camp that, um, you know, James talked aboutor I think, uh, Gordon blogged, where like I want my thoughts and my thinking to be part ofthe training of these AI models, sort of part of the future super intelligences.Um, but other folks might monetize by people visiting the website. So what does that look like?Um, what are ways we can sort of start to embed micropayments and some of this stuff?You know, micropayments is kinda like Linux on the desktop.It's always been something that's like always right around the corner, but Linux on the desktop is actually happening now.There's some very cool stuff like the, is it the Marky project, you know, with DHH and some other cool things where some fun things are happening. And actually, I think we now are starting to get some things with like stable coins, uh,where you could actually have things that look a lot more like micropayments always.And I know there's a lot of folks at AI Labs and folks like, you know, products companies that are thinking about, you know, if we're answering a query or something, we can actually perhaps attribute how much of that came from different websites and if they're registered or like sort of registered perhaps in like a royalty-like fashion, not unlike, you know, ASCAP or BMI do for musical rights or other things that sort of licensing other creative works might be able to attribute and perhaps even pay out, uh, sort of different creators. So it's the early days of this, and in the beginning, so much like when streaming started, everyone was like, ah, uh, you know, used to sell an album for $17.99 and now I'm just getting pennies per stream.But over time, if you look at the trends, like the music business is making more than ever, or, you know, in newspapers and in media, they talked about, you know, print dollars being replaced by digital pennies. But now for, you know, some like New York Times, the digital subscriptions are driving all the revenue growth and everything.So we might see a dip or some sort of adaptation as these technologies start to be adopted in the first couple of years.But I think long term, there's gonna be way more usage, way more adoption, and hopefully way more sort of abundance to go around.And that's even before the singularity.And you know, money just starts to not matter 'cause we all get, you know, everything all the time. One more minute.Cool. I think we had a question up here.Jonathan.Hi, I'm Jonathan Ros.I work at Blue House.This is a Five for the Future contributor.And my question is, to stage it, one of the things I've been noticing lately, and thethings that I'm most excited about with AI is, um, I categorize it as learning and empowerment.And with that, I've seen a trend of people starting to take moreownership in the things that they do.And they own and they take on themselves.And from the perspective of the web and all these walled gardens that we've becomeaccustomed to over the past decade, um, besides the importing and exporting of our WordPress sites,what observations do you have around this, and what other ways can WordPresshelp with this trend that seems to be out there of reclaiming our content and our stuff? Huh, that's a good question.Just before you pass on the mic, like, I'm curious, is there somethingin mind or something that you've seen that sort of inspired this?Um, I think RSS is becoming more popular again, in some ways.It's kind of funny.Yeah.And that's such a, you know, well-established older technology.And so that's really nice to see, especiallywith some new feed readers popping up, and since Google got rid of theirs,there hasn't been a good replacement for that. Um, but then just in general, people being able to, like I said, just learnand then that empowers them to have educated opinions and resourcesthat they can publish themselves on things.Yeah.Um, and physically I'm also seeing people are recognizing that theTrades are, uh, more valuable again. And so people are starting to see, oh, a plumber isn't, electricians isa good path, uh, to earn a living.Yeah.Um, and that's from.Whether it's AI type stuff or whether it's just frustration with society andthe way things, certain things are going.Um, but I think they're all kind of connected in some ways.So I'm just curious if you have any WordPress related observations to that effect. Well, and it's funny you brought up RSS,so I think of technology sometimes, like you shouldn't throw away your old clothes 'cause they come back in fashion.Again.RSS is coming back and actually very exciting. You know, the inventor of RSS and one of the OG bloggers, Dave Winer, has gotten very active inthe WordPress community and he's building like alternative posting clients and it's very fun.I actually got to see him speak at WordCamp Canada a few weeks ago,which was like an amazing, uh, WordCamp up in, was it Ottawa, um, that I visited.And, um, well, incredible set of speakers, but also, you know, to have sort of oneof the creators, sort of innovators of like blogging and RSS and everything like that.Um, sort of engaging with WordPress.Um, check it out.Uh, Dave's done actually some great blogging about, um, sort of why WordPressmatters and everything like that.So his site is scripting.com, but if you just Google like Dave Winer WordPress,um, you'll see some of the writing there. So, um, I think, you know, when you go back to the, I love the Jess pagesquotes where like, it's harder to predict the future, but maybe easier to lookat the things that aren't gonna change.So for Amazon, he always talked about like, there’s no day when people are gonnasay, "I would like my packages slower."So, investments they make in the countless logistics they’ve investedin, like the shipping networks, the trucks, and all the fulfillment centers and everything. That's a long-term bet.That’s now, you know, in some places I can now order something and it’s showing up literallyhours later, which when you imagine the early days of ordering from catalogs,it shows up, you know, weeks later, you sort of forget you ordered it, andyou’re lucky when the doorbell rings. Now it’s sort of this instant thing. Um, in WordPress, I like to think of the things that aren’t going to change.And so, um, I think freedom and agency is at the core of everything that we do.Um, our commitment to open source is not just in ourwords, but in the actions and the constitution of the license of open source,I think is not going to go out of style.In fact, it may even become more important.Um, I think things like user control and privacy,which is kind of like embedded into that.Um, again, a long-term trend.I’d be very comfortable with our principles and investments there. And also how our core technology stack goes into it.Um, the final thing I’ll say is, you know,free people and community building.When I speak to entrepreneurs or other folks building things, Ilike to say, don’t just build software.Don’t just build a product.Try to build a movement; build something that people can believe in.Something that’s more than just whatever you’re doing, but actually aspires to a higher goal,or principle, and make it people first.So that kind of like person-to-person. What we do at the work camps, what we do at events like this is fun;the talking, but my favorite is before and after, when everyone is mingling and meetingpeople. I love seeing folks I know that don’t know each other meet for the first time.That’s sort of like the spark or fire that gets created from those interactions or collisions. Um, I think it's one of the best parts of it.So, you know, I'm sure there are a few more principles we could think of, but those area few that in the WordPress world at least, I think are going to remain, um, not going to change.How are you doing?I think we have you on a hot mic.We might hot mic.Hopeful.About to come on the screen.All right, well, little drum roll, y'all.Y'all are about to experience TVPN for the first time. Our audience, we are streaming on them.They're streaming on us.Ah, folks.Bob two.Fantastic.How are you doing?Howdy, howdy.Uh, thank you so much for, I know this is a little non-traditional, so we’re, it is.Love it.We're kind of like two hours into our big annual address, the state of the word.It's kind of like our state of union speech.And, um, thank you so much for allowing us to connect them.I'm kind of imagining a lot of folks in the room have never heard or seen TVPN before.Fantastic.So this will bring a lot of new folks into your world, and I'm excited for your world to learn about workforce.Yeah.Yeah. Give me the state of the word.Uh, and then also I want your personal word of the year.We've been debating what the word of the year should be. Ooh.Uh, so state of the word — and I'll say the state of the word is strong.Okay.There we go. That's good.Let's hit the gong.We're hitting the gong for that one.A strong state of the word, uh, congratulations. We actually just did a live release of WordPress 6.9.So WordPress does major releases three times per year.We were able to do it right here on stage.We had a little button that we pushed.We gotta get it gone next time.I love it.That was, uh, that was pretty fun.Don't worry, I didn't just ship it again.But, um.You know, uh, one of the things about WordPress is, it's a community of WordPress, 6.9, over 900 contributors from all over the world, different countries, different languages, different companies all coming together.And so that was pretty exciting.Uh, my word of the year — and actually a thing we were just talking about — is I'm going to choose freedom.Uh, so, you know, powerful as technology starts to influence more and more of our lives, you know, how we travel, who we date, the things we learn, the news we're supposed to, um, you know, the sort of freedoms that are embedded in open source licenses.I like to refer to open source licenses sort of like a bill of rights for software.Um, it gives you inalienable rights that no company or person can take away from you.And that freedom and agency I think is really, really important and something that, um, I think, you know, as technologists or builders, we should try to embed into everything that we do. Give us an update on Beeper.I was super fascinated by that product.I love walled gardens.I also love tearing down the walls of gardens.It seems like a good shot across the bow of the iMessage walled garden.How's the progress going there? Are you using the service personally daily?Are we going to see a lot of growth there?Well, obviously I'm using it daily.So I would think of it not as replacing a walled garden, but more like allowing your gardens to come together.I'm sure like me, you have friends on lots of different networks, and some of them always love to use WhatsApp, while others prefer Instagram or LinkedIn DMs.Sometimes I even get some interesting stuff there.I hate it when I miss these messages because checking all the different apps sometimes makes me miss something.So think of it like email clients that can bring in lots of different email accounts.Beeper takes all the different networks where your friends already are and maps them together.Now, the plus and minus is that it's not going to replace the networks.I still keep all the different specialized messaging apps because, for example, if someone sends you an Instagram story, when you click on that, you're going to want to load Instagram.So I think of it as complementary and hopefully even increasing the usage in a very small way.Right now, it's pretty nascent, but in the future, think of it as serving a different interface.You might still have the dedicated apps, but then having this all in one inbox that you can sort of manage everything. Uh, tag people have folders and cool features like scheduling messaging acrossall platforms, or even just like weird heuristics that are pretty simple to do, butlike, show me all the, not, don't just show me unread, but show me all the people I'vemessaged that haven't messaged me back yet. Oh yeah, sure, sure.Uh, we've talked to some young hackers, some startups, uh, who are building.You know, sort of Beeper competitors, and their whole value proposition is like, we've figured outa way to get it into the iMessage ecosystem.Uh, do you think that we need a new regulation there or some sort of law changeor some result to actually open up iMessage?Or do you think that, with enough tricky hacking, it can be done? Um, well technically, it's not hard.Well, it is hard, but it's hard.It's very possible to reverse engineer these networks.Yeah.Um, however, as we saw with sort of a previous iteration of Beeper, if thenetwork really, really doesn't want you to do that, um, it's probably not good to picka fight with a trillion dollar company. Yeah.So, um, perhaps these things might happen through open source or something, but asa commercial company, I think ultimately you have to be somewhat respectfuland try to complement these networks. Um, so how Beeper works today is we don't support iMessage on mobile or Android.Um, in theory we could, but Apple has indicated that’s something they don't want.We do support on the Mac OS clients.We have a way to integrate with sort of iMessage using some APIs thatare available on Mac OS and so on.Mac OS we can bring in your iMessage.Um, but again, I'm building this for the long term and we are a commercial company as well. So, um, you know, we want to work with the networks and, um, perhaps there canbe regulations like the European DMA or things that can encourage interoperability.Um, but ultimately I think that the sort of people who run these networks haveto see a longer-term benefit for them.And for things like, um, you know, some of the other networks I mentioned that people work with,I think their business model and everything, the increased usage is really useful for them. I think for today,Apple's business model, particularly in the US, kind of the lock-in effect to the devicebusiness, which is of course where they make a lot of money from iMessage, probably indicatesthat less forced to, I doubt, uh, they will adopt iMessage interoperability.Uh, but who knows, sort of like they used Lightning for a while and eventuallygot USB-C and all our lives got better.Um, who knows what'll happen in the future. Talk about links on the internet.I feel like we're at a point in time where social media platforms are trying to keepusers in their own applications so that they can monetize them to the fullest extent.Meanwhile, you have LLMs, which are ultimately doing a lot of the same thing.They're taking content from all over the internet, trying to keep usersin the individual applications. Uh, it feels like WordPress, in many ways, is making moves to kind of like almost fight back against that.I might have that incorrect, but I feel like it's important if you're running a businessindependently online, it's great to have people on your own website so you candevelop a deep relationship with them.Uh, but what is your view on that?We're very much anchored around X as a business. Obviously, X has had issues with links or, you know, chosen to demote themin the algorithm over the last couple of years.But, uh, give us kind of the state of the union on links.That's a broad one. Well, I will say X is actually a great example, and I’ve talked to Nikita about this.So they now, um, they’ve shifted some of the balancing of links, and they now havethis really nice sort of app browser.So you’ve probably noticed that now, when you load a link, you actually still have theability to like, and reblog, and everything.And I think that’s kind of the future.Um, so I do think that there you can have things that are complementarybecause so much of the great content and everything is more on this open web.It doesn’t have to be fully embedded in an app.Um, but that is sort of a technological change. So I would say actually point to X as someplace where I think thingsare going in the right direction.Although I do agree that the time when links got really de-boostedand everyone had to do it as a reply was kind of weird and sucked.Um, yeah.So for WordPress publishers, you know, we support so many different types ofwebsites, and different types of websites, I think might have different motivations. So for example, um, a popular plugin for WordPress is called WooCommerce.It’s the e-commerce plugin.It actually runs on about 8.9% of all websites in the world are now running this e-commerce plugin.You can think of it like an open-source Shopify.And when you’re selling something, a merchant, um, youdon’t, you just want to sell a product.You don’t necessarily care that someone comes to your website to buy it. So some new things that are happening, in partnership with AI and others,where we’re allowing products to actually be browsed and bought inside of the LLM are pretty exciting.Um, I also think that the incentives of these open-source chatbots in particularare very complementary to the open web. So, for example, like if you’re on Amazon, Amazon really wants you to say,eBay, Etsy, or something like that. They want you to stay in their marketplace on their system.But when you think of how Google works and sort of the growth of Google and the open web, youknow, they have their search pages, but they also link out, and that was part of their business model and how they grew.Um, we're seeing that with chatbots as well.In fact, something I talked about a little bit earlier is that the traffic frombots, both from them crawling and user-initiated actions, is exploding and hasalready surpassed human traffic.It'll be interesting to see where that goes in the future. So, there's never been a better time, I think, to invest in having a domain, but alsoinvest in publishing. You know, just like you might have a direct relationship, like forexample, I suppose I could get a chat GPT to summarize today's TVPN episode.But it's more exciting to watch it.I think that creator's developing a direct relationship and brand is going to be part of the future as well.Very, very cool. Well, there are so many more things that I want to ask.Yeah.But, uh, I know you're in the midst of your own presentation, so,thank you for tuning in.Come back on soon.And thank you for having us.The view is spectacular as well, so it's a pleasure to meet.I'd love to come down and hang out.One, I'm in LA next, so thank you so much.That'd be fantastic.Thanks so much.We'll talk to you soon.Great chatting, cheers. Have a good rest of your day.Cheer. See you.Bye. They have this fun thing where they do really cool ad reads, so for alltheir sponsors and everything, they'll go into an ad read in the middle.As you can see, they have the sort of tickers and everything.Um, very cool.Check it out if you haven't seen it before.TBPN.Oh, and cool.That was cool.That was Jason free from Base Camp.I think they're launching something today as well.So he just got on.Um, cool. So how are we doing on time and everything?We're good today.All right.Well.Um, this has been a very exciting day.We've seen so many amazing, sort of things launch.It has been quite the year, you know, there have been some highs and lows, a rollercoaster every year.I've seen this across the community for me personally as well.But coming out at the end of it, it is so amazing to see, you know,in the tough times, that's actually when people come together, I think. To see the WordPress community, the things we've built and shipped, the AI team goingfrom Genesis six months ago to all the amazing things that are shipping 6.0, and witha very exciting 7.0 right around the corner.I won't announce a date yet, but call it early next year.Um, we've got some fun things in mind, so let's keep building together. The planet, keep hacking together. Um, you know, fight for freedom, fight for anopen web, and I will see you all online.Check the number.Oh, and check the number.Wait, what is the number of WordPress downloads?So we did the live release, not downloads, but 700,000 sites are running six months.Over 700,000 sites have already updated to WordPress6.9. Wow.So, and just the time we've been talking, 700,000 sites are— that’s good.So,see y’all. Thank you., State of the Word 2025, WordPress, 01kbmr20fcvkb4yre9pk6aw1xx.