WordCamp Canada 2025 - Ma.tt Mullenweg "Town Hall/AMA" 🔗 **Source:** [WordCamp Canada 2025 - Ma.tt Mullenweg "Town Hall/AMA"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [wordpress, community, matt-mullenweg, open-source] > author: WordCamp Canada > source: YouTube > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY > date created: 2025-01-22 10:30 > > # 🏷️ Title: WordCamp Canada 2025 - Ma.tt Mullenweg "Town Hall/AMA" > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🧰 Action Inbox - [H1] Explore WordPress Playground/Studio for rapid prototyping — 30-second VM setup #wordpress - [H2] Review WP Photo Directory integration opportunities — better media library access #community - [H3] Consider AI policy evolution for themes/plugins — legal landscape changing rapidly #policy ## 🧭 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 - [Ma.tt Blog](https://ma.tt) - [WordPress.org](https://wordpress.org) ## 📝 Summary - Matt Mullenweg presented a live town hall at WordCamp Canada 2025, sharing updates across his portfolio of publishing, commerce, and messaging projects - Key announcements included WordPress Playground's 30-second VM capabilities, AI integration challenges, and the evolution of community policies - Audience Q&A covered WordPress Photo Directory expansion, theme submission policies, AI-generated content guidelines, and independent WordPress events - Live demonstration of publishing a blog post directly from the event using a Daylight Computer device - Discussion of legal challenges with WP Engine and their impact on WordPress development priorities ## 📖 Main Content Matt Mullenweg delivered an interactive presentation at WordCamp Canada 2025, combining prepared remarks with live Q&A. His presentation focused on three core areas of his work: democratizing publishing (WordPress, Tumblr), commerce (WooCommerce), and messaging (Beeper). The session included a live demonstration of WordPress Playground, which allows spinning up a WordPress virtual machine in 30 seconds within a browser. This technology represents a significant shift from traditional server setup requirements and enables new possibilities like mobile app development entirely within WordPress containers. Community policy discussions emerged around AI-generated content, particularly in theme submissions and the WordPress Photo Directory. Mullenweg indicated evolving approaches to AI content, including potential acceptance of AI-generated images without human subjects for CC0 licensing. The Q&A revealed ongoing tensions around community governance, independent events, and balancing commercial interests with open-source values. Mullenweg emphasized "voting with your wallet" as a mechanism for community influence over commercial actors. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=0) — [H1] Live Blog Post Experiment - Key idea: Mullenweg wrote his talk as a WordPress post to publish live with the audience - Evidence: "I wrote out a little talk that actually is also on my WordPress right now. So, at the end of it, we'll all push publish together" #### ⏱️ [02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=150) — [H2] Mission Statement and Projects Overview - Key idea: Three-pillar focus on democratizing publishing, commerce, and messaging - Evidence: "My life mission is to democratize publishing, commerce and messaging. So I have some projects in each of those areas" #### ⏱️ [05:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=345) — [H3] Tumblr Migration Challenges - Key idea: Tumblr represents biggest missed opportunity due to technical debt and costs - Evidence: "It's over 500 million blogs, actually. And as a business, it's costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue" #### ⏱️ [08:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=500) — [H1] WordPress Playground Revolution - Key idea: 30-second WordPress VM setup in browser represents massive architectural shift - Evidence: "It's literally like cuz you know how hard it's been to like set up servers and databases and everything like that. And so to see a WordPress virtual machine spin up in like 30 seconds just blows my mind" #### ⏱️ [12:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=735) — [H2] WooCommerce Growth Metrics - Key idea: WooCommerce processes $30B+ GMV annually on 8% of all websites - Evidence: "It now processes over 30 billion of GMV per year and you can customize it to do pretty much anything" #### ⏱️ [15:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=930) — [H3] Daily Blogging Streak Inspiration - Key idea: WordCamp US inspired return to daily blogging with 28-day streak - Evidence: "I've been blogging a lot. It's a lot to keep up with. I've actually been going every day since work camp US with one missed day" #### ⏱️ [18:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=1125) — [H1] WordPress Photo Directory Expansion Plans - Key idea: AI-generated faces could expand photo directory while avoiding model release issues - Evidence: "When AI creates a face there's no such restrictions there. So something that we could actually start to do" #### ⏱️ [25:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=1520) — [H2] AI Integration in WordPress.org Operations - Key idea: AI models like Gemini making plugin review process more efficient - Evidence: "We've started to incorporate some of the AI models like Gemini and other things on WordPress.org to make us way more efficient" #### ⏱️ [30:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=1810) — [H3] Theme Directory Policy Evolution - Key idea: Moving from strict rules to tagging system for better marketplace flexibility - Evidence: "I think part of the way we can do this is as a marketplace right now... move these things from being maybe rules to being like tags" #### ⏱️ [38:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=2320) — [H2] Hello Dolly Plugin Defense - Key idea: Hello Dolly represents WordPress's soul and connection to jazz culture - Evidence: "That's one of the cool things about WordPress versus other software is it has soul. Code is poetry" #### ⏱️ [45:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=2715) — [H1] Cross-CMS Collaboration with Drupal - Key idea: Regular communication with other CMS leaders drives mutual innovation - Evidence: "There's only there's like a dozen people in the world who like their whole life is creating CMS's" #### ⏱️ [50:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=3030) — [H2] Community Ethics and Good Actors - Key idea: Commercial motivation can be aligned with community values through incentives - Evidence: "Let's commercially motivate them to do the right thing by giving more business to the good companies" #### ⏱️ [55:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=3320) — [H3] WordPress 1.5 Historical Significance - Key idea: Pages feature in WordPress 1.5 transformed it from blogging engine to CMS - Evidence: "Pages is the point at which I would say that WordPress went from blogging engine to CMS" #### ⏱️ [58:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY?t=3525) — [H2] Independent WordPress Events Philosophy - Key idea: "Thousand flowers bloom" approach supports diverse event formats - Evidence: "I'm very much like a thousand flowers bloom kind of guy" ## 📚 References - [WordPress Playground](https://playground.wordpress.net/) - [WordPress Photo Directory](https://wordpress.org/photos/) - [Openverse Search](https://openverse.org/) - [WooCommerce](https://woocommerce.com/) - [Beeper](https://beeper.com/) - [Day One](https://dayoneapp.com/) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - WordPress Playground enables instant WordPress environments in browsers, eliminating traditional server setup barriers and opening possibilities for mobile app development entirely within WordPress containers - Community policies around AI-generated content are evolving, with potential acceptance of AI-created images without human subjects to expand resources while avoiding legal complications - The WordPress ecosystem benefits from commercial motivation when aligned with community values through market incentives rather than rigid rule enforcement ## 📰 Newsletter Matt Mullenweg's latest WordCamp Canada presentation showcased exciting developments in WordPress technology and community governance. The standout demo of WordPress Playground spinning up a full WordPress environment in 30 seconds represents a game-changing shift for developers and educators. Key takeaways for the WordPress community include evolving AI content policies, streamlined plugin review processes, and the continued growth of WooCommerce processing over $30B annually. The discussion of moving from strict theme directory rules to flexible tagging systems could significantly improve the marketplace experience. For developers, the potential of WordPress Playground extends beyond quick testing to full mobile app development, as demonstrated with the BlockNotes iOS app built entirely on a WordPress container. Resources: [WordPress Playground](https://playground.wordpress.net/), [Learn WordPress](https://learn.wordpress.org/), [Developer Docs](https://developer.wordpress.org/) ## ✅ Action Items #### WordPress - Core: Evaluate WordPress Playground integration opportunities for development workflows - Themes: Implement tagging system to replace restrictive marketplace rules - Photos: Enhance media library integration with WordPress Photo Directory search - Community: Develop clearer AI content guidelines across directories - Documentation: Create Playground tutorials for rapid prototyping and testing #### Community - Maintainers: Review AI policy implications for plugin and theme submissions - Contributors: Explore Playground for simplified contribution testing environments - Educators: Integrate Playground into WordPress training curricula #### DevRel - Developer experience: Create Playground-based learning paths and sandboxes - Education: Develop workshops showcasing 30-second WordPress setup capabilities - Community management: Facilitate discussions on AI content policy evolution ## 🧪 Hypotheses - WordPress Playground adoption will accelerate developer onboarding by reducing technical barriers to WordPress experimentation - AI-generated content policies will evolve from restrictive to permissive with appropriate safety guardrails - Theme directory tagging systems will increase marketplace diversity while maintaining quality through user filtering - Cross-CMS collaboration will accelerate innovation across the broader content management ecosystem ### 📊 Methodology - Track WordPress Playground usage metrics and developer adoption rates - Monitor theme submission volumes and approval rates under evolving AI policies - Survey community satisfaction with marketplace search and filtering capabilities - Analyze cross-pollination of features between WordPress and other CMS platforms ### ❓ Questions - How will WordPress Playground's container technology scale for enterprise development workflows? - What legal frameworks will emerge for AI-generated content in open-source directories? - How can community governance balance commercial interests with open-source values at scale? ### 🔮 Future Research - WordPress container orchestration for complex multi-site deployments - Legal precedents for AI content licensing in open-source contexts - Community governance models that scale with ecosystem growth ### 💡 Implications - Practice: Playground reduces WordPress development friction from hours to seconds - Policy: AI content guidelines require regular review as legal landscape evolves - Education: Instant WordPress environments transform learning and teaching workflows - Community: Market-based incentives may prove more effective than rule enforcement ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment Reading level estimate: 9.2 (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level) #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: Live demonstration of Daylight Computer and WordPress admin - Improve: Architecture diagrams for Playground container technology, visual timelines of WordPress evolution #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: Full video presentation with Q&A format - Improve: Audio-only version for podcast consumption, timestamped audio chapters #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: Clear analogies (Playground vs traditional setup), defined technical terms - Improve: Glossary of container/VM terminology, comparison tables #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: Live publish button demonstration, interactive Q&A format - Improve: Step-by-step Playground tutorials, hands-on policy workshops #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: Clear project categorization (publishing/commerce/messaging), metrics (30B GMV, 500M blogs) - Improve: Decision trees for AI content policies, ROI analyses #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: Town hall format encouraging audience participation - Improve: Discussion prompts for community policy debates, collaborative workshops #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: Blog post format for individual consumption and reflection - Improve: Self-assessment tools for community contribution, personal action planning #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: Open-source ecosystem analogies and community growth patterns - Improve: WordPress ecosystem impact studies, sustainability considerations ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: Clear heading hierarchy, descriptive link text for resources - Improve: Alt text for visual demonstrations, ARIA labels for interactive elements #### Keyboard navigation - Present: Standard video player controls accessible via keyboard - Improve: Timestamped navigation shortcuts, skip-to-section functionality #### Contrast and readability - Present: Good text contrast in presentation materials - Improve: High contrast mode for demo interfaces, larger text options #### Media and captions - Present: Full video with audio content - Improve: Professional captions, downloadable transcript, audio descriptions for visual demos ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: Canadian venue with international speaker, multilingual WordPress context - Improve: Global community examples, non-Western technology perspectives #### Inclusive language - Present: Gender-neutral technical terms, defined jargon - Improve: Plain language summaries, cultural context for jazz references #### Representation - Present: Mix of technical and community-focused questions - Improve: Diverse questioner representation, varied use case examples #### Psychological safety - Present: Respectful handling of controversial topics (WP Engine legal issues) - Improve: Clear community guidelines reference, constructive disagreement modeling ### ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - Deductive strength: Clear mission-to-projects logic structure - Inductive strength: Playground capabilities generalized from specific use cases - Causal reasoning: Market incentives driving community behavior - Analogical strength: WordPress evolution compared to other platforms #### Fallacies - Appeal to authority: Citing Field Effect board position without direct relevance - False dichotomy: Good vs bad actors framing oversimplifies complex motivations #### Tone of voice - Overall tone: Conversational and informative with occasional defensive elements around legal issues ### 🛡️ DARVO Analysis - Deny: Minimizes WP Engine conflict impact ("can't comment on that") - Attack: Subtle criticism of court orders limiting transparency - Reverse victim/offender: Positions legal restrictions as attacks on free speech - Emotional cues: Protective language around community values and open source principles ## 🎯 Conclusion Matt Mullenweg's WordCamp Canada presentation demonstrated WordPress's continued evolution toward a comprehensive development platform, with WordPress Playground representing a fundamental shift in how developers interact with WordPress technology. <!-- deep-read:sections end --> ## 📺 Video  --- # 📄 Full Transcript *Auto-generated from YouTube captions · timestamps roughly every 30 seconds · [watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY)* **[00:00]** Thank you so much. Uh sorry for running a few minutes late. I actually have a little bit of a speech and a little demo thing to start with. So, uh just for a few minutes cuz I know we want to do some Q&A. But, um first of all, thank you all so much. This is actually I'm doing an experiment with you which is I wrote out a little talk that actually is also on my WordPress right now. So, at the end of it, we'll all push publish together. So, don't worry if I if I have lots of notes or anything like that. You don't **[00:31]** have to write it down. This will all be there. I need to add the link still. So, I'll edit it and we'll I'll talk about it. So, um let me start. So, howdy and bonjour. >> First, thank you so much Mercy Boku for having me at your word camp. I love the spirit of local communities gathering and helping each other learn and grow together. I wasn't actually planning to speak or even do a Q&A. I was just going to attend this work camp, but since the organizers have given me a bit of your **[01:03]** time, I will try to make the best of it. I love Canada. I first came here for the Northern Voices Conference in 2006 in Vancouver. Was anyone at that one? I think I think Dave Wer was actually. Um Tim Bray, it was pretty pretty awesome one. What's that? >> I'm over here. >> Hey Dave, were you at Northern Voices? >> Oh, **[01:33]** blogging conference instead of the island, but I think it was a few years before that. >> Oh. Huh. >> My memory is not that good. >> Well, that's why we blog. My memory is not that good either. That's why I blog. >> And by the way, I think this week is your anniversary, right? Did we figure out what year it was? No, it was a couple of weeks ago, but 30 31 years. >> Oh, wow. [Applause] >> Round of applause for Dave. That's that's amazing. I think why I thought it **[02:05]** was your anniversary is actually on my blog on a related post. It showed a post from I think 2014 that was congratulating you on your 20th because I think the register someone did a nice article. So, um, yeah, I've since been back dozens of times, including several summers in Montreal at the jazz festival there. And they also do a festive foe, I think it's called, the French one and the just for laughs and a few times here in Ottawa where I'm on the board of a **[02:36]** cyber security company called Field Effect. We might even have some Field Effect people here. I don't know. But Oh, hey. Thanks for coming. Uh let me give a little update on what I have been up to. My life mission is to democratize publishing, commerce and messaging. So I have some projects in each of those areas. In publishing my main work is WordPress. The core software available to everyone. We host it on WordPress.com pressible and allow **[03:07]** others to host it actually with WP cloud cool product. Um and we use Jetack to bring all the best cloud features to every WordPress wherever it is running. and of course running the main community hubs at WordPress.org, WordPress.tv, Word Camps, WordPress.net, probably some of y'all haven't heard of, and etc., etc. On the social side of publishing, I have Tumblr, which is a micro blogging social network, but right now it's on a different technical stack. I need to switch it over to WordPress, but it's a **[03:37]** big lift. It's over 500 million blogs, actually. And as a business, it's costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue. We've had to prioritize other projects to make it sustainable. It's probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we're still working on it. I'm really excited about the personal publishing side of our products with Day One and the WordPress.com Studio at Playground. Day One is a fully encrypted, shared uh synchronized blogging and journaling app that runs on every device and on the **[04:10]** web. You can also have shared encrypted journals with others. um uses the same encryption as one password. It's the first place I go to draft an idea or for example to write this talk. Its editor is not as good as Gutenberg yet, but it's pretty decent at all multi multi input multimodal input which means you can record voice notes, draw things, etc. and capturing it all. It's mostly replaced Evernote, Simple Note, and even private P2s and such for me. has some fun features like when you make a new entry records the location, what music **[04:41]** you're listening to on on Apple Music, how many steps you've taken, the weather, honestly, some features that would be nice to get into WordPress at least as a plugin. Right now, I just copy and paste it into WP Admin or the Jetack app if I want to publish something, but that could also be made smoother in the future. So the WordPress.com studio is built on an open source project called Playground that we created to allow you to spin up WordPress in a WM container in about 30 seconds right inside your browser. Who's tried Playground or Studio? **[05:12]** It's kind of wild, right? It's literally like cuz you know how hard it's been to like set up servers and databases and everything like that. And so to see a WordPress virtual machine spin up in like 30 seconds just blows my mind. There's so much you can do with it. It's the most sci-fi thing happening inside of WordPress right now. And we've just barely begun to take advantage of the massive technical and architectural shift it allows. For example, my colleague Ella built an iOS app called BlockNotes that's a lot like Simple **[05:42]** Notes, but it uses the Gutenberg editor and actually it's entirely a WordPress playground instance. The entire iOS app. So, right. So I mean part of the evolution of WordPress has been going from a blogging system to a CMS to a full development platform. So what Dave talked about yesterday and now that you can build entire mobile apps which by the way can run on every platform crossplatform and run the same thing on the web. It's kind of like the promise from back in the day of like Java or other things react native. It's now very **[06:14]** possible with this WordPress WM stuff. Wom stands for I think web assembly language or something. I forget what the M is for. Does anyone know? We'll look it up later. >> Web Assembly. Yeah. Um, the main distraction and thing holding back WordPress right now are the legal attacks from WP Engine Silver Lake. I can't comment on that, but stay tuned for some major updates soon. Um, in the Oh, I forgot to put this in the Woo Commerce. On the commerce side, **[06:45]** there's of course Woo Commerce, uh, which is very, very exciting. You can think of it like a open- source Shopify, our neighbors here in Ottawa. Um, it now processes over 30 billion of GMV per year and you can customize it to do pretty much anything, subscriptions, digital, physical goods, everything. And of course, it's fully open source and built on WordPress. It's actually a WordPress plug-in. Um, so pretty exciting. If you haven't checked it out, Woo Commerce is now on about 8% of all websites in the world. **[07:16]** So compared to like WordPress's 40. So it's running on about a quarter of all WordPress sites. It's been a big part of the growth of WordPress actually the past few years. In messaging, uh, we have this product called Beeper. Has anyone tried out Beeper yet? >> Oh, we got a Beeper super user here actually in Robert. So Beeper is basically takes all the different messaging apps, WhatsApp, Telegram, uh, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn DMs if you ever check those. and and it brings it all into one app, **[07:46]** one interface, kind of like a superhuman for uh for messaging and gives you cool features across all of them. Um, now this is obviously a pretty hard technical challenge cuz we have to re reverse engineer all the different networks for everything. So, it's uh but check it out. It's a pretty fun little app. It's uh it's free for up to a couple accounts and pay it after that. And there's also an open source component of that as well. So, some of the bridges. So, we're going to make it easier for people to build bridges and connections to different networks because there's a lot that we don't support yet that we get demand for like **[08:17]** uh cacao and Asia or also people want to do dating apps which I guess have messaging platform. So, it could be pretty fun to have everything all in one. Um I've been in the public a lot doing lots of talks and actually blogging every single day now for 28 days, which will be 29 when we all hit the publish button at the end of this. So, I've been blogging a lot. It's a lot to keep up with. I've actually been going every day since work camp US with one missed day in there. I got very very inspired at work campus US. It was a fantastic event. So, I got to hang out a **[08:48]** lot and go to a bunch of sessions and um yeah, just inspired me to to blog a lot more again. Um if you run Jetack, there's actually a pretty cool feature where the notifications will tell you what kind of streak you're on. So, that's whenever I post, I get this nice little notification like 28 days and it has little Easter eggs when you get certain number of days in a row, which is fun. So, I'm going to have to add some of this to the to the post later. So, I ripped a little bit, but uh we'll get the recording. So, now that this is all done, we can push the publish button **[09:19]** together. This is a cool device called a daylight computer. Um it's a cool from a startup I'm an investor in through Audrey Capital and Automatic. Think of it like a cross between a Kindle and an iPad. It works in the daylight, hence the name. Doesn't emit any blue blue light. It's great for kids and you can order it on daylightcomputer.com. It runs Android so it's super hackable and you can have apps like Beeper, Day One, WordPress, Jetack, Woo Commerce on it. Um, very very neat device. I **[09:49]** actually have WP Admin loaded right here. You can see you can scroll like super super fast. Um, assuming the Wi-Fi is going to work. It's a Wi-Fi only. Later, I'll update this post with an MP3 recording enclosed in RSS in honor of Dave Winer who spoke here. invented podcasting and RSS. And actually, if you go way back on my RSS feed, I have some like MP3 enclosures from like 2005, 2004, uh some very funny early podcast. **[10:22]** Um I'll also whenever they post this video to WordPress TV or YouTube, I'll share that too and I'll add some links. Thank you. Mercy to you all. If you want to follow more, please check out my blog at ma.tt TT no wno.com just ma.t um I crossost to um ma.t on blue sky and massadon on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter access as photo match. And now we're going to push the button together. Are y'all ready? **[10:52]** >> Yeah. >> Word for you willing. Are you ready to publish? Sure. I think I need to add a category and stuff, but I'll do that later. Tada. Now, let's open it up to some questions. >> How's this going to work? Do we have a mic going around or >> All right, let's get started. **[11:23]** >> Hold on. Hold on. Yeah, we'll get you. And please say your name as well. I'm Michelle and I drove up from Rochester, New York on Wednesday. So, it's good to be here. [Applause] >> I love that our open source extends beyond just publishing websites and words and that we have uh now several years ago the photo directory which is available to people and we are closing in on 30,000 published photos which I think is phenomenal. >> Woohoo. **[11:54]** And >> and all of those are are I think CC0 creative common zero license. So it's compatible with GPL. You can embed it in WordPress themes. You can use it on your site. It's very cool. >> Yeah. You don't have to give, you know, attribution to anybody. You can just use the photos that are there, which I think is beautiful. What are we going to do so that more people know that it exists besides the 10,000 people who have submitted photos? Because I think it's still it's it's growing. It's huge. There's a million beautiful Well, there's almost 30,000 beautiful photos in there, but I don't think enough **[12:25]** people know that it exists yet. So, how can we get the word out to get more people to use it? >> Well, I think first we should ask questions about it at work camps. [Laughter] >> So, check um we're actually just kind of on like a version one of that whole idea. Um, so in my mind for things that we should do is one, I think we need to better integrate finding those photos in the media library because right now it's kind of like you have to click a few buttons to get to it. Two, I would like **[12:57]** for every single WP admin when you upload a photo for you to be able to set the licensing to it and if it is licensed as CC0, we can submit it to the directory. Now, of course, the directory has some extra rules, right? Um, some of these rules I think we might be able to re-examine now. So, for example, right now in the directory, um, we don't allow anything that shows someone's face, right? And the reason for this is even if something's CC0 licensed, um, to have **[13:28]** someone's face, you need like a model release form. There's kind of different laws for that in different countries and things like that. Makes sense, right? You wouldn't want someone to take your photo at a work camp and now like they think it's CZ C and you start being running ads for you know some sort of new medicine or vagger or something like it could be very embarrassing. Um however when a AI creates a face there's no such restrictions there. So something that we could actually start to do because right now I think we have some anti- AAI rules in the photo **[14:00]** directory. I think we should probably start to look at evolving that. So, for example, you could take a picture like I'm me right now, change my face with AI to a face that has never existed and that could be CC0 licensed and anyone in the world could use it. So, I think there's some possibilities there because right now the laws for AI generated stuff vary for country to country. I think right now in America um it can't be sort of copywritten in the same way. At least if it's fully created when a human starts to modify it, it can be. Does someone want to say something about Canada? **[14:32]** Oh, sorry. I heard someone I heard someone in Canada something. I'm not familiar with the laws here yet, but I'm sure I'll look them up later. >> Um, >> so I think that would be a pretty interesting way to open it up right now because uh in theory we should have way more than 30,000 photos. Actually, I have 30,000 photos on my site actually, which are mostly GPL licensed. So, um, how can we >> submit those, right? >> I do need to submit them. Yeah, >> some of them are already in WordPress core. So remember like the 2010 theme which has like the little sheep. People **[15:03]** really love those sheep. Um so so all those photos I I GP licensed a long time ago >> in my in my copious free time. Yes. So um I think those are some of the ideas for it. And also think about another project we do that's not people are as familiar with is the open verse search. Has anyone used open verse yet? It's pretty cool. So, actually, Creative Comments, the nonprofit, used to have a search engine that indexed the entire web and would allow you to find different types of creative comments **[15:34]** content, including network that requires attribution or other things. Um, the foundation actually was shutting this down and we took it over and we now run it on WordPress.org. We renamed it to open verse instead of uh creative comments, but it uh they still index the entire web including audio files, video files, images, all sorts of stuff. So, it's a very very cool project. um it is embedded in WP admin a bit but again you know we probably should combine that with a photo search and other things. Um I do also think there's some opportunities to just use um sort of AI **[16:05]** analysis of all the photos to give a better semantic understanding and a better search than we currently offer which right now is typically monolingual. I don't think it translates well into the you know 60 plus languages that WordPress supports and it's manual tagging. So there might be things to do like a more automated understanding which of course gets better over time. You know, we've started to incorporate um some of the AI models like Gemini and other things on WordPress.org to make us way more efficient on things like plug-in submissions and some code **[16:37]** scanning. And I actually think we're we're very much in chapter one of where this is going to be. It can sort of massively because WordPress.org relies on, you know, volunteers basically. You know, some people who are sponsored but most are not. And um and we're over 60,000 plugins now. We're 10,000 themes. And actually the rate of plug-in submission, I think, has basically doubled since last year. And the team has gotten it down where before they had like a six-month queue, they've got it down to basically under a week. So, you know, we can definitely automate more **[17:08]** and more and more and be vastly more efficient and support way more developers, way more users, way more everything, and probably improve the code quality. So, that's another thing I'm pretty excited about. word.orgf if you want to look it up. >> Thank you, Michelle. >> Hey, Matt. Courtney Robertson. Uh, this week, kind of related to Michelle's question. this week **[17:39]** I saw Nick I'm not sure how to pronounce Nick's last name maybe on Twitter uh kind of recounting how when you go to submit a theme the image that's in the preview for the theme if it is AI generated um that that's getting rejected and the nuances Dion dug into the nuances of this Dion's one of our longtime core commit core leads etc in the project a hidden gem if you haven't encountered Dion yet. Please find Dion and meet him. **[18:11]** >> Um, so, uh, Nick is learning the legal ramifications of having an AI generated image as part of the theme directory. Like what we have to do in the theme directory because if the image that's in the theme is generated by AI, there's a lot of legal stuff yet about can we do it, can we not? And we would all like to just be like, yeah, whatever, move on. But then there's some other ramifications. Do you is that on your radar? Is that like I know we've looked at criteria of what **[18:41]** could go into the theme repo and some of those fields and I don't know if I mean if once we get into legal stuff that's maybe beyond your eye. >> Well, fortunately I'm getting really good at legal stuff. Wasn't on my road map for uh for the past year or two, but um yeah. Um so this is very much an evolving area and the laws from country to country do vary a lot. Um however there's also some common sense things you can apply and I **[19:13]** think that there is a sort of rapidly um we're not putting the genie back in the bottle with AI stuff. one just the companies like OpenAI are just too big to fail now like the entire economy and growth is based on these systems the infrastructure buildouts the massive data centers everything it's kind of incredible not to mention the usage like it's really transforming like translation code so much um now WordPress.org or particularly because **[19:43]** it's volunteers. A lot of these things um those folks aren't comfortable making big policy decisions like this that could have ramifications. Um they already put a lot on the line, you know. Um there's, you know, I kind of shield everyone from a legal point of view and everything like that, but in theory, people could go after them and and we have had instances where some of these folks can get harassed by someone who gets like something rejected or banned from the forums for spamming or stuff like that. So we do try to provide some um some shelter. Um now on this issue in **[20:17]** particular, Nick is someone I I talk to almost every day. He's he's he's doing some very very cool stuff across WordPress and lots of innovative things with themes. Um I like that he pushes the boundaries. So for example, right now theme directory is fairly conservative in for example with the intention that we want the demo to look like the theme when you install it. But we don't want it too reliant on like we're eating a plugin. And part of the intention there is that we want for WordPress, you'll be able to switch between themes really easily. It's one **[20:48]** of the beauties of it. You know, you can kind of take your entire blog site, click a button, you have an a brand new design. Now, also themes is they start to incorporate more advanced functionality, which is pretty cool. Um, those sorts of things aren't allowed. And in fact, one of my favorite examples of something that was in the theme directory a long time ago and is not allowed on the current guidelines, although I think we've made an exception, is the command line theme. Has anyone seen this? You load it up, it's like a blinking terminal, and you **[21:18]** interact with it by typing in commands like list post and you can type help and it gives you all the things. This is so cool. By the way, I don't think it complies with like any of our standards like accessibility probably break some rules there like all sorts of things. So, I think part of it is, you know, how can we remove and I think Nick even did a post about this like rules versus guidelines or guard rails. So, I think part of the way we can do this is as a marketplace right now. There's certain **[21:49]** things that we don't allow. And in fact, those rules just get they creep up and get more and more bigger every time, right? because each sub team comes in and says, "Oh, I need my rules to be a requirement." Um, actually accessibility is a great great example of that. Now, I think what's interesting in marketplace is we can move these things from being maybe rules to being like tags. So, for example, if you were like a university and you only wanted to see themes that were wagg 2.0 or higher compliant, which by the way, some pretty **[22:19]** strict requirements that don't apply to many websites for good reasons. Um, but that was a requirement. you should be able to do that as a search or if you want to see themes that are orange or all these sorts of things like I feel like those should just be tags in the marketplace and use the rating system as well to sort of allow open up what we can host but then give better tools for people to search and uh choose what they want. Thanks. Uh, just a shout out. Please let Nick know that a lot of us are reading what he's putting forward. Um, and I **[22:51]** forget his exact website domain. It's iconic. >> It's spelled in an interesting way. Yeah. Yeah. >> It has Nick in his name, too. I wonder where he got that idea. >> Nick. >> I read as iconic, but it's Io Nick. >> I Nick. Cool. And Nick Hamsy. H A M Z. So, uh, Google him. He's got some really cool themes. He's done a lot of cool projects. A bunch of Wapoos. Actually, I'm talking to him about how we can upgrade all the Woo stuff. By the way, y'all have some awesome ones at this event. I got the little swag pack with **[23:23]** all the stickers and everything. Like, I look love all the sponsors have different ones and there's like you have like four or five of them. I'm actually going to put the sticker on my laptop later. Probably the WCF one. So, keep an eye out for that. >> Okay. Paul, uh, I want to talk about Henry Dolly, the plugin. >> Oh, yeah. Um, it's been it's in court, shipped with core. Um, >> which by the way, people tried to get rid of because of copyright issues. >> Yeah, >> there's actually some interesting things we did to get around that and make it fair use. **[23:54]** >> Um, should it be removed? >> You're asking the wrong guy. >> Well, it's there because nobody wants to ask you to come and remove it. >> No, they ask me like once a year. Um, if it stays, perhaps we could re redo the description to indicate that it's historic. It was the first plug in a proof of concept, but please don't copy it. It's no longer good code. I **[24:24]** completely disagree with that. >> Tell me why it's not good code. >> Because it doesn't use classes or object orientation or like why is it bad code? >> It's not accessible. translatable. >> It is translatable. It actually goes through the translation functions. >> Translation, haven't strings. >> That's not true. >> This is true. >> Then it was removed because it used to have it was one of the first things we did the underscore underscore for. **[24:55]** >> Look this up for you. >> Well, let's look it up later. Um, >> but don't it's not true that I No one's ever asked me. It does get asked about once a year. There's lots of issues on the bug tracker about it. And if there's ways to improve it, like make it translatable, I think that's great. And I know people have actually used that before to also just change it lyrics to like put different songs in there, different things they want to say. >> Yeah. When it becomes translatable, the poly polygraphs are going to have more fun with the translation strings. **[25:26]** >> Yeah. But they don't have to, right? That's the fun thing. >> Um, then look look forward to some patches then. I think >> now what I don't want to do is I don't want to make it like super complicated. >> So I know we did something like we moved it to a subdirectory. It actually just used to be a single file. >> Um so there have been some minor upgrades there. But the whole idea is to show how easy it is to use the actions and filter system inside of WordPress. >> No actions or filters in that plugin. >> Yeah, that's how it hooks into WP admin. **[25:58]** >> Oh, it uses one. >> Yeah, that's that's the idea on the What's that? >> Sorry, there's no filter on the strip. >> But we can add a filter on the string. Um, and maybe it's it is actually a filter and not translation might be actually better cuz like you said, like maybe the the pot system is not appropriate for that. Um, although why not? Like I'm sure you can translate those lyrics to French and other things. They would they would be meaningful. And also the connection to jazz musicians. It was one of the first like famous jazz songs by one of my idols, Louis **[26:28]** Armstrong. And you know since then we've named every uh release of WordPress in honor of a jazz musician. So that's one of the cool things about WordPress versus other software is it has soul. You know it's true. Code is poetry. You know we honor musicians and artists. You know one of the first blocks we did in Gutenberg was actually a poetry block, a pros block. Has anyone used this one? It's one of these things people always like we should remove this. But um but actually I I did it cuz I took a writing poetry course and the author was **[27:00]** complaining how when she posted to it's a famous poet. She said when she posts to WordPress um she couldn't have the formatting correctly cuz you know how a lot of poetry will use like interesting formatting or the white space is significance and so or spacing um that has like kind of unusual things. So kind of the fault behavior of the editor which takes like multiple line breaks and combines into one and other things all that was being collapsed and so I said oh I think it's called the pros uh block uh but it's basically a block inside Gutenberg that preserves whites space kind of like a pre tag and um and **[27:33]** it's used by some of the poets out there. So sometimes we do these really niche features um for like very high-end users. So, for example, I think three or four of the living fields medalist um use uh WordPress. Actually, WordPress.com. Does anyone know about the Fields Medal? A couple people. So, it's it's a math award. It's more prestigious than a Nobel Prize. They give away a Nobel Prize every year. This happens only every four years. And some of the smartest people in the world have it like Terrence Ta who is, if you don't **[28:04]** know about him, look him up. He is probably one of like the top five smartest people in the world. um amazing, brilliant mathematician. Uh actually just got defunded, but he the Jim Simons uh foundation just uh took it over. It's going to be sponsoring all his work, which is very exciting. If you don't know Jim Simons as well or J Simons, look that up. He's the founder of Renaissance Technologies. Has anyone heard of Renaissance Tech? Rent, one of two people. Oh, I'm telling you all sorts of cool stuff now. So Renaissance Technologies is the most **[28:36]** successful hedge fund ever in history. They show I think annualized returns of over like 40% of like over 35 years. It's actually a sort of physicist of mathematicians that uh came together. Jay Simons was one of them and basically said uh I think he came he went out of business or bankrupt or something. He was like gosh I need to make some money. Maybe I'll check out this stocks and trading things. and they started out and they actually did really well but then in the crash I think in the 80s it all **[29:08]** crashed and so Jay's sort of big uh big innovation was he invented algorithmic trading so he basically said we have humans making decisions and one they're too slow and two we don't know why it's working and so he's like there must be some fundamental sort of physics or rules of the trading markets and the business systems and so RENT started to gather the most data of anyone in the world. The next hedge fund to do this well was uh Bridgewwater, but basically they started getting data sets like **[29:39]** shipping back to the 1400s like really obscure things. They go get stuffs out of books and develop all this proprietary trading data, use it to map the economy and essentially, you know, create these models that uh the mathematicians would come up. Um you can only be an investor in this fund if you work for the company, which is pretty interesting. And um of course everyone there is like a deca millionaire and everything now. They they're only like I forget how many employees like like 200 or 150 or something really really small. So legendary. Um and he passed away a **[30:10]** few years ago. But his foundation actually funds a ton of fundamental research in physics and math. And so he's just someone I I really look up to and admire. I blogged about him I think earlier last year. He reminds me a lot of my dad just kind of the way he looks and talks. So my dad passed away in 2016. So I really like watching J. Simon stuff. So, >> so let's add a block block for hello. >> Oh, I forgot to say the point of the fields malice. The reason the fields mal use WordPress is we support a latte plugin. So, latte is basically like a **[30:41]** markup language to doing it for doing advanced math formulas. We're actually working on an update to this to be a bit more you user friendly. But um yeah, because we added in uh I think 2005 the support for this blog cuz Terrence Stal started a free WordPress.com account and he was complaining about this and embedding these images and I followed his blog. I was like, "Oh, we should make a blog for this." At that time, a short code and this short code is actually built into Jetack. So anyone who runs Jetack has access to this and it's now good block as well. So uh we're at a university so maybe tell the math **[31:13]** department here. It'd be awesome to get some more mathematicians and folks on WordPress. >> Matt, I just want to give you a heads up. We got about five minutes left. So, this is the >> All right, rapid fire. We'll try to do some fast ones. I mean, you you'll be fine. I just need to talk a little less. >> I'm Chris. I work Pantheon and as you obviously know, Pantheon uh does Drupal stuff. So I don't work but I have been watching uh particularly the evolution of uh their development work in AI uh **[31:44]** specifically integration in like the Drupal admin and also the how the Drupal CMS has sort of made onboarding like new users to Drupal uh and things in experience builder that they're building that as we gather here today um probably most WordPressers might not be aware that there's actually Drupal con Europe happening in Vienna right now and there's lots of news that I have coming out of that um and and there's a lot of really interesting and exciting things happening in that Drupal space and I was wondering I know you've had conversations with Three uh because at **[32:14]** least says that you've had conversations we talk semi-regularly you know there's only there's like a dozen people in the world who like their whole life is creating CMS's Dave's actually one of them in the room like we're just going to do it the rest of our lives and Dre is one of them so I have incredible respect and uh we actually did a talk together with Mike Little the co-founder of WordPress. So if you look up um Dre Mon, you'll you'll find this. It's a pretty cool talk actually. We got to talk about the history and everything. So >> So the question here is to what degree **[32:45]** are you looking at or thinking about the types of uh developments that are happening in Drupal but all their CMSs as well and what we as WordPress can learn from those other ecosystems. >> Oh, that's a great question. Um, actually, you know, I was I got to look up the user ID, but I think I was one of the first couple hundred people registered on drop.org, which is the predecessor to uh drupal.org. Um, and Dre was actually at that Northern Voice conference in 2006. He has a a post **[33:17]** about it on his blog with some photos. Um, so yeah, I keep in pretty close contact with a number of the other CMS. Well, I won't say close contact, but usually about once a year we'll get together with Anthony from Squarespace, Toby from Shopify, with Dre. Whenever we're in the same country or I'm over in Europe or Boston, I try to look them up and um and I test out things pretty regularly. So, I haven't seen the very very latest stuff with Drupal, but I think I checked out one of the last iterations they did. Um, I love that with companies like Pantheon now do both **[33:48]** WordPress and Drupal. We're getting a lot of overlap between the communities. So, I would say please bring this stuff over. I mean, we're both PHP, we're both GPL. It's one of the reasons I've always really supported Drupal. Even though we're we're kind of mutually exclusive solutions, but I think it's really I'm always going to be supportive of the other open source projects. So, um, yeah, for those people overlap like yourself, please uh make some suggestions. You know, start a P2 post or do a blog post about it. we'll get in the newsletter or maybe even if there's something specific that we can bring over code-wise, we can start to get that into into the uh track and bug tracker **[34:20]** and everything. Cool. I think Drupal also has a plugin to use Gutenberg, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah. Which pretty cool. It was one of the reasons we designed Goodutenberg to actually be portable to other CMS's and why we've been putting it under license, dual licensing it so it can be embedded even more places, not just GPL. Forgive the AI translation of my words, but I'll help you be concise. Here's the question. Uh, really, really simple. Um, no, it's not. WordPress has always thrived because of its open **[34:51]** communitydriven ethos, but as the ecosystem grows, we're seeing more like uh large profit driven players who don't necessarily share the values. How can individual contributors and agencies like ours like actively help protect WordPress and uphold the values and ethics that have sustained it from bad actors uh and and people who might try to exploit the community? And do you see room for something like more formal like a certification for individuals and agencies that define what being a good **[35:22]** actor is >> uh to help educate clients and even the market to help kind of protect uh in a more proactive way from that those sorts of bad actors? >> Well, that's a that's a big question. So, I'll try to I'll try to answer quickly. So first I will say I I don't want to say that there's bad actors. I think there might be bad actions sometimes and just temporarily bad actors who hopefully will be good in the future. So you know every saint has a past, every sinner has a future. So I **[35:54]** never want to define like any company or any person is like permanently good or bad. Um let's talk about actions. So second, I think with these actions, we can start to create incentive systems and it's part of what we're doing with five for the future, which is basically saying like you contribute back, which also implies that you're like not violating the GPL or something like that. So we've got like the hard stuff like if you violate the GPL, you're going to get a letter violate the trademark, you know, that was more of a legal thing, but also the gentle stuff like how can we encourage a good behavior by giving people higher rankings in the directory or in the **[36:26]** showcase, for example. Um, then finally, I'll just say vote with your wallet. So, each one of you here has the ability to strongly influence these companies. By the way, if they're commercially motivated, great. Let's commercially motivate them to do the right thing by giving more business to the good companies and less business to the other companies. Um, this has actually been happening a lot the past year. Uh, I think I can say this. There's a site called WordPress engineer.com which is currently tracking a number of sites that have left a certain host. It's about to cross 100,000 about to **[36:58]** cross 100,000 that have switched to others host and over 74,000 that have gone offline since September of last year. We actually used to make all this data public. It was all the whole list was on there. Um they got a court order so that the way like the data could be fact checked by press or other people. There was actually a court order that made us take that that down. So again trying to muzzle free speech and and transparency, but you know we're allowed to keep that site up. So check it out while you can. Do we have time for one more? Is this the last one? **[37:29]** >> Time for two more. >> Okay. >> Don't think this is qualifies as rapid fire, but it's but it's a softball because I uh I wanted to Well, first of all, I came to WordPress as an open-source advocate. I became a V2 user. >> Wow. >> That's how I got to WordPress. So, um, my all-time favorite WordPress release is one part five straight on because it has a, uh, it has a what I consider a killer feature. It's not the **[38:00]** one you're thinking. It's pages. >> Yeah. >> Because as of >> 1.5, right? >> Yeah. I remember introducing that. Originally, I had a different CMS I was going to release called content press and um or multi-attern. I wasn't sure what they call it. And so I had this whole other CMS and I was like man we just build this into WordPress even though it's a blogging system I think having this pages feature will like put us ahead of mobile type and others. So glad we did. I think we introduced themes in that uh release too. >> Yeah themes was the was kind of the obvious uh you know big feature for it but pages is the point at which I would **[38:33]** say that WordPress went from blogging engine to CN. >> So that's that's my favorite. And what I was going to ask is >> so it's all been downhill since then. you know, it's just that was it was such a pivotal moment that um that helped with WordPress's uh you know, meteoric adoption rates and all of these and and for me personally at that time, it allowed me to take a whole bunch of static HTML and bring it into WordPress so I could manage it so much more **[39:04]** easily. >> So my question was, can you tell us, you know, a little story or give us some fun facts about that release? So, softball question unless it really taxes your memory. >> Um, well, like I said, luckily I blog. So, I I'll say that my two two of my favorites ever in history are 1.2 and 1.5, which actually came out right after each other cuz we skipped a few releases, I think, um, because I think it was a time when we actually got pretty delayed. So, 1.2 introduced the hooks and filter system, which was **[39:36]** pretty revolutionary, I think, still as a unique programming paradigm. But before that, to modify WordPress, you'd actually like open up files and change lines. And that was and I used to publish these. We called them hacks. They they were then like I think in 1.0 or something, we introduced a hacks file which made it a little bit better. But then this plug-in and theme or plug-in hook system allowed a separation between the core and the add-ons and but you could go really deep to modify things. Then 1.5 was uh themes I believe. So 1.2 **[40:08]** two was like plugins, 1.5 was themes, and then the other big one, I think it was 2 or 2 something, was was when we introduced Wizzywig for the first time, which by the way was so controversial. People did not want Wizzywig, basic Wizywig in WordPress, which was funny like 10 years later when they're like, "Okay, good Scutenberg things even worse." I was like, "Oh, I've been through this before." So, I think that those are kind of the fun stories around there. Um, again, some of this stuff was pretty slow to be adopted at first. It was very much informed. I I wasn't certain that this should be rolled into WordPress or whether it should be **[40:38]** separate uh separate software. Um but I'm glad we did and it was informed with this question about other things. You know, movable type was a dominant thing at the time and their sort of static page functionality wasn't very robust. And so the other thing that WordPress did around this time that I thought was pretty awesome was really clean URLs. So where prior you know people would have crusty URLs like they'd have an ID and the number or you'd have for WordPress the defaults it's still there actually is like question mark P equals 1 2 3. So creating the the mapping **[41:10]** system where we map like dates, a hierarchy and these clean slugs to uh the pages in the back and the routing system essentially I think was really crucial and I love that URLs from 20 something years ago still work or redirect to proper things today. So I think that's really really important. So thank you. All right, last one. >> Hey Matt, I'm Raquel and I love kitties and surprises. There's just some facts. Um, and I have **[41:40]** a another question regarding around the community and I wanted to know how do you feel? What are your raw thoughts on independent WordPress events that are happening in our space now? >> And do you want to disclose anything there? >> I mean I I um am the one responsible for Presscom. >> Yeah. So independent WordPress event. So yeah. Uh, how do you feel, Link? Um, and just curious as how we can all get better together just tends to be my motto. **[42:11]** >> I'm very much like a thousand flowers bloom kind of guy. So, uh, thank you for I know it's a huge labor of love doing something press. I assume that you've been very active in in work camps and other things in the past and hopefully with, you know, work camp US going to Phoenix, we'll have an opportunity to uh to, you know, do some work together there. >> Totally. So I think that's my fundamental you know raw thoughts. Um you know I do think about you know what do we want to encourage in the world as **[42:41]** well. So I I would just encourage you as an independent organizer you know there's some beauty there that you don't have to follow the rules or guidelines necessarily and it's commercial event as well like the tickets cost more than a word camp and stuff right >> how much is a ticket actually >> depending on early bird to total uh 700 average. Yeah. And so it's a bit of a smaller event, right? That's part of what people like about it. So the ticket price actually becomes like a little bit of a barrier to entry. It's more intimate. You get some really awesome attendees and talks there. Um as I think about this as well, just like um you **[43:12]** know what what do we want to see more of in the world and you know trying to focus time um particularly my time to those types of things. So that's why I came to work