Matt: WordCamp Canada Talk

How­dy and bon­jour! First, thank you so much, mer­ci beau­coup, for having me at your Word­Camp. 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 Word­Camp. But sin­ce the orga­ni­zers have given me a bit of your time, I will try to make the best of it.

I love Cana­da. I first came here for the Nor­t­hern Voice con­fe­rence in 2006. Was anyo­ne at that one? I think Dave Winer was actual­ly the­re. It was a pret­ty awe­so­me one. What’s that?

[Here I think Dave said he wasn’t at that one, but a dif­fe­rent con­fe­rence, but can’t remember.]

Well, that’s why we blog. My memo­ry is not that good. [laughs] By the way, I think this week is your anni­ver­sa­ry, right?

Dave Winer: It was actual­ly a cou­ple of weeks ago—31 years.

MM: Oh, wow. Thir­ty-one years. Round of applau­se! I think why I thought it was your anni­ver­sa­ry is that on my blog’s rela­ted posts, it show­ed a post from 2014 that was con­gra­tu­la­ting you on your 20^th becau­se I think The Regis­ter or someone did a nice article.

So yeah, I’ve sin­ce been back dozens of times, inclu­ding seve­ral sum­mers in Mont­re­al, at the jazz fes­ti­val there—they also do Le Fes­ti­val Haï­ti en Folie, and Just For Laughs—and a few times here in Otta­wa, whe­re I’m on the board of a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­ny cal­led Field Effect. We might even have some Field Effect peo­p­le here—oh, hi! Thanks for coming.

Let me give a litt­le update on what I’ve been up to. My life’s 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 and Pressa­ble, and allow others to host it with WP Cloud—a cool product—and we use Jet­pack 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, Word­Camps, WordPress.net, which pro­ba­b­ly some of y’all haven’t heard of, et cete­ra, et cetera.

On the social side of publi­shing, I have Tumb­lr, which is a micro­blog­ging social net­work, but right now it’s on a dif­fe­rent tech­ni­cal stack. I need to switch it over to Word­Press, but it’s a 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: Day One and WordPress.com Stu­dio and Word­Press Play­ground. Day One is a ful­ly encrypt­ed, shared, and syn­chro­ni­zed blog­ging and jour­na­ling app that runs on every device and on the web. You can also have shared encrypt­ed jour­nals with others. It uses the same encryp­ti­on as one pass­word. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea—for exam­p­le, to wri­te this talk. Its edi­tor is not as good as Guten­berg yet, but it’s pret­ty decent at allo­wing mul­ti­mo­dal input—which means you can record voice notes, draw things, etc.—and cap­tu­ring it all. It’s most­ly repla­ced Ever­no­te, Simp­len­o­te, and even pri­va­te P2s for me. It has some fun fea­tures, like when you make a new ent­ry it records, the loca­ti­on, what music you’re lis­tening to 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 in the WC admin or the Jet­pack app if I want to publish some­thing; that could also be made smoot­her in the future.

So WordPress.com Stu­dio is built on an open source pro­ject cal­led Play­ground that we crea­ted to allow you to spin up Word­Press in a WASM con­tai­ner in about 30 seconds, right insi­de your brow­ser. Who’s tried Play­ground or Stu­dio? It’s kind of wild, right? You know how hard it’s been to 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 builds an iOS app cal­led Block­no­tes. It’s a lot like Simp­len­o­te, but it uses a Guten­berg edi­tor, and it’s enti­re­ly a Word­Press play­ground instance—the enti­re iOS app.

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, cross-plat­form, and run the same thing on the web—it’s kind of like a pro­mi­se from back in the day of Java or other things, React, Nati­ve. It’s now very pos­si­ble with this Word­Press WASM stuff. WASM stands for web assem­bly.

The main dis­trac­tions and things hol­ding back Word­Press right now are the legal attacks from WP Engi­ne and Sil­ver Lake—I can’t com­ment on that, but stay tun­ed for some major updates soon.

I for­got to put this in my post—WooCommerce! On the com­mer­ce side, there’s, of cour­se, Woo­Com­mer­ce, which is very, very exci­ting. You can think of it like an open-source Shop­i­fy, our enablers here in Otta­wa. It now pro­ces­ses over $30 bil­li­on of GMV (gross mer­chant volu­me) 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 plug­in, so pret­ty exci­ting. Woo­Com­mer­ce is now on about 8% of all web­sites in the world—WordPress is 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, we have this pro­duct cal­led Bee­per. Anyo­ne tried out Bee­per yet? We got a Bee­per super-user here, actual­ly, in Robert. So Bee­per basi­cal­ly takes all the dif­fe­rent mes­sa­ging apps—WhatsApp, Tele­gram, Insta­gram DMs, Lin­ke­dIn DMs, did you ever check those?—and it brings it all into one app, one inter­face, kind of like a Super­hu­man for mes­sa­ging, and gives you cool fea­tures across all of them. Now this is obvious­ly a pret­ty hard tech­ni­cal chall­enge, becau­se we have to rever­se engi­neer all the dif­fe­rent net­works for ever­y­thing. But check it out, it’s a pret­ty fun litt­le app. It’s, free for up to a cou­ple accounts, and paid after that.

There’s also an open source com­po­nent of that as well. 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 Kakao­Talk in Asia. Peo­p­le also want to do dating apps, which I guess have mes­sa­ging plat­forms. So it’d be pret­ty fun to have ever­y­thing all in one.

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. Actual­ly been going every day sin­ce Word­Camp US, with one missed day in the­re. I got very, very inspi­red at Word­Camp US. It was a fan­ta­stic event. I got to hang out a lot and go to a bunch of ses­si­ons, and it inspi­red me to blog a lot more. If you run Jet­pack, there’s actual­ly a pret­ty cool fea­ture whe­re the noti­fi­ca­ti­ons will tell you what kind of streak you’re on. So 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 gon­na have to add some of this to the post later—I rif­fed a litt­le bit. We’ll get the recor­ding. So now that this is all done, we can push the publish but­ton together.

This is a cool device cal­led a Day­light com­pu­ter. So cool. It’s from a start­up I’m inves­ted in through Audrey Capi­tal and Auto­mat­tic. Think of it like a cross bet­ween a Kind­le and an iPad. It works in the day­light, hence the name—it doesn’t emit any blue light. It’s gre­at for kids. You can order it on DaylightComputer.com. It runs Android, so it’s super hackable. You can have apps like Bee­per, Day One, Word­Press, Jet­pack, Woo­Com­mer­ce on it. Very, very neat device. I actual­ly have WP Admin loa­ded right here; you can see you can scroll like super, super fast. Soon the wifi is going to work—it’s a wifi-only device.

Later I’ll update this post with an mp3 recor­ding enc­lo­sed an RSS in honor of Dave Winer, who spo­ke here, who inven­ted pod­cas­ting and RSS. And actual­ly, if you go way back in my RSS feeds, I have some mp3 enclo­sures from 2004 and 2005, some very fun­ny ear­ly pod­casts. Also, when­ever they post this video to Word­Press TV or You­Tube, I’ll share that too, and I’ll add some links. Thank you. Mer­ci beau­coup! If you want to fol­low more. Plea­se check out my blog at ma.tt. No WWW, no .com. Just ma.tt. I cross post to ma.tt on Blues­ky and Mast­o­don and on Tumb­lr, Insta­gram and Twitter/X at @photomatt.

And now we’re going to push the but­ton tog­e­ther. Y’all rea­dy? Mur­phy wil­ling, are you rea­dy to publish? think I need to add a cate­go­ry and stuff, but I’ll do that later.

Q: Hi, I’m Michel­le Fre­chet­te, 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, for now seve­ral years, the pho­to direc­to­ry, which is available to people—and we are clo­sing in on 30,000 published pho­tos, which I think is phenomenal.

MM: And all of tho­se are, I think, CC0, Crea­ti­ve Com­mons Zero-licen­sed. So it’s com­pa­ti­ble with GPL, embedded in Word­Press the­mes. You can use it on your site. It’s very cool.

Q: Yeah, you don’t have to give attri­bu­ti­on to any­bo­dy. You can just use the pho­tos that are the­re, which I think is good. 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 there’s almost 30,000 beau­tiful pho­tos in the­re, but I don’t think enough peo­p­le know that it exists yet. So how can we get the word out, to get more peo­p­le to use it?

MM: Well, I think first we should ask ques­ti­ons about it at WordCamps.

Q: I’m on it.

MM: So check. We’re actual­ly just kind of on like a Ver­si­on One of that who­le idea. So in my mind, for things that we should do, is 1: 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. 2: I would like, 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. And of cour­se, the direc­to­ry has some extra rules, right? Some of the­se rules, I think we might be able to re-exami­ne now. So for exam­p­le, right now, in the direc­to­ry, we don’t allow any­thing that shows someone’s face, right? And the reason for this is, even if something’s CC0-licen­sed, to have someone’s face, you need a model release form. There’s dif­fe­rent laws for that in dif­fe­rent count­ries and things like that make sen­se, right? You wouldn’t want someone to take your pho­to at a Word­Camp, and now they think it’s CC0, and you start see­ing them run­ning ads for, you know, some sort of new medi­ci­ne or Via­gra or some­thing; it could be very embar­ras­sing. Howe­ver, when 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-AI rules in the pho­to direc­to­ry, I think we should pro­ba­b­ly start to look at evol­ving that. So, for exam­p­le, you can take a pic­tu­re of 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 from coun­try to coun­try. I think right now in Ame­ri­ca, it can’t be copy­writ­ten, at least in the same way. At least if it’s ful­ly crea­ted; when a human starts to modi­fy it, it can be. Some­ti­mes I’m not fami­li­ar with the laws here yet, but I’m sure I’ll look them up later. So I think that would be a pret­ty inte­res­t­ing way to open it up right now, becau­se in theo­ry, we should have way more than 30,000 pho­tos. Actual­ly, I have 30,000 pho­tos on my site, which are most­ly GPL-licen­sed. So how can we—yeah, I do need to sub­mit them. Some of them are alre­a­dy in Word­Press Core. So remem­ber the Twen­ty Ten the­me, which has like the litt­le sheep. Peo­p­le real­ly love tho­se sheep. So all tho­se pho­tos I GPL-licen­sed a long time ago—in my copious free time, yes.

So I think tho­se are some of the ide­as for it. And also think about ano­ther pro­ject we do that peo­p­le aren’t as fami­li­ar with, Open­ver­se search. Has anyo­ne used Open­ver­se yet? It’s pret­ty cool. So actual­ly, Crea­ti­ve Com­mons, the non­pro­fit, used to have a search engi­ne that inde­xed the enti­re web and would allow you to find dif­fe­rent types of Crea­ti­ve Com­mons con­tent, inclu­ding that requi­res attri­bu­ti­on or other things. The foun­da­ti­on actual­ly was shut­ting this down, and we took it over, and we now run it on WordPress.org We ren­a­med it to Open­ver­se ins­tead of Crea­ti­ve Com­mons, but they still index the enti­re web, inclu­ding audio files, video files, images, all sorts of stuff. So it’s a very, very cool pro­ject. It is embedded in WP Admin a bit, but again, we pro­ba­b­ly should com­bi­ne that with a pho­to search and other things.

I also think there’s some oppor­tu­ni­ties to use AI ana­ly­sis of all the pho­tos to give a bet­ter seman­tic under­stan­ding and a bet­ter search that we curr­ent­ly offer, which right now is typi­cal­ly monol­lin­gu­al, 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 star­ted to incor­po­ra­te 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 scan­ning. I actual­ly think we’re very much in chap­ter one of whe­re this is going to be. It can sort of mas­si­ve­ly [grow]—because WordPress.org reli­es on vol­un­teers, basi­cal­ly. Some peo­p­le are spon­so­red, but most are not. And we’re over 60,000 plug­ins now, or 10,000 the­mes, and actual­ly, the rate of plug­in sub­mis­si­on, I think, has basi­cal­ly dou­bled sin­ce last year, and the team has got­ten it down whe­re befo­re they had a six-month queue, they’ve got it down to basi­cal­ly under a week. So you know, we can defi­ni­te­ly auto­ma­te more and more and more and be vast­ly more effi­ci­ent and sup­port way more deve­lo­pers and more users, way more ever­y­thing, and pro­ba­b­ly impro­ve the code qua­li­ty. So that’s ano­ther thing I’m pret­ty exci­ted about.

Q: I love it. WordPress.org/photos, if you want to look at it.

MM: Thank you, Michelle!

Q: Hey, Matt. Court­ney Robert­son. Kind of rela­ted to Michelle’s ques­ti­on: This week, I saw Nick Ham­ze recoun­ting how when you go to sub­mit a the­me, the image that’s in the pre­view for the the­me, if it is AI-gene­ra­ted that that’s get­ting rejec­ted and the nuan­ces Dion dug into—Dion is one of our long time core com­mi­t­ers, core leads, etc, in the pro­ject. A hid­den gem. If you haven’t encoun­te­red Dion yet, plea­se find Dion and meet him. So 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 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. Is that on your radar? I know we’ve loo­ked at cri­te­ria of what could go into the the­me repo and some of tho­se deals. I don’t know if. I mean, once we get into legal stuff, that’s may­be bey­ond you and I.

MM: Well, unfort­u­na­te­ly, I’m get­ting real­ly good at legal stuff. [Laugh­ter] It wasn’t on my road­map for the past year or two, but yeah. So this is very much an evol­ving area, and the laws from coun­try to coun­try do vary a lot. Howe­ver, there’s also some com­mon sen­se things you can app­ly, and I think that the­re is a sort of rapidly—we’re not put­ting the genie back in the bot­t­le with AI stuff. One, just the com­pa­nies; like, Ope­nAI is just too big to fail now. The enti­re eco­no­my and growth is based on the­se sys­tems. The infra­struc­tu­re buil­douts, mas­si­ve data cen­ters, ever­y­thing. It’s kind of incre­di­ble. Not to men­ti­on the usa­ge, like it’s real­ly trans­forming trans­la­ti­on, code, so much.

Now, WordPress.org, par­ti­cu­lar­ly, becau­se a lot of this is vol­un­teers, tho­se folks aren’t com­for­ta­ble making big poli­cy decis­i­ons like this that could have rami­fi­ca­ti­ons. They alre­a­dy put a lot on the line. I kind of shield ever­yo­ne from a legal point of view and ever­y­thing like that, but in theo­ry, peo­p­le could go after them, and we have had ins­tances whe­re some of the­se folks can get oppres­sed by someone who gets some­thing rejec­ted, or ban­ned from the forums for spamming or stuff like that. So we do try to pro­vi­de some shelter.

Now, on this issue, in par­ti­cu­lar, Nick is someone I talk to almost every day. He’s doing some very, very cool stuff across Word­Press and some inno­va­ti­ve things with the­mes. I like that he pushes the boun­da­ries. So for exam­p­le, right now, the 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, or we don’t want it to rely on a plug­in. And part of the inten­ti­on the­re is that for Word­Press, we want you to be able to switch bet­ween the­mes real­ly easi­ly. So one of the beau­ties of it is that you can take your enti­re blog site, click a but­ton, and you have a brand new design. Now the­mes, as they start to incor­po­ra­te more advan­ced functionality—which is pret­ty cool—those sorts of things aren’t allo­wed. 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, that 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 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. [laugh­ter] Like acces­si­bi­li­ty, it pro­ba­b­ly breaks some rules the­re, all sorts of things.

So I think part of it is, you know, how can we move? And I think Nick even did a post about this, like rules ver­sus guar­drails. So I think part of the way we can do this is as a mar­ket­place. Right now, there’s cer­tain things that we don’t allow, and in fact, tho­se rules creep up and get big­ger every time, right? Becau­se each sub-team comes in and says, “Oh, I need my rules to be requi­re­ments.” Actual­ly, acces­si­bi­li­ty is a gre­at, gre­at exam­p­le of that. Now, I think what’s inte­res­t­ing in a mar­ket­place is we can move the­se things from being rules to being like tags. So for exam­p­le, if you were a uni­ver­si­ty, you only want to see the­mes that were WCAG 2.0 or hig­her compliant—which are by the way, some pret­ty strict requi­re­ments that don’t app­ly to many web­sites, for good reasons, 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: I feel like tho­se should just be tags in the mar­ket­place, and use the rating sys­tem as well to open up what we can host, but then give bet­ter tools for peo­p­le to search and choo­se what they want.

Q: Thanks. Just a shout out. Plea­se let Nick know that a lot of us are rea­ding what he’s put­ting for­ward, and I for­get his exact web­site domain. It’s Ico­nick.

MM: It’s spel­led in an inte­res­t­ing way.

Q: Yeah, it has his name in it. I won­der whe­re he got that idea. [Laugh­ter]

MM: Yeah. So it reads as “ico­nick.” Nick Ham­ze, H‑A-M-Z‑E. Goog­le him. He’s got some real­ly cool the­mes. He’s done a lot of cool pro­jects, a bunch of Wapu­us. Actual­ly, I’m tal­king to them about how we can upgrade all the Wapuu stuff. By the way, y’all have some awe­so­me ones at this event. I got the litt­le swag pack with all the sti­ckers and ever­y­thing. All the spon­sors have dif­fe­rent ones. You have like, four or five of them. I’m actual­ly gon­na put this sti­cker on my lap­top later, pro­ba­b­ly that WCF one, so keep an eye out for that.

Q: Paul Bear­ne. I want to talk about Hel­lo Dol­ly, the plug­in, which ship­ped with Core.

MM: 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.

Q: Should it be removed?

MM: You’re asking the wrong guy.

Q: Well, it’s the­re becau­se nobo­dy wants to ask you to come and remo­ve it.

MM: No, they ask me like once a year. [Laugh­ter]

Q: If it stays, per­haps we could redo the descrip­ti­on to indi­ca­te that it’s historic—it was the first plug­in, it was the pro­of of concept—but plea­se don’t copy it. It’s no lon­ger good code.

MM: I com­ple­te­ly dis­agree with that. Tell me why it’s not good code. Becau­se it doesn’t use clas­ses or object ori­en­ta­ti­on? Why is it bad code?

Q: It’s not acces­si­ble, it’s not translatable.

MM: It is trans­lata­ble. It actual­ly goes through the trans­la­ti­on functions.

Q: There’s no trans­la­ti­on around the strings.

MM: That’s not true.

Q: ’Tis true. [Laugh­ter]

MM: Then it was remo­ved becau­se it was one of the first things we did the unders­core for. Well, let’s look it up later today, but it’s not true that 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 the lyrics to, like, put dif­fe­rent songs in the­re, dif­fe­rent things they want to

say.

Q: When it beco­mes trans­lata­ble, the [inau­di­ble] can have more fun with the trans­la­ti­on strings.

MM: Yeah, but they don’t have to, right? That’s the fun thing.

Q: Then I look for­ward to some patches.

MM: What I don’t want to do is, I don’t want to make it super-com­pli­ca­ted. I know we did some things, like we moved it to a sub-direc­to­ry. It actual­ly just used to be a sin­gle file, 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.

Q: The­re are no actions or fil­ters in that plugin.

MM: Yeah, that’s how it looks in the WP Admin.

Q: There’s no fil­ter on the string

MM: Well. we can add a fil­ter on the string. And may­be it’s, it’s actual­ly a fil­ter and not trans­la­ti­on, might be actual­ly bet­ter, becau­se, like you said, like may­be the pot sys­tem is not appro­pria­te for that. Alt­hough, why not? Like, I’m sure you can trans­la­te tho­se lyrics to French and other things, they would be meaningful. And also the con­nec­tion to jazz musi­ci­ans. It was one of the first famous jazz songs by one of my idols, Lou­is Arm­strong, and you know, sin­ce then, we’ve named every 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 pro­se block. Has anyo­ne used this one? It’s one of the­se things peo­p­le are always like, “we should remo­ve this.” [Laugh­ter]

Actual­ly, I did it becau­se I took a wri­ting poet­ry cour­se, and the aut­hor, a famous poet, was com­plai­ning how, when she pos­ted to Word­Press she couldn’t have the for­mat­ting correctly—you know how a lot of poet­ry will use inte­res­t­ing for­mat­ting whe­re the white space has signi­fi­can­ce? Or spa­cing that has kind of unu­su­al things? So the beha­vi­or of the edi­tor, which takes 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 Pro­se block, but it’s basi­cal­ly a block insi­de Guten­berg that pre­ser­ves white space, kind of like a “pre” tag, and it’s used by some of the poets out the­re. So some­ti­mes we do the­se real­ly niche fea­tures for like, very high-end users. So for exam­p­le, I think three or four of the living Fields Meda­lists use WordPress—actually, WordPress.com.

Does anyo­ne know about the Fields Medal? A cou­ple peo­p­le. So 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 Terence Tao, who is, if you don’t know about him, look him up. He is pro­ba­b­ly one of the top five smar­test peo­p­le in the world, ama­zing, bril­li­ant mathematician—he actual­ly just got defun­ded, but the Simons Foun­da­ti­on is now spon­so­ring all his work, which is very exci­ting. If you don’t know Jim Simons, he’s the foun­der of Renais­sance Tech­no­lo­gies. Has anyo­ne heard of Renais­sance Tech? Ren­Tec? One or two peo­p­le? Oh, I’m tel­ling you all sorts of cool stuff now.

So Renais­sance Tech­no­lo­gies is the most suc­cessful hedge fund ever in histo­ry. They show, I think, annua­li­zed returns of over 40% over 35 years. It’s actual­ly phy­si­cists and mathe­ma­ti­ci­ans that came tog­e­ther. Jim Simons was one of them, he went out of busi­ness or bank­rupt or some­thing, and was like, “gosh, I need to make some money. May­be I’ll check out the stocks and tra­ding thing.” And they star­ted out, and they actual­ly did real­ly well, but then in the 80s, it all cra­s­hed. Jiim’s big, big inno­va­ti­on was that he inven­ted algo­rith­mic tra­ding. So he basi­cal­ly said, we have humans making decis­i­ons. One, they’re too slow. And two, we don’t know why it’s working. And so the­re must be some fun­da­men­tal sort of phy­sics or rules of the tra­ding mar­kets and the busi­ness sys­tems. And so Ren­Tec star­ted to gather the most data of anyo­ne in the world. The next hedge fund to do this well was Bridge­wa­ter, but basi­cal­ly they star­ted get­ting data sets, like ship­ping back to the 1400s, like real­ly obscu­re things. They go get stuff out of books and deve­lop all this prio­ri­ty trai­ning data, use it to map the eco­no­my and essen­ti­al­ly crea­te the­se models that the mathe­ma­ti­ci­ans would come up with. You can only be an inves­tor in this fund if you work for the com­pa­ny, which is pret­ty inte­res­t­ing. And of cour­se, ever­yo­ne the­re is like a deca­mil­lionaire and ever­y­thing. I for­get how many employees—200 or 150 or some­thing. Real­ly, real­ly small. So legen­da­ry. And he pas­sed away a few years ago, but his foun­da­ti­on funds a ton of fun­da­men­tal rese­arch and phy­sics and math and so he’s someone I real­ly look up to and admi­re. I blog­ged about him ear­lier last year. He reminds me a lot of my dad, just the way he looks and talks. My dad pas­sed away in 2016, so I real­ly like wat­ching Jim Simon’s stuff.

Oh, I for­got to say, the point of the Fields Meda­lists. The reason the Fields Meda­lists use Word­Press is we sup­port a LaTeX plug­in. LaTeX is basi­cal­ly like a mark­up lan­guage for doing advan­ced math for­mu­las. We’re actual­ly working on an update to this to be a bit more user-fri­end­ly. We added sup­port for it in 2005 becau­se Terence Tao star­ted a free WordPress.com account, and he was com­plai­ning about this and embed­ding the­se images. I fol­lo­wed his blog, and I was like, “oh, we should make a block for this kind of short­code.” And this short­code is actual­ly built into Jet­pack, so anyo­ne who runs Jet­pack has access to this, and it’s now a Guten­berg block as well. So we’re adding diver­si­ty. So may­be tell the math depart­ment here. It’d be awe­so­me to get some more mathe­ma­ti­ci­ans and folks on WordPress.

Q: Matt, just want to give you a heads up. We’ve got about five minu­tes left.

MM: All right, rapid fire. Should I do some fast ones? I just need to talk a litt­le less.

Q: I’m Chris, I work for Pan­the­on. As you obvious­ly know, Pan­the­on does Drup­al stuff. So I know Word­Press, but I have been wat­ching, par­ti­cu­lar­ly, the evo­lu­ti­on of their deve­lo­p­ment work in AI, spe­ci­fi­cal­ly inte­gra­ti­on in the Drup­al admin, and also how the Drup­al CMS is onboar­ding new users to Drup­al, and the Expe­ri­ence Buil­der that they’re buil­ding. As we gather here today, pro­ba­b­ly most Word­Pres­sers might not be awa­re that there’s actual­ly Drup­al­Con Euro­pe hap­pe­ning in Vien­na right now, and there’s lots of things that are hap­pe­ning out of that. And there’s a lot of real­ly inte­res­t­ing and exci­ting things hap­pe­ning in that Drup­al space. I know you’ve had con­ver­sa­ti­ons with Dries, becau­se at least Dries says that you’ve had conversations.

MM: 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 CMSes, Dave’s actual­ly one of them in the room. We’re just going to do it the rest of our lives. And Dries is one of them, so I have incre­di­ble respect. We actual­ly did a talk tog­e­ther with Mike Litt­le, the co-foun­der of Word­Press. So if you look up Dries, Mull­en­weg, Mike Litt­le, you’ll you’ll find this. It’s pret­ty cool talk. Actual­ly, we got to talk about the histo­ry and everything.

Q: So the ques­ti­on here is: To what degree are you loo­king at or thin­king about the types of deve­lo­p­ments that are hap­pe­ning in Drup­al but other CMSes as well, and what can we, as Word­Press, learn from tho­se other ecosystems?

MM: Oh, it’s a gre­at ques­ti­on. I’ve got to look up the user ID. I think I was one of the first cou­ple hudn­red peo­p­le regis­tered on drop.org, which is the pre­de­ces­sor to drupal.org. Dries was actual­ly at that Nor­t­hern Voice con­fe­rence in 2006; he has a post about it on his blog with some pho­tos. So yeah, I keep in pret­ty clo­se cont­act with a num­ber of the other CMSes. Well, I won’t say clo­se cont­act, but usual­ly about once a year we’ll get tog­e­ther with Antho­ny from Squa­re­space, Tobi from Shop­i­fy, with Dries, when­ever we’re in the same coun­try, or I’m over in Euro­pe or Bos­ton. I try to look them up, and I test out things pret­ty regularly.

So I haven’t seen the very, very latest stuff for Drup­al. I think I che­cked out one of the last ite­ra­ti­ons they did. I love that with com­pa­nies like Pan­the­on now doing both 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 kind of mutual­ly exclu­si­ve solu­ti­ons. I’m always going to be sup­port­i­ve with other open source pro­jects. So yeah, for tho­se peo­p­le who over­lap, like yours­elf, plea­se make some sug­ges­ti­ons. You know, start a P2 post, or do a blog post about it. We’ll get it in the news­let­ter, or may­be even if there’s some­thing spe­ci­fic that we could bring over code wise, we can start to get that incen­ti­ve into Trac and ever­y­thing. Cool.

I think Drup­al also has a plug­in to use Guten­berg, right? Yeah, which is pret­ty cool. It was one of the reasons we desi­gned Guten­berg to actual­ly be por­ta­ble to other CMSes, and why we’ve been put­ting it under licen­se, dual-licen­sing it so to be embedded even more places, not just GPL.

Q: For­gi­ve the AI trans­la­ti­on of my words, but it’ll help me be con­cise. But here’s the ques­ti­on. Real­ly, real­ly simple—no, it’s not. Word­Press has always thri­ved becau­se of its open, com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven ethos, but as the eco­sys­tem grows, we’re see­ing more like lar­ge, pro­fit-dri­ven play­ers who don’t neces­s­a­ri­ly share the values. How can indi­vi­du­al con­tri­bu­tors and agen­ci­es like ours actively help pro­tect Word­Press and uphold the values and ethics that have sus­tained it from bad actors and peo­p­le who might try to exploit the com­mu­ni­ty? And do you see room for some­thing more for­mal, like a cer­ti­fi­ca­ti­on for indi­vi­du­als and agen­ci­es that defi­ne what being a good actor is, to help edu­ca­te cli­ents and even the mar­ket, to help pro­tect in a more proac­ti­ve way from tho­se sorts of bad actors?

MM: Well, that’s a big ques­ti­on. I’ll try to ans­wer quick­ly. So first I will say, 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. You know, every saint has a past, every sin­ner has a future. I never want to defi­ne any com­pa­ny or any per­son as per­ma­nent­ly good or bad. Let’s talk about actions.

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, you con­tri­bu­te back—which also impli­es that you’re not vio­la­ting the GPL, or some­thing like that. So we’ve got the hard stuff, like, if you vio­la­te the GPL, you’re gon­na 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 good beha­vi­or by giving peo­p­le hig­her ran­kings in the direc­to­ry or in the show­ca­se, for example?

Then final­ly, I’ll just say, vote with your wal­let. Each one of you here has the abili­ty to stron­gly influence the­se com­pa­nies. 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. This has actual­ly been hap­pe­ning a lot the past year. I think I can say this: There’s a site cal­led Word­Press Engi­ne Tra­cker which is curr­ent­ly track­ing a num­ber of sites that have left a cer­tain host. It’s about to cross 100,000 that have swit­ched to others host. And 74,000 have gone off­line sin­ce Sep­tem­ber of last year. We actual­ly used to make all this data public. The who­le list was on the­re. They got a court order so the data could be fact-che­cked by press or other peo­p­le. The­re was actual­ly a court order that made us that down. So again, try­ing to muz­zle free speech 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 last one?

Q: Okay, I don’t think this qua­li­fies as rapid fire, but it’s a soft­ball. First of all, I came to Word­Press as an open source advo­ca­te. I beca­me a b2 user. That’s how I got to Word­Press. So my all-time favo­ri­te Word­Press release is 1.5, becau­se it has what I con­sider a kil­ler fea­ture. It’s not the one you’re thin­king. It’s pages.

MM: 1.5 right? Yeah, I remem­ber intro­du­cing that. Ori­gi­nal­ly. I had a dif­fe­rent CMS I was going to release cal­led Con­tent­Press. Or Mul­ti­pat­tern. I wasn’t sure what to call it, and so I had this who­le other CMS. And I was like, man, we should just build this into Word­Press, even though it’s a blog­ging sys­tem. I think having this pages fea­ture put us ahead of Mova­ble Type and others. So yeah, glad we did. I think we intro­du­ced the­mes and that I released him.

Q: Yes, the­mes was the was kind of the obvious big fea­ture for it, but pages is the point at which I would say that Word­Press went from blog­ging engi­ne to CMS. So that’s my favo­ri­te. But what I was going to ask is—

MM: So it’s all been downhill sin­ce then?

[Laugh­ter]

Q: No, it was such a pivo­tal moment that hel­ped with WordPress’s mete­o­ric adop­ti­on rates. 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 easi­ly. So my ques­ti­on was: can you tell us a sto­ry, or give us some fun facts about that? Soft­ball ques­ti­on, unless it real­ly taxes your memory.

MM: Well, lucki­ly I blog. I’ll say that two of my favo­ri­tes ever in histo­ry are 1.2 and 1.5—which actual­ly came out right after each other, becau­se we skip­ped a few releases; it was a time when we actual­ly got pret­ty delay­ed. So 1.2 intro­du­ced the hooks and fil­ter sys­tem, which was pret­ty revo­lu­tio­na­ry, I think still, as a uni­que pro­gramming para­digm. But befo­re that, to modi­fy Word­Press, you’d actual­ly open up files and chan­ge lines. I used to publish the­se, we cal­led them hacks, and they were. At one point we intro­du­ced the hacks file, which made it a litt­le bit bet­ter. But then our plug­in hook sys­tem allo­wed a sepa­ra­ti­on bet­ween the core and the add-ons, but you could go real­ly deep to modi­fy things. Then 1.5 was the­mes, I belie­ve. So 1.2 was plug­ins, 1.5 was the­mes. And then the other big one—I think it was 2 or 2 point some­thing, was when we intro­du­ced WYSIWYG for the first time. Which, by the way, was so con­tro­ver­si­al; peo­p­le did not want basic WYSIWYG in Word­Press, which was fun­ny, like 10 years later, when they’re like, “Okay, this Guten­berg thing’s even worse.” I was like, “Ah, I’ve been through this before.”

So I think that tho­se are kind of the fun sto­ries around the­re. Again, some of this stuff was pret­ty slow to be adopted at first. I wasn’t cer­tain that this should be rol­led into Word­Press or the­re should be sepa­ra­te soft­ware, but I’m glad we did. You know, Mova­ble Type was a domi­nant thing at the time, and their sta­tic page func­tion­a­li­ty wasn’t very robust. And so the other thing that Word­Press did around this time that I thought was pret­ty awe­so­me is real­ly clean URLs. So whe­re, pri­or, you know, peo­p­le would have cruf­ty URLs, like they’d have an ID in the num­ber, or you’d have for WordPress,—the default’s still the­re, actually—is like “?p=123,” so crea­ting the map­ping sys­tem whe­re we map dates, a hier­ar­chy, and the­se clean slugs to the pages in the back, in the brow­sing 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. Thank you. All right. Last one,

Q: Hey, Matt. I’m Raquel, and I love kit­ties and sur­pri­ses. Just some facts. I have a ano­ther ques­ti­on around the com­mu­ni­ty. I want to know how do you feel, what are your raw thoughts, on inde­pen­dent Word­Press events that are hap­pe­ning in our space now?

MM: And do you want to dis­c­lo­se any­thing there?

Q: I mean, I am the one respon­si­ble for Press­Conf, so inde­pen­dent Word­Press event. So, yeah, how do you feel? I’m just curious as to how we can all get bet­ter tog­e­ther, which tends to be my motto.

MM: I’m very much like a “let a thousand flowers bloom” kind of guy. So thank you. I know it’s a huge labor of love doing some­thing like Press­Conf. That’s some­thing that’s been very acti­ve in Word­Camps and other things in the past, and hop­eful­ly with Word­Camp US going to Phoe­nix, we’ll have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to do some work tog­e­ther there.

So I think that’s my fun­da­men­tal, you know, raw thoughts. You know, I do think about, you know, what do we want to encou­ra­ge in the world as well? So 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 events. Well, like the tickets cost more than Word­Camp and stuff, right? How much is a ticket?

Q: Depen­ding on ear­ly bird to total, $700 average.

MM: And so that’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, as I think about this as well, just like, you know, what do we want to see more of in the world? And, you know, try­ing to focus time, par­ti­cu­lar­ly my time, to tho­se types of things. So that’s why I came to Word­Camp Cana­da. You know, this is not the big­gest Word­Camp in the world, but man, this spi­rit here, and the peo­p­le and the ever­y­thing, and like you know, what you’ve all put tog­e­ther, as it’s come tog­e­ther over the past few months, the incre­di­ble work of the organizers,the social media team’s been doing a gre­at job get­ting some awe­so­me spea­k­ers like Jill and Dave and like, I was like, man! That’s why I was just plan­ning to come and attend. You know, just to check it out, becau­se I was very inte­res­ted in the con­tent and ever­y­thing y’all put tog­e­ther. So again, I guess we’re out of time. So I just want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to run to the rest­room, but then I’ll be right back out in the lob­by. I’m going to take pic­tures, shake hands, kiss babies.

[Laugh­ter]

I can shake the hand of a baby too. It’s wha­te­ver. I’m open-min­ded. But hey, thank you. I app­re­cia­te it.

Update: The video is up, it’s pret­ty bad I think the audio is pul­ling from a DJI thing not the micro­pho­nes, but here it is.