What’s Next for WordPress

Josepha launched her keynote by celebrating 20 years of WordPress and reflecting on its journey from a blogging tool to the world’s most popular community-driven web platform. On WordPress as a platform for empowerment and change, Josepha shared, “The more people that know about WordPress, the more people can access the incredible opportunities that WordPress can provide.” And that sustaining the platform for future generations ensures these opportunities will persist. She added, “We exist for as long as people want to use our software.”

The community is the key to sustaining WordPress, and Josepha touched on the importance of WordCamps, workshops, and events that create value, promote inclusivity,  and spark inspiration. WordPress can be a catalyst for positive change in the life of a contributor, end user, or site builder.

Concluding her keynote, Josepha asked the audience to think about the story they’d want to tell about themselves and their time in WordPress; and the story they would want WordPress to tell the world.

What’s Next for Gutenberg

Matt began his keynote with a touch of nostalgia, referring to a comment on his personal blog in 2003 by WordPress Co-founder Mike Little, and then looked ahead to the most recent release, WordPress 6.3. As this year’s largest release, it includes new features such as the Command Palette, a quick way (⌘+k on Mac or Ctrl+k on Windows) to search your site and access common commands.

Matt continued, “WordPress never rests, so right around the corner is WordPress 6.4 on Nov 7… with some cool new features.” He shared that 6.4, like 5.6, will be an underrepresented gender-led release. A new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four, is tailored for entrepreneurs and small businesses, photographers and artists, and writers and bloggers. Additionally, 6.4 will feature integrated font management and Image block options to expand single images for optimal viewing.

Looking further into the future, Matt highlighted Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, which will focus on workflows and collaboration, “moving WordPress from a single-player to a multi-player tool.” In that spirit of collaboration, a new #LMS working group will also bring WordPress learning management systems together to improve the web standards for courses and learning content.

Beyond Phase 3, Matt shared thoughts about what it means to support WordPress many years from now. A new 100-Year Plan from WordPress.com is an exploration into long-term planning for your online presence. He encouraged attendees to be inspired by the region’s history, reflecting on what it would mean to honor the past while anticipating and planning for the future. 

Q&A

A Q&A session followed the keynotes, with questions submitted by the in-person audience and live stream viewers.

Additional questions will be answered in a future post on make.WordPress.org/project/. Join the global community making WordPress and be part of our journey toward a brighter future!

Thank you to @angelasjin, @bmcsherry, @cbringmann, @dansoschin, and @eidolonnight for collaborating on this post.

The atmosphere was electric at WordCamp Europe (WCEU) 2023 in Athens, Greece, as WordPress celebrated its 20th anniversary and the opportunity to gather in person for inspiration and engagement. More than 2,500 individuals from 94 countries came together in person or through the live stream to participate in a remarkable three-day event (plus Contributor Day) filled with talks, networking, and learning opportunities. The event concluded on June 10 with a captivating keynote address by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and Gutenberg Product Architect Matías Ventura, who highlighted the advancements and upcoming milestones of the WordPress Project.

One significant update shared during the keynote was the successful reactivation of WordCamps. This time last year, we organized eight in-person WordCamps, and by the end of 2022, the number had risen to 23. Thanks to the enthusiasm and involvement of the WordPress community, we are already on track to organize 25 WordCamps in the first half of this year alone. 

Josepha also emphasized the importance of the upcoming Community Summit on August 22-23. This in-person gathering brings contributors together across the WordPress open source project, fostering cross-project discussions vital for future growth and sustainability. For more information, visit the official Community Summit website.

Discussing the Five for the Future (5ftF) program, Josepha highlighted the impressive growth in active contributors and company pledges over the past year. She also underscored the expansion of the WordPress ecosystem, citing examples like Openverse, which now provides access to nearly 800 million images and audio files, all easily accessible in the Site Editor. 

Another exciting addition to the WordPress repertoire is WP Playground. This new feature allows users to build WordPress applications instantly in the browser without needing a PHP server. This tool provides a swift and seamless experience, reducing the installation time from five minutes to a near-instantaneous 500 milliseconds. The application of WP Playground may seem like magic, but its practical application promises tangible and revolutionary benefits for WordPress users.

Matías Ventura then took the stage to share updates on Gutenberg. Through a visually stunning video built entirely with blocks, he showcased the six-year development journey and the transition from words to blocks to a final design. The upcoming WordPress version 6.3 will mark the completion of the first two phases of Gutenberg, consolidating all these features into a cohesive and user-friendly experience. He also highlighted the introduction of features such as the Wayfinder tool, Style Book, and the ability to save patterns, further empowering users to own their web presence and voice.

Following the keynote presentation, the WordPress leadership engaged in a lively Q&A session with the audience, further illustrating the continuous evolution within the WordPress Project. This session highlighted how the WordPress community innovates, iterates, and continually improves to create a better platform for today and tomorrow.

Join the global community and be part of the WordPress journey toward a brighter future!

Special thanks to @cbringmann and @eidolonnight for review and collaboration.

Matt also opened a thread for questions on his blog, so be sure to chime in there if you have any!

We’re going to explore if speakers — including myself — can do our sessions with the same content and at the same time that was originally planned, just online instead of in-person so we can achieve our goal of bringing the pan-Asian community closer together without putting anyone’s health at additional risk.

Regardless, I greatly appreciate the work everyone — from organizers to attendees,  speakers to sponsors — put into making this a big success. So many people have come together to create an event to inspire and connect WordPressers, and I am confident that this passion will carry through into the event next year. Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the virus so far, and we sincerely hope that everything is resolved quickly so that this precaution looks unnecessary in hindsight.

We’d love to see you in St. Louis next year, so mark your calendar now!

Sometimes though, passionate and enthusiastic community members can’t pull together enough people in their community to make a WordCamp happen. To address this, we introduced the WordCamp Incubator program in 2016.

The goal of the incubator program is to help spread WordPress to underserved areas by providing more significant organizing support for their first WordCamp event. In 2016, members of the global community team worked with volunteers in three cities — Denpasar, Harare and Medellín — giving direct, hands-on assistance in making local WordCamps possible. All three of these WordCamp incubators were a great success, so we're bringing the incubator program back for 2018.

Where should the next WordCamp incubators be? If you have always wanted a WordCamp in your city but haven’t been able to get a community started, this is a great opportunity. We will be taking applications for the next few weeks, then will get in touch with everyone who applied to discuss the possibilities. We will announce the chosen cities by the end of March.

To apply, fill in the application by March 15, 2018. You don’t need to have any specific information handy, it’s just a form to let us know you’re interested. You can apply to nominate your city even if you don’t want to be the main organizer, but for this to work well we will need local liaisons and volunteers, so please only nominate cities where you live or work so that we have at least one local connection to begin.

We're looking forward to hearing from you!

The title says it all. We had some great applications for cities to host WordCamp US after we finish up in Philadelphia this year, and the city chosen for 2017-2018 is Nashville, Tennessee.

Based on the other great applications we got I’m also excited about the pipeline of communities that could host it in future years as WordCamp US travels across the United States and gives us an opportunity to learn and love a new city, as we have with Philadelphia.

By the way, if you haven’t yet, now is a great time to take the Annual WordPress Survey and ask your friends to as well.

Photo Credit.

This has been successful in many areas — there are currently 241 meetup groups on our meetup.com chapter program! In some regions, though, enthusiastic volunteers have had more of a challenge getting things started. Because of this, we’re going to try an experiment this year called the WordCamp Incubator.

The intention of the incubator program is to help spread WordPress to underserved areas through providing more significant organizing support for a first event. In practical terms, this experiment means we’ll be choosing three cities in 2016 where there is not an active WordPress community — but where it seems like there is a lot of potential and where there are some people excited to become organizers — and will help to organize their first WordCamp. These WordCamps will be small, one-day, one-track events geared toward the goal of generating interest and getting people involved in creating an ongoing local community.*

So, where should we do these three events?  If you have always wanted a WordCamp in your city but haven’t been able to get a meetup group going, this is a great opportunity. We will be taking applications for the next week, then will get in touch with everyone who applied to discuss the possibilities. We will announce the  cities chosen by the end of March.

To apply, fill in the application by February 26, 2016. You don’t need to have any specific information handy, it’s just a form to let us know you’re interested. You can apply to nominate your city even if you don’t want to be the main organizer, but for this experiment  we will need local liaisons and volunteers, so please only nominate cities where you live or work so that we have at least one local connection to begin.

Thanks, and good luck!

* For the record, that describes the ideal first WordCamp even if you have an active meetup — there’s no need to wait until your group is big enough to support a large multi-day event, and small events are a lot of fun because everyone has a chance to be involved and get to know most of the other attendees.

This year the speaker lineup is stellar. There will be talks by three of the lead WordPress developers: Andrew Nacin, Helen Hou-Sandí, and Mark Jaquith. We’re also looking forward to speakers like Jenny Lawson, also known as The Bloggess, and Chris Lema. If you’re at all interested in the web, you will appreciate the appearance of Jeff Veen – one of the creators of Google Analytics and co-founder of Typekit.

Even though San Francisco is far far away for most of you, you can still be part of the fun and watch all presentations in real-time via livestream:

Get a livestream ticket and watch all talks from WordCamp San Francisco live

If you hurry, you can get one of the special livestream tickets, including a WordCamp San Francisco 2104 t-shirt. You can find all the technical details and start times at the WordCamp San Francisco website.

Here are the WordCamps on the schedule for the rest of this year.

October 25-27: WordCamp Boston, Boston, MA, USA
October 25-26: WordCamp Malaga, Spain
October 26: WordCamp Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal
October 26: WordCamp Sofia, Bulgaria
November 7: WordCamp Cape Town, South Africa
November 9: WordCamp Porto, Portugal
November 9-10: WordCamp Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya
November 15: WordCamp Edmonton, AB, Canada
November 16-17: WordCamp Orlando, FL, USA
November 16: WordCamp Denver, CO, USA
November 23-24: WordCamp London, UK
November 23-24: WordCamp Raleigh, NC, USA
November 23: WordCamp São Paulo, Brazil
December 14: WordCamp Las Vegas, NV, USA
December 14-15: WordCamp Sevilla, Spain

No WordCamps on this list in your area? Not to worry! There are thriving WordPress meetups all over the world where you can meet like-minded people, and we maintain a library of WordCamp videos at WordPress.tv.

Get Involved

• If you’re interested in organizing a WordCamp in your area, check out our WordCamp planning site.
• If you’re interested in starting a WordPress meetup in your area, let us know and we can set up a group on meetup.com for you.
• And speaking of WordCamp videos, we’ve recently enabled volunteer-generated subtitles/closed captioning of the videos on WordPress.tv to make them more accessible. Interested in helping? Check out the WordPress.tv subtitling instructions.