On today’s episode we’ll talk about what’s latest in the news and give a recap from the State of the Word address at WordCamp US, right here on Your Website Engineer podcast episode No. 263.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we’re gonna talk about some new things that have come out recently with WordPress and we’re gonna talk about the State of the Word address by Matt Mullenweg at the WordCamp US. But first, let’s dive into announcements and then I’ve got a plugin to share with you and then we’ll get to the recap of what’s happened in the last year within the WordPress community.

So since I’ve been gone WordPress – and I guess I was just gone last week, but I prerecorded a show. And in theory last week we should have been talking about the release of WordPress 4.4 because it released last Tuesday, but today we’re gonna talk a little bit about it. WordPress 4.4 Clifford came out on December 8 and it is the – it’s named in honor of jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown and it’s available to download. Most likely you’ve already downloaded and updated your website. It’s got some really cool things in it. It’s got responsive images; it’s got the Twenty Sixteen theme, one of the new default themes that come with it. Again, like I said, it has responsive images so it allows you to set a specific size for an image based on what device it is. So if you want a certain image to appear on a desktop site and then a much smaller, cropped differently version for your – for a tablet or a phone, you can go ahead and do that now with WordPress 4.4.

Another thing that’s really cool is now you can embed everything. That’s what it says on the news post. But basically it allows you to – you can embed your post on other WordPress sites. You simply just drag and paste in the post URL into the editor and you’ll see an instant preview of what it looks like. Really, really cool, really, really slick. It also adds more embeds to the post area where you can now embed from Cloudup, Reddit Comments, ReverbNation, Speaker Deck and now VideoPress.

Under the hood, some technical things, there’s a lot of things that are way above my paygrade and way above my head, but the WP REST API has been integrated into the core of the first version of it. It’s basically giving developers an easy way to build and extend the RESTful API on top of WordPress. And we’ll talk a little bit more about this when we get to the main section of the show. But mainly, this is where the core of WordPress is going. This is where the future of the technology is going. I’m really excited to see what people build on top of this. Again, they have to be smarter than me because I still can’t grasp my head around how this WP REST API works.

Another thing in the news since last time I recorded a show is I’ll put a link in the show notes for this episode, but there was a post over on optimizerWP and it is 21 Podcasts That Will Turn You Into a WordPress Whiz. So if you are interested in listening to other podcasts just not this – in addition to this one, then you can go ahead and you can find all 21 over there. There’s things like the DradCast, and WP Watercooler, and Office Hours, Please Advise, the Matt Report, Kitchensink WP, WordPress Weekly and there’s a bunch more. So if you’re interested in other people’s takes on what’s going on in the WordPress community, definitely jump over there to optimizerwp.com and look for the WordPress podcast post. And again, there will be that in the show notes for this episode.

And the last piece of news is for WordCamp Dayton, I am one of the organizers of WordCamp Dayton and we are looking for speakers to come and talk at WordCamp Dayton. So if you live in the general area or if you want to make a trip to Dayton, the call for speakers is open. There’s a link in the show notes as well, but you can go on over to dayton.wordcamp.org/2016 and you can find out where to submit a session or just basically say that you’re proposing – this is the session that you wanna speak at. So I’m definitely looking forward to seeing a bunch of people there connecting.

It’s hard to believe the next year of WordCamps are getting ready to get started already. We’re closing in on the end of 2015 and it’s almost time to get started again. The WordCamp in Dayton is going to be – it’s in March. It’s going to be March 4 and 5, 2016 and we’ll be going back to the same location that we had the very first year at the Small Business Center at Wright State University. It is going to be awesome and it’s going to be so much fun and I’m excited to kick off this whole new season of planning and getting ready and just putting on an awesome event here in Dayton, Ohio.

All right. In the news – or, that was the news. In the ‘Is there a plug in for that?’ section, there is yet another maintenance plugin that I found that looks really cool, but I’m just kind of wondering how cool can it be. It has more than 100,000 active installs and it basically allows a WordPress site administrator to close a website for maintenance. You can enable a 503 service temporarily unavailable. You can set up a temporary page with authorization and you can customize it. It looks good on all devices. It is a really slick looking plugin. It has the same look and feel as the rest of your WordPress site. It’s just very, very simple to do, to use. And I think – it must be doing some really great things.

I’ve never really tried it yet, but we’re on version 2.6 and it’s got over 100,000 active installs, which is kind of a tricky thing to say because an active install means that the plugin is on and activated and people are actually using that as their landing page for their website. So pretty cool. If you’re interested you can just search for maintenance in the WordPress plugin directory or you can find a link to it in the show notes as well.

So today, I wanna just kind of recap what happened a couple weekends ago at WordCamp US. It was the first WordCamp that was not held in San Francisco, the big major WordCamp for the entire North America. And it’s the first one that didn’t happen in the summertime. This one happened just a few weeks ago, it was December, it was in Philadelphia. And there was an hour long presentation that you could watch that Matt Mullenweg gave and then there’s about 40 minutes of question and answer afterwards. And you’re more than welcome to watch that. It’ll be embedded on the show notes page for this episode. But it was kind of a neat way to listen to what the plans were – or, I guess what has happened over the last year, some stats and some statistics about that. And then what are the plans in the upcoming year, is what does that look like? What is WordPress gonna look like in the next year or so?

So I just thought if you didn’t have time to sit around for an hour and 40 minutes watching this and learning, I would just take the snippets and kind of make it a highlight. I’ve done this every year for the last couple years. It’s usually in the summertime but now it’s right here at the end of the year.

But let’s go ahead and just dive right in. The presentation opened up with a presentation by, it was either the Mayor of Philadelphia or – I’m not exactly sure. I don’t remember who it was, but they declared that December 5 was a National WordPress Day in Philadelphia, which was pretty cool. This event a couple Saturdays ago was the tenth annual event. It was the tenth time there had been a major WordCamp and it was the largest WordCamp in the world at over 1800 tickets were sold, 1801 to be precise. The official hashtag was WCUS and you can go out and you can search in the archives of what people were talking about on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and whatnot. Let’s see.

Back in August of 2005 – or August 5 of 2006 was the first one and that was when WordPress was at 2.0. So that was really cool. So it started – WordCamp started when WordPress was 2.0 and then for a while it was kind of – they weren’t nearly as small in incremental jumps like what we’ve been seeing in the last couple years. But that’s when it started when WordPress was 2.0. Matt had a screenshot of what WordPress looked like and there was no dashboard icons down the left hand side. It was all across the top. It was very basic and you couldn’t do a lot of things. WordPress 2.0 had no themes and had no plugins, which I thought was unique as well. That there is – you get so caught up on what’s the best theme? What’s the best plugin? How can we do this? How can we do this? And WordPress, when it first got started, there was none of that. It was almost when the iPhone came out there were no apps except for the apps that Apple put on the device. So I thought that was super interesting.

Another thing that kind of came out this past year was a WordPress book, and I’ll link to this in the show notes as well. And it’s called Milestone: The Story of WordPress. And Matt kind of says that it’s like everything else that WordPress does. It is open source, people can contribute to it. The book is actually on GitHub. I started reading it a few months ago and just downloaded the version right off GitHub. And he also commented this is like version .5 and it’s going to continue to iterate as WordPress continues to grow, as the community gets bigger, as things start to happen in the WordPress ecosphere. So I thought that was pretty neat as well.

In 2015 there were 89 WordCamps, which, if you think about it, 89 WordCamps, there’s only 52 weeks in a year. And there’s some years – like right now for the last two weeks in December there are no WordCamps and for the first couple weeks in January there are no WordCamps. So there are usually more than one WordCamp every weekend, which is pretty crazy. There were over 21,000 attendees to WordCamps and across 34 countries where the WordCamps were located, which I thought was pretty cool. There were over 600 – I guess there was 601 organizers for these WordCamps and so that includes – on our Dayton team we have a handful – we have five or six organizers, co-organizers of the event.

And then also, across all of these 89 WordCamps there were 1.6 – or 1,006 – 1,600, I’ll get this number right, 1,600 speakers and 2,100 in – or 2,100 sessions. So there are some speakers that did multiple sessions, like if I spoke at WordCamp Dayton and then I did the same thing at Columbus and then I did the same thing in North Canton and then I went to Michigan and did it. That’s why there’s not quite as many presenters to presentations. And the other truly amazing stat is that with meetups that are found on meetup.com, there were over 40,000 people that attended more than 2,000 events. And I thought that was really, really cool. Even though there’s not WordCamps in every location, or every state, or every country, there are more than 40,000 people attended 2,000 events, which is really, really cool.

And a cool quote, too, that Matt had during this presentation, he says, “Technology is best when it brings people together.” And you just look at those stats and you think about them and indeed, we’re all coming together because of this free software that we all have passion about and we’re all there trying to learn more and more and more about. And so I think that was an awesome quote. So that was kind of like the recap, the stats. It’s interesting that Matt said that he didn’t – he didn’t really include any of the stats from that survey that was on the header of WordPress.org for the longest time because he said that more people were making a living with WordPress, more people were making more money, more people were – it just continued to go up and up and up. And so he’s like, the stats were kind of just on target and it wasn’t anything earth shattering that he felt that he needed to improve about – or talk about.

There are some things that happened, speaking of WordPress.org, there were some updates to this site. The plugin now says active installs instead of number of downloads. We talked about this; it was probably back towards the beginning of the year. That now instead of saying, “Oh, this plugin has one million downloads,” now it says 500,000 active installs, which is a better representation of how many sites are actually using a certain plugin.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, WordPress.org adopted Slack and it has sent over two million messages. So Slack is like an instant messaging system. It’s kind of like a cross between Skype and messages, like text messages, but there’s channels in different rooms. And on the Slack channel, within WordPress.org, there’s information about how to sign up for it. It’s a free account that you can get. All of that details is over at WordPress.org. But you can follow on and you can see what’s happening in core, you can see what’s happening in the documentation area, you can see what’s happening in the training area, and there’s all of these different channels. You can go and participate, you can give back.

He commented, since there was more than two million messages, that this is probably the largest organization on Slack. I forget how many members are on there. I turned Slack off right now so I didn’t get any notifications while I was recording, but that’s super interesting that we’re no longer using an – IRC was the technology we were using before and it’s kind of archaic and it was kind of hard to set up and so this barrier to entry is much lower so people can participate and get into the conversation and help out where they can.

WordPress.tv got a facelift a little bit. Let’s see, what else? The local – now WordPress.org, there’s plugins, they’re starting to get localized languages on that page. So if you go to the – if you’re in Spain and you go to the section on plugins, it’s going to show the text in Spanish instead of just English, which is really cool. There are – if you think about it, last year alone they had – I think it was version 4.0 or 4.1 is where the – it started having more downloads per – more active installs that were non-U.S. based or non-English based versus the ones that are English based. So that is pretty cool.

All plugins and themes in the repository are now available to be translated. This happens as soon as you update your version to the newest version and all the strings are in there and they’re able to be translated. That’s really, really cool. The plugins directory crossed one billion downloads and added 9,000 new plugins this year alone, which is pretty crazy. And there’s only a handful of people that approve those plugins and make sure the code looks good, and they review them and that sort of thing. So those volunteers are doing a heck of a job.

And then lastly, within the WordPress space, WordPress now powers more than 25 percent of the web. We’ve talked about this on the show as well, but that was highlighted and a loud round of applause happened once that statistic was mentioned. Let’s see. There are a handful of new versions and this was mainly because of the fact that there was a December release or a late 2014 release and then the three releases in 2015, and so that’s why there was four. The first one, 4.1, that was – that’s when Twenty Fifteen was introduced. Matt also said that that is the most popular all-time theme, when it comes to the default themes. It has been used and activated so many more times that it’s got 1.6 million active installs. Version 4.1 also included distraction free writing and you could select your main language when you started setting up WordPress, which was really cool.

4.2 was named after Bud Howell and this had the new Press This, the themes in the customizer, and emojis were all built into that one. Then 4.3 we got site icons, we got menus and customizers, and a few other features as well. Then of course 4.4 came out. He talked a little bit about that. 4.4 had over 2,000 commits, it had over 400 contributors, which was the largest amount of contributors ever, comments have been upgraded, a lot of old tickets had been closed. He said they went back two, three, four, five, six, seven years finding old tickets and they went ahead and closed those to resolve them. So there’s not a lot of flash and flare with 4.4, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s just been kind of lingering that actually got fixed as well. It had the first version of the REST API, Twenty Sixteen theme, responsive images, and the oEmbed like I said earlier at the top of the show.

He broke then a little bit and talked about a story about the latest version of WordPress. He showed a graph of how many people are actually using the latest version of WordPress versus older versions. And he said it was an interesting case study when he talked about Bluehost had two million sites using WordPress and there was a lot of them that were not using the latest version of WordPress. So they went ahead and they wrote a script to back up and update every site to version 4.3, this was when 4.3 was live, and they saw support request for like .008 percent of these two million websites. And it was something they could quickly revert to the older version of their site, or it might have just been why did you auto update? It didn’t really go into depth of what type of tickets were coming in. And then he said that the overall support requests went down by 18 percent and this was mainly because there was less sites were getting hacked.

So that was really encouraging to see a hosting company like Bluehost taking that initiative to make sure that all of their websites on their servers are updated and running on the latest version of WordPress, which is going to help really control and make those servers more secure. It’s going to make it harder for people to hack in because they are using the latest and greatest version of WordPress.

Another thing that he spent a little bit of time on was talking about Calypso. We talked about this a few episodes back, let’s see, it was episode No. 260 when we talked about this new code. It was a code base called Calypso, but it’s the new WordPress.com editor. It’s what you go to – what you see when you go to WordPress.com. It’s also what you see when you use the new app. And I guess another thing I need to mention is we talked about the WordPress app for iOS – or for the Mac app for the app store. It’s now been released on Windows which is really exciting. So now Windows users can now use the Mac app – or Windows can use the WordPress app as well and they can use it to manage all of their websites.

The main idea with Calypso was, a few years ago the initiative was, Matt said, what would we do if we would want to build WordPress from scratch? What would it look like? How would it work? And that was a big question back then because WordPress has been evolving for 14 years and to go through and redesign something that’s been designed for 14 years, it took a lot of time. It took a year and a half, took a ton of developers and a ton of team members to put forth the effort inside of Automatic to make it work and make it look like it does. It needs to be mobile friendly; it was designed from a mobile friendly approach so people can manage their websites on the go with their phones.

They don’t even need computers any more to have a website; you can just run everything right from your phone. It gives you the ability to manage both your WordPress.org with Jetpack and your WordPress.com sites all in one place. It is natively multi-site, so you just – everything that’s connected to your same WordPress.com user name, you can manage all of those things all in one place. It is 100 percent JavaScript, which is really crazy that so much of WordPress is built on PHP and now this is going into the JavaScript frame of reference. So, all of this new stuff is doing what JavaScript, which makes it much, much faster. It makes you be able to change things. You can click buttons to activate and deactivate plugins and there’s no page reload, which makes everything so much faster. The clicking of the button isn’t any faster, but since you don’t have to reload the page, every time you activate or deactivate a plugin, it just seems like everything is so much faster. In fact, they said that it is 14 times faster than wp-admin, which is really, really cool.

Let’s see. There was a few other things – a few other notes that came out. They’re trying to partner with Let’s Encrypt to get free SSL certificates on all domains, that’s an initiative by Let’s Encrypt. PHP 7 has come out and that’s the newest version of PHP and it makes your website faster as well. Let’s see. They’re working on getting all themes and all plugins translation ready and to be able to be translated into every language. And so that’s gonna take a lot of volunteers. It’s gonna make sure that – and it’s gonna take all developers making sure that all their strings are able to translated. So that’s another thing to work on as well. Plugins now can add their own endpoints for the REST API, which is pretty cool.

And customization is the biggest opportunity. So many people in the customizer, a lot more things are gonna come to the customizer. But one of the biggest pain points for WordPress users is it doesn’t look like the demo. How do I set it up so it actually works and does what I need? So that’s another thing that’s going to be worked on in the next few years. And then the homework and Matt said this is the first time that he’s ever given homework at a State of the Word address, is learn JavaScript deeply. And he made a point that it wasn’t Java, learn JavaScript.

So if you’re interested in learning new technology, like JavaScript is going to be the place to be. I know that it’s something on my list to continue to learn about. Still haven’t wrapped my mind all the way around PHP, there’s a lot more that I can learn in PHP, but there’s always something to be learned and it just continues to help drive forward the contributors. And if you know JavaScript then you’re gonna be able to contribute and help out and it’s gonna be awesome. The things that are coming, we haven’t even – we can’t even imagine some of the things that are gonna be developed in the next few years using JavaScript and WordPress.

And then lastly, the date has been set for the next WordCamp US. It’s going to be on December 2-4, 2016. It’s also gonna be in Philadelphia, that was one of the requirements for the WordCamp selection committee, that it’s going to be there two years in a row. So the second year is a little less taxing than the first year. And then 2017 – we will be in another city 2017 and 2018 will be in another city. And so that is the recap of the State of the Word.

So it’s been an incredible year. I know that there’s a couple more episodes that will come out this year, but it’s just been an amazing year to see what’s been happening in WordPress, how many more people are getting involved and how big WordPress is really getting. Yes, it’s going to take a long time to get to 50 percent of the web and 75 percent of the web, but it’s somewhere that we can go with open source and our community, we can absolutely do it. And so I’m just excited to see what 2016 holds and we’ll see what happens. Take care.