545
===

Dustin: [00:00:00] On today's episode, we are going to do a recap of State of the Word 2023.

Right here on your website, Engineer Podcast, episode number 540.

Hello and welcome to another episode of your website engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we are kicking off 2024 with a recap of what happened in 2023. Yes, that's right. We are going to kick off something that happened last year so we can kick off and get ready for the future.

And and honestly, like I watched this this morning, like I've just been busy the last few weeks and I knew the State of the Word happened, but I watched it today and now I'm more excited for things that are coming in 2024 and kind of got to spend a little bit of time sitting down and just kind of figuring out what are some of my WordPress plans for 2024.

So let's go ahead and just dive in. I've got a whole bunch of notes of just like quick summaries, quick bullet point items of the things that happened in this keynote. And if you're very new to WordPress or haven't had the time to see [00:01:00] this presentation, it's usually about 45 minutes to an hour.

I watched just the general presentation. And then there was a whole segment of Q and A, where people will ask in questions about things that are coming up in WordPress and whatnot. And Matt will answer them. And sometimes he has people like Josepha or Matias come up and answer those questions as well.

Again, I haven't watched that part yet, but I just watched the main presentation. And we've been doing this for years and years and years. Generally, it was always the last thing of WordCamp US, but lately, in the last couple years, it's been in New York, and this was the first one that was held outside of the United States and it was in Madrid, Spain.

There was a lot of cool Spanish related things. Some of the slides had Spanish on it as a speaker would come up. They would normally say hello in Spanish and say some different things. And as someone who sends kids to a Spanish immersion school, like that was really near and dear to my heart.

Granted, I didn't understand quite everything that they were saying, but again, that's something for me to work on is to work on my Spanish. But anyways, this was again, the first, the state of the word outside of the United States.

The event was kicked off by Josepha Haden Chomphosy, [00:02:00] who is the executive director of the WordPress project.

She talked about the community's heart and spirit and what fuels the hope. For the future, ensuring the freedoms for the open web for all. Then she introduced Matt and then they went ahead and get started. I do want to say a side note with the WP briefing podcast, which you can find over on WordPress.org/news. That is Josepha's podcast. It comes out every other week and it is somewhere between 8 to 25 minutes, depending on if she has guests or not, but really she gives a very high level overview of what's to come in 2024 and whatnot. And as part of my job at Automatic, I do edit that podcast.

So I do have a behind the scenes look of what's going on on that project. And it's really nice to listen and get an overarching feel for what is coming in the next year or so, or what's coming up in the WordPress project or what they're looking for, what kind of volunteers are looking for and things like that.

So that's what I want to say.

Now, the general flow of how a State of the Word works is usually Matt gives some sort of statistics, things that happened over the past year. They say some of the accomplishments that happened in the year, and then they [00:03:00] will look forward and say, here's some of the.

Things that are coming in the new year. So let's go ahead and dive into the, some of the stats from 2023, WordPress turned 20 on May 27th, and the presentation had quite a few pictures from people having celebrations across the world, celebrating WordPress, turning 20 and Matt made a comment that there was a lot of cake.

We like cake as WordPressers because there was a lot of cake involved with a lot of these pictures. Last year was the year that the WordCamps kind of got back on track. There were 70 WordCamps in 33 countries. Just to put that in perspective, the year after COVID there was 19. And then in 2022, I think he said there was 33.

And so it's more than doubled in 2023 to get to that 70 point. WordCamp Asia happened for the first time ever, and that is happening again in 2024, looking like it could be bigger than WordCamp Europe. So if you're in that part of the world, I highly recommend checking out information there.

Again, look in the show notes and you'll see links to a bunch of things and whatnot. There were more than [00:04:00] 2,500 WordCamp organizers. Those were for the big events and those were for the small events. So lots of people volunteered their time to help keep these things running. And bringing a bunch of people together.

Also, there is a WordCamp meetup survey that is still happening. I believe. I think there's one more week left to respond to this. But this is how can we make meetups better? That is something that's just overarching they're looking for information of how they can make gathering together as a WordPress community better.

So if you haven't filled out that if you haven't taken a chance to to look at that meetup survey I do recommend spending just a few minutes to volunteer some time and give some feedback there if you attended WordCamps. Or if there are none in your area and you haven't had the chance to experience one of those, I recommend doing that survey as well.

There is a new feature, if you head on over to wordpress.org/meet, this is very similar to the way that now it's in the WordPress dashboard. And this has been here for a few years, that if you go to your main dashboard page, there's usually a section where it looks for, it kind of knows where your [00:05:00] location is and then it'll display WordPress events that are happening geographically close to you.

Well, now if you go to wordpress.org/meet, it'll also show meetups. And so you can find out where different meetups are happening.

He talked a little bit about like, what do you do when somebody says like, Oh, is WordPress, can it handle their performance? Oh, is, is it secure? Things like that. Well, he wanted to point out that the, the performance thing is there. When time announced that Taylor Swift was the person of the year.

That site time. com was hosted on WordPress VIP was getting more than 100, 000 requests per second and was able to handle all the traffic just fine.

He also said another good point to reference if people are wondering if it is secure that the whitehouse. gov website is on WordPress. And so that is another like just kind of a key data point to say like, Oh, Hey, even our president thinks that it is a secure enough platform to run their entire web presence on WordPress.

Also, he mentioned that if you head on over to w. org or wordpress.org/remembers that is a tribute to [00:06:00] all of the folks that who have contributed to WordPress or have shaped the project in some way that are no longer here on earth with us, but that is a good place to remember the legacy of some of these people and some of the work that they've done to the WordPress project.

Then he spent a little bit of time talking about WordPress Playgrounds. And I've talked about this a lot on the show before how you can go and you can spin up a WordPress site right in your browser. And he really showed some really cool things. So there was a short demo video. If you do have time to watch the 40 ish minute presentation, I do recommend or even scrubbing through it.

The YouTube video has it broken into segments so you can scrub right to the Playground section. But this is basically a virtual machine in your browser. And so the cool parts that he highlighted here is now plugin authors can opt in to add a button to the WordPress repository page. And so you can just click open in playgrounds and then your plugin would automatically be installed inside of WordPress and you can start using it.

And I think there was some, there was some backlash early on when this was announced, but now I think there's some variables that you can say. So [00:07:00] if you have a WooCommerce plugin, it will allow you to say, Oh, also install WooCommerce and my plugin so that it'll work properly. This one was cool and I didn't know about this.

You can also develop locally and sync your local changes to the browser. So basically inside of the playgrounds inside your browser, it gives you the option to sync with a file structure on your computer. And maybe you're developing a plugin or developing the theme, you can make some changes, you can save and then you can refresh your browser and it will automatically do that.

The demo example was like basically turning the admin bar from a black color or blue color or something to a purple color. And it showed the CSS. They saved it in the text editor and then they refresh the browser and it turned purple. And it was, it was obviously amazing. Really, really cool.

If you're not familiar with the WordPress playgrounds, it basically is made for people to try out plugins or themes or even like code snippets to see if they work without having to spin up an entire WordPress site.

A lot of times it's like, oh, I want to use a clean environment, but if I'm using Local, then I have to create a new thing. Or, you know, even if you're like using SiteGround [00:08:00] and you have to go to SiteGround and spin up a new site just to test some things, it's really kind of a cumbersome type process. So we talked a little bit about that. And they said that there was almost 57,000 users of WordPress playgrounds in 2023.

Obviously they want to grow that, but that is kind of their baseline of how many people were using it in 2023.

The next thing you mentioned was 2024 was built. It has 35 different patterns built in. It talked about how you can use this for a standard blog for a business website and a lot of different patterns built into 2024. There were 1,339 new contributors to WordPress. So those were people that worked on a bug or added a feature or did some sort of documentation or added translations, all those types of things.

And that was 1300 new people to WordPress to one of the three core releases in WordPress in 2023.

They talked a little bit about moving into phase three in 2024, which is more about collaboration. And you can actually see some of these collaborating features if you install the [00:09:00] Gutenberg plugin. And then there's a checkbox inside of Gutenberg that says enable live.

I forget exactly the wording, but it basically allows you to do that live collaboration. And what that means is you can have two people open up browsers both working on the same post very much like a Google Docs type thing and somebody makes a change and then it will be reflected and on the other person's browser.

And from what I could tell from the demo, it looked like if somebody was updating a paragraph block, like it would wait till the pair, it would wait till the block was done being edited and then it would. Fully refresh on the other person's screen. So if you added a new image to a block, like it would wait till that image is uploaded and then it's done.

And then it would refresh on the other person's browser. And again, the demo was super, super cool.

Some of the other things that they're working on that part of the collaboration, part of phase three is that they're going to be able to, they're trying to lock down some features and swap out patterns and style variations with only certain patterns. So if you basically will say like give somebody the ability to have a pattern, but they can't, [00:10:00] they can change the text, but they can't change the colors or they can't change the styling, things like that.

So more for a developer giving a project over to a client say that, oh, they can update this, this and this, but they're not allowed to update, you know, the colors. So make sure that it falls within their color styles and their palettes and whatnot. They also are looking to improve the custom fields area.

If you're familiar with custom fields are usually at the bottom of a post or a page, and you can create any custom fields that you like. Mainly now they're trying to bring those more into blocks so that you can add a block.

And then in the site editing feature, you can go in and you could say add this dynamic custom field data, just pretty much bringing it in line with the rest of WordPress and making it look aesthetically more pleasing and just more user friendly without having to know tons and tons of code in order to do this.

Performance is another big thing that they're working on this year, and that means making the admin faster for people just using the back end, but also making the front end faster.

And I think they said the version of 6. 4 was [00:11:00] 2x faster than previous versions, especially when navigating across the back end and the front end. They do have a A demo site, wpmovies.dev, and this site is lightning fast. And this is something that they're working on, and this isn't, I don't know exactly what the infrastructure is behind WP movies, but man, it is kind of like an IMDb type site, but when you click on something like the page reloads instantly or not even reloads.

It's like a dynamic type. It feels like a react based thing and it's all powered by WordPress, which is really, really cool.

Another thing on the list of this year is updating list views. So think about if you go to your posts or your pages and those are all just kind of in a list view, they're working on adding some different filters, some sort options, some things like that. So if you wanted to only see podcast category posts, you know, in a post page or all of your posts that are related to a specific category or publish with a certain date with filters and stuff like that.

That is going to be updated in the coming year.

The learn AI [00:12:00] deeply. There was a short intro with the playgrounds again, but basically it was like with AI. The demo was something like create me a site with this particular name that has WooCommerce and it sells this thing. I think, you know, you just wrote that out in text to AI and then with the WordPress Playgrounds, it went out and it created a new site. Then it added the cart menu and the checkout menu.

It added WooCommerce it changed the name of the site like it did a bunch of cool things and kind of it worked. It was basically like AI using and creating a blueprint so that you could use and reuse within WordPress, which I don't know that was it was cool. Like I appreciate some of the things that we're doing with AI.

And I think something like that, writing out a short paragraph to say this is what I want. And then it It knows that within Playgrounds, let me go add WooCommerce and install these things and do this. And I think that's going to save us a lot of time when we're spinning up and we're setting up the new sites.

Another thing that he highlighted and Matt's talked about these four phases that we've been working on for years and years and years, right? But and he said, I think he said seven years ago, we came up with these four phases and we're finally into [00:13:00] phase number three now.

But he's like, sometimes we have to just pivot and we have to make sure that we are working on the right things, even though we set these goals seven years ago, like there's some other things that we can be working on. And one of the things he talked about was a data liberation. So these are basically like we want to unlock the digital barriers that sometimes that people and services have you locked in, like for Shopify, for example, like you can't export any of your content with tools from Shopify. Or just moving WordPress from like one server to another is really hard or it's a lot harder than it should be.

So he's talking about like different teams working on one click migrations from a certain place to a certain place or over to WordPress. And just making copy and paste better, like copying rich text from somewhere else in the web and then pasting it into your WordPress site. Working on that and featuring them or even sometimes like some of the other things were like moving from other sites, like I said, Shopify to WordPress or Wix to WordPress, like, how do we make that much of a smoother transition, but then also like maybe exporting from a page builder into Gutenberg, like what does that look [00:14:00] like? What, what can we do and how can that work? And so that is one of the things there is a whole site over there on wordpress.org/data-liberation. And it has a bunch of different projects that are out there.

Basically right now there's Squarespace to WordPress, RSS to WordPress, Blogger to WordPress, Tumblr to WordPress, Wix to WordPress, WordPress to WordPress, HTML to WordPress, and Drupal to WordPress. Those are the ones so far that are there. But he said, if you are interested in, this is one of your passions, reach out and you can start a team there and they can, you know, you can start working on that in a public environment.

He also mentioned that the plugins team is looking for volunteers. There is a huge backlog of WordPress plugins that haven't been approved yet.

And they're looking for more volunteers to spend some time reviewing plugins and making sure that that process of somebody submits a plugin and it gets reviewed within a week or two instead of months or more. All right. And then let's see what else was there.

He talked about WordCamp US. I'm not sure if I mentioned this earlier in a podcast, but WordCamp US is happening in Portland, Oregon. I believe it's in September of [00:15:00] 2024, so there'll be more details about that coming out.

And then lastly, he was saying that there was a new translation AI tool for translating videos.

So he took a video of Josepha saying, come and join us in Portland for WordCamp US. And then he translated it into multiple languages. So even though it was not Josepha saying these things in Spanish, but it was her voice translated in Spanish. Her mouth obviously did not move along at the same rate, but just kind of talking about some of those cool AI tools.

So they said they were going to translate State of the Word into four different languages, and so you can hear the whole presentation in those four different languages.

And that's a recap on State of the Word at 2023. I don't know. I always get excited about these things and then all of a sudden I started writing down, okay, what are my goals for WordPress? How am I going to, you know, do these things?

And so some of my plans for 2024 is weekly content. It has been several years since I have been very weekly with Your Website Engineer shows it. That was my bread and butter. Early, early on when I started this show, it was [00:16:00] like, I'm never going to miss. It's always going to come out every week. If I'm gone for three weeks, like I'm going to plan those episodes out in advance and make sure they publish obviously like kids and work and job and everything else kind of got in the way for a few years.

And now I'm going to commit to a weekly show and getting those back into your ears every week so that you can keep up on what's happening in WordPress. But I'm also going to work through a different variety of shows. Like, so we've got obviously the State of the Word recap and when a new version of WordPress comes out, those are normally the type of review type podcasts that I do.

So I'm still going to build in those shows that have, you know, here's how to do this with WordPress, with some news and a plugin to share. I'm also going to do shows dedicated specifically to plugins. So if you have a plugin that you want to share one that you just say, I can't live without this one, send that over to me, Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com. I'd love to do a review about those doing one of those per month.

And then I'd like to interview somebody every single month. I don't know how possible this is. But if you listen in December, I did that interview with Matt Medeiros, basically just talking about his journey with WordPress, where he is as a 20 minute type of show. And I want to [00:17:00] get more of those out this coming year just to hear more voices and just get excited and passionate.

I feel like every time that I listened to somebody else talk about how they're using WordPress, it's like, oh, I didn't think about that. And oh, I could do that as well. So. Those are some different varieties of shows coming up in 2024.

This year in 2024, I want to get back into contributing either to WordPress core or WooCommerce core, just helping out and figuring out some of those bugs.

I do have some technical background. I do have the knowledge of how to use GitHub and to create a pull request and stuff like that. So I want to get back into those types of things. I will transform all of my sites into block theme sites. That is a promise, a guarantee.

And I've been working on a couple sites in 2024 and it just wasn't a priority. But I think that as I'm reading the book, The One Thing, and the question of what is one thing that I can do that will make everything easier. And I think just as a general thing it's like so many of these sites that i'm running have custom page templates and if something else needs added then i've got to go in and customize and with the block editor, you can just build out what you need [00:18:00] very, very quickly.

And I think of all of my sites were on the block editor. It would just make everything so much easier. So that is what I'm going to, you know, you need to hold me to that to make sure that all of my sites are over onto a block theme.

And then my day job this year within WordPress is I work at Automattic. I am on the WooCommerce support team, but I'm also on a small team, a subset of a team that helps people transition their sites either to one of our WooExpress plans so that you have the highest performance type plan of WordPress that you can have, but also like moving over your payment processor to WooPayments. WooPayments is an incredible payment processor that allows you to do all kinds of different payments, whether that be through PayPal and you can do those like the affirm payments where you can have people pay over time and all of the interfaces just inside of WordPress. You don't have to go to Stripe. You don't have to go to PayPal to manage all your things. It's all in one dashboard inside your WordPress dashboard. So if you're interested in that as well, reach out to me, Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com and I can help you get all of that set up as well.

All right, those are my plans for [00:19:00] 2024. If you're doing something awesome in 2024 with WordPress, with themes, with plugins, reach out and share those with me.

Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com. And until next week, take care and we'll talk again soon. Bye bye. For more great WordPress information, head on over to YourWebsiteEngineer. com. Oh yeah, and I turn 40 in 2024. So that is another milestone that's happening in just a couple of months. . So that's really keeping my nose to the grindstone so I can accomplish some things before I turned 40. So that'll happen in March, but until then, we'll talk again soon. Bye.