[00:00:00] **Dustin:** On today's episode, we are going to do a quick recap of Matt's state of the word 2024 right here on your website, engineer podcast, episode number 552,

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. And today we're going to be talking about the State of the Word address. That happened in December of 2024. I don't know about you, but I like to watch these every single year and they're about an hour in length.

And then sometimes there's a Q and a, but these, this one was about an hour and I really just enjoy to kind of see and hear the future of things to come with WordPress and it always gets me a little bit excited. It, I think it's kind of falls in in a weird spot as I'm like getting ready to go back to work and, and a few things.

And so it's just a matter of like, now I'm really excited about this. The things in the changes that are coming, how can I implement some of these things? And just looking at some of the stats and I think WordPress is still really, really great. And it is obviously as we continue to do a podcast about WordPress, but I think it's, it is a platform where people are [00:01:00] getting more and more encouraged to use and just the flexibility.

And one of the things that I really liked about it, and we'll get to it in the recap said, basically we need to make WordPress easy for everyone to use, but challenging enough to be able for the developers to do what they need to do. And I thought that was really encouraging that that's something that they always think about every time they add a new feature or they do things like, is this intuitive enough for everybody to be able to understand and everybody's to do, but also can developers do what they need.

So anyways, that's what I want to share at the top of the show. Let's go ahead and get started with with the recap.

This was the first State of the Word that was outside of the U S I believe. And it was in Tokyo and there was a little bit of history at the very beginning. I'm not going to recap that whole thing, but basically about how the WordPress first localization in Japan in 2003 and then the growth of the market.

And then also the cool part was, I don't know if you've ever seen Wapu. Wapu came from Japan at a WordCamp event in 2009. It's GPL and each camp and location now have their own flair. So for example, like [00:02:00] Wapu in Philadelphia can be holding the cheesesteak or, you know, you just kind of get some of the natural flair from those different areas across the world.

First section here is about WordPress release and development WordPress sits at 43. 6 percent of the web. And if a person is going to pick a CMS, it sits at 62. 3 percent of the CMS market share and Shopify is next at 6. 6 percent which is mind boggling. And the fact that you hear so much about Shopify, you see all the ads everywhere about Shopify, but it's only at 6. 6 percent of the market share for the CMS.

In Japan the numbers are even more impressive at 58. 5 percent of Japanese websites use WordPress. And so that's up from 43 percent and 83 percent of the market share in Japan is using WordPress. Shopify is a mere 2. 7 percent in Japan. Over the year, there was 500 million global downloads of the WordPress software.

There was three major releases. [00:03:00] Regina was WordPress 6. 5, Dorsey 6. 6, and Rolands 6. 7. They introduced a ton of new themes and plugins, especially 2025, and they emphasized the block themes in Gutenberg framework. There were over a thousand plus new block themes, and more than 2 billion plugin downloads.

They also reduce the number of times the plugin queue used to be at days, I think it was 76 days when you submitted a plugin for the very first time in order for it to be reviewed, to get onto the plugin directory, they zeroed out the queue in October. And so that was really good. And they've got, got all caught up there.

And then there's improvements in writing and direct manipulation of content in blocks. We'll talk about that on an upcoming episode about using attributes and being able to pull meta fields from different places. The future developments was recapped by Matias Ventura. He recap the four phases of development, the editing, the customization, the collaboration, the multilingual.

These are the four things that I think WordPress as a community have been working on [00:04:00] since 2015. Right now we're in the collaboration phase. And so there's some new features coming up, like being able to comment directly on blocks. And so if you have sent something over to an editor, they can comment on things and then you could see the edits in the sidebar and you can go back and forth until you get the article.

Just perfect. This could be really good for like FAQs or anything along those lines. Like there's a lot of really neat things that you could do with the collaboration feature. I think eventually we're going to get to the point where it's going to be more like a Google Doc. So multiple people can be on at the same time, but they're doing this slowly.

They're rolling it out slowly. So that everyone has the opportunity to test it and to work through it and make sure that it works for everyone. Matias also talked about four different kind of segments that they were working on. It was called Write, Design, Build and Develop. We'll go through each one of those very quickly.

With the Write section, there was, there's a distraction free mode. There is a click to move and drag. So instead of using the up and down arrows, you can now click to drag to move blocks from place to [00:05:00] place, including the ability to drag images side by side. So I don't know if you ever tried to create a column of two pictures, like you have to go and you have to create the column and you have to put one image on one and one on the other.

And so this is going to give you the ability to like click and drag and move things to the right spot. There's a show template toggle in the top right. So if you're working on a post itself, but you wanted to modify something in the, in the, In the template itself to go across all pages.

You can just toggle that in the upper right hand corner. Again, some of these features are not here. You can get them with the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin. And then also is in the right section was working on the comment blocks, how that works, how people can comment and leave them in WordPress. On the design side, there are now, Editing and design options.

So there is a button that's going to be up in the upper left hand corner where you can toggle or you can change between editing and design. So if you're in the editing mode, you could only change the text and not made mess up the page layout. But if you go into the design option, you can rearrange and you can work on those templates.

There are style sections with [00:06:00] the style book to customize all the blocks. There's also a mention of how the blocks make up patterns and patterns make up templates, which is kind of like what we know, you know, you can start with a block and then you can build blocks and put blocks together to make patterns.

And then if you put all of these things on a page, that's going to be a template and the templates are what can be used for different sections of your site. In the build phase or in the build section, the blocks can now be connected to custom metafields. An advanced query field could also be attached to custom fields, too.

So just the ability to pull that data from the WordPress Dashboard. So I know that I do a lot of like, oh, I'm gonna make it easy for the people using my site. So I'm gonna go ahead and take the time and build custom meta boxes in the back end. So if somebody needs to put a social profile for maybe a speaker or, you know, something that's very much related and just needs a field.

I'll add those as custom fields. And now you can grab those in display them in a template, which is really nice. And then on the develop side, you can now easily add a template to the block editor and the interactivity API is built onto WordPress.

We'll make search and [00:07:00] pagination and everything more instant without needing page reloads, which makes sites really, really fast. And then also they're adding control in there, how you can work with things with different breakpoints. So I know that this isn't in Gutenberg right now, or even in the block editor templates, like if you want something to do something specific in a mobile setting or have something, you know, like, Oh, on mobile, I want to hide this entire area or whatnot.

In 2025, you'll have the ability to customize that inside of the block editor.

They mentioned WordPress playgrounds. They're getting some work done to them. You can now have multiple sites open at one time, and now there's the ability to have blueprints and easily add content you use regularly.

So if you always start with the 2025 theme and these seven plugins, you can save that as a blueprint. And then every time you start a new WordPress Playground, it can start with those.

And there is also now a WordPress Figma project that can be used and accessed by the community. So everyone can use the same actual images that they're using to build the WordPress project itself.

I thought that was kind of neat that if you were going to create [00:08:00] tutorials or different things like you could just grab and use the Figma screenshots and make him exact instead of taking your own screenshots. And then there's also, I mentioned this at the top of the show, but there was a lot of thought and Matias talked about this in making it the best tool for everyone.

It needs to be simple enough for all to use, but powerful enough for the developers to do what they need. After Mathias was done with his segment, Matt came back and talked for a couple minutes about power of how we can use the help of AI to build out a WordPress site, which quicker than before.

And then there is a YouTube man versus machine build off. I've linked in the show notes for episode number 552, but basically it is like it was two people going head to head against building from scratch and building using AI, like asking chatGPT to build me a plugin to do this. The very first part of the video was like make it snow on your WordPress site. And so you had to try to figure out the best, fastest way to do that.

And no spoilers, but the the AI tool might have won on that one, but you can watch that video later. Then Mary Hubble came to the stage. She's the new WordPress executive director. [00:09:00] They talked a little bit about addressing the legal issues.

There was a brief mention about WP Engine's legal action and WordPress commitment to its open source nature. Then she highlighted some of the global and local WordPress community things that there was 1097 unique contributors to the three releases in 2024. There are now learning pathways in learn WordPress designed for beginners to advanced users.

And now, and then she talked a little about, about open verse and it's, oh, it's open source. It's you can use it on WordPress or other CMSs. There's 885 million images on Openverse, and it's continuing to grow, and there's other content there as well.

Then there was some talk about the data liberation initiative and basically what that is for. It's talking about content freedom. It is giving the importance of you can take your content free. anywhere. There's also a widget inside bar that's being built that help you use any site on the internet. You can turn it into blocks so you can start building and customizing from there.

I know that that would be huge. There's a lot of like websites that you get some inspiration for. It's like, I wonder how they do that. I wonder how they do this. [00:10:00] And this widget, I wasn't sure exactly if it was going to be like a browser extension or somehow you can open it up in WordPress or I don't know exactly how it works, but basically you can click a button and it can generate like the content in the blocks.

It can't pull all the CSS and all that kind of stuff, but it is a great starter and it was a cool piece at the very end of this video. So that was a little bit there. And then they talked about the encouragement to get involved with the WordPress community, regardless of background or expertise or like it just talked about, and they were highlighted so much about how this global community has come together and put together all that it is of WordPress.

And then lastly, the last thing Matt says was that even though the last few months it might have seen like they've been just trying to take down a bad actor full of distractions. It was a year of growth and focus in many areas. And with three solid releases and just being able to dive in over the last three months of rebuilding a WordPress site using all the features in WordPress, I'm just really blown away at how flexible it is, how customizable it is and how quick you can do things [00:11:00] and before it was like, oh, I need to do this and it's a whole custom page build out thing.

But now it's like, oh, I can do this very, very quickly and I can make you know, the site exactly what I need to do. And it's gonna save me a lot of time in 2024. So that is the State of the Word recap. I hope that you found something interesting. It is an hour long. You can watch it on the 2x like I did, and it's only a 30 minute show.

But it, yeah. It did get you a little pumped up for what's to come with WordPress in 2025. I again, am excited. I'm going back to work next week. And so it's like, I am going to get back into the swing of things with all the WordPress things. So I'm excited there. That's what I want to share with you today. Take care. And we'll be back next week.