Matt Mullenweg Gives the State of the Word

Don’t ask me why, but I have been to every WordCamp San Francisco. My badge actually says “First Class” this year. And every year I get to watch Matt Mullenweg grow up with his invention, the WordPress community. This year the conference is three days long, and it appears to be a mix of people I recognize, and newbies who don’t know as much as I do (which is very, very little).

Matt did a survey this year, and found out something really new: WordPress is a job generator. 2800 people who answered the survey now make their living through WordPress. Wonder what percentage of people who didn’t bother to answer the survey also make their living from WordPress? At any rate, it’s a large number, and I think it illustrated the future of work: these people don’t work for WordPress; they work with WordPress.

 More stats:

170,000 sites have been built

Most WordPress developers have built more than 25 sites each

Many have built over 100

Most of the developers think WordPress is easy to use, but the # 1 complain is plugins, some of which are not secure and aren’t updated.

So WordPress has decided that of the 15000 plugins in the repository.any not updated for two years will be deleted.

People are coming to use WordPress as a content management system more than as a blogging platform. 92% of respondents use it for both

Matt’s still young enough to believe in what he does, and what he wants to do is create, as he said, “an open source spectacular.” Because he has the community, he feels a virtuous loop drives innovation.

This year Matt talked a lot about “desire paths.” A desire path is a green lawn without paving that only gets paved where the users have trampled across it to get from one place to another. In WordPress, the Release 3.0 had a new theme, customized post types, a leaner interface, and an optimized UI because users requested it.

The best thing I saw this year was the release of Jetpack, which combines a bunch of commonly used features from WordPress.com and makes them available as a single plug-in for WordPress.org. Matt said that was because plug-ins and theme are manifestations of desire paths in WordPress.

To illustrate this he quotes from Stewart Brand‘s “Learning Buildings,” in which he turns the phrase “Form follows function” from architecture to “Form Reforms Function – Perpectually.” He wants WordPress to be adaptive.

What comes next?

1)An open unified mobile experience, relying more on HTML5 and CSS3

2) A better marriage of reading and writing experience

3) A more responsive responsive admin panel

4) A better NUX (new user experience) rather than SUX

5) Better media handling (DRAG AND DROP IMAGE UPLOADING)

And…last but not least: auto-updating without versioning,  the thing I gathered Matt looks forward to most.