Matt Mullenweg Drops WordPress Summer Update Bombshells @ WCEU2024 (We’re Excited!)

Matt Mullenweg’s summer update at WordCamp Europe 2024 is a treasure trove of insights and innovations beneficial for you and the WordPress community. In this keynote presentation, Matt provided an overview of various ground-breaking developments about the new and existing projects in the WordPress ecosystem.

He started the session at WCEU2024 by discussing the Contributor Mentorship Program and highlighting its success in developing confidence among new contributors. He then discussed the data liberation project, urging the community to unlock the data trapped in proprietary systems.

Matt further talked about the upcoming WordPress release, WordPress Playgrounds to the high-octane Speed Build Challenge, and more valuable things for the WordPress community and on and on…!

So, if you missed the WordCamp summer update or haven’t attended the WCEU 2024 live, then this blog is for you.

Here we will walk you through some of the key highlights from Matt Mullenweg’s summer update, exploring the advancements and what these mean for the future of WordPress.

So, let’s dive deep into it!

Contributor Mentorship Program

Matt started the session by discussing the contributor mentorship program. He even emphasized that 66 WordPress enthusiasts have already graduated from this program. But what exactly is it? 

Matt Mullenweg introduced the contributor mentorship program, a new initiative designed to support and nurture new members of the WordPress community. 

In this program, WordPress experts connect with the newbies to offer the guidance, knowledge, skills, and support they require to contribute to the leading content management system. With the help of this dedicated mentorship, the program ensures that new-age WordPress enthusiasts have a wonderful experience and feel like they are already part of this vibrant community.

The program will benefit not only the mentees but also the mentors in the WordPress ecosystem. Mentors will have an incredible feeling of satisfaction by giving back to the WordPress community. This initiative is part of Matt Mullenweg’s ongoing commitment to growing and strengthening the WordPress community by making it more accessible and welcoming to everyone.

Matt even talked about contributor day. He said that it is the most amazing day for WordPress enthusiasts to learn new skills, become experts in WordPress, and connect with the vast WordPress community.

What’s more? He shared an astounding fact!

“66 People have translated more than twenty-one thousand strings on the contributor day.”

This fact clearly indicates the potential of WordCamp Contributor Day.

Data Liberation and Innovations in WordPress Playground

Matt Mullenweg re-introduced the Data Liberation project at the State of the Word event. The project focuses on building an open web for seamless data migration between different platforms. 

For the same, different people in the WordPress community create tools and resources that streamline shifting data to and from WordPress. Thus, it helps you avoid being locked into systems that don’t allow data composability or transferability. 

The initiative is meant to improve the community-driven approach. How? All contributors have an opportunity to create and share plugins, scripts, and guides to facilitate migrations. The end goal here is to ensure that data portability happens with just one click, regardless of whether it is social networks, page builders, or any CMS.

In simple words, as a user, you will have access to your own data with complete control over it. Plus, if someone has access to your data, it will stay with them forever. 

Apart from data liberation, Matt even talked about the WordPress playground. It is a groundbreaking tool designed to change everything. The tool allows you to test and configure the WordPress quickly and easily.

This tool leverages the blueprints for rapid configuration and provides a local sandbox environment for safe testing and experimentation. Its primary purpose is to make the development process smooth and enhance the user experience by integrating with WordPress CLI and GitHub. The community-driven project encourages contributions and promises to transform how WordPress is used and developed. 

WordPress 6.6 Release 

Matt even announced in WordCamp Europe 2024 that WordPress 6.6 will be released on July 16th, 2024. The upcoming release will comprise various new features and enhancements that can improve the overall user experience. 

He even shared the list of features that would be coming up in the upcoming release. These are as follows:

• Style variations for groups
• Rollbacks for auto updates
• Quick previews for pages
• Set negative margins
• Consisting editing flow in site and block editor
• Building grid layouts
• Pattern management in classic themes and more.

Gutenberg Editor Update

In the annual WCEU 2024 event known as “State of the Word,” Matt promised that typing speed would be increased in Gutenberg in the upcoming WordPress version. He stated that in WordPress 6.6, Gutenberg’s typing speed will be 5X faster than the previous WordPress release. This would be really beneficial for those who type a lot in the Gutenberg editor.

Zoom Out View: 

Zoom Out View allows users to view the entire webpage rather than just a small section. It even allows understanding all the pages that fit effectively.  Hence, WordPress users can arrange, remove, and style all the sections simultaneously, instead of working on one part only. This feature offers an excellent sense of the design and flow. It even ensures that the design looks aesthetic and appealing from top to bottom. 

The Exciting Speed Build Challenge

Matt mentioned the speed build challenge, describing it as ‘the hottest eSports platform’ in a funny yet quirky manner. 

It’s a prestigious competition where two people race against the clock to replicate a website design in 30 minutes. This esteemed challenge is a regular feature on Jamie Marsland’s official YouTube Channel.

Moreover, he mentioned that the speed build challenge was hosted live on the 2nd day of WordCamp Europe, i.e., on 14th June 2024. 

He also stated that the speed build challenge should include new challenges, such as CMS Olympics, or something where two participants build websites using different CMSs and compete against each other. 

11 Key Opinions from Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg started working on WordPress when he was 19 years old with Mike Little, who is also a co-founder of WordPress. 

Matt shared 11 points that he thinks would be beneficial for the entire WordPress community.

So, let’s get the ball rolling.

1. Simple Things Should be Easy and Intuitive, and Complex Thigns Possible

It is one of the most crucial challenges in the world of technology. One of the best examples he shared is of smartphones. The smartphones these days are highly intuitive and accessible from anywhere. 

Similarly, WordPress is the leading content management system that can be used to build small websites and some of the most influential websites in the world. 

2. Blogs and Dynamic Sites are Better

Matt mentioned that static sites are good. However, in this digital age, everyone likes interactions. So, he said we should focus on building more dynamic sites comprising blogs and other exciting stuff where users can comment, interact, subscribe, etc.

He even emphasized that don’t just create a website but instead focus on creating a community.

He even shared that we should focus on creating personalized content for our target audience. Every business should brainstorm and put ideas together for a blog. Why? Because people around the world love this kind of content.

3. Documentation Should be Wiki-Easy to Edit

He mentioned that WordPress documentation was imported from a website known as codex.wordpress.org, and it was a MediaWiki instance. 

As of now, the WordPress.org documentation does not have an edit button. He stated that it should have one that would redirect users to GitHub or Gutenberg and allow them to make changes to it.

He even shared a new idea, moderative Wiki, which is not present in the current WordPress world. Here, whenever someone wants to change the documentation, it goes into moderation and then gets updated if needed.

4. Forums should be Front and Center

After returning from the sabbatical, Matt said he provided extensive customer support for various products at Automattic. He found it challenging to find questions and answer them in forums. Hence, he suggested creating a Wapu bot to answer users’ queries in forums. Apart from this, he said that we should focus on building a system where users can interact with each other and resolve each other’s issues without much hindrance.

5. Every Theme and Plugin should have Infrastructure Similar to WordPress

Matt stated that building themes and plugins with the same infrastructure as WordPress would be great. This means that all the themes and plugins should have an extensive infrastructure comprising version control, bug trackers, forums, documentation, internalization, chat rooms, and more. 

6. Great Theme Previews and Diverse Aesthetics

Matt here described the many themes available in the Theme directory. However, not all themes have proper previews and diverse aesthetics. 

He insisted that all the theme authors can now leverage the WordPress playground and improve the theme previews by adding better screenshots and other things. Moreover, plugin and theme authors should consider showcasing screenshots based on the device of the users.

7. We Can’t Over Index for Guidelines and Requirements

Basically, Matt wants to say that we should not keep many guidelines and requirements for publishing WordPress themes and plugins. 

But why? 

By keeping these, we are hampering the creative ideas of the respective plugin and theme authors. A better idea here is to allow exceptions if the developer’s concept is unique and safe.

He wants to strike a balance between maintaining quality and enabling developers to experiment. This way, WordPress can stay innovative and exciting while ensuring security and reliability.

8. Feedback Loops are So Important

Matt emphasized the significance of the feedback loops. He mentioned that whenever someone wants to install a plugin, they check the ratings, reviews, and forums and manually install it on the website. 

Here, everyone has to follow this process, and nobody can know in advance whether the plugin is accessible on their site or whether it supports the language. 

To make this somewhat interesting and exciting, we should focus on providing a facility where people can tag from the WordPress dashboard about the particular plugin. In short, we should work on scaling the feedback.

A great example of this could be whenever someone builds a plugin and pushes the code on GitHub, the team at WordPress checks the plugin and provides feedback. 

9. Core Should be Opinioned and Quirky

Firstly, Matt insisted that there should be a strong opinion on how the core of WordPress works. This means it should instruct users on best practices and offer a straightforward path. This would be really great for consistency and quality in all types of WordPress sites.

Other than this, WordPress’s core should be fun and unique. This simply means integrating new features into the content management system should be enjoyable. These things would make WordPress a platform that reflects the personalities of the users and developers. 

10. If You Make WordPress, Use WordPress

He stated that if you are improving WordPress, you should use it often. One should consider starting a blog or building their own personal site on WordPress. It helps you understand all the strengths and weaknesses of the content management system.

Whenever you use WordPress yourself or hear feedback about it from any of your loved ones, you will have empathy for it. Moreover, you should focus on resolving all the issues effectively because you have hands-on experience with the CMS.

In short, when you are involved in a team that makes WordPress, you should use it. It further helps you to understand user experience, identify improvements, and enhance the content management system.

11. Stay Close to Our End-Users

Last but not least, Matt advised the people involved in WordPress to stay close to the CMS. He stated that we should often listen to new posts, read blogs, and read news associated with WordPress. It helps us to know what is happening in WordPress and what new technologies and tools we can implement in the WordPress ecosystem.

In-Depth Q&A Session: Top Questions Answered

After conducting an extraordinary session, Matt Mullenweg held a Q&A session. Here are the exciting questions asked by the WordCamp Europe 2024 attendees, along with their answers.

1. How can you make documentation easier in WordPress?

Matt stated that there should be a way to integrate GitHub with the Gutenberg editor, making documentation editing simpler yet more effective. He further emphasized that we should consider synchronizing WordPress and GitHub to make editing easy for not only developers but for everyone.

2. When will the development of the multilingual functionality begin, and what features can we expect from it?

Matt informed the WordPress community that multilingual functionality is part of Gutenberg, phase 4. He emphasized that while it’s not ready yet, it will focus on developing robust data and interaction models. However, he suggested that some of the existing plugins could provide a framework for future integration.

3. What is the status of stats dashboards, and what kind of data do project leaders need?

Matt highlighted that we should ensure complete data integrity before making the system accessible to all. He further stated that to have trustworthy data, we should focus on eliminating all spam from the systems. Matt showcased an interest in feedback on data views and what project leaders find useful.

4. When can we expect Core to modernize the database structure and make it more performant and modern?

Matt said he would avoid building a lot of tables, as it doesn’t constantly improve performance. Rather, it would be better to utilize fewer tables because it simplifies the integration and maintenance of multiple features. 

He further stated that the existing methodology, which uses the WP_Post and WP_Options, is absolutely better for streamlining various system functions. These performance improvements are possible with hardware and technological advancements, such as leveraging quick processors and database handling software like SQLite.

He lastly stated that we should consider profiling before optimizing to identify actual bottlenecks and address them well.

5. Can we have a formal people and culture team to improve and be a shared resource for all contributors?

Matt said that the principles of the people and culture should definitely be present in every team. This means that mentorship and community support should be the most crucial parts of the team. 

6. What do you think about having blueprints or recipes in core WordPress?

The recipe is similar to the playground but in Drupal. It allows users to do various things in the core. The attendee asked if we could do the same thing in WordPress core. 

Matt first praised the name “recipe” and thanked Drupal. Then, he mentioned that Playground acts just like a middleman. Think of it as a browser in between that loads things and lets you know what is possible in real-time. However, doing all these things in the core would be difficult as it is a heterogeneous system. However, he stated that we might develop something like this in the future.

7. Can WordPress.com provide free plans for meetup groups to remove ads?

Matt approved the idea enthusiastically and confirmed that Meetup groups would get free WordPress.com Creator plans, which was met with applause.

8. Are there any plans to integrate AI or automation in upcoming WordPress updates?

Matt stated that we should advance with future developments and highlighted Apple’s recent WWDC presentation. He mentioned that AI features might become integrated into operating systems and browsers, naturally extending to WordPress.

9. When will you do a speed-building challenge again?

Matt gracefully accepted the challenge. He said it would be an excellent opportunity for the entire community to learn and engage.

10. What will be done about the security issue with closed plugins not showing in the backend?

Matt acknowledged the problem and agreed that it needed to be fixed, promising to address the ticket quickly.

Final Thoughts

In the end, we would say that Matt Mullenweg is now more dedicated to WordPress after this sabbatical break. He even stated in WCEU 2024 that he is now fully immersed in the WordPress community, listening to podcasts, reading blogs, and keeping up with the latest news.

With Matt’s renewed energy and focus, we can expect various amazing updates and enhancements in the WordPress ecosystem. His commitment to the content management system ensures many innovative developments that would benefit WordPress users. Hence, the future of WordPress looks exciting, with Matt leading the journey.