10 Key Takeaways from Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A: What WordPress Users Need to Know

With the recently held WordCamp Asia 2024 between 7^th and 9^th of March 24, the WordPress community is buzzing with a lot of news and information from the event across these 3 days! Held at the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC), in Taipei, Taiwan, WordCamp Asia 2024 witnessed scores of developers, enthusiasts, fans, and even WordPress-oriented companies attending the event. 

Apart from the usual subject-specific sessions by leading WordPress personalities, the most looked forward-to session was the Matt Mullenweg WordPress Q&A! Eagerly awaiting his presence at the Plenary Hall, all the WordPress fans, enthusiasts, developers, etc. welcomed WordPress founder Matt with roaring fanfare as he walked on to the centerstage. Matt began by addressing the audience after very briefly greeting everyone. 

Matt Mullenweg began with elaborating upon how his vision for an open and accessible web has helped WordPress, and by every extension of it, fostered a community of contributors and innovators across continents. In fact, he was quite overjoyed to see such a huge turnout, and shared that he missed attending quite a few WordCamps held previously in other countries. Especially between 2020 and 2023, when WordCamps were not held due to the global pandemic crisis. 

Attending or Travelling to WordCamps 

On the same subject, an attendee drew his attention about some noted Speakers on WordPress, who weren’t able to attend the WordCamp Asia, due to financial difficulties. Another such similar concern was brought to the fore of an incident narrated by another attendee, where their visas to the host country were denied by the consulate of that country. 

Matt was seriously concerned about such issues and provided directions for enlisting their attendance. Their trip expenses would be sponsored by noted companies interested in WordPress and such noted identities making their presence felt in WordCamps. As for Visa problems, Matt asked to reach out to their internal WordPress team, and they would help sort out requirements or issues with the visa issuing panel.

Decentralized Publishing and Web3

Matt Mullenweg was asked about his outlook for the WordPress future with decentralized publishing and Web3 with respect to the WordPress platform, and the emerging blockchain revolution in the past few years. Matt went ahead explaining the current systems supporting blockchain technology needs to be aligned with the central mechanism of WordPress core. 

Moreover, he has been toying with the idea of decentralized publishing with WordPress, for some time now. He envisions using this technology, for stamp-marking digital content such as articles or even web page content, photos, and videos in their original unmodified form, to add or ensure their authenticity.

Upcoming WordPress Projects & Initiatives

Upon being asked about Matt’s future plans about WordPress, or if something radical is in the pipelines or under development within the WordPress ecosystem, Matt took up Gutenberg. Currently, Matt and the team are looking to integrate or implement the co-editing feature in Gutenberg. A single document can be opened by multiple users at the same time, and all of them could be editing it, with changes that could be merged instantly into the document in real time, without any conflicts. 

Moreover, an intelligent method would keep track of the changes, in case any single user went offline, so that the user’s changes would be incorporated immediately, when logged back in. In fact, it makes for a very seamless collaboration and workflow across people working on the same document or even a web page! Matt wondered if they could create an entity that could come online and chat with users, and edit and do things in WordPress as the user wanted!

Data Migration / Data Liberation

On being asked about Data migration and Data Liberation, Matt shared his views on the current data privacy on the web. With several big companies really locking users or their data in almost a hostile, competitive manner called as ‘Malicious Compliance’, which Matt detests unforgivingly. Taking out data from these companies is absolutely impossible, or even to use. 

Most of the time, once someone gets hold of your data, it stays with them forever; your data is never released per se. He opined that users should have access to their own data at least, with full control over it, just as you can take out your data from your Google account. People must have immediate and open access in a standard format to their own data, which is Data Liberation. 

To achieve this, Matt feels a truly open-source avenue would ‘make scraping or spidering’ your own data within your control, increasing user freedom on the internet. He introduced this idea in the State of the World in Madrid, in December 2023. Those looking for their ‘Five To The Future’ contributions can adopt these data liberation projects, and keep the ball rolling. 

About LMS plugins

Reminiscing WordCamp US, Matt Mullenweg brought the topic of LMS plugins or Learning Management Systems plugins for WordPress to the fore. He emphasized that developers of LMS plugins should improve their compatibility within WordPress, which is the need of the hour. These learning LMS plugins need to get some data compatibility within the framework for some of their common functions and data, to increase their usage and applications within WordPress. 

Gutenberg Project & Increasing Use of JavaScript 

Of the recent progress and developments in Gutenberg, Matt reiterated its features. Gutenberg allows creating a common block format that makes it easier for developers to get things in and out while coding or building a website. Furthermore, they have to consider the users’ growing needs around page builders and more ‘atomic editing’ of page code. In the same lines, someone asked him whether core WordPress or rather Gutenberg is slowly moving towards incorporating more of JavaScript? 

Matt was quite elated that someone asked this question. He elaborated that given the current web technologies moving gradually and increasingly towards more of JavaScript, it was inevitable and became imperative to incorporate more of JavaScript into WordPress, as well as more of it into the Gutenberg project. As it happened, initially, when the Gutenberg project began, it was already kind of a JavaScript first project, with more of it and less of PHP as it developed further, which made people learn a lot of new things, because of WordPress updates. 

To AI or Not to AI

Quite a few of the attendees expressed their curiosity in knowing whether, WordPress roadmap would also traverse into implementing AI into either generating content, or developing websites. To which Matt replied, “they won’t be running AI models shared hosting.”. He began and also had encouraged developers back in December 2022, to learn ChatGPT and AI deeply. He had foretold that “AI would become to be used in daily lives, will augment our development, even find bugs, fuzz things as well as test & improve everything from the code to the plugin queue, etc.”. he reemphasized, to “learn JavaScript tools every day.”.

It’s All In The Name 

A Polish attendee presented the current dilemma scenario involving the WordPress.com and WordPress.org domains. He suggested to Matt if it could be possible to retire WordPress.com, and replace it entirely with Jetpack. Matt was quite bemused, responding with an anecdote about receiving communication from competitors, stating they found it pretty difficult to compete with WordPress as a whole. 

Ever since, they have been managing both the domains in separate spaces, with an ever-expanding WordPress community. He shared the idea that the interface of WordPress.com, which was different from that of WPAdmin, is now gradually growing closer to resembling it, thereby should clear up the confusion a bit, in some time. Though, Matt would personally love to own a “W.org” domain, which he calls as “Worg”. From about 6 months from now, all confusion should be ironed out, and the usages would be clarified, as they are gathering surveys from across the world to finalize and implement this. 

A Rare Issue of Media Plugin

An attendee, a digital marketing manager, expressed that certain features in the content management system in WordPress are now dated, in architecture or terms of their design. Some of these core WordPress features could do with an uplift or introduce something new. 

His primary issue was managing media or any content, viz., a Media library, having a lot of media content, which isn’t possible without resorting to third-party plugins. It would have been great to see these features as a default part of core WordPress. Having asked Matt, “How does he categorize which features should be there in core, and which should be there in third-party plugins only?”. Matt took this as a question, which required much elaborate answers.

Matt opened up about having more than 30,000 photos uploaded to his library. The media content is the hardest to manage through core WordPress. Many features were regressed, including the people tagging feature, taxonomy on people (with custom taxonomies), Indexing, Alt tags, comments, EXIF metadata, etc. For him, there’s a science to arriving at a conclusion of which features would be added or integrated into core WordPress. There are tickets to consider, internal debates, opinions, people’s demands, etc., which go on before implementing or eliminating any features or updates. They have to balance what everyone needs, and also build what people are going to need on the WordPress platform. 

Finally, His Next Journey.

Certain attendees have faced Visa hurdles traveling to other countries for WordCamps. Furthermore, some women attendees requested guidance in encouraging women participants in future WordCamp events. Angela Jeon replied with, ‘referring to several options’ listed on the DEIB (Diversity Equity Inclusion, and Belonging) page. 

Matt, on the other hand, exclaimed that he would love to attend the next WordCamp if exclusively held in India! That’s one thing he has wanted to check off his list of ‘ToDos’ for a long time! He was also quite overjoyed to see that the younger generation is getting more into WordPress with each passing day! 

At WPLift, we too are waiting for the day when a WordCamp would be scheduled and hosted in India, and we would be the ones covering it too!