The annual State of the Word keynote address took on a different look in 2021.
Held in New York City on December 14, 2021, the annual talk was a combination live event with small audience of WordPress community members (around 30 people) along with livestream.
In his two-hour talk, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, discussed WordPress accomplishments, open source, and answered questions from the WordPress community.
Here are my notes.
State of the Word 2021
- Mullenweg kicked off the address welcoming community members, commenting how fulfilling it was to be together again
- Traveling almost 7,000 miles from Antarctica to New York City for State of the Web, Mullenweg shared the story of explorer Ernest Shackleton whose expedition to the South Pole ended 97 miles short of the destination. Which reminded him of the WordPress 5.9 release.
- Originally scheduled for December 14, 2021, WordPress 5.9 version was delayed to January 2022 to continue working on the Full Site Editing feature
- Eight new core committers are working on core and themes: Kelly Choyce-Dwan, David Baumwald, William Patton, Isabel Brison, Jonny Harris, Jeff Ong, JB Audras, and Tonya Mork
WordPress in 2021
- WordPress now powers 43% of websites on the web, the top technology used for creating a website. In second place, Shopify powers only 4.4% of the web.
- WordPress Pattern Directory launched, a huge opportunity for WordPress users to contribute to WordPress
- In 2021, WordPress had the most downloads ever (an increase of 11.6%)
- Creative Common Search is now called Openverse, and is owned by Automattic. The plan is to have the WordPress media library integrated with Openverse. (Note: Confirmed by WordPress Community Strategist Angela Jin, all images in the Openverse will have automatic alternative text.)
- The Polyglots group continues to grow, with 15,900 active translators who work on 71 languages
- The new Diversity in WordPress program had 135 participants in 66 cities from 16 countries participate in workshops
- From two themes in 2020, block themes grew to 28 themes in 2021
- Block-based Widgets were introduced
- Two major versions released: 5.7 and 5.8. For the WordPress 5.7 version, there were 481 contributors (24% new contributors). For WordPress 5.8, there were 530 contributors (25% new contributors).
WordPress 5.9
- Features coming in WordPress 5.9: duotone, directly edit your site logo, create headers and footers in the editor, block spacing with a single control, Twenty Twenty Two theme and bundled patterns, flex layout for buttons, rows, navigation, and social icons, integrated Pattern Directory
- Users can use styles to change all the visual elements globally
- Mullenweg gave a quick demo of the Twenty Two theme to show how differently it displays after modifying styling options
Future of Open Source
- Over the years there’s been a big shift in market share, from three open source systems (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla) to WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix. After WordPress, the three top content management systems are proprietary.
- The idea of owning your content, owning the software that powers it is compelling. If we want a majority of the web to be powered by open source, we need to create as many use cases.
- If people are using WordPress open source, open API, open data, everything to get to where they’re going, that is better than using proprietary software to get from point A to point B
- Even if people are using open source to create a website or service, sell something online, they’re helping to make the web more open.
Other News
- The impact of companies that contribute to WordPress development is not related to the size of the company
- In the future, Tumblr will be powered by WordPress
- WordCamp US 2022 will take place in San Diego, California sometime in September
- Two more phases of Gutenberg are expected: collaboration in 2023 and multi-lingual after the collaboration phase is completed
- Share your WordPress story using the #ILoveWP hashtag and your story may be selected to be featured on the WordPress Testimonials page.
Mullenweg covered a lot of ground in his two-hour State of the Word address, I’ve only highlighted some of the takeaways.
I recommend watching the video, especially the question and answer period at the end (which I didn’t cover in my takeaways).
