Episode 174: Thoughts on 2021 State of the Word

Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks about the State of the Word and he offers his analysis.

Show Highlights:

WordPress 5.9.
Gutenberg.
Roadmap for the future.

Show Notes

Episode 174 State of the Word Summary and Analysis

From the center of the universe, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This is the SDM show with your host Rob Cairns. The SDM show focuses on business life productivity, digital marketing WordPress and more. sit back relax, grab your favorite drink and enjoy the show here is Rob.

Hey everybody, Rob Cairns here and the founder, CEO and chief creator amazing ideas Stunning Digital Marketing. today’s podcast I look back at last night stated word, give you some quick highlights and certainly insights in the some of the things that were discussed. Sit back, relax, grab a drink, and enjoy this short podcast.

Hey, everybody, Rob here again. In today’s podcast, I really wanted to spend some time talking about the 2021 State of the Word. So Matt Mullenweg did this broadcast from New York City last night at the time of this recording. And I thought I’d throw some thoughts into it, as I’ve been in the WordPress community for a long, long time. couple of caveats here. One of the things I’ll tell you is I met Matt in Toronto about six or seven years ago when he was up here for a WordPress event. And it was such a pleasure. I am not in the Matt Mullenweg hatred camp. I do think there’s some things he could do differently. But personally, I’m not a Mac the tractor. I think he’s done a lot for the community. And he’s done a lot for me and my profession and what I do for a living so from that standpoint alone, that’s a real good thing. I want to start out by saying one of the things I was disappointed in instated word is Matt did not spend a lot of time talking to the community and the issues in the community. And if you don’t want this podcast, I’ve had Paul Lacey on I’ve had Brian Gardner on, I’ve had multiple people on our urine review on. And we’ve all talked about the community and what the community means to us. And I think one of the things Matt could have done was embrace that community a little more. But that said, I think he did some things right with the community, for example, he had 35 or so community people in the room when he did stay to the ward, that was a really, really good thing to do personally. The other thing that he did yesterday, I noticed is he had more energy yesterday when he was talking to no seen him in a long time. And I don’t know if the pandemic had a lot to do with that. Or if other things had a lot to do with that. I’m just not sure. But I thought I’d mentioned that. He did start off by mentioning 5.9 had been delayed to the end of January, as we know. And he kind of said it was unprecedent. It’s never really been done. That way before. And I don’t recall a major release that’s ever been delayed over a month. And the concern with 5.9, frankly, is full site editing. I’ve looked at the beta with a bit beta three just came out yesterday. And what I’ll tell you is the beta is pretty stable. So I think by the time we get to release date will be in really good shape and my personal opinion. So that’s the first big thing. The other thing he did was he sort of did a review of some things that happened during the year. And let me sort of highlight these. There’s eight new core

contributors to the core, which is a big deal. He highlighted open verse, and for those who don’t know, are open verse is a Creative Commons image licensing page. And what it allows people to do at wordpress.org/open Verse is to bring in Creative Commons or free images. As long as you have attribution to them to a WordPress website. That’s amazing that they’ve taken on that project to keep it going. He talked about the new pattern directory on wordpress.org. And that comes into play if you are headed towards Gutenberg. And one thing he’s mentioned, what I really think is important is diversity in WordPress. And he’s talked about the diversity speaker programme. And I think diversity is important because we have to get away from all this. It’s just the white male that does WordPress. No, it’s ladies. It’s people from India. It’s people from all over the world. So what To try and make the community a little more diverse. And then he went on to talk about learning and more press learned about wordpress.org, which is WordPress is learning initiative. And I think that’s really important because if we want to improve this space, we need to bring more people into WordPress. For those who don’t know, the current stat and mag highlighted yesterday, WordPress occupies about 43% of all websites on the internet 40 pre 3%, that number is just staggering. And when you look at platforms, let me give you the top five, one is WordPress. Two is Shopify three is Wix for Squarespace and five is Joomla. And the other four aren’t even close to WordPress. And that is absolutely amazing. Then that goes on to security reports. And he kind of talks about that we’re doing a really good job of closing security reports. And I think that’s important. And I think what people need to realise is, if WordPress power 43% of the internet, and that makes some the dominant CMS content management system out there, there many big kundig become a target for hackers. Look at Microsoft. Frankly, Microsoft does a really, really good job at patching holes. But the reality of it all is, they have issues because they are the number one operating system out there. And when you become number one, you become the target. And that’s part of the issues with WordPress. Then he highlighted a little bit about the 2022 theme, which will be released with WordPress 5.9. That’s the new theme coming up. And just to kind of give you an idea of how many people are involved in WordPress, with 5.7, there were 480 contributors with the 5.8 release with 530. And with 5.9, we’ve already had 580 contributors, and there’s still a couple of weeks to go. So that’s a pretty big deal. There. Were 5.9 There’s some things coming you new navigation blocks for Gutenberg new styles. And more block patterns what a sharp, so if you’re in the Gutenberg camp, and I’m not here to say what he should be or shouldn’t be. Most people know me know that I say, use what works for you, Gutenberg or page builder, however you want to do it. There’s a lot of trending towards the future mentioned. And Matt sort of got into the discussion yesterday around web three. And he said, the big thing is we got to keep decentralising the web. And I tend to agree with that philosophy very much. So. And one of the ways you can decentralise is you can participate. And the big thing with WordPress, and you know open source software is you can participate anywhere. And that’s the biggest attraction. With WordPress, whatever you do is open source and you can contribute. And you can participate anywhere WordPress is which is really good.

And frankly, at the end of the day, Matt was saying he would like to have more companies that make their living involved in WordPress, to do things for WordPress, which goes around the five for Future initiative, they 5% of what you get from WordPress and put it back into the comments, ie the community. And I am a real big believer of fight for the future. And one of the places I get involved in a big way. And even more so recently is I’m managing the WordPress or help managing with Courtney Robertson, the WordPress product community group, which is located on Linked-In. And that’s one of the ways I like to contribute back as well as helping people as well as having discussions as well as doing a podcast which I often have WordPress guests out. So I like to do it in a number of ways. So look of five for the future. And Gutenberg it’s one of those love hate things for many people. Here’s kind of a bit of the roadmap in 2018 we made easier editing and 2019 we added customizations and we have 5.9 coming out in 2021 and 2023 which couple years away more towards collaboration And then down the road, some multilingual language support. And I think that’s really important. Not everybody’s language is English. And that’s really important. So if you go to wordpress.org, you can do a search for for many things, including the photos or five for the future. So check those out. And how can you contribute to the community, everybody thinks it’s just designed. It’s not really, you can do design, you can code you can get involved in the community, like I am learning, training or even documentation. So there’s a couple ways. And then think about how WordPress has helped grow your story. And one of the things Courtney Robertson and I talked about is your WordPress origin story, one, we got involved both of us in the WordPress product community group. And in the next couple of days, I’m actually gonna do a podcast and share my WordPress origin story and how I got involved with WordPress. The next word camp will be word camp Seville in 2021, the first in person work camp after 21 months. Congratulations. And then, of course, many people heard the big announcement and I can’t wait. And I kind of want to be there is WordCamp us 2022 will be dates to come in San Diego, California. And I love California. So there’s one I would kind of like to be at. So there’s some quick highlights on what we taught what was talked about in you know, word camp, about word camps, about WordPress from that about a number of things now. There wasn’t anything in my opinion, real earth shattering or new. Yesterday, it was kind of more a this is what we’ve done recently. And this is where Gutenberg gets added. There was no mention of page builders, which frankly didn’t surprise me because page builders or third party product, there was no mention of really any in depth Gutenberg stuff just got this subsurface stuff. And I would have liked personally a little more in depth stuff coming out of Matt yesterday. I think I was in a conversation earlier today, we’re probably see mentioned and said, you know, this could have all been summed up in a blog post probably could have. But I think Matt wanted to deliver it to the community to have a presence again. And I alluded to this at the top of this podcast, and I think it’s really important. I think some more could have been done, frankly, around community and and the WordPress community and I don’t mean just giving back. I mean even more. And I think that’s one of the challenges of WordPress right now is building the community. So that’s some quick thoughts on The stated word last night and some of my opinion. I’m not suggesting that’s the only one I’m not suggesting them right or wrong.

But thanks for Matt for putting it out there. Thanks for all the conversation that’s gonna go on. And I have to highlight my good friend Mr. Bob Dunn, Bob WP for the most unique way to get to stay to the world, and that was by train. Well done, Bob, love you. And for everybody else. Robert Cairns, co founder chief creator of amazing ideas of Stunning Digital Marketing. Be back call soon with another great podcast. Hope you’re all doing well. And please take care of yourselves. Bye for now. Thank you for listening to this edition of The SDM show. The SDM shows brought to you by Robert Cairns and Stunning Digital Marketing. For more information about Robert Cairns in Stunning Digital Marketing, go to StunningDigitalMarketing.info. From here you can connect to us on social media, go to our website and even go to the podcast to subscribe. This podcast is dedicated to my late father Bruce Cairns. Dad, I miss you very much. Keep your feet on the ground. Keep reaching for the stars. Make your business succeed.