Hi, everyone. Great to see you all. So about 11 years ago, myself and some other people here sat down with Matt and Andrea from the WordPress Foundation and pitched them on the idea of WordCamp Europe. And a year later, so 10 years ago, we had the very first WordCamp Europe in Leiden. And I just want to say personally, it's been a really beautiful thing to see how it's developed over the years and how amazing this event has been. So I want to thank Matt and the Foundation for putting their faith in us and taking that leap of faith and to thank all of the organisers over the years who've carried the baton on. So thank you all. So back then, 10 years ago, we were talking about 10 years of WordPress. And I can't quite believe we're now talking about 20 years of WordPress. So I'm going to pass it over to Matt, Josepha, and Matthias, who are going to speak to you about Variation on a Theme: 20 years of WordPress. Thanks. Wow. So fancy as you walk into your own starting music. Oh my goodness. Howdy, Athens. Wow, what an amazing WordCamp. Wow. This has really come together. It's been so incredible. And gosh, what a venue. I feel so honoured to be here with all of y 'all, with Josepha and Matthias here on stage. We have so much exciting stuff to share with y'all. And I think we'll let you dive into it. Happy to kick us off. Hey, WordPress, I don't know if you heard lately, but you are now 20 years old as a project. Congratulations. Before we get started, I do want to give us a couple of updates from things that we've talked about over the last probably six months or so. A little bit from last WordCamp Europe and a little bit from State of the Word. The first thing that I want to talk about is actually our WordCamp reactivation. So you all obviously are part of that. But last year at this time, we had held eight in-person WordCamps, and as of right now, as of this WordCamp, I believe, we are on track to have 25 WordCamps in the first half of the year, which is more than we had all year last year. And that's because you all are doing all of this with us. Huge thanks to the community team. Huge thanks especially to the folks who are helping all of our organizers relearn how to do all of this wonderful connection of our community. And if you are one of our long-term members of the community, or you just are really interested to learn how you can get more knowledge and understanding of how we try to make WordPress be organized and functional and working together, we have the community summit coming up in August of this year on the 22nd and 23rd, so just before WordCamp US, where we all also should be, barring any emergencies, because never say never. If you would like to attend that or want to raise a topic of your own that you think is incredibly important for the community to be discussing right now, or if you want to apply for travel assistance or to our company's support travel assistance, you can do all of that over on communitysummit.wordcamp.org. If I said that too fast, don't worry. We've got social folks who are putting that out there as well soon on the hashtag, #WCEU2023. We also have a little bit of update on Five for the Future, so that was a big topic last year, and so far this year, we've seen some pretty healthy growth, not only in active contributors overall, but also in specifically individual pledges to the Five for the Future program, as well as company pledges, so again, thank you all for your constant support of this excellent project. And we're going to touch super briefly before I hand it over to Matias on extending the ecosystem. We've been talking a lot about one of our big goals, which is to get open source alternatives to proprietary systems into as many tools as we can for the WordPress project. A quick update on Openverse. That project has been with us for a while. I heard it. You can applaud. We love WordPress. Extra special exciting announcement, we finally got it on to its own home, Openverse.org. We have nearly 8 million images and audio files. 800 million! That's way more exciting. 800 million images and audio files on it, which I think is incredibly exciting, and then, of course, in 6.2, we made it available in the editor, so you can hit for slash Openverse slash media, and it comes up as an option, and that's super exciting for me, of course. Before I get to this one, I'm sure all of you have heard about at this point Playground. WP Playground. Anyone? For the last remaining five of you who have not heard about it, you are now going to hear about it. It is one of my current favourite explorations that we have going on in the WordPress project. Live translations are part of the new WordPress Playground API. You can now build WordPress applications that run instantly in the browser and don't require a PHP server. To get started, go to playground.wordpress.net and use URL parameters to install any theme and plugin from the WordPress directory, for example, a pendant theme. Once you're happy with the result, embed this live Playground on your website using an iframe. And if you need even more, JSON blueprints allow you to provide step-by-step WordPress setup instructions. Run any PHP code, pre-install custom plugins, import site content, and more. This is how live translations are set up. And for even more control, use the JavaScript API. And what can we build with WordPress Playground? Let's take a look at a few inspiring projects. A live plugin demo on your website, just like translations. A pull request previewer, like this one for Gutenberg. An interactive PHP code editor that enables learning directly in the browser and even on your mobile phone. A local development environment that works either in a terminal or as a Visual Studio Code plugin and starts WordPress on your computer, even if you don't have PHP, MySQL, or Docker installed. Learn more at developer.wordpress.org and start building with WordPress Playground today. Yeah, but before we jump in, I just want to say how incredible this is. I mean, when WordPress started, you used to have to download a zip file, upload it to a server, configure MySQL, like all these sorts of steps. And one of our innovations was the famous five -minute install that we tried to, you know, shorten the installation time to be faster. But literally now with WordPress Playground, for those who don't know, it runs WordPress inside of your browser. So it spins up a whole virtual instance using technology called Wasm. So we went from a five-minute install to like a 500-millisecond install. Like literally, like it's...I'm so excited for how I'm sure many of you at Contributor Day got to play with it and how easy it makes. So the things we just showed where you can like preload themes, translations, this is now like an instant developer environment for anyone who wants to play with WordPress. And as, you know, billions of more people come online on new devices, all this runs on mobile phones too. So literally, you can run WordPress on your phone in the browser, which is ridiculous. It's amazing. Sorry, I was just... Playground, I said in the state of the word, but Playground just blows my mind. It's the closest thing to magic I've seen in my years working on WordPress. And it's also worth mentioning because I am a big celebrator of all of our wins, I would just want to mention that this has been featured as like a WordPress experiment in all of the Google I.O. and Google I.O. Connect events. Oh nice. Yes, and so like they're paying attention to what we're doing and I think that's great. So congratulations all of you for that fantastic work with this fantastic magic. Now I'm going to hand it over to a face we all know, Matias Ventura. What do you want to tell us about Gutenberg today? Thank you, thank you. I think the other cool thing about the Playground is that I think we keep finding use cases like day to day. I think some of the workshops we're using it to like get people quickly started in the sessions and so on. So it's really cool to just see that. Our table lead at Contributor Day stood up and during his wrap-up and was like, it turns out it's contagious. We have four tables. It was great. I loved it. Yeah, and the Glot Press project as well. You've seen it for like live translations and stuff. It's really cool to see. Okay, I'll move on to the little G project. So we have a video to show you that I'm really excited about because I think it tells a bit of the story for like now like around six years so far between when we started phase one all the way to phase two and I think it's nice that it goes from like words to blocks to full design. So we'll just want to show you. You want to repeat your comment because there was that was that was all Gutenberg. Everything you just saw was created with Gutenberg. Yeah, all the designs are like block designs or patterns or something which is to me I was I was reflecting the other day like since we started with a wasn't really like something that we planned but I think the way that it has opened up the ability for like the design community to contribute to to the project directly without depending on like a developer to translate their ideas into a design. I think to me it's really it's really rewarding because I started my journey doing themes so it's really curious to see how like new generations embrace these sort of like the expressive capabilities that WordPress needs to keep evolving. I don't know if either of you heard but I believe that our theme group at Contributor Day created a new community theme from scratch using only Gutenberg the whole way through. Yes? Yes, Maggie agrees. Confirmation from the audience. That's typical WordCamp. I love it.
Thank you. I'll move on to the next slide which is we'll talk a little bit about 6.3. We've been saying that 6.3 was going to be the sort of the wrap of these first two phases. Doesn't mean like our work is done of course. We'll have a lot of things to continue doing but it's like I think we're closing a bit of a chapter here so. Can I interject with the four phases of Gutenberg? If you remember when we started Gutenberg we said there was going to be four phases. The first phase being when we Gutenberg for the block editor for editing post. Then we would go outside of the box and allow you to edit a whole site in phase two. Phase three is going to be all about collaboration and workflow and then phase four will be multilingual. So when Matias refers to we're almost done with phase two and how many years in now? Depending on how you count. How many? I think the Parthenon was like nine years. So I think like we're getting close to that. I will always now refer to the Parthenon in our timeline for scale. Great. Sounds good to me. Beautiful. And one of the goals in 6.3 is also like to bring a lot of these features together into a more cohesive narrative. Like there's been a lot of features that can be seen sort of isolated in 6.3. We're really trying to bring it all together. So I'll be talking through a small demo. Hopefully you can see some of the details. But this is stuff that you can already try in the plugin. We're still a few weeks away from the first betas. So if you want to try you can install the plugin and play with it. And one of the main focuses we're introducing this sort of wayfinder tool where you can run commands and navigate to different pages quickly. Before that the editor was really sort of focused on single pages and so on. So now you can just navigate the whole site, customize, like get into the style book. We're introducing style revisions as well. So you'll be able to sort of compare how all your changes look and in the sidebar you can see all the variations there. We want to add like a side by side comparison as well. But it's really like coming together to tell the story. I think the style book is also really interesting for some like enterprise use cases where they can sort of have a style guide and see like without getting like a single post or so to see how the whole design of blogs is coming together. The navigation menus is a we've been wrestling with it for a few times and I think we're like finally consolidating it so that you can here is showing like how to edit some of those navigations without getting into the nitty-gritty of the editor. You can do it from the outside. So that sort of balance is the one of the main things we want to we want to get here. You will see that it bounces between like this sort of zoom out view of your site and getting into the site. So there's there are some activities that you can do without getting boggled down into the complexity of the full editor and stuff that you can do outside. One thing I'm really like excited about is this is showing the ability to sort of have like a more clear delineation between what is the content and what is the template. So if you're editing a page you can like focus on the title the content and so on. If you want to edit the template is going to tell you like oh hey this is part of the template it applies to the whole site. So you can like smoothly get into that state and edit everything but the delineation is a bit more clear which is a feedback we've been hearing from users you all developers and so on. It's that there's of course like a ton of refinements to just the interactivity the drag and drop experience performance there's a whole lot of accessibility refinements that are really cool to see. We're introducing the finally the ability to save your own patterns so people can you'll see now you can just have some design you create your own pattern you save it and there's now a place to see essentially all the patterns. Someone's excited. All the patterns on the site are going to be accessible from this sort of a slight zoom out view where you can see the ones that are coming from core the ones that are from the theme and your own like save patterns. You'll be able to see them in a this sort of mosaic view and you'll be able to edit them in isolation as well so you can just go into and customize the thing and reuse it across the across the site. So yeah that's that's about it for 6.3. Just. That's it.
