First, if the buyer insists you don’t talk to any other bidders, you are being screwed. They only do this because they don’t want you to find the market-clearing price.

Do you think when Microsoft called LinkedIn and said, “We want to buy you for $26B,” they just replied, “Sure! That sounds good.”

If you’re very lucky, you get to work with a bank like Qatalyst, which says, “That’s a lovely offer, let’s see who else would be interested.”

Ask yourself why someone wants to buy you? Who else might have the same motivations? That begins a process in which a wide array of parties review the deal.

If you don’t have the connections or a bank to help you, just email the CEOs of other companies that might be interested. Say: “XYZ wants to buy me for $Y dollars. Is that something you’d also be interested in?”

Now you’re creating a market.

Remember that you’re doing this for the first time, and on the other side of the table, they’ve done dozens of deals.

It really pains me to see WordPress-adjacent companies get taken advantage of by sophisticated financial and corpdev players who strong-arm them into not shopping their deal.

A confident buyer doesn’t care if you talk to others because they know they can offer you the best deal, which usually combines money with what happens to the business after it’s sold. This is the magic of Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffett doesn’t care if you talk to other bidders; in fact, he wants you to, so you see why he’s the better outcome for your business if you want to sell it.

It’s tempting to want to celebrate every time a creator sells something. Say it’s good for the community. But if they didn’t sell it through a fair process, it’s more likely they were taken advantage of, and that saddens me.

For public companies, failing to follow the process I describe above can constitute a breach of your fiduciary duty to shareholders and expose you to legal action. But there aren’t any such rules for private entities, which is why they get rolled over so often.

What this means is you need to fundamentally shift how you think about WordPress.

From the beginning, WordPress has always been open source, giving you freedom, liberty, autonomy, and digital sovereignty. Open source is the most powerful idea of our generation.

For the past few decades, WordPress was software you got from a cloud provider or web host, such as WordPress.com, Bluehost, Hostinger, or Pressable (the currently recommended WordPress hosts). You could self-host it on a Raspberry Pi or home server, but few people did.

The experience of downloading WordPress, as my Mom did, is that it unzips a bunch of PHP and various code files onto your desktop. Very confusing!

But now, thanks to incredible advances in WebAssembly (WASM), we can spin up a web server, a database (SQLite or MariaDB), and a full WordPress installation inside your browser in about 30 seconds. Instantly. No server needed. I introduced Playground at State of the Word in 2022.

You can even use it to cross-publish apps to the web, desktop, and iOS, like Blocknotes did in 2023. You can get the latest Blocknotes at Blocknotes.org. One codebase, multiple platforms.

These WordPress Playground containers are fully composable and atomic. You can track and roll back any change. Undo for everything. Stop thinking of WordPress as just on a web host and worrying about maintenance and management, and more as a self-contained unit of open source goodness, a fun little package where you own and control the code and data and can run it however you like.

How perfect is that for AI to work with? Playground makes WordPress local, fast, and trivial to spin up multiple instances, test code changes, and save them.

Next up, we’re going to add peer-to-peer sync, version control integration, and cloud publishing so other people can access it.

I believe this will take us from millions of WordPresses in the world to billions. Hosting isn’t going away; in fact, I think demand for cloud syncing will increase drastically as we radically open up what people can build on top of WordPress.

In an AI age where it’s trivial to spin up software from scratch, consumers will have to give much more thought to brands they trust to be in it for the long term. We’ve been relentlessly iterating on WordPress since 2003. I plan to work on it the rest of my life, and there’s a broad community of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who make their living on top of WordPress.

On WordPress.com we offer 100-year plans and 100-year domains, and I believe we’re one of the few companies where that’s credible. It’s led by Zander Rose, who ran the Long Now Foundation (one of my favorite non-profits) from 1997 to 2023, a quarter century.

In core WordPress, we are obsessed with backwards compatibility. You can run plugins and themes written 20 years ago on today’s WordPress. I’ve stumbled on decade-old installs, and the built-in auto-upgrade took everything to the newest version.

At Automattic, for better and worse, unlike Google, we almost never shut things down. We obsess about maintaining or redirecting permalinks. We make it easy not just to get your data in, but take it out too. We build businesses that lower churn not by locking you in (Wix famously has no export) but by making it easy for you to leave. If you love somebody, set them free.

In the next few years, there will be a Cambrian explosion of software and services. You’re going to have a lot of choices about where to put your most precious data and software. You should demand open source and bet on those who are clearly in it for the long-term.

Today, everyone gets a phone number and email when they grow up. That will expand in the future, everyone will have a domain and a WordPress. A part of the internet that you own.

Technology is best when it brings people together. Technology is best when it puts you in control, gives you ownership, digital autonomy, freedom, and liberty. That’s open source. It’s so exciting to see how AI is supercharging open source.

Join the WordPress community. It’s fun! We have cookies that don’t track you.

AI security audit wave incoming: Expect AI tools to flood WordPress core and the 70,000+ plugin ecosystem with both improvements and newly discovered security vulnerabilities, requiring infrastructure to triage at scale.

Avoid vibe-coding compliance surfaces: For payments, fraud, and regulated commerce flows, prioritize battle-tested WooCommerce and vetted extensions over bespoke AI-generated code.

Reposition plugins around durable differentiation: If AI collapses “nice-to-have” features (e.g., basic image manipulation), shift value to workflow ownership, integrations, compliance, performance, and support.

Agencies gain leverage, not obsolescence: AI tools give motivated technical people 10-100x capability increases, meaning agencies can serve existing clients far better rather than being replaced by DIY site builders.

Sell outcomes, not hours, as an agency: Client expectations will compress delivery timelines; adapt pricing to value-based packaging and use AI internally to raise throughput and QA coverage.

Design for agentic usability: Strengthen APIs, WP-CLI, and machine-friendly interfaces so personal agents can safely operate WordPress tasks without brittle UI automation.

WordPress Playground enables AI verification: Spinning up fully containerized WordPress instances in 20-45 seconds inside browsers allows AI to test code across 20+ environments simultaneously, fundamentally changing plugin compatibility testing.

Benchmark AI outputs against WordPress-specific evals: Adopt WordPress block, plugin, and site-generation evaluations to catch “small file” failures (readme, headers, packaging) that break deployments.

Prioritize compatibility testing by real-world co-install patterns: Reduce factorial plugin-combination risk by sampling tests based on which plugins are commonly used together and automating those paths.

Plugin directory needs editorial curation: With submissions accelerating toward 100,000+ plugins, WordPress will introduce editorial spotlights on newer plugins with excellent code/design to balance discoverability with marketplace openness.

Improve plugin discoverability without freezing innovation: Curate “trusted” and “high quality” signals while preserving pathways for new entrants to earn distribution through measurable excellence.

Plan for uneven economic diffusion: Even with today’s models, enterprise adoption lags consumer usage; build internal enablement and governance now so teams can scale impact as tooling matures.

Learning to learn beats domain expertise: When advising students/parents, the most future-proof skills are curiosity-driven learning, command of language, and study of classics/philosophy/ethics rather than specific technical domains.

WordPress 7.0 promises AI integration: The upcoming release will feature “lots of fun AI stuff” and represents one of the most exciting technology years in Matt’s career since starting in the industry.

I had no idea that today Anthropic would release their security thing that does exactly what I said.

The best thing you’ll read about AI engineering today is Chris Lattner’s take on Claude’s C compiler implementation. To steal Techmeme’s headline: “Claude’s C Compiler shows AI elevates the role of human judgment and vision; it’s a milestone, but closely mirrors LLVM/GCC, and hard codes things to pass tests.” The entire post is important, but this paragraph is particuluarly profound:

As writing code is becoming easier, designing software becomes more important than ever. As custom software becomes cheaper to create, the real challenge becomes choosing the right problems and managing the resulting complexity. I also see big open questions about who is going to maintain all this software.

To bring this back to WordPress: While I was in another meeting today, Claude Code with Opus 4.6 completed a cleanroom implementation of the ACF plugin in about 45 minutes. It was about to go off and implement all the pro features, but I stopped it because it would be a tremendous waste of tokens. The entire point of open source is collaborating on a shared goal rather than reinventing the wheel every time.

We’ve seen a slow version of this play out over the past decade, where every single web host that offers WordPress also spun up some sort of proprietary website or ecommerce builder. Bless their hearts. None has caused Shopify any lost nights of sleep. With countless person-years of development and who knows how many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars spent, I think we can now safely say that all of these efforts have had at most a marginal impact on their businesses, while the benefits of WordPress have continued to compound.

The thought experiment of whether those same resources had been used to make WordPress better is left as an exercise for the reader.

It does mean that competition is fiercer. You have to differentiate yourself on performance, customer service, reliability, design—things that are hard, but that’s capitalism.

It’s really important that in the plugin directory, we figure out how to make it easier for people to collaborate and build things together, rather than make a thousand versions of the same thing.

The State of the Word is tomorrow, and it’s so fun to see SF abuzz with WordPress open source energy. We’re doing a lot of firsts tomorrow, including the first release timed to the State of the Word, and we’ll have a good chunk of the release team there to push the button and bring WordPress 6.9 to the world.

We’ll also be crossing streams with another community: in the last ten minutes, we’ll join TBPN, the new must-watch daily tech show.

The art and activations are looking so good; it’s fun to see how everything evolves. Tokyo was so beautiful last year; I wasn’t sure how we’d top it, but the creativity of everyone coming together has sparked something new this year that I think is quite cool. We’re trying to honor our mission of democratizing publishing, making things that are powerful and capable, but also retain the flicker of art.

We’re also opening up TinkerTendo to the community. I was just there with a few dozen of the crew, and the vibes are so fun. If you’re in SF, definitely swing by and connect with the folks building the most open internet we can all enjoy.

Check out the livestream tomorrow, it’ll be a nice capstone to all we’ve built together this year.

The team gave me a sweet surprise! I’ve been fighting for the open web for 20 years, and hope to do it for at least 20 more. There’s a lot of exciting behind-the-scenes stuff happening inside Automattic that also made this day special, but one significant thing is public.

Automattic has finally had its first chance to file its counterclaims that spell out the bad actions of WP Engine and Silver Lake, as reported here by TechCrunch. You may recall that last month, the court dismissed several of their most serious claims, and they responded by filing an amended complaint. In our dogged defense of the free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem, Automattic responded today with a comprehensive counter-filing, which you can read in a 162-page PDF here about all the things WP Engine/Heather Brunner and Silver Lake did wrong.

We’ve got receipts!

I don’t think WP Engine employees or investors were aware of the gaslighting they did, hopefully some of this is enlightening. And there’s a lot more discovery to go!

I love Canada. I first came here for the Northern Voice conference in 2006. Was anyone at that one? I think Dave Winer was actually there. It was a pretty awesome one. What’s that?

[Here I think Dave said he wasn’t at that one, but a different conference, but can’t remember.]

Well, that’s why we blog. My memory is not that good. [laughs] By the way, I think this week is your anniversary, right? 

Dave Winer: It was actually a couple of weeks ago—31 years.

MM: Oh, wow. Thirty-one years. Round of applause! I think why I thought it was your anniversary is that on my blog’s related posts, it showed a post from 2014 that was congratulating you on your 20th because I think The Register or someone did a nice article. 

So yeah, I’ve since been back dozens of times, including several summers in Montreal, at the jazz festival there—they also do Le Festival Haïti en Folie, and Just For Laughs—and a few times here in Ottawa, where I’m on the board of a cybersecurity company called Field Effect. We might even have some Field Effect people here—oh, hi! Thanks for coming. 

Let me give a little update on what I’ve been up to. My life’s mission is to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. So I have some projects in each of those areas. In publishing, my main work is WordPress, the core software available to everyone. We host it on WordPress.com and Pressable, and allow others to host it with WP Cloud—a cool product—and we use Jetpack to bring all the best cloud features to every WordPress, wherever it is running. And, of course, running the main community hubs at WordPress.org, WordPress.tv, WordCamps, WordPress.net, which probably some of y’all haven’t heard of, et cetera, et cetera. 

On the social side of publishing, I have Tumblr, which is a microblogging social network, but right now it’s on a different technical stack. I need to switch it over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue. We’ve had to prioritize other projects to make it sustainable. It’s probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we’re still working on it. 

I’m really excited about the personal publishing side of our products: Day One and WordPress.com Studio and WordPress Playground. Day One is a fully encrypted, shared, and synchronized blogging and journaling app that runs on every device and on the web. You can also have shared encrypted journals with others. It uses the same encryption as one password. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea—for example, to write this talk. Its editor is not as good as Gutenberg yet, but it’s pretty decent at allowing multimodal input—which means you can record voice notes, draw things, etc.—and capturing it all. It’s mostly replaced Evernote, Simplenote, and even private P2s for me. It has some fun features, like when you make a new entry it records, the location, what music you’re listening to on Apple Music, how many steps you’ve taken, the weather. Honestly, some features that would be nice to get into WordPress, at least as a plugin. Right now, I just copy and paste it in the WC admin or the Jetpack app if I want to publish something; that could also be made smoother in the future. 

So WordPress.com Studio is built on an open source project called Playground that we created to allow you to spin up WordPress in a WASM container in about 30 seconds, right inside your browser. Who’s tried Playground or Studio? It’s kind of wild, right? You know how hard it’s been to set up servers and databases and everything like that, and so to see a WordPress virtual machine spin up in like 30 seconds just blows my mind. There’s so much you can do with it. It’s the most sci-fi thing happening inside of WordPress right now, and we’ve just barely begun to take advantage of the massive technical and architectural shift it allows. For example, my colleague Ella builds an iOS app called Blocknotes. It’s a lot like Simplenote, but it uses a Gutenberg editor, and it’s entirely a WordPress playground instance—the entire iOS app. 

Part of the evolution of WordPress has been going from a blogging system to a CMS to a full development platform. So what Dave talked about yesterday, and now that you can build entire mobile apps—which, by the way, can run on every platform, cross-platform, and run the same thing on the web—it’s kind of like a promise from back in the day of Java or other things, React, Native. It’s now very possible with this WordPress WASM stuff. WASM stands for web assembly. 

The main distractions and things holding back WordPress right now are the legal attacks from WP Engine and Silver Lake—I  can’t comment on that, but stay tuned for some major updates soon. 

I forgot to put this in my post—WooCommerce! On the commerce side, there’s, of course, WooCommerce, which is very, very exciting. You can think of it like an open-source Shopify, our enablers here in Ottawa. It now processes over $30 billion of GMV (gross merchant volume) per year, and you can customize it to do pretty much anything: subscriptions, digital, physical goods, everything. And of course, it’s fully open source and built on WordPress. It’s actually a WordPress plugin, so pretty exciting. WooCommerce is now on about 8% of all websites in the world—WordPress is 40, so it’s running on about a quarter of all WordPress sites. It’s been a big part of the growth of WordPress, actually, the past few years. 

In messaging, we have this product called Beeper. Anyone tried out Beeper yet? We got a Beeper super-user here, actually, in Robert. So Beeper basically takes all the different messaging apps—WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn DMs, did you ever check those?—and it brings it all into one app, one interface, kind of like a Superhuman for messaging, and gives you cool features across all of them. Now this is obviously a pretty hard technical challenge, because we have to reverse engineer all the different networks for everything. But check it out, it’s a pretty fun little app. It’s, free for up to a couple accounts, and paid after that. 

There’s also an open source component of that as well. We’re going to make it easier for people to build bridges and connections to different networks, because there’s a lot that we don’t support yet that we get demand for, like KakaoTalk in Asia. People also want to do dating apps, which I guess have messaging platforms. So it’d be pretty fun to have everything all in one. 

I’ve been in the public a lot, doing lots of talks and actually blogging every single day now for 28 days, which will be 29 when we all hit the publish button at the end of this! So I’ve been blogging a lot. It’s a lot to keep up with. Actually been going every day since WordCamp US, with one missed day in there. I got very, very inspired at WordCamp US. It was a fantastic event. I got to hang out a lot and go to a bunch of sessions, and it inspired me to blog a lot more. If you run Jetpack, there’s actually a pretty cool feature where the notifications will tell you what kind of streak you’re on. So whenever I post, I get this nice little notification, like 28 days. And it has little easter eggs when you get certain number of days in a row, which is fun. So I’m gonna have to add some of this to the post later—I riffed a little bit. We’ll get the recording. So now that this is all done, we can push the publish button together. 

This is a cool device called a Daylight computer. So cool. It’s from a startup I’m invested in through Audrey Capital and Automattic. Think of it like a cross between a Kindle and an iPad. It works in the daylight, hence the name—it doesn’t emit any blue light. It’s great for kids. You can order it on DaylightComputer.com. It runs Android, so it’s super hackable. You can have apps like Beeper, Day One, WordPress, Jetpack, WooCommerce on it. Very, very neat device. I actually have WP Admin loaded right here; you can see you can scroll like super, super fast. Soon the wifi is going to work—it’s a wifi-only device. 

Later I’ll update this post with an mp3 recording enclosed an RSS in honor of Dave Winer, who spoke here, who invented podcasting and RSS. And actually, if you go way back in my RSS feeds, I have some mp3 enclosures from 2004 and 2005, some very funny early podcasts. Also, whenever they post this video to WordPress TV or YouTube, I’ll share that too, and I’ll add some links. Thank you. Merci beaucoup! If you want to follow more. Please check out my blog at ma.tt. No WWW, no .com. Just ma.tt. I cross post to ma.tt on Bluesky and Mastodon and on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter/X at @photomatt. 

And now we’re going to push the button together. Y’all ready? Murphy willing, are you ready to publish? think I need to add a category and stuff, but I’ll do that later.

Q: Hi, I’m Michelle Frechette, and I drove up from Rochester, New York on Wednesday, so it’s good to be here. [Applause] I love that our open source extends beyond just publishing websites and words, and that we have, for now several years, the photo directory, which is available to people—and we are closing in on 30,000 published photos, which I think is phenomenal. 

MM: And all of those are, I think, CC0, Creative Commons Zero-licensed. So it’s compatible with GPL, embedded in WordPress themes. You can use it on your site. It’s very cool.

Q: Yeah, you don’t have to give attribution to anybody. You can just use the photos that are there, which I think is good. What are we going to do so that more people know that it exists, besides the 10,000 people who have submitted photos, because I think it’s still, it’s it’s growing. It’s huge. There’s a million beautiful there’s almost 30,000 beautiful photos in there, but I don’t think enough people know that it exists yet. So how can we get the word out, to get more people to use it?

MM: Well, I think first we should ask questions about it at WordCamps. 

Q: I’m on it. 

MM: So check. We’re actually just kind of on like a Version One of that whole idea. So in my mind, for things that we should do, is 1: I think we need to better integrate finding those photos in the media library, because right now, it’s kind of like you have to click a few buttons to get to it. 2: I would like, for every single WP admin when you upload a photo, for you to be able to set the licensing to it. And if it is licensed as CC0, we can submit it to the directory. And of course, the directory has some extra rules, right? Some of these rules, I think we might be able to re-examine now. So for example, right now, in the directory, we don’t allow anything that shows someone’s face, right? And the reason for this is, even if something’s CC0-licensed, to have someone’s face, you need a model release form. There’s different laws for that in different countries and things like that make sense, right? You wouldn’t want someone to take your photo at a WordCamp, and now they think it’s CC0, and you start seeing them running ads for, you know, some sort of new medicine or Viagra or something; it could be very embarrassing. However, when AI creates a face, there’s no such restrictions there. So something that we could actually start to do, because right now I think we have some anti-AI rules in the photo directory, I think we should probably start to look at evolving that. So, for example, you can take a picture of me right now, change my face with AI to a face that has never existed, and that could be CC0-licensed and anyone in the world could use it. So I think there’s some possibilities there. 

Because right now, the laws for AI-generated stuff vary from country to country. I think right now in America, it can’t be copywritten, at least in the same way. At least if it’s fully created; when a human starts to modify it, it can be. Sometimes I’m not familiar with the laws here yet, but I’m sure I’ll look them up later. So I think that would be a pretty interesting way to open it up right now, because in theory, we should have way more than 30,000 photos. Actually, I have 30,000 photos on my site, which are mostly GPL-licensed. So how can we—yeah, I do need to submit them. Some of them are already in WordPress Core. So remember the Twenty Ten theme, which has like the little sheep. People really love those sheep. So all those photos I GPL-licensed a long time ago—in my copious free time, yes. 

So I think those are some of the ideas for it. And also think about another project we do that people aren’t as familiar with, Openverse search. Has anyone used Openverse yet? It’s pretty cool. So actually, Creative Commons, the nonprofit, used to have a search engine that indexed the entire web and would allow you to find different types of Creative Commons content, including that requires attribution or other things. The foundation actually was shutting this down, and we took it over, and we now run it on WordPress.org We renamed it to Openverse instead of Creative Commons, but they still index the entire web, including audio files, video files, images, all sorts of stuff. So it’s a very, very cool project. It is embedded in WP Admin a bit, but again, we probably should combine that with a photo search and other things. 

I also think there’s some opportunities to use AI analysis of all the photos to give a better semantic understanding and a better search that we currently offer, which right now is typically monollingual, I don’t think it translates well into the, you know, 60-plus languages that WordPress supports, and it’s manual tagging. So there might be things to do, like a more automated understanding, which, of course, gets better over time. You know, we started to incorporate some of the AI models like Gemini and other things on WordPress.org to make us way more efficient on things like plug-in submissions and some code scanning. I actually think we’re very much in chapter one of where this is going to be. It can sort of massively [grow]—because WordPress.org relies on volunteers, basically. Some people are sponsored, but most are not. And we’re over 60,000 plugins now, or 10,000 themes, and actually, the rate of plugin submission, I think, has basically doubled since last year, and the team has gotten it down where before they had a six-month queue, they’ve got it down to basically under a week. So you know, we can definitely automate more and more and more and be vastly more efficient and support way more developers and more users, way more everything, and probably improve the code quality. So that’s another thing I’m pretty excited about. 

Q: I love it. WordPress.org/photos, if you want to look at it. 

MM: Thank you, Michelle! 

Q: Hey, Matt. Courtney Robertson. Kind of related to Michelle’s question: This week, I saw Nick Hamze recounting how when you go to submit a theme, the image that’s in the preview for the theme, if it is AI-generated that that’s getting rejected and the nuances Dion dug into—Dion is one of our long time core commiters, core leads, etc, in the project. A hidden gem. If you haven’t encountered Dion yet, please find Dion and meet him. So Nick is learning the legal ramifications of having an AI-generated image as part of the theme directory, like what we have to do in the theme directory. Because if the image that’s in the theme is generated by AI, there’s a lot of legal stuff about, can we do it? Can we not? And we would all like to just be like, “Yeah, whatever. Move on.” But then there’s some other ramifications. Is that on your radar? I know we’ve looked at criteria of what could go into the theme repo and some of those deals.  I don’t know if. I mean, once we get into legal stuff, that’s maybe beyond you and I.

MM: Well, unfortunately, I’m getting really good at legal stuff. [Laughter] It wasn’t on my roadmap for the past year or two, but yeah. So this is very much an evolving area, and the laws from country to country do vary a lot. However, there’s also some common sense things you can apply, and I think that there is a sort of rapidly—we’re not putting the genie back in the bottle with AI stuff. One,  just the companies; like, OpenAI is just too big to fail now. The entire economy and growth is based on these systems. The infrastructure buildouts, massive data centers, everything. It’s kind of incredible. Not to mention the usage, like it’s really transforming translation, code, so much. 

Now, WordPress.org, particularly, because a lot of this is volunteers, those folks aren’t comfortable making big policy decisions like this that could have ramifications. They already put a lot on the line. I kind of shield everyone from a legal point of view and everything like that, but in theory, people could go after them, and we have had instances where some of these folks can get oppressed by someone who gets something rejected, or banned from the forums for spamming or stuff like that. So we do try to provide some shelter. 

Now, on this issue, in particular, Nick is someone I talk to almost every day. He’s doing some very, very cool stuff across WordPress and some innovative things with themes. I like that he pushes the boundaries. So for example, right now, the theme directory is fairly conservative in for example, with the intention that we want the demo to look like the theme when you install it, or we don’t want it to rely on a plugin. And part of the intention there is that for WordPress, we want you to be able to switch between themes really easily. So one of the beauties of it is that you can take your entire blog site, click a button, and you have a brand new design. Now themes, as they start to incorporate more advanced functionality—which is pretty cool—those sorts of things aren’t allowed. In fact, one of my favorite examples of something that was in the theme directory a long time ago and is not allowed on the current guidelines, that I think we’ve made an exception, is the Command Line theme. Has anyone seen this? You load it up, it’s like a blinking terminal, and you interact with it by typing in commands, like “list,” “post,” and you can type “help,” and it gives you all the things. This is so cool! By the way, I don’t think it complies with, like, any of our standards. [laughter] Like accessibility, it probably breaks some rules there, all sorts of things. 

So I think part of it is, you know, how can we move? And I think Nick even did a post about this, like rules versus guardrails. So I think part of the way we can do this is as a marketplace. Right now, there’s certain things that we don’t allow, and in fact, those rules creep up and get bigger every time, right? Because each sub-team comes in and says, “Oh, I need my rules to be requirements.” Actually, accessibility is a great, great example of that. Now, I think what’s interesting in a marketplace is we can move these things from being rules to being like tags. So for example, if you were a university, you only want to see themes that were WCAG 2.0 or higher compliant—which are by the way, some pretty strict requirements that don’t apply to many websites, for good reasons, but that was a requirement. You should be able to do that as a search. Or if you want to see themes that are orange, or all these sorts of things: I feel like those should just be tags in the marketplace, and use the rating system as well to open up what we can host, but then give better tools for people to search and choose what they want. 

Q: Thanks. Just a shout out. Please let Nick know that a lot of us are reading what he’s putting forward, and I forget his exact website domain. It’s Iconick.

MM: It’s spelled in an interesting way. 

Q: Yeah, it has his name in it. I wonder where he got that idea. [Laughter]

MM: Yeah. So it reads as “iconick.” Nick Hamze, H-A-M-Z-E. Google him. He’s got some really cool themes. He’s done a lot of cool projects, a bunch of Wapuus. Actually, I’m talking to them about how we can upgrade all the Wapuu stuff. By the way, y’all have some awesome ones at this event. I got the little swag pack with all the stickers and everything. All the sponsors have different ones. You have like, four or five of them. I’m actually gonna put this sticker on my laptop later, probably that WCF one, so keep an eye out for that.

Q: Paul Bearne. I want to talk about Hello Dolly, the plugin, which shipped with Core.

MM: Which, by the way, people tried to get rid of because of copyright issues. Yeah, there’s actually some interesting things we did to get around that and make it fair use.

Q: Should it be removed?

MM: You’re asking the wrong guy.

Q: Well, it’s there because nobody wants to ask you to come and remove it.

MM: No, they ask me like once a year. [Laughter]

Q: If it stays, perhaps we could redo the description to indicate that it’s historic—it was the first plugin, it was the proof of concept—but please don’t copy it. It’s no longer good code.

MM: I completely disagree with that. Tell me why it’s not good code. Because it doesn’t use classes or object orientation? Why is it bad code?

Q: It’s not accessible, it’s not translatable. 

MM: It is translatable. It actually goes through the translation functions.

Q: There’s no translation around the strings. 

MM: That’s not true. 

Q: ’Tis true. [Laughter]

MM: Then it was removed because it was one of the first things we did the underscore for. Well, let’s look it up later today, but it’s not true that no one’s ever asked me. It does get asked about once a year. There’s lots of issues on the bug tracker about it. And if there’s ways to improve it, like make it translatable, I think that’s great, and I know people have actually used that before to also just change the lyrics to, like, put different songs in there, different things they want to

say. 

Q: When it becomes translatable, the [inaudible] can have more fun with the translation strings.

MM: Yeah, but they don’t have to, right? That’s the fun thing.

Q: Then I look forward to some patches. 

MM: What I don’t want to do is, I don’t want to make it super-complicated. I know we did some things, like we moved it to a sub-directory. It actually just used to be a single file, so there have been some minor upgrades there. But the whole idea is to show how easy it is to use the actions and filter system inside of WordPress. 

Q: There are no actions or filters in that plugin.

MM: Yeah, that’s how it looks in the WP Admin.

Q: There’s no filter on the string

MM: Well. we can add a filter on the string. And maybe it’s, it’s actually a filter and not translation, might be actually better, because, like you said, like maybe the pot system is not appropriate for that. Although, why not? Like, I’m sure you can translate those lyrics to French and other things, they would be meaningful. And also the connection to jazz musicians. It was one of the first famous jazz songs by one of my idols, Louis Armstrong, and you know, since then, we’ve named every release of WordPress in honor of a jazz musician. So that’s one of the cool things about WordPress versus other software is it has soul. You know, it’s true. Code is poetry. You know, we honor musicians and artists. You know, one of the first blocks we did in Gutenberg was actually a poetry block, a prose block. Has anyone used this one? It’s one of these things people are always like, “we should remove this.” [Laughter] 

Actually, I did it because I took a writing poetry course, and the author, a famous poet, was complaining how, when she posted to WordPress she couldn’t have the formatting correctly—you know how a lot of poetry will use interesting formatting where the white space has significance? Or spacing that has kind of unusual things? So the behavior of the editor, which takes multiple line breaks and combines into one, and other things, all that was being collapsed. And so I said, “Oh!” I think it’s called the Prose block, but it’s basically a block inside Gutenberg that preserves white space, kind of like a “pre” tag, and it’s used by some of the poets out there. So sometimes we do these really niche features for like, very high-end users. So for example, I think three or four of the living Fields Medalists use WordPress—actually, WordPress.com. 

Does anyone know about the Fields Medal? A couple people. So it’s a math award. It’s more prestigious than a Nobel Prize. They give away a Nobel Prize every year. This happens only every four years, and some of the smartest people in the world have it, like Terence Tao, who is, if you don’t know about him, look him up. He is probably one of the top five smartest people in the world, amazing, brilliant mathematician—he actually just got defunded, but the Simons Foundation is now sponsoring all his work, which is very exciting. If you don’t know Jim Simons, he’s the founder of Renaissance Technologies. Has anyone heard of Renaissance Tech? RenTec? One or two people? Oh, I’m telling you all sorts of cool stuff now. 

So Renaissance Technologies is the most successful hedge fund ever in history. They show, I think, annualized returns of over 40% over 35 years. It’s actually physicists and mathematicians that came together. Jim Simons was one of them, he went out of business or bankrupt or something, and was like, “gosh, I need to make some money. Maybe I’ll check out the stocks and trading thing.” And they started out, and they actually did really well, but then in the 80s, it all crashed. Jiim’s big, big innovation was that he invented algorithmic trading. So he basically said, we have humans making decisions. One, they’re too slow. And two, we don’t know why it’s working. And so there must be some fundamental sort of physics or rules of the trading markets and the business systems. And so RenTec started to gather the most data of anyone in the world. The next hedge fund to do this well was Bridgewater, but basically they started getting data sets, like shipping back to the 1400s, like really obscure things. They go get stuff out of books and develop all this priority training data, use it to map the economy and essentially create these models that the mathematicians would come up with. You can only be an investor in this fund if you work for the company, which is pretty interesting. And of course, everyone there is like a decamillionaire and everything. I forget how many employees—200 or 150 or something. Really, really small. So legendary. And he passed away a few years ago, but his foundation funds a ton of fundamental research and physics and math and so he’s someone I really look up to and admire. I blogged about him earlier last year. He reminds me a lot of my dad, just the way he looks and talks. My dad passed away in 2016, so I really like watching Jim Simon’s stuff. 

Oh, I forgot to say, the point of the Fields Medalists. The reason the Fields Medalists use WordPress is we support a LaTeX plugin. LaTeX is basically like a markup language for doing advanced math formulas. We’re actually working on an update to this to be a bit more user-friendly. We added support for it in 2005 because Terence Tao started a free WordPress.com account, and he was complaining about this and embedding these images. I followed his blog, and I was like, “oh, we should make a block for this kind of shortcode.” And this shortcode is actually built into Jetpack, so anyone who runs Jetpack has access to this, and it’s now a Gutenberg block as well. So we’re adding diversity. So maybe tell the math department here. It’d be awesome to get some more mathematicians and folks on WordPress.

Q: Matt, just want to give you a heads up. We’ve got about five minutes left. 

MM: All right, rapid fire. Should I do some fast ones? I just need to talk a little less.

Q: I’m Chris, I work for Pantheon. As you obviously know, Pantheon does Drupal stuff. So I know WordPress, but I have been watching, particularly, the evolution of their development work in AI, specifically integration in the Drupal admin, and also how the Drupal CMS is onboarding new users to Drupal, and the Experience Builder that they’re building. As we gather here today, probably most WordPressers might not be aware that there’s actually DrupalCon Europe happening in Vienna right now, and there’s lots of things that are happening out of that. And there’s a lot of really interesting and exciting things happening in that Drupal space. I know you’ve had conversations with Dries, because at least Dries says that you’ve had conversations.

MM: We talk semi-regularly. You know, there’s only there’s like a dozen people in the world who, like their whole life, is creating CMSes, Dave’s actually one of them in the room. We’re just going to do it the rest of our lives. And Dries is one of them, so I have incredible respect. We actually did a talk together with Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress. So if you look up Dries, Mullenweg, Mike Little, you’ll you’ll find this. It’s pretty cool talk. Actually, we got to talk about the history and everything. 

Q: So the question here is: To what degree are you looking at or thinking about the types of developments that are happening in Drupal but other CMSes as well, and what can we, as WordPress, learn from those other ecosystems?

MM: Oh, it’s a great question. I’ve got to look up the user ID. I think I was one of the first couple hudnred people registered on drop.org, which is the predecessor to drupal.org. Dries was actually at that Northern Voice conference in 2006; he has a post about it on his blog with some photos. So yeah, I keep in pretty close contact with a number of the other CMSes. Well, I won’t say close contact, but usually about once a year we’ll get together with Anthony from Squarespace, Tobi from Shopify, with Dries, whenever we’re in the same country, or I’m over in Europe or Boston. I try to look them up, and I test out things pretty regularly. 

So I haven’t seen the very, very latest stuff for Drupal. I think I checked out one of the last iterations they did. I love that with companies like Pantheon now doing both WordPress and Drupal, we’re getting a lot of overlap between the communities. So I would say, please bring this stuff over. I mean, we’re both PHP, we’re both GPL. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always really supported Drupal, even though we’re kind of mutually exclusive solutions. I’m always going to be supportive with other open source projects. So yeah, for those people who overlap, like yourself, please make some suggestions. You know, start a P2  post, or do a blog post about it. We’ll get it in the newsletter, or maybe even if there’s something specific that we could bring over code wise, we can start to get that incentive into Trac and everything. Cool. 

I think Drupal also has a plugin to use Gutenberg, right? Yeah, which is pretty cool. It was one of the reasons we designed Gutenberg to actually be portable to other CMSes, and why we’ve been putting it under license, dual-licensing it so to be embedded even more places, not just GPL.

Q: Forgive the AI translation of my words, but it’ll help me be concise. But here’s the question. Really, really simple—no, it’s not. WordPress has always thrived because of its open, community-driven ethos, but as the ecosystem grows, we’re seeing more like large, profit-driven players who don’t necessarily share the values. How can individual contributors and agencies like ours actively help protect WordPress and uphold the values and ethics that have sustained it from bad actors and people who might try to exploit the community? And do you see room for something more formal, like a certification for individuals and agencies that define what being a good actor is, to help educate clients and even the market, to help protect in a more proactive way from those sorts of bad actors?

MM: Well, that’s a big question. I’ll try to answer quickly. So first I will say, I don’t want to say that there’s bad actors. I think there might be bad actions sometimes, and just temporarily bad actors who hopefully will be good in the future. You know, every saint has a past, every sinner has a future. I never want to define any company or any person as permanently good or bad. Let’s talk about actions. 

Second, I think with these actions, we can start to create incentive systems, and it’s part of what we’re doing with Five for the Future, which is basically saying, you contribute back—which also implies that you’re not violating the GPL, or something like that. So we’ve got the hard stuff, like, if you violate the GPL, you’re gonna get a letter. Violate the trademark. You know, that was more of a legal thing. But also the gentle stuff, like, how can we encourage good behavior by giving people higher rankings in the directory or in the showcase, for example? 

Then finally, I’ll just say, vote with your wallet. Each one of you here has the ability to strongly influence these companies. If they’re commercially motivated, great, let’s commercially motivate them to do the right thing by giving more business to the good companies and less business to the other companies. This has actually been happening a lot the past year. I think I can say this: There’s a site called WordPress Engine Tracker which is currently tracking a number of sites that have left a certain host. It’s about to cross 100,000 that have switched to others host. And 74,000 have gone offline since September of last year. We actually used to make all this data public. The whole list was on there. They got a court order so the data could be fact-checked by press or other people. There was actually a court order that made us that down. So again, trying to muzzle free speech and transparency. But you know, we’re allowed to keep that site up, so check it out while you can. 

Do we have time for one more. Is this last one?

Q: Okay, I don’t think this qualifies as rapid fire, but it’s a softball. First of all, I came to WordPress as an open source advocate. I became a b2 user. That’s how I got to WordPress. So my all-time favorite WordPress release is 1.5, because it has what I consider a killer feature. It’s not the one you’re thinking. It’s pages.

MM: 1.5 right? Yeah, I remember introducing that. Originally. I had a different CMS I was going to release called ContentPress. Or Multipattern. I wasn’t sure what to call it, and so I had this whole other CMS. And I was like, man, we should just build this into WordPress, even though it’s a blogging system. I think having this pages feature put us ahead of Movable Type and others. So yeah, glad we did. I think we introduced themes and that I released him. 

Q: Yes, themes was the was kind of the obvious big feature for it, but pages is the point at which I would say that WordPress went from blogging engine to CMS. So that’s my favorite. But what I was going to ask is—

MM: So it’s all been downhill since then? 

[Laughter]

Q: No, it was such a pivotal moment that helped with WordPress’s meteoric adoption rates. And for me, personally, at that time, it allowed me to take a whole bunch of static HTML and bring it into WordPress so I could manage it so much more easily. So my question was: can you tell us a story, or give us some fun facts about that? Softball question, unless it really taxes your memory.

MM: Well, luckily I blog. I’ll say that two of my favorites ever in history are 1.2 and 1.5—which actually came out right after each other, because we skipped a few releases; it was a time when we actually got pretty delayed. So 1.2 introduced the hooks and filter system, which was pretty revolutionary, I think still, as a unique programming paradigm. But before that, to modify WordPress, you’d actually open up files and change lines. I used to publish these, we called them hacks, and they were. At one point we introduced the hacks file, which made it a little bit better. But then our plugin hook system allowed a separation between the core and the add-ons, but you could go really deep to modify things. Then 1.5 was themes, I believe. So 1.2 was plugins, 1.5 was themes. And then the other big one—I think it was 2 or 2 point something, was when we introduced WYSIWYG for the first time. Which, by the way, was so controversial; people did not want basic WYSIWYG in WordPress, which was funny, like 10 years later, when they’re like, “Okay, this Gutenberg thing’s even worse.” I was like, “Ah, I’ve been through this before.” 

So I think that those are kind of the fun stories around there. Again, some of this stuff was pretty slow to be adopted at first. I wasn’t certain that this should be rolled into WordPress or there should be separate software, but I’m glad we did. You know, Movable Type was a dominant thing at the time, and their static page functionality wasn’t very robust. And so the other thing that WordPress did around this time that I thought was pretty awesome is really clean URLs. So where, prior, you know, people would have crufty URLs, like they’d have an ID in the number, or you’d have for WordPress,—the default’s still there, actually—is like “?p=123,” so creating the mapping system where we map dates, a hierarchy, and these clean slugs to the pages in the back, in the browsing system, essentially, I think was really crucial. And I love that URLs from 20-something years ago still work or redirect to proper things today. So I think that’s really, really important. Thank you. All right. Last one,

Q: Hey, Matt. I’m Raquel, and I love kitties and surprises. Just some facts. I have a another question around the community. I want to know how do you feel, what are your raw thoughts, on independent WordPress events that are happening in our space now?

MM: And do you want to disclose anything there?

Q: I mean, I am the one responsible for PressConf, so independent WordPress event. So, yeah, how do you feel? I’m just curious as to how we can all get better together, which tends to be my motto.

MM: I’m very much like a “let a thousand flowers bloom” kind of guy. So thank you. I know it’s a huge labor of love doing something like PressConf. That’s something that’s been very active in WordCamps and other things in the past, and hopefully with WordCamp US going to Phoenix, we’ll have an opportunity to do some work together there. 

So I think that’s my fundamental, you know, raw thoughts. You know, I do think about, you know, what do we want to encourage in the world as well? So I would just encourage you as an independent organizer. You know, there’s some beauty there that you don’t have to follow the rules or guidelines necessarily. And it’s commercial events. Well, like the tickets cost more than WordCamp and stuff, right? How much is a ticket?

Q: Depending on early bird to total, $700 average.

MM: And so that’s a bit of a smaller event, right? That’s part of what people like about it. So the ticket price actually becomes like a little bit of a barrier to entry. It’s more intimate. You get some really awesome attendees and talks there, as I think about this as well, just like, you know, what do we want to see more of in the world? And, you know, trying to focus time, particularly my time, to those types of things. So that’s why I came to WordCamp Canada. You know, this is not the biggest WordCamp in the world, but man, this spirit here, and the people and the everything, and like you know, what you’ve all put together, as it’s come together over the past few months, the incredible work of the organizers,the social media team’s been doing a great job getting some awesome speakers like Jill and Dave and like, I was like, man! That’s why I was just planning to come and attend. You know, just to check it out, because I was very interested in the content and everything y’all put together. So again, I guess we’re out of time. So I just want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to run to the restroom, but then I’ll be right back out in the lobby. I’m going to take pictures, shake hands, kiss babies. 

[Laughter]

I can shake the hand of a baby too. It’s whatever. I’m open-minded. But hey, thank you. I appreciate it.

Update: The video is up, it’s pretty bad I think the audio is pulling from a DJI thing not the microphones, but here it is.

This trader apparently didn’t have inside information, in the traditional bad sense of like bribing a Nobel committee staffer. Instead, web scraping:

“The Nobel site runs on WordPress. Like many WordPress setups, it has an XML sitemap that lists every indexable page, even ones not yet public. If someone were monitoring this sitemap, they could easily notice a new page appear, something like “http://nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2025/machado/facts/”

If you run a WordPress site and want the best advice in the world for how to avoid this sort of thing, I highly recommend our enterprise WordPress VIP service! They help run some of the largest and most secure WordPress sites in the world, and could easily help navigate avoiding something like this from happening. WordPress is easy and cheap to run everywhere, even on a Raspberry Pi, but you get what you pay for, and any serious organization or mission-critical website should be on VIP.

I’ve only started the new book, but I’m interested to see what’s happened in the 20 years between Yvon’s book and David’s, especially the story of how Yvon gave away all his equity and control in the company to ensure a focus on his lifelong goal of environmentalism and conservation. Patagonia is one of the better corporate entities fighting for good, but it reminded me of how companies can put on a jacket of doing good while actually being evil underneath.

Like I talked about the economic concept of Externalties a few weeks ago, I think it’s imperative that the WordPress community understands the history of Greenwashing, which the United Nations defines as follows:

1. Claiming that the company will achieve future environment milestones while not putting sufficient plans in place to do so.
2. Being intentionally vague about operations or using vague claims that cannot be specifically proven (like saying they are “environmentally friendly” or “green”).
3. Saying that a product does not contain harmful materials or use harmful practices that they would not use anyway.
4. Highlighting one thing the company does well regarding the environment while not doing anything else.
5. Promoting products that meet regulatory minimums as if peer products do not.

In WordPress and open source our environmental crisis comes from companies that frack the open source software and brands, which shows up as lack of investment in the code which falls fallow especially in the security sense, or by attaching themselves to a brand or trademark and tricking people into thinking they’re associated with the Good Open thing, when they’re really a parasitic cancer on it.

This is happening right now in WordPress, so when you see a company hire a good person or sponsor an event that seems on its own a good thing, and probably represents hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment, weigh that against the tens of millions they’re spending with their other hand to destroy the source of everything they’ve benefited from, and if they were to win, endanger every open source project. It’s an open source form of greenwashing, perhaps call it openwashing.

I learned today from the Newspack newsletter that the Houston Press is now on WordPress. Newspack is a distribution or bundle of WordPress designed for journalism, and it is led by Kinsey Wilson, who began his career as a night-shift journalist covering cops for a newspaper in Chicago, went on to have top editorial and business positions at The New York Times, NPR, and USA TODAY, and ran WordPress.com for a few years, which gives him a very unique position to help craft WordPress for journalists and publishers.

The Houston Press is an alt-weekly that wrote the very first profile of me in the world, which I blogged about here. There’s a funny quote in there:

He recently considered taking a job with a San Francisco search-engine start-up, but ended up turning them down. “They have a ton of money…But it would be 50- or 60- or 70-hour weeks, a lot of work, and I wouldn’t have time” to do WordPress. 

That “search-engine start-up” was Google! How the internet might have turned out differently if I had taken that job, as my Mom wanted me to (because they offered free food). I still think Google is one of the most interesting companies in the world, one of the few places I’d consider working if I weren’t running Automattic.

Back to linkrot, the original link to the profile in that article was http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2004-10-28/feature2.html, which this morning didn’t work, but thanks to the Houston Press being on Newspack/WordPress I was able to ping Kinsey and his colleague Jason Lee was able to fix it so it redirects to the new canonical URL for that content in minutes. A little corner of the internet tidied up! I love the Wayback Machine, but not needing it is even better.

My colleague Eduardo Villuendas has been making some cool music with it.

This really gets to my vision for Gutenberg to be a builder that anyone can use to create an incredible website, like legos anyone can assemble anything they imagine on the web. This is why I said Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress.

• Jeff Paul made a game of Pong.
• JuanMa Garrido made a mermaid diagram. (Which I have never heard of before.)
• Marko Ivanović did a beautiful dot art thing.

Hat tip to the Gutenberg Times. As I said in 2022, you need to learn AI deeply, there is so much fun stuff happening. Berkan Cesur even likes it on Reddit.

Nick Diego writes how Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block developer.

• Core WordPress now has an MCP Adapter that uses a new Abilities API to do CRUD and more operations across WordPress.
• Woo’s core MCP is coming in version 10.3 in early October, though Lawrence Sinclair already spun one up on Github.
• Here’s how to set up Clay’s MCP so your AI can ask things like “Who are my contacts at Google that I haven’t spoken to in 6 months?”
• Beeper’s MCP implementation lets you query your entire message history across iMessage (on MacOS), WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Instagram, and many more with natural language.
• Day One has a community MCP implementation from Kevin Davinson.

When nerds start connecting things, interesting stuff happens; that’s been my entire career, so while none of these have made it into a critical daily workflow for me, I’m curious to see what people come up with.

With respect to any remaining claims, we’re confident the facts will demonstrate that our actions were lawful and in the best interests of the WordPress community.

This ruling is a significant milestone, but our focus remains the same: building a free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem and supporting the millions of people who use it every day.

Open source is full of externalities. On the positive side, adoption creates ecosystems of developers and provides many paths of distribution. On the negative side, there’s often underinvestment in the very projects that sustain the ecosystem. I have a lot of empathy for why, when open source meets finance and private equity, things can go sideways. You can look at a business built on open source and see seemingly amazing margins—efficient R&D that compounds in a DCF model. A percent here or there over many years really adds up.

My plea to investors in open-source businesses is this: when a business is built on top of open source, incorporate a restorative investment percentage back into the projects critical to the end-user experience of what you’re offering customers. In WordPress, we call this Five for the Future, but it doesn’t have to be five percent; it could be 0.1%. Plan for it when modeling your expected IRR hurdle from an investment. Then, a few years down the line, when the small percentages start to add up, you won’t face a big catch-up or gap.

This underinvestment is itself an externality. It doesn’t appear on the balance sheet, but it can manifest in black swan events, such as security breaches or remote code exploits. Technical debt is one of the largest unaccounted-for externalities in the world today. Engineering, in the long run, is primarily a craft of maintenance rather than creation. The bulk of the cost of something comes from its upkeep over time.

I’ve done this before — asked people to think differently about things, like public writing, with blogging. In the 90s I was running around the Vallley trying to explain to everyone that blogging was going to change everything, all I got was blank stares from people who said “we don’t do that.” They of course eventually did do it. But at first the ideas seemed foreign, unreasonable.

And in light of the news of Typepad shutting down, note that WordPress has a Typepad importer. A big advantage of putting your content into an open source platform like WordPress with an active community, vs just static pages or something custom, is that you’re getting constant upgrades “for free” as we maintain and iterate on the software, enabling new APIs or things like allowing your AI to talk to your site.

WordPress is built by a community of people deeply passionate about backwards and forward compatibility, radical openness so it’s easy to get things in and out of it, and relentless iteration building for the long term. Despite literally billions of dollars spent trying to kill or crush WordPress, and frequent proclamations of its death, we keep trucking along and doing our darndest to make the web a bit more open and free every day. It’s a life mission of many people, including myself.

• Scalable, Ethical AI: How to Own Your Content and Your AI with WordPress
  • Presenter: Jeffrey Paul, VP of Open Source, Fueled
  • Wednesday, August 27, 1:15 PM PT
• Catch Bugs Faster with AI & Playwright (No Hype, Just Results)
  • Presenter: Wendy Erdheim-Poch, Senior Automation Engineer, Elementor
  • Wednesday, August 27, 3:15 PM PT
• Core AI: What We’re Building
  • Presenter: James LePage, Head of AI, Automattic
  • Thursday, August 28, 10:30 AM PT
• Zero to Plugin in 30 Minutes – Harnessing AI Coding Assistants for WordPress Development
  • Presenter: Maulik Vora, Founder and CEO of Zluck Solutions
  • Thursday, August 28, 1:45 PM PT
• Fixing and Optimizing websites with AI
  • Presenter: Arnas Donauskas, Product Manager at Hostinger
  • Thursday, August 28, 3:45 PM PT
• Turn your local WordPress install into your AI coding assistant
  • Presenter: Jonathan Bossenger, Developer Educator, Automattic
  • Friday, August 29, 10:30 AM PT
• From Storefront to Strategy: What Happens When AI Shops for Your Customers?
  • Presenter: Sonja Ibele, Delivery and Account Manager, Syde
  • Friday, August 29, 1:15 PM PT
• Unlock Developer Superpowers with AI
  • Presenter: Adam Silverstein, Developer Relations Engineer, Google
  • Friday, August 29, 2:15 PM PT

At higher-priced plans you’d get access to not just a curated set of plugins and themes but the ability to install anything you like from the ecosystem, which invisibly switches your account to WP.cloud in the backend that supports unlimited plugins and themes and custom code, in a way that’s still multi-datacenter and maintenance-free. This has been very successful and works great for a ton of customers, but it still puts an asterisk when you recommend WordPress.com to someone because they’d need to be on one of the higher-priced plans to get an experience of WordPress with custom plugins and themes.

For the first time ever we’re running a summer special where every single paid account gets that full WP.cloud experience with full customization and control. It’s a test we’re running until August 25^th. It’s WordPress, without the asterisk, without limits, implemented in a way that’s intuitive and safe for novice users, while also being extremely powerful for developers. If you haven’t checked out WP.com in a while, it’s a great deal starting at just $4 per month. I’m curious to see the results of how this goes. We also have a number of more radical things I’m eager to try out! It’s a great time to reimagine what you’re doing from the ground up and question your longest-held beliefs, as AI has really put people in a more experimental and open mindset.

Speaking of Beeper, we’re going to do a fun event for the next-gen version that’s launching on July 16 in New York City in NoHo. I’ll be there along with Beeper CEO Kishan Bagaria and some of the best and brightest in New York’s tech and creative class. If you’re a Beeper early adopter (or would like to be) and want to attend, leave a comment! We’ve held back some invites for cool folks like readers of ma.tt. It’s like getting on board with WordPress in 2004.

I loved Alfred, I tried Raycast, but a general life goal this year is to simplify wherever I can, so I’ve been exploring the enhancements in the new Spotlight.

What I’ve found the most useful in the past is Alfred’s Open URL Action, which basically lets you type something like “gm united reservation” and it translates that into opening a Gmail search in your browser, with “united reservation” put in the URL in the right place to run a search.

The Shortcuts app in MacOS and iOS is amazing, which I’ve always known, but I haven’t played with it much. This was my chance! After a bit of tinkering, I got it to pop up an input form and then run the search. I Googled a lot to see if it could take input from the Spotlight search bar and every place said no, I’m not sure if this is new in MacOS 26 or not but I found the button that makes it work. It’s not as smooth as Alfred, but it’s pretty decent. I’m going to share a screenshot that shows my Gmail search shortcut that takes input from Spotlight — the key breakthrough was clicking the (i) menu on the right and finding the checkbox for “Receive Input from Search.”

I gave it a “gm” hotkey, pressed enter, and you get this in Spotlight.

Tada! Not as nice as Alfred but it gets the job done. My other shortcuts that people might find useful are LI for LinkedIn search, PY is Perplexity, YT for searching the history of YouTube videos I’ve watched, and AM for searching my Amazon order history. (Because I’m usually trying to find a link for something I’m recommending, or re-order an item.) Here are the search URLs for everything I’ve mentioned:

• https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/ (If you have multiple Google accounts, change the number in the URL to go to the one you want, and then login in that same order every time.)
• https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/index/?keywords=
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/
• https://www.youtube.com/feed/history?query=
• https://www.amazon.com/your-orders/search/?search=

If you dug this, did you know WordPress also has a cool popup shortcut feature? In 2023, we introduced the Command Palette in the Gutenberg block editor and site editor. To access it on Mac, you press Command + k. I’d like to bring it to every admin page so it can function more like Spotlight or Raycast for WordPress.

During a recent product review of Day One, I was struck by how central the app is to my perspective on humans, relationships, and what we share. There are several layers to it, ranging from your innermost thoughts to what you share with the world. Each layer has its own context, challenges, and possibilities, and Automattic offers technology and products tailored to each.

1. Layer one is your internal thoughts. Your consciousness, what exists only in your mind, or what I like to call meatspace. This space is yours and yours alone. This generative space is at the core of human creativity and existence.

2. Layer two is triggered as soon as you put something into a medium, like writing it down. It’s everything that leaves your head, but is just reserved for you. In the past, we only had physical journals. Today, we have Day One as our strongest product in this space, but many people also have a private WordPress installation just for themselves. There are so many tools out there that help you create! Colors, brushes, canvases. Harper, for example, helps you write better — think of it as an open-source Grammarly, right now just in a few limited contexts, but in the future everywhere you write. 

3. Layer three is you and someone else. This is everything you share with one other person, which is an incredibly sacred act. Shared journals on Day One, messaging on Beeper, DMs, private blogs with your best friend. A shared Google doc. This is its own special space. It has an intimacy and privacy that is core to the human experience. This is also phase 3 of Gutenberg, which is all about real-time co-editing and collaboration. This layer is the one I’m most excited about expanding in 2025 and 2026.

4. Layer four is sharing within a finite group. N+1. It’s a space of collaboration and brainstorming with families, tribes, and teams. P2, Linear, Github, group chats, and cozy communities. You lose some of the intimacy of layer three but gain more group intelligence.

5. Finally, we have the fifth layer. This is the public layer, where I have spent a lot of my time at Automattic. It is an extremely competitive space of social media and blogs: WordPress, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. Once you publish publicly, you open yourself up to the beauty and chaos of the wider world. The best reason to blog is comments, the people who find you and add to your thoughts, who you never would have imagined. This is a crucible, but makes your own writing and thinking so much better, it’s worth the mishegoss.

This has been kicking around in my head and at layer four for a while. Thanks to Kelly Hoffman for helping me get this to layer five.

P.S. Happy 22^nd birthday to WordPress! Very excited about the new AI team on .org.

The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so many ways, inspiring me and drawing me back to the Catholic faith I grew up with, with an emphasis on service, compassion, and humility. His passing on Easter Monday, a holiday about rebirth, feels historic. Moments like that invite reflection—not just on personal choices, but on the broader systems we’re a part of.

My life, which was primarily about generative creative work that was free for everyone to use, has been subsumed by legal battles. From the start, I’ve said this: after many rounds of negotiation that I approached in good faith, WPE chose to sue. In hindsight, those conversations weren’t held in the same spirit, and that’s unfortunate.

But we can’t rewrite the past. What we can do is decide how we move forward.

The maker-taker problem, at the heart of what we’ve been wrestling with, doesn’t disappear by avoiding it. If we’re serious about contributing to the future of open source, and about preserving the legacy of what we’ve built together, we need space to reset. That can’t happen under the weight of ongoing litigation. The cards are in WPE hands, a fight they’ve started and refuse to end.

So I’m asking for a moment of reflection for us all as stewards of a shared ecosystem. Let’s not lose sight of that.

It’s a funny time in WordPress because there are a lot of really interesting open questions:

• Can we iterate faster with canonical plugins?
• What’s the fun thing we can put in to celebrate 7.0, and when will that be? (I was rooting for real-time co-editing like Notion/Canva/Google Docs.)
• How can we use AI to automate our manual work around WordPress.org?
• Can AI help us make 60k+ open source plugins and themes in the directory more secure? (I think so.)
• What should we do with our 13k issue backlog? (That’s a lot of bug gardening.)
• How will AI change how people build and update sites?
• Just like RSS and web standards supercharged WordPress for the podcasting and search revolutions, what standards or APIs can we ship to help 40%+ of the web work with AI agents? (Plus an entire rabbit hole of all the new sloppy crawlers using so many resources.)

Some of these broad changes are mixed. At one point, I used Google to search for things and would visit their top result, which is great for website owners. Nowadays, Google pulls almost everything I need into the results page, so I don’t see as many random sites. But on Perplexity, sometimes I’ll read the answer and then visit 4-5 of the sources it cites to learn more, so I’m visiting 4-5x more random websites, usually powered by WordPress, than I would have even in the early days of Google. We don’t know how this all plays out yet.

These questions are also against the backdrop of some of the brightest minds in WordPress spending more time with legal code than computer code, which could last until 2027 or longer with appeals.

Speaking for myself, I was in my first deposition today. I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted. Hence, I’m posting about 6.8 after it’s had 6 million downloads. I’m more impressed than ever by what smart lawyers do, and the entire thing, though sometimes imperfect and frustrating, is a blessing to our democracy. However, I can’t wait to return to spending the plurality of my days with engineers and designers again. I’m sure many other folks in the WordPress community would agree.

They may try to sell you a security plan that for example at Godaddy goes from $300 to $700 a year on top of your hosting. (Don’t be fooled by the low entry price, look at renewal.) It’s heartbreaking to hear stories of non-technical people forced into these high fees to fix something their host should have prevented in the first place.

When a host is powered by WP.cloud, it doesn’t need to do this because hacks are so incredibly rare. (That’s why it may appear more expensive, but the total cost of ownership or being a WP.cloud-powered host is much lower when you factor in human time.)

One problem we’ve had on WordPress.com is we do all these amazing things and don’t tell anyone about it, something we’re trying to change with our focus this year on developers and developer tooling. One great example is we’re so confident about our security, if your site gets hacked we’ll fix it for free! We’ve actually been doing this for the better part of a decade, just never mentioned it anywhere.

Pressable (which is WP.cloud-powered) does a better job talking about these things and has a nice landing page on malware cleaning and hack recovery that says essentially the same thing.

WordPress has done a ton over the years to move the hosting industry around upgrading PHP and MySQL, PHP extensions, free SSL, and in general using our clout to advocate for user rights and freedoms from even the largest hosting companies, and I’m proud to say there are a good number, for example the ones you see at WordCamps, that have not just embraced these values but actually been more commercially successful as they’ve done so. I hope security and auto-upgrades not just for core but for plugins and themes becomes the next standard. (Jetpack does this for free, some hosts charge $100/yr per site.)