Matt Mullenweg's State of the Word 2013

If you follow WordPress news, you’ll know that Matt Mullenweg gave his annual “State of the Word” talk at WordCamp San Fransisco. If you really follow WordPress news, you’ll be just as excited as I am for what WordPress core will be bringing us. From the history of the first WordCamp San Francisco 8 years ago to what versions 3.7 (and even 3.8) will be bringing us, Matt’s talk was one surely not to miss.

Things Worth Mentioning

In December of 2012, WordPress 3.5 was released with support for retina devices (retina all the things!). No specific date has been given yet, but Matt said that 3.6 will be released “soon”. After such, the audience was given a chance to see 3.6 in action with a world premier video.
Matt went on to tell everyone about the history of WordPress book, which is currently on GitHub. Why Github you ask? Matt (and pretty much everyone else, right?) believes that “the text of the book is written as open as the software itself.”
There have been over 46 million downloads of WordPress in the last 12 months. That’s an average of over 126,000 downloads a day. With 6,758 plugins being approved in the last year alone, the WordPress plugin repository now has over 26,000 plugins in the repository. All open source. All free.

WordPress Survey

Each year, Matt tells us all about the WordPress survey, which tracks some statistics such as who is using WordPress, what they’re using WordPress for, and how they use it. The survey found out that 7% users are using WordPress as an app platform. 69% use WordPress as a CMS only, while 20% use it as a blog / CMS hybrid (hello JLB!), 6% use WordPress as a blog only. WPEngine did a WordPress brand awareness survey and found that 29.3% of people surveyed said they have heard of WordPress before.

WordPress 3.7

The 3.7 update will be led by Andrew Nacin and Jon Cave, with a planned release in October of this year. The release cycle for 3.7 is much quicker than we’ve seen before, as the development of new core features will be starting in plugins. For example, if you have heard of MP6 before (shh, it’s a secret), you’ll know that the goal of MP6 is to quickly design the WordPress admin. It’s gorgeous too. Beautiful colors, vector icons, Open Sans, the whole shebang. Check it out if you haven’t already.
Much to my surprise, Matt then went on to talk about 3.8 and his hopes for a December release, again describing how much of the development of core features will be started through plugins, this way each feature can become it’s own component with its own team. This will probably be much easier for users and developers to contribute back to core in a simple and understandable way. If you’ve ever thought about contributing to WordPress core (literally anybody can in one way or another) head over to make.wordpress.org and do it!
All in all, Matt’s State of the Word has me super excited for what’s to come. WordPress has always been my tool of choice for every web project I work on, and has been JLB’s primary CMS of choice for over three years. I’m excited for all of WordPress’s new features, and giving back to the WordPress community by putting out a few plugins of my own.
I think the rest of 2013 looks very promising for WordPress.
Watch Matt’s State of the Word talk on WordPress.tv