State of the Word 2022 has just completed another hybrid presentation.

A mix of livestream on the official WordPress YouTube channel and in-person attendees traveled to NYC to watch Matt Mullenweg and others update us on all things WordPress. We'll cover some of the highlights in today's post. Tune in to listen to the complete recording of the event on our podcast or in the player above.

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Video highlights

Key takeaways

• Gutenberg will be bigger than WordPress itself. To mobile apps and the web.
• bbPress forms now have Gutenberg
• Using Blocks Everywhere plugin. Will be embedded in BuddyPress.
• PEW Research using Gutenberg
• Day One App using Gutenberg in web app
• Mobile Gutenberg is dual-licensed GPL & MPL
• Tumblr using Gutenberg
• 500 meetups doubled their events in 2022
• 1 WordCamp in 2021 to 22 in 2022
• Community Summit is coming back
• WordPress is turning 20 next year
• Doing a new 10 year update to the "Milestones Book"
• 12,000 People took a Learn.WordPress course
• New blog and showcase pages on WordPress.org bringing Jazz design languages over
• 22 million images. 1.1 million audio files. OpenVerse scours the web for Creative Commons images & other media. Now launched audio."Not fully embedded into WordPress yet"
• Create themes just using blocks & style variations
• We're at the end of Phase 2 of Gutenberg initial development
• Create block theme "plugin" allows you to make themes from blocks
• Zen mode is a new writing experience
• Showing off "locked-in patterns." A way for consultants to pass sites off to clients.
• 1399 Release contributors
• New core contributors to WordPress. "Think of them like the Wikipedia super-editors"
• WordPress is what it is because of community
• "Think of WordPress.org as an App Store for WordPress"
• Matt likes to think of the community as fractal
• Allow theme & plugin developers to self-identify as what their project goals are through a new taxonomy. Will be launching this month.
• Phase 3 Gutenberg: Collaboration. Improvements for editorial workflows. Also bringing in OpenVerse.
• Share your experience with the WordPress 2022 survey
• Matt was excited about OpenAI and Stable Diffusion
• WordPress Playground. A way to experience the entirety of the WordPress stack in the browser, without installing dependencies. 100% in the browser using web assembly.
• How can we make WordPress that is a gift to the world for decades to come?
• "WordPress belongs to all of us, but really we're taking care of it for the next generation."

Important links

• wordpress.tumblr.com
• Engineawesome.com using Gutenberg
• communitysummit.wordpress.org/2023
• WP20.wordpress.net
• learn.wordpress.org
• wordpress.org/openverse
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/create-block-theme/
• Make.wordpress.org
• https://developer.wordpress.org/playground
• photomatt.tumblr.com
• https://distributed.blog

Future Predictions

• Gutenberg will be bigger than WordPress (Said in 2021)
• OpenVerse will make its way in to WordPress app
• Create entire "themes" with blocks. See: "Create Block Theme" plugin
• WordPress Playground. Opportunities to test WP, plugins, and themes in a browser without installing

Questions from the Q&A round

• Last year at SoTW you announced the photo directory. 5,500+ photos. Where do we go from here? Can we provide stats to creators?
• What do you think our biggest challenge WordPress is facing right now? What can we do as a community to lovingly address those challenges?
• Can we do another all-female release squad in 2023?
• What's the plan to full support of WordPress 8 (at least on the charts of .org)?
• Will WordPress be a thing in the future?
• Why are certifications on the roadmap for Learn?
• Are we going to get to one universal theme?
• Any thoughts on integrating GPT AI models into WordPress?
• How do we keep the younger generation interested in WordPress?
• Will WordPress have backwards compatibility for PHP