Press This: Our Thoughts on the State of the Word

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now it is 2024. Happy New Year, everybody. Each month on Press This, we like to do a special Word Around the Campfire edition, where we cover recent WordPress news. Since this is the first Word Around the Campfire of 2024, I thought it’d be nice to cover some of the topics that Matt Mullenweg brought up during his State of the Word talk at the end of 2023.

This was originally presented on December 11th, 2023 in Madrid, Spain. Hopefully, you’ve already seen it. Whether you’ve seen it or not, I’m hoping we can bring you something interesting that maybe you haven’t heard about, or our takes on it. So joining me today for this Word Around the Campfire edition is Mike Davey, the Senior Editor at Delicious Brains. Happy New Year, Mike.

Mike Davey: Happy New Year, Doc. Good to be here. 

DP: We are super excited to have you. Now, first off, I want to know, did you manage to catch the State of the Word live? 

MD: I did, Yep. I did catch it live and I’ve actually reviewed it since, one whole time through and then a few times with bits and pieces. 

DP: What was your favorite moment of the talk? What was the most important thing that you think was discussed?

MD: I’m not sure it’s the most important thing for WordPress as a whole, but one of the things I found most exciting is the WordPress Playground. I mean, I was fascinated with it when it first launched, and they’ve improved it significantly since then.

I seem to recall something like thousands of people have already used it in various ways. And I would encourage anybody who hasn’t tried it, just get on there and play around with it a bit. You will be amazed at what you can do just in your browser. Like, without having to download anything. You know, you need some workarounds right at the moment to install plugins and things like that. But other than that, it’s, as far as I can tell, it’s pretty much a fully functional WordPress site, just running on your browser, and the potential for that to introduce people to WordPress, to help them learn WordPress like that’s some of the more obvious applications. 

I’ve also heard some early adopters are in fact using it to show off client sites. They’re using it to show, they’re building a client site in the playground, and then saying, you know, just maybe a quick sketch, that sort of thing, and then saying to their clients, “Like this? “Like this,” because of course you can fairly easily show it to people.

WordPress Playground uses WebAssembly. And I was reading an article recently, that proposed that we’re going to see even more amazing things out of WebAssembly in 2024. The author of that article, Matt Butcher, writing for The New Stack, he mentions that he actually said 2023 was going to be the year for WebAssembly. He is convinced he’s right, and I have to say he probably is as well, because WebAssembly is really starting to come into its own.

One of the other things he noted, actually, is that, in his view, WebAssembly is AI’s perfect match. And he says, it’s a fascinating phenomenon in developer tooling. It’s just how often programming language paradigms are coupled with infrastructure advances. Right, like Java, a company of the web in the 1990s.

Python was the big data language for a lot of companies and, you know, sites, as NoSQL-style databases took hold. Now he thinks it’s really time for WebAssembly to come into its own, for three reasons, and the reasons he gives are basically, it’s platform-neutral, alright, which extends to GPUs, makes it portable across hardware.

You can build the AI apps locally, it’s also got fast startup times, meaning AI inferencing can be done on demand while waiting for a virtual machine or container to come online, and its portability and small binary sizes mean that the application can be moved as close to the data and GPU as possible.

And one of the big themes for AI in 2024 is going to be efficiency. How do we shave off time from those models? How do we cut costs? And how do we run more apps on the same hardware? And, he believes that the secret there is WebAssembly. And I mean, this does relate to WordPress Playground because it does use WebAssembly and I think we’ve really only started to see the potential from the WordPress Playground, like what we’re going to see in the future.

I expect, and I may be wrong, but I expect, at the next State of the Word, we’re going to be hearing more about the WordPress Playground and how you can now do practically anything within it that you can do, on a local development site. 

DP: One of the things that I remember, being interested in with Playground, because it Playground is basically a virtual version of WordPress running the WordPress dashboard, running in a browser. So you don’t have to create an account or anything, so you can use it very effectively if you have a plugin, you know, listed on the plugin repository, instead of showing screenshots, you could literally just have a link to be like, “Hey, you want to see what it’s like to interact with this plugin? Just click this.” And it takes you right into like that, you know, version of WordPress with nothing else other than that one plugin installed and just the ability to kind of look and be like, “Oh, okay, this is the options it has, and this is kind of how it’s laid out. Okay. I get it. Maybe I’ll download this and install it on my WordPress site.” 

So that’s one of the things that I think is most exciting is just using it to demo for other WordPressers within the WordPress plugin repository. That’s probably thinking small, but I think it’s pretty cool. 

MD: I think that is one of the big advantages there. I seem to recall it was mentioned during State of the Word. I can’t remember if this was something Matt said but, or if it was in the video that he introduced by Adam Zielinski.

I think it was actually something Matt said. Basically is that one of the big challenges they’ve always had when they did Contributor days, was getting people’s development environments set up now. And then he noted that all of those sorts of things can now happen literally in seconds, and you can do a lot of learning and development right in the browser.

it’s going to help more with collaboration, it’s going to help more with development, and I’m really excited to see what the future of WordPress Playground offers us.

DP: So Playground came out last year, and this year we’re hoping that more folks adopt it and play with it and mess around with it. Do you know where, if someone wants to build something with Playground, do you know where they would learn about that? 

MD: That’s a good question actually. Usually I just when I feel like playing with it or I want to try something out, I just Google WordPress Playground. And it’s wordpress. org slash playground. And it’s got it’s got at least some instructions for you right there. But they’re not very long. There’s probably something there’s probably a doc around somewhere that goes a little deeper into it. But yeah, just wordpress. org slash playground will let you get started on it.

DP: Well, the bit of Matt’s talk that I got most excited about, mostly because I remember being at a State of the Word, maybe eight years ago when it was first mentioned, but we are now done with Gutenberg phase two. And so it’s time for phase three of the Gutenberg project, which is collaboration or real-time multi-user interface. This is something that’s going to come out in one of the next big versions of WordPress, but for now, they’re still testing it out. So there’s not much news around it as much as I was excited to hear him talk about it and that we’re finally on collaboration, basically, it’s a working prototype in the Gutenberg plugin that’s out now. 

So if you install the Gutenberg plugin, there’s often these experimental features that you can activate and one of them is collaboration. Apparently, it’s super wonky right now. But it is basically a peer-to-peer version of WordPress where two users could be in a post or page at the same time, and if one of them types something, the other user will see it. This is kind of unheard of. I think most of us, especially newsroom folks have that experience of, you know, somebody else is editing, are you sure you want to take over? Right. That kind of like one, one person at a time kind of thing.

And man, I’m just so excited to move past that, because I feel like that feels so old-fashioned. It is basically the Google Docs experience is what everybody’s saying, but it gets more interesting than that. It’s going to be. Page editing, right? So you can build the front of your website and other people can kind of chime in too and be like, “Oh, you got that color wrong or that contrast isn’t,” that sounds very naggy.

That doesn’t sound like a fun use, but basically, you know, you can kind of design a page together. So it’s more than just editing a post and seeing when someone uploads an image, it’s going to be a really powerful game changer. And apparently the changes they have to make it work. One of them was, you know, the introduction of blocks and then next was Full Site Editing, and now that they have that infrastructure in place, they can do it.

But apparently the changes that they’re working on are going to further improve blocks and the technology. So there’s going to be kind of more advancements coming as they prep for collaboration. 

MD: For sure. I mean, that is that’s something I’m looking forward to seeing as well. For pretty much the reasons you mentioned, those of us who do come out of the newsroom background. And I mean, still, a large part of my work week is document tracking. Is making sure that you know, edits made to things we’re preparing in Google Docs as our single source of truth are actually making it to the site. That they’re staying they’re displaying properly there and you know, that always throws a bit of a throws a bit of a monkey wrench into the plans when, say, something changes, we have to go update, you know, we’ve got to make sure we update that Google Doc that’s serving as the single source of truth.

You know, and I’m looking forward to a day where I can just basically turn to one of my co-workers even though they may be halfway across the world, and say, what do you think of this? 

Like, give me your notes on this, I’ll look at them, you know, and then we can just move straight to publish from there.

Once we’ve got it all, you know, we’re working from basically one source. Right, instead of working in a Google Doc, or finding a Google Doc, creating WordPress previews, and so on and so forth, we could just work directly in WordPress. Which would, from my end, would definitely speed up my output a bit. And just make my life a whole lot easier in terms of tracking and management.

DP: Absolutely. And on that note, we’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to pick up, we’re going to talk about data liberation and more from Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word address. So stay tuned for more after this short break.

Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. This is our Word Around the Campfire edition. Today I’m joined by Mike Davey and we are talking about what happened at the State of the Word address. We’re just recapping that and other news that is going to be very useful for 2024. I actually attended a live rebroadcast or a watching party in San Francisco.

And this was about 12 hours after the original thing aired. So it would have been like 6 AM our time, but at 6 PM, San Franciscans got together at an Automattic office in San Francisco. And we watched  Matt’s presentation. We fast-forwarded over the 30 minutes of jazz, but we watched the presentation.

And the thing that really seemed to get most of the people excited in that room—and these are web developers, people who own companies, people who own agencies—the thing that everyone seemed to be talking about was data liberation. There were a lot of kind of questions about that, but basically, data liberation is the idea that we should make it easier for everyone to take their data from one site and move it to somewhere else to migrate it somewhere else.

If you are a Wix customer, for instance, there’s not an export function. So you feel trapped maybe on purpose, right, by Wix, wants to kind of keep you in their ecosystem, but the WordPress community and what Matt was announcing with Data Liberation is they’re trying to find workarounds for those.

And so they have this project called Data Liberation, and I believe the website for Data Liberation is wordpress. org slash and. And if you go there, it’ll take you to all these tools and tutorials to migrate from Squarespace. Tumblr, HTML, Wix, Drupal, Blogger, RSS, even Figma, Divi, and even the classic editor all bringing those old sites or, you know, using tools to bring those old you know, classic editor posts to the block editor.

Now, many of these tools are pretty much in the early stages. Some are pretty nice. And some of these tools like Blogger had a pretty easy way to kind of go from Blogger to WordPress. I moved from Blogger to WordPress in like 2006. But some of them like Wix, The tutorial on wordpress. org slash and the data liberation tutorial currently is basically just using RSS. So here’s how to export your RSS feed. Which is you know, every time you write a new post and hit publish, it’s going to update your RSS feed. So it’s basically all those posts and contents from there.

And here’s another tool that you can use in WordPress to import RSS feeds. So basically, you know, you can export your content from here and you can import it from here. And now, unfortunately, when. Using RSS, you’re just getting the posts. So you’re getting like the, you know, the content and the images, maybe the featured images, you’re getting the dates and some metadata, but you’re not getting a site design.

You’re not getting the theme or the layout or anything like that. So I think there’s still a lot of work to go with those, but it’s a cool project and I’m super excited to see. Even, you know, Matt stressed that this isn’t just for taking something from another platform and moving it to WordPress.

It’s even for like WordPress to WordPress. If you have a staging site, it’s not super easy necessarily to go from that staging site to you know, WordPress live. They want to make that even easier. Or if you have an older, you know, classic editor, if you’re still, if you’re still like on a classic version of WordPress, migrating from there to a new version of WordPress not updating, but migrating to like from one site to another, that could be pretty difficult.

So they’re actually trying to solve this problem for everyone. And yeah, that means. Hey, it could be easier to leave WordPress and go to other platforms, but that’s just part of the open web. That’s what we want to make is where you can, you know, take your content and move it to wherever you want and make that as easily as possible. We’re not trying to trap people into our tools. Mike, I just ranted there, but did you have any thoughts on the data liberation section?

MD: I mean, I think that this is it is very much in line with the WordPress ethos, which is that, you know, data should be free. And if it’s not free, at least you, the data’s owner should control that data.

You should get to control where it lives, you know, where it goes, and how you upload it. One of the things I’m actually really looking forward to giving a try is the Convert to Blocks WordPress plugin, which is part of the Data Liberation Project. And that’s that’s currently, I believe, only available on GitHub.

It’s still in development, but the idea there is it transforms classic editor content to blocks on the fly. So I’d love to see how that works, basically. How to see how it works in the field.

DP: And for anybody listening wordpress. org. slash and, that actually takes you to all the things that Mike’s talking about is on GitHub, but the link for that is available on the data liberation page. So you can access all that stuff on the GitHub from wordpress. org slash and.

And so I’m sure there’s going to be a lot more cool stuff. We’re going to see from the data liberation team. Also, I just want to give a shout-out to my friend, Brian Fitzpatrick, who worked at Google in the early aughts, and he was one of the big people pushing for the Takeout, Google Takeout.

So data liberation is kind of, in my mind, kind of a sequel to what Google was working on, where they made it very easy to export anything from Google, including Blogger, that was very important for them to always give you access to your content. So this is kind of a continuation of that, but you know, outside of Google inside the larger world.

I think the final thing I want to ask you about, Mike, is oftentimes you and I like to talk about AI and WordPress. And this year, once again, Matt Mullenweg at State of the Word said, “Learn AI deeply.” Did you notice any changes in how he’s talking about AI and WordPress compared to previous times? 

MD: Not necessarily changes, but he went into a little more detail. And I believe he said that one of the keys to using AI tools is to treat them essentially as productivity enhancers. And in his view that just, like, in the same way that learning to read or learning to code is a sort of basic element of literacy in the modern age, learning to use AI tools effectively is probably one of the most important skills any of us can pick up. 

And as he notes, it’s often called prompt engineering, and basically that’s the art of asking the tool to help you figure out what it is you want to do. One of the things that he did note that I thought was amusing was that new versions of ChatGPT seem to have gotten lazier recently. And one of the funnier ideas I saw about that is because it was December when they were testing it. And the data it’s tested, it’s trained on, of course, is human data.

And people tend to be less productive in December. As we approach the holiday season that’s just, I mean, that’s sort of common wisdom. I don’t know that anybody’s actually done any productivity studies on it, but the common wisdom is that people just don’t accomplish much in December as they do in say, November or January or any…they’re distracted by, you know, the upcoming holidays, they’ve got a lot of family stuff to do, things like that. 

But, I mean, I think he’s right, you do have to have to learn to use them. You have to learn how to use them properly. And, one of the other things he noted that was that they are really great for education.I read constantly, but having someone I can ask questions of, at the drop of a hat, about what I’m reading really helps the learning process. That doesn’t mean that it’s always going to be right. I’ve had teachers, human teachers, tell me things that later turned out to be not true. Not because they were lying just because they didn’t have, you know, they didn’t have all the data to hand, or, you know, facts changed, or what have you. So you still need to do some checking up, but it’s a really great way. The more specific questions, in my experience with AI, the more specific the question you ask it, the more likely the answer is to be correct.

One of the other things, too, is, of course, you can ask the same question again. And see if it gives you a vaguely different answer or a totally different answer. And if the answer is totally different, then you may have to you know, start checking other sources. But it’s really incredible the amount of things you can learn with AI to help you.

Like there’s very, it’s really opened my world in a lot of ways. I’m never going to be, say, a JavaScript expert, but I’ve learned more JavaScript through consulting with AI assistants, than I ever had trying to learn it on my own, right? And the same goes for practically anything.

And it does know, like the AI assistants I’ve used tend to know an incredible amount about WordPress. In part because WordPress is so widespread, because the docs are very good, and because it is open. So much of it is open, right? It’s it’s training data probably includes a lot of WordPress information. 

And we’ve actually like, 2023 has taught us a lot about how AIs, or let’s just for now let’s just call them LLMs, Large Language Models actually work. And  it turns out they’re not really that complicated. Very often you can build an LLM with a few hundred lines of Python. Training the LLM is incredibly hard, right?

That’s where you really like that’s the big money thing is training them. However, it’s also become possible fairly recently to start downloading and running LLMs locally. And if you’re training data is a fairly small subset, it becomes a lot easier and cheaper to train them. You can train them, say, on just your writing style, right?

Write something in my style, or write something in this style. So I think, I mean, broadly speaking, I think, I don’t think I’m going to surprise anybody when I say that we’re going to see more AI tooling, not just in WordPress, but everywhere. I think on the technology development lifecycle, I suspect AI is actually still in the first stage of innovation.

It may have broke into growth by now, but it’s nowhere near maturity and it’s such a useful and protean tool that we’re really just still figuring out exactly what it is we can do. And I, and it’s another one of those, like, looking again at the technology lifecycle, which if anybody out there is not familiar with it, it’s basically four stages of integration, growth, maturity, and decline.

And I don’t know that we’re ever going to really hit decline with AI tools. Like, you’ll notice that not all technology really does that, like, we’ve never hit a decline in the use of the wheel, right? The wheel is still a mature technology. Invented in I believe the Neolithic, right, it’s been with us for many thousands of years now, and really doesn’t show any signs of disappearing.

Even after we eventually get hover cars, assuming that day ever comes, we’re still going to be using the wheel in a lot of ways, as gears, things like that. And I think the same goes through for AI. It’s it will get to the point where if not us, our children are going to wonder how they ever lived without it.

And that, I mean, has its it’s got its benefits, but it also has its disadvantages and its dangers as well. Like with any new technology.

DP: And on that note, I think it’s time for us to take our final break. When we come back, we’re going to pick up our loose ends with maybe some of the little tidbits from State of the Word that we didn’t get a chance to talk about. So stay tuned after the short break, we’ll be right back.

Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. Today I’m talking with Mike Davey. We’ve been talking about our favorite takeaways from Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word address from late 2023. And I think there are just a few final things that I wanted to pick up on, first off, I think we should talk about WordCamps and meetups.

In 2023, there were 70 WordCamps in 33 countries. And in comparison in 2022, there were 22 WordCamps in that year. So if we were to go back to the first year before Covid began, 2019, we had about 142 WordCamps in 2019. So we’re at 70 last year, and I think we’ll probably kind of be close to that I think this year too.

So that’s coming back certainly more than last year. The next big word WordPress meetup is going to be WordCamp Asia, March 7th through 9th in Taipei, Taiwan. And WordCamp US is going to be happening in Portland, Oregon this year, which is, man, I’m so excited about visiting there. Mike, have you ever been to Portland?

MD: I have not actually, but it’s one of the, one of the U.S. cities that I’ve never managed to visit, but I’ve always wanted to. Same with Austin, Texas.

DP: Well, Austin and Portland are both known for, you know, being weird. So hopefully they’ll embrace that maybe mandatory hair dye. You know, you have to have blue hair to go to the event or something. But man I’m excited about that. And I think, the other thing that I was kind of interested in that we didn’t get a chance to talk about is during the Q&A, Matt was asked, can you say more about your plans to integrate ActivityPub into WordPress now?

Automatic has hired Matthias Pfefferle who runs the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, and they are assumably presumably looking to integrate more, at least experiment with, they don’t want to miss, you know, the fediverse, if it is going to be a thing.

And we had Matthias on the show last year. So if you’re interested, definitely check that out. It was a very fun episode, but Matt is saying that as far as plans for fediverse integration, Tumblr, which Automattic also owns, will be adopting ActivityPub to connect to the fediverse, and that will happen sometime this year.

That sounds like the next thing they’re focusing on, but as far as. As far as the future of WordPress and the fediverse, it seems kind of, cautiously optimistic. As an example, the ActivityPub plugin that I mentioned only has 5,000 installs in WordPress, and that’s not a lot of installs. So if you’re looking at user interest right now, and you’re saying it doesn’t look like a lot of users are currently integrating the ActivityPub plugin, which is amazing, into their WordPress sites. That’s quite possibly true. Threads did just‚—Threads, which is Instagram’s version of Twitter—Threads just started their journey into the fediverse. I think they, I think Threads users can access other sites like Mastodon or whatever and follow those people.

Currently, it’s not a two-way integration, but that will be coming. So maybe. Maybe the growth of the fediverse is happening pretty slowly. Maybe it’s stagnated. It’s going to be hard to say, but it is kind of interesting to see what WordPress can do to be part of that. Cause I, you know, I like the fediverse a lot.

Mike, were there any other quick things that you wanted to point out from the talk that we didn’t get to?

MD: Well, I think just to sort of expand on what you said about the fediverse, I think in a lot of ways, it seems to be really a great match for WordPress because it is free and it’s open source, and it’s about social networks talking to one another. And I think that, like, it’s one of those things where it’s gonna, it needs more growth.

Right, it’s going to eventually hit a point, though, where the growth is self-sustaining, and at that point, everybody will start using it, I think. We’re, I think we’re, we are slowly but surely moving away from sort of Twitter being the default social media application for WordPress users and developers.

I Mean, you do certainly see WordPress stuff, like WordPress discussions on other platforms, but it has been, in my experience, mostly Twitter. And for various reasons, I think we are going to see more and more people moving into the fediverse, at the very least, as an adjunct to their use of Twitter.

DP: On that note, Mike, where should users who are listening, where should people who are listening stay tuned to what you’re working on?

MD: Oh, they can they can follow anything I’m working on for Delicious Brains or ACF by following me on Twitter, oddly, @MediumMikeDavey. I do have a fediverse account, but I don’t actually have the the address handy right at the moment.

Yeah, as I said, I think the growth is needed and it’s going to be there one day, but it’s not quite there. Not quite yet. 

DP: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Our next episode is going to be a conversation with Nathan Ingram from Solid Academy about what’s happening with Solid Academy and about rebranding in public as SolidWP did. You can follow our adventures on Twitter, @theTorqueMag, but to be honest, we’re not really posting as much there.

The best place to find us is always TorqueMag. io, where you can find transcribed versions of these podcasts, as well as other bits of news and tutorials and things like that. That’s TorqueMag. io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Again, I’m your host, Dr.Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.