Highlights from Matt Mullenweg’s "State Of The Word" Address

The most anticipated and eagerly awaited session at the San Francisco WordCamps has always been The State of the Word address  delivered by WordPress Co-founder Matt Mullenweg. In this address, Matt goes over the current state of the WordPress project. He also breaks news on what is around the corner. The address has always been very interactive, with Matt opening up the floor for questions at the end.

This year, using an analogy to Jazz – his favorite form of music – Matt drew co-relations between Jazz and WordPress throughout his State of the Word Speech.

Highlights from Matt Mullenweg’s – “State of the Word” Address.

• Plugins are like Solos - Plugins prevent bloating of your software by allowing people to only add the specific feature or functionality they are looking for.
• Hello Dolly was the first wordpress Plugin. It was created to be the simplest plugin.
• Customizations for web publishers, are like Improvisation for jazz musicians.
• A blog is indepedent, just like jazz.
• What’s New in WordPress 3.0?
  • A menu navigation system for greater control over your navigation menu.
  • Core WordPress and WordPress MU (Multi-User) have been merged into one.
  • A New Default Theme 2010 has arrived! The theme has been name after year, so that automattic will force itself to upgrade every-year
  • Each post and page can now have its own featured image.
  • Custom Taxonomies and Custom Post Types are in this release.
  • New “Surprise Me” feature. Try it!
• More people that you thought are making a living off of the free open source wordpress software.
• You own your data and in this aspect, WordPress is inclusive like Jazz.
• glocal is the new in thing. Think glocal / act lobal.
• Code will always have bugs. Automattic will dedicate more time and resources to Security. This includes frequent security updates as well as recommendations to hosts on best practices and secure hosting.
• Large corporations are now interacting with WordPress.Google has released a Plugin. SalesForce launched the WordPress-To-Lead Plugin for leads generation. Microsoft also “hearts” WordPress.
• Automattic aspires to do a major release every 3 to 4 months.
• Some mind-boggling stats about WordPress usage around the world, that you probably didn’t know. Like
  • 21 Million downloads of WordPress in last year alone.
  • 70 Million plugin and themes downloads this year (and its only May right now).
  • 35 Billion (yes, BILLION) pageviews between wordpress.com and wordpress.org in 1 year.
  • 8.5% of the sites the creator of Drupal crawled were running WordPress!

In closing Matt declared…

The State of the Word is STRONG!

and the audience erupted into cheers!