Matt Mullenweg

2008 has been an active year

Almost 3000 commits of code to the official WP source code repository

11 Releases this year

Shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes to upgrade your WP blog

3 new developers on the project this year

11.1 million downloads of WP this year – up from a couple million a year ago

WordPress.com is seeing over 35 million posts per month

5 billion spams caught by Akismet – 99.925% accuracy

There have been 18 WordCamps so far and average btw 50-350 attendees each

Features this year:
3 major releases
New release every 4 months
Less focus on waiting for big features and more focus on releasing good stable code regularly
2 – 3 months dev and 1 month dedicated testing
Focusing on polished features since they can let plugin developers focus on cool experimental stuff

iPhone app has been downloaded 100,000 times so far with cool new things on the way with the next version

Comment moderation coming to the iPhone app in next version

Stats are coming as well

A little less about posting and more about managing your blog remotely

New theme repository coming to help making it easier to find solid themes

Theme designers can’t use the same systems and interfaces as developers. Need to upload via a ZIP file which will get sucked in, double checked, and posted

WordPress is also trying to focus on theme update messages when things change

Working on a one-click integration of whole theme repository inside of the base WP package

WordPress Usage
6 million wordpress.org blogs in use
4 million of those are WP multi-user installs

Plugins
A free market of features
Poll plugins are becoming very popular and seem to generate more comments
Automatic upgrade and cache are super popular since they make stuff alot easier
Plugins really do make everyone’s WP very custom and unique
Average user has 5 plugins installed

Heavy focus on the core of WordPress – keep it stable, lean and boring and make sure plugin developers have what they need to innovate.

WordPress 2.7 – What’s Next?

Dashboard redesign – revisiting the Happy Cog version of the Dashboard

The redesign was nice but they missed validating the changes with users and test the impacts of the changes.

Interface was prettier but not as efficient

New Dashboard redesign fully based on proper user testing, eye tracking studies, etc.

Admin UI is a lot more customizable now that you can drag palettes around and lock in the ideal UI for the individual user

Accepted that all users use the tool very differently

Admins can activate and de-activate all elements of the posting interface. This is super useful for client work where you can hide all the features they will never need or use. – very cool!

Almost as if the admin acts like widgets now – sort of…

Inline “quick edit” capabilities on post list page in admin

Adding a new comment API – part of iPhone app development and useful for other desktop apps, etc.

New inline reply when you are reviewing comments – much easier to interact with users

Keyboard shortcuts

All available in November

Themes for 2009

Upgrades – gotta make them easier!

Has been very hard to get an official upgrade system into the core – still relying on plugins for now.

Security – gotta lock it down and keep it safe

Lotsa US Gov agencies using WP and that scares Matt into wanting it to be as secure as possible.

Media and gallery management – video, audio, photo management refinements

Multi-modal – focus on micro-blogs, and other versions of what a blog can be.

WordPress as a hub – we are putting a lot of data into the cloud and we don’t control what others do with it. WP could help with this.

Feed data from other services into WP as a way to act as a repository

BuddyPress is well on its way – Social Network powered by WPMU – social networks as easy to setup as a blog.

Lots more testing integrated into core WordPress development – low tolerance for mistakes that should have been caught

2009 is the year of the theme… Prologue and others can really change WP into something new