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Happy to announce that WP GraphQL is becoming canonical on WordPress.org. I could say more, but I’ll let Jason tell his story.

Back by popular demand! We’re taking a look at one of our most insightful episodes: Enterprise Clients and the Business of WordPress. Whether you missed it the first time or just want a refresher, we rewind and look back at the importance of WordPress with Enterprise businesses. Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she discusses the role WordPress Enterprise plays along with the WordPress community.

Credits

Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Brett McSherry
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

• WordPress Enterprise
• NASA Website (beta)
• WordPress TV
• Learn WordPress
• Small List of Big Things
  • Upcoming WordPress Meetings
  • WordPress Events
  • Make WordPress
• Have a question you’d like answered? Submit them to WPBriefing@WordPress.org.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

[00:00:28] (Music intro)

[00:00:39] Josepha: In a previous episode, we talked about the Community Summit and some trends that I was seeing. I’ve spent a lot of time since then summarizing the notes from each session, and I was processing notes from the session about aligning WordPress Enterprise and WordPress Community, which is a session that explored the various strengths and weaknesses of WordPress from an enterprise perspective, but especially when it comes to contributing to or communicating about WordPress.

Now, my vantage point on analyses like these is generally pretty different. Since I work mainly in an operations space for the project, I’m almost always looking at the health and safety of our ecosystem, product excellence, funding, things like that. So, I especially like to attend sessions that are from the vantage point of people who are much closer to the work than I am.

[00:01:24] Josepha: When I looked at the brainstormed list of things from the session, my first inclination was to catalog the relationships between what we saw as a positive or a negative and the things that we saw as intrinsic to us versus part of the environment. But the more I look at it, the more I see that there’s confirmation of what I have always known to be true. That WordPress is a valuable starting point for web-based solutions of all sizes and any purpose. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest themes that shine through from that session. I was able to distill them down to about nine primary themes, but I especially want to focus on some that come up year after year in talking with our community.

[00:02:07] Josepha: The first, of course, is the community and ecosystem. If you’ve listened to this podcast 62 times, then you’ve heard me say at least like 60 times that the community is what sets us apart from other open source projects. But, I would encourage you to expand that understanding to include the ecosystem that the community provides.

The community not only helps to plan and create WordPress, our primary software, but it also makes it distributable through the Polyglots team and Accessibility and Docs and Training. It also makes it extendable through plugins and themes, and all of the work that goes into reviewing plugins and themes, and the support that’s provided to people who come to the WordPress.org site, trying to figure out how to make this thing work for them.

And we also, this community, make it knowable, not only through the community part with our event series but also in marketing and the videos that we provide on WordPress TV and all of the training and learning cohorts that we provide on learn.WordPress.org, all of those teams make WordPress learnable and knowable and easy to use and usable to more people and available across the world, regardless of whether you speak English or not. And so yeah, the community and the ecosystem is one of the things that makes WordPress valuable for enterprise, but also WordPress valuable in general. 

[00:03:33] Josepha: The second is the software’s usability and flexibility. We exist for as long as people want to use our software, and that’s a funny little two-sided coin for us. WordPress remains very usable for folks who come to it in the same way that I came to it, which is as a user who is trying to accomplish a goal unrelated to WordPress. I didn’t start using WordPress because I wanted to figure out how WordPress worked or because I wanted to figure out how to contribute to WordPress. I came to WordPress because I was trying to market something, and WordPress was the best choice for that. But it’s also flexible for our brilliant developers out there who are doing things like building a suite of sites for NASA or creating bespoke social networks. So, our usability and flexibility, both of those things working together, are certainly one of the things that make me know that WordPress is incredibly valuable for anyone who needs to use it.

[00:04:30] Josepha: But the final thing is WordPress’s longevity or our resilience. So, I used to work at a marketing agency that served enterprise-level clients. And any time we pitched a new site build to a client, one of the main elements of discussion during decision-making was how long the decision would last. Do you want a page that you can launch in a day, run a six-week campaign through, and then abandon it forever? Or do you want a site that can take up to six weeks to build but can be yours to refine and hone for years after that? I know this seems like a silly example, but when you’re looking at the potential for a long-term bet, what you’re worried about, what you’re asking is, is this a software trusted in my industry? Is it time-tested by those companies I aspire to be? Is the available workforce composed of seasoned professionals or flash-in-the-pan peddlers of the latest craze? And of that workforce, how many will still be doing this in five years?

[00:05:32] Josepha: The question of how long we’ve been doing this and why it matters that WordPress has been here for 20 years and has no intention of going anywhere should be so much higher on everyone’s list of reasons to use this software. Yes, the WordPress software is powerful enough to be everything you might want it to be someday, but the WordPress ecosystem brought to us by this community has shown resilience through major breaking changes in 2008, 2016, 2018, 2020, and probably a lot of things between there that we have forgotten. So, if I were hoping to hedge my bets on a long-term solution, I would absolutely place those bets on this community, this ecosystem, and this software. 

(Music interlude) 

[00:06:25] Josepha: That brings us now to our small list of big things.

There are some upcoming WordPress meetings. You can find those on make.WordPress.org/meetings, I think. So really, really easy URL to remember. You can join your fellow community members and contribute to the WordPress project there.

[00:06:43] Josepha: And I also wanted to just call your attention to a few really big projects that still need a little bit of help around the project. So, on the one hand, we have Data Liberation. That is still a really big project, but specifically, we are nearly ready to start working on some user-facing elements of that. It is being powered by Playground, and because the data liberation, the migration of one site to another, is so complex, once we get those elements built into Playground, I think it also stands to fix a bunch of the problems that we have across our user flow, our user experience for the project. Things like having better theme previews and being able to get a sense for what a plugin functionally will do for you versus what it says it’s going to do for you. And getting a sense for what the admin looks like, all of those things. And so, anyone who wants to learn more about contributing to Playground or to Data Liberation, I absolutely encourage you to go check out those meetings, see what’s happening, and get your hands a bit dirty with that.

[00:07:50] Josepha: We also have a bunch of stuff happening in our community space. If you had received this podcast from somebody because they were like, hey, I know someone who might like WordPress or who has just learned WordPress and has never been to an event or any other reason that you are listening to this but don’t yet know the community, there is an easier option than just jumping straight into a WordCamp like I did. You can go to a meetup. You can see there’s a widget in your dashboard that’ll tell you what your nearest event is, but if you put your location into that widget, and nothing comes up. Technically, that means that you have an opportunity to bring a bunch of people together to teach you stuff you wish you knew about your site right now. So you can wander over into your dashboard and see those, or you can also head over to the community area on make.WordPress.org and anybody over there is happy to help you get started. And let me tell you, it is a very low-effort sort of thing to do. Here again, perfection’s not the point. And so that, my friends, is your small list of big things.

[00:08:52] Josepha: Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there is a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I am your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

[00:09:18] (Music outro)

WordPress 6.7 Beta 1 is ready for download and testing!

This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, set up a test environment or a local site to explore the new features.

How to Test WordPress 6.7 Beta 1

You can test Beta 1 in any of the following ways: 

WordPress Beta Tester Plugin	Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream.
Direct Download	Download the Beta 1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.
Command Line (WP-CLI)	Use this WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.7-beta1
WordPress Playground	Use a 6.7 Beta 1 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. No setup required–-just click and go!

The scheduled final release date for WordPress 6.7 is November 12, 2024. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next six weeks is vital to ensuring the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive.

How important is your testing?

Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether or not you have experience.

If you encounter an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.

Curious about testing releases in general and how to get started? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.

WordPress 6.7 will include many new features that were previously only available in the Gutenberg plugin. Learn more about Gutenberg updates since WordPress 6.7 in the What’s New in Gutenberg posts for versions 18.5, 18.6, 18.7, 18.8, 18.9, 19.0, 19.1, 19.2, and 19.3.

What’s New in WordPress 6.7 Beta 1

WordPress 6.7 Beta 1 contains over 500 enhancements and over 500 bug fixes for the editor, including more than 200 tickets for WordPress 6.7 Core. Here’s a glimpse of what’s coming:

Meet the Twenty Twenty-Five theme

Launching with WordPress 6.7, the new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Five, embodies ultimate flexibility and adaptability, showcasing how WordPress empowers you to tell your story with a rich selection of patterns and styles. Inspired by glimpses of natural beauty and ancestry heritage, it evokes ideas of impermanence, the passage of time, and continuous evolution–mirroring life’s journey. Experience effortless site creation with Twenty Twenty-Five and follow its progress or report issues on this GitHub repo.

Zoom Out to Compose with Patterns

The Zoom Out view simplifies your editing experience by allowing you to create and edit at the pattern level rather than focusing on individual blocks. Easily toggle this view from the toolbar to streamline your site-building process, making it faster and more intuitive to design pages using patterns.

Media improvements 

Now supporting HEIC image uploads–automatically converted to JPEG for maximum compatibility–you can add high-quality images without worrying about browser support. Plus, enjoy auto-sizing for lazy-loaded images and expanded background image options at both individual and global levels, giving you greater control over your site’s visuals and performance. 

Expanding Block Supports

Several blocks now come with expanded support options, enabling even more design possibilities. Notably, the long-requested shadow support for Group blocks has been added, a big win for designers and theme developers!

Preview Options API 

The latest WordPress release enhances the Preview Options in the block editor, empowering developers to customize content previews. A new API allows plugins and themes to add custom items to the preview dropdown menu, enabling users to see content in different formats or environments. This flexibility enriches the editing experience while maintaining the existing familiar Preview dropdown structure.

Refined Data Views

The Data Views introduced in 6.5 continue to be improved. This release is focused on refining the experience with a few new features aimed at making these views more flexible for customization and more functional to use. 

Manage Block Bindings Directly

The Block Bindings API now features an interface that lets you connect attributes with dynamic data to be bound to block attributes, solving many use cases for custom blocks and powering other features, like overrides in synced patterns. Updates to this API in 6.7 polish the underlying APIs, improving the overall user experience, and add a user interface (UI) that allows you to connect attributes with their binding sources. This new UI makes it possible to create bindings directly in a block instead of needing to use the Code Editor.

Simplified and Smarter Query Loop Block

The Query Loop block is improved, as it now automatically inherits the query from the template by default, eliminating the need for manual configuration. This means your posts display immediately in both the editor and on the front end, streamlining the process so users can focus on content without extra configuration needed.

Edit and Control Font Size Presets

An enhanced Styles interface allows for greater flexibility when creating, editing, removing, and applying font size presets. You can now easily modify the presets provided by a theme or create your own custom options. A key feature is the ability to toggle fluid typography, which enables responsive font scaling with additional options for finer control over responsiveness.

View Meta Boxes in the iframed Post Editor

A new split view option has been introduced that allows you to access both the editor canvas and metaboxes while editing. This change will provide a consistent WYSIWYG experience between the editor and front end views.

Template Registration API

With this release, developers can now more easily register custom block templates without complex filters. Streamline your development process and create custom templates with ease. 

The features included in this first beta may change before the final release of WordPress 6.7, based on what testers like you find.

Get an overview of the 6.7 release cycle and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.7-related posts in the next few weeks for further details.

Vulnerability bounty doubles during Beta & Release Candidate

The WordPress community sponsors a monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. This reward doubles during the period between Beta 1 on October 1, 2024 and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for November 5, 2024. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.

Just for you: a Beta 1 haiku

Lines of code arise, 
Testing shapes the future path,  
WordPress grows once more.

Props to @annezazu, @cbringmann, @courane01, @desrosj, @marybaum, and @preithor for reviewing and collaborating on this post!

Social media, in its current form, is broken and chaotic. A new organization, the Social Web Foundation, aims to change that. This initiative has launched with a clear mission: fuel the growth of the fediverse and make the social web a better place for everyone.  

Automattic, WordPress.com’s parent company, is excited to be part of this movement and to support the Foundation’s vision for a healthier, more diverse social web.

What is the Social Web Foundation?

Founded by leaders in the open social networking space, including Evan Prodromou, Tom Coates, and Mallory Knodel, the Social Web Foundation is focused on fostering a financially sustainable, decentralized social web. It will empower users and creators by enhancing platform diversity, encouraging innovation, and promoting user safety across the fediverse.

The Social Web Foundation’s immediate focus is on building the infrastructure needed to connect users and developers across platforms. The Foundation will also work to educate the public, policymakers, and developers about the benefits of the fediverse while continuing to improve the ActivityPub protocol and the tools that power it.

Automattic’s role in supporting the Social Web Foundation 

Automattic has a long history of championing open source software and open standards, and we believe the fediverse plays a critical role in shaping the future of the web. That’s why Automattic is eager to collaborate with the Social Web Foundation to ensure a stronger, more open ecosystem for all users.

Matthias Pfefferle, Open Web Lead at Automattic, said, “We’re excited about the launch of the Social Web Foundation and its mission. We’re eager to collaborate with the Foundation to expand platform diversity and enhance the support for various content types—especially long-form content—within the fediverse, fostering greater interoperability across the ecosystem.”

Alongside Automattic, companies like Mastodon, Flipboard, Ghost, and Meta have expressed their support for the Foundation’s mission. As Eugen Rochko, Founder and CEO of Mastodon, states, “Mastodon is committed to the fediverse and proud to back the Social Web Foundation’s efforts to build a stronger, more open, and dynamic social web for all.”

Federating WordPress.com with ActivityPub

For creators using WordPress.com, there’s already an easy way to join the fediverse. The ActivityPub plugin federates your WordPress.com site, allowing readers on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed to follow your site directly. This integration gives creators even more control and reach, offering a seamless way to distribute content across multiple networks while maintaining ownership of what you publish.

Why this matters

As the Social Web Foundation builds out its program, Automattic and WordPress.com are proud to be part of the next wave of social networking. The ability to control your own data, interact across platforms, and have a say in the future of the social web aligns perfectly with our own values as an organization dedicated to empowering creators and users worldwide. And with the ActivityPub plugin, WordPress.com users can easily join in, helping to build a more open and federated web.

To learn more about the Social Web Foundation, visit their website, or follow them at @swf on the fediverse.

Also be sure to catch up on all things fediverse with our five-part YouTube series, The Fediverse Files.

I’ve heard from WP Engine customers that they are frustrated that WP Engine hasn’t been able to make updates, plugin directory, theme directory, and Openverse work on their sites. It saddens me that they’ve been negatively impacted by Silver Lake‘s commercial decisions.

On WP Engine’s homepage, they promise “Unmatched performance, automated updates, and bulletproof security ensure your sites thrive.”

WP Engine was well aware that we could remove access when they chose to ignore our efforts to resolve our differences and enter into a commercial licensing agreement. Heather Brunner, Lee Wittlinger, and their Board chose to take this risk. WPE was also aware that they were placing this risk directly on WPE customers. You could assume that WPE has a workaround ready, or they were simply reckless in supporting their customers. Silver Lake and WP Engine put their customers at risk, not me.

We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00. Hopefully this helps them spin up their mirrors of all of WordPress.org’s resources that they were using for free while not paying, and making legal threats against us.

As an open source project, the WordPress software relies on contributions from individuals and businesses alike to remain a healthy and innovative ecosystem. 

Individuals can contribute in a number of ways, from writing code to organizing meetups to working on WordPress’s accessibility. Companies can contribute by permitting their employees to allocate part-time or full-time hours to WordPress. 

For the latest WordPress release Automattic provided over 3,500 core contributions—over half of all WordPress 6.6 contributions—at the hands of 105 individual contributors. 

Given that WordPress powers over 40% of your favorite websites, it’s in the best interest of every company that benefits from WordPress to give back to the project and community. 

This idea is codified in WordPress’s Five for the Future initiative. Any company that profits from the software—including every business offering hosting for WordPress—is encouraged to put 5% of its resources back into WordPress development.

At Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, we take this responsibility very seriously. 

Automattic employs just under 2,000 people. Over 100 of them work on the WordPress project full-time. In terms of workforce hours, this puts the company at almost exactly 5%. 

Contributor day at WordCamp Europe 2024.

Though this is not a requirement and it is not policed by the WordPress Foundation, every company that profits from WordPress should think about the long-term health and vibrancy of the WordPress ecosystem. At Automattic and WordPress.com, we’re proud to give back and to constantly be thinking about bettering WordPress as a whole when we’re working on features, squashing bugs, and generally doing our best to democratize publishing for the entire world.

As a customer—whether you’re a developer at an agency or an aspiring creator—you have a say in the future of WordPress. You have options when it comes to hosting. We recommend that the dollars you spend go towards a WordPress host that acts as a good steward of open source philosophy—like WordPress.com.

Any WP Engine customers having trouble with their sites should contact WP Engine support and ask them to fix it.

I won’t bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit.

What I will tell you, that pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.

WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.

The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, WP Engine will need to replicate that security research on their own.

Why should WordPress.org provide these services to WP Engine for free, given their attacks on us?

WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers, and they can experience WordPress as WP Engine envisions it, with them getting all of the profits and providing all of the services.

If you want to experience WordPress, use any other host in the world besides WP Engine. WP Engine is not WordPress.

The WordPress.com team is always working on new design ideas to bring your website to life. Check out the latest themes in our library, including great options for brats, foodies, and beauty bloggers. Take a look below.

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Partygurl

Tap into your brat summer vibes all year round with our brand new Partygurl theme. Inspired by the now-iconic bright green and simple typography from Charli XCX’s Brat album, this styling will immediately identify you as someone who’s done with the “clean and polished” aesthetic of sameness that you see across the web.

Click here to view a demo of this theme.

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RecipeBook

RecipeBook is a warm, vibrant theme made for foodie content creators who want their recipes to shine. Inspired by the charm of old-school cookbooks, RecipeBook pairs eye-catching colors with bold typography. The homepage invites discovery with a handy category list and flexible Query Loop block, making it easy to showcase your culinary creations. Whether you’re sharing recipes or creating food collections, RecipeBook offers a playful yet functional design to help you dish out your passion for cooking.

Click here to view a demo of this theme.

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Goodskin

Goodskin is a great theme for beauty bloggers and skincare enthusiasts. With its light, calming aesthetic and clean layout, Goodskin provides an elegant space for sharing your routines, product reviews, and more. The theme includes thoughtful features like a sidebar for easy navigation and a product rating pattern to highlight your favorite finds. Available in three soothing color variations—Jojoba, Blush, and Eyeshadow—Goodskin offers a serene, sophisticated platform that allows your content to glow.

Click here to view a demo of this theme.

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Luxus

Luxus is the perfect look for beauty salons wanting to make a sleek, no-fuss impression. Designed with simplicity in mind, Luxus gives the essentials—services, location, hours, and contact information—right away on the homepage, making it easy for clients to find what they need.

Optimized for mobile right out of the box with a clean, single-column layout, Luxus offers a seamless experience for your busy, on-the-go clientele. With the luxurious Ojuju font for headings and the classic Hanken Grotesk for body text, this theme exudes elegance while keeping the focus on what matters most.

Click here to view a demo of this theme.

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To install any of the above themes, click the name of the theme you like, which brings you right to the installation page. Then click the “Activate this design” button. You can also click “Open live demo,” which brings up a clickable, scrollable version of the theme for you to preview.

Premium themes are available to use at no extra charge for customers on the Personal plan or above. Partner themes are third-party products that can be purchased for $99/year each on the Business plan and above.

You can explore all of our themes by navigating to the “Themes” page, which is found under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard. Or you can click below:

It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion.

I spoke yesterday at WordCamp about how Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102B assets under management, can hollow out an open source community. Today, I would like to offer a specific, technical example of how they break the trust and sanctity of our software’s promise to users to save themselves money so they can extract more profits from you.

WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia. This means if you make a mistake, you can always undo it. It also means if you’re trying to figure out why something is on a page, you can see precisely the history and edits that led to it. These revisions are stored in our database.

This is very important, it’s at the core of the user promise of protecting your data, and it’s why WordPress is architected and designed to never lose anything.

WP Engine turns this off. They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content. It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to get your content back, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is manage and protect your content.

Here is a screenshot of their support page saying they disable this across their 1.5 million WordPress installs.

They say it’s slowing down your site, but what they mean is they want to avoid paying to store that data. We tested revisions on all of the recommended hosts on WordPress.org, and none disabled revisions by default. Why is WP Engine the only one that does? They are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.

If you are a customer of “WordPress Engine,” you should contact their support immediately to at least get the 3 revisions they allow turned on so you don’t accidentally lose something important. Ideally, they should go to unlimited. Remember that you, the customer, hold the power; they are nothing without the money you give them. And as you vote with your dollars, consider literally any other WordPress host as WP Engine is the only one we’ve found that completely disables revisions by default.

WordCamp US (WCUS), North America’s largest WordPress event, hosted over 1,500 attendees from around the world at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, from September 17 to 20.

Over four days, WordPress professionals and enthusiasts came together to explore the latest advancements and use cases, collaborate on open source projects, and strengthen community connections.

A dedicated team of more than 40 volunteers, led by Aaron D. Campbell, Julia Golomb, Katie Richards, and Sandy Edwards, made the event possible.

Building WordPress

Contributor Day brought together over 400 contributors across 25 teams to support the WordPress project. As with any Contributor Day, participants learned and collaborated while tackling key projects, including triaging issues, exploring performance improvements, advancing the Twenty Twenty-Five theme, and preparing for the upcoming WordPress 6.7 release.

Celebrating WordPress

At WCUS 2024, the inaugural Showcase Day highlighted how enterprises like Disney Experiences, The New York Post, CNN, Vox Media, and Amnesty International are leveraging WordPress across a variety of industries. With 19 sessions, attendees gained diverse insights into WordPress’s wide-ranging capabilities and features.

Sustaining WordPress

Joseph “JJ” Jacks, founder of OSS Capital, kicked off the first day of programming with a keynote about how open source will dominate the next wave of software. In looking at emerging trends in tech, he expressed how closed core, or closed source, software is hitting a plateau. Commercial open source companies are able to disrupt and forge the path for a shift in the space. 

Sharing his optimism for the future, JJ highlighted emerging projects OSS Capital is excited about and emphasized that the most successful open source companies thrive by generating more value than they capture.

Learn WordPress

The second half of the conference featured more than 20 sessions and workshops across three tracks. Topics ranged from leveraging AI in WordPress to getting the most out of wp-admin.

Thursday’s dedicated networking session brought attendees to the sponsor hall to explore and connect with the vast ecosystem of hosts, plugins, agencies, and service providers. The WordCamp US Lounge, located within the exhibit hall, held focused discussions on hosting, neurodiversity, inclusivity, and content marketing.

Friday began with a fireside chat between TIME’s CTO Burhan Hamid and WordPress VIP’s CMO Tim Hossain. The duo discussed how TIME’s implementation of reusable components allowed them to scale and support major traffic-generating topics such as Taylor Swift’s Person of the Year, House of the Dragon, and political events.

Q&A with Cofounder Mullenweg

In a dynamic keynote, WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg delivered one of his “spiciest” WordCamp presentations, combining insights on WordPress’s open-source future with a creative twist. He opened by reading his recent post that explores open-source philosophy, touching on themes of freedom, collaboration, and the ongoing influence of open-source projects like WordPress. Mullenweg also critiqued companies for misleadingly labeling proprietary models as open source, stressing the importance of true open source licenses for the future of software freedom.

Matt further emphasized WordPress’s ecosystem-driven development and highlighted the Five for the Future initiative, an effort to avoid the tragedy of the commons and ensure that WordPress thrives for everyone. His speech addressed community concerns about companies profiting off WordPress without giving back and urged attendees to support companies that contribute to the platform’s growth.

Before diving into the Q&A segment of the presentation, Matt expressed the importance of recognizing:

“What we create together is bigger than any one person.”

Save the Dates

In his closing remarks, emcee Brian Richards expressed gratitude for the fantastic work the event organizers and volunteers contributed to produce WCUS 2024.

Brian reminded attendees to save the date for WordCamp US 2025, which will once again take place in Portland, Oregon, from August 26 to 29, 2025. 

No WordCamp is complete without an after-party, with this year’s taking place at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). Attendees concluded a week of WordPress with refreshments while visiting the exhibits—including a submarine and planetarium—and posing in the photo booth.

Stay connected

WordPress events enable technologists, open source enthusiasts, and community members around the globe to meet, share ideas, and collaborate to drive WordPress and the open web forward.

Mark your calendars for State of the Word (Tokyo) on December 16, 2024, 2025’s WordCamp Asia in Manila, WordCamp Europe in Basel, Switzerland, and WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon!

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This post is a collaboration between the contributors who produce content for wordpress.org/news and the WordCamp US Communications Team.

Props to the following contributors for the work reviewing/contributing to this post: @rmartinezduque, @juliarosia, @brettface, @eidolonnight, and @cbringmann. Thank you to the Photos Team for supplying images for this post and the official WordPress social media accounts throughout the event: @gwallace87, @m_butcher, @correliebre, and @zstepek.