The Future of WordPress
- Search interest is trending down, but market share has stabilized
- “Mature services” are on an upward trend (number of freelancers and agencies offering WordPress services)
- Where is Hubs on the S-Curve? Early adoption → Growth → Maturity
- WordPress brand has some challenging narratives to overcome—competition labels it as a monolith, and it’s seen as obsolete tech, although over 40% of the web uses WordPress
- “Market doesn’t understand WordPress” — WordPress needs to transform itself; closing the distance from core to market is the answer
- WordPress has over 60,000 plugins
- Noel sees an opportunity to create first-party plugins that WordPress can ship and support for common third-party integrations
- Human Made has to sell clients not only on their services but also fight against negative branding around WordPress (being outdated, insecure, “just a blogging platform,” etc.)
Recognizing Contributors in WordPress
Jonathan Desrosiers
March 8, 2024 • 1:00 PM CST • Track 3 / Room 101B
- WordPress has sponsored contributors through the Five for the Future program (companies making money on WordPress are encouraged to contribute 5% back to WordPress)
- Aretha Franklin “give me my propers” — WordPress uses props as kudos
- Props are built into WordPress PRs with a required line to give people credit
- They have different distinction levels within the props system
- Challenge: What about contributions that don’t get tracked?
- There’s an independent website called WordPress.org Profiles that allows contributors to register profiles
- They have a props bot that collects all activity connected to a PR using GitHub Actions
- The Faces of WordPress series takes a more qualitative approach to recognizing contributions
Key Takeaways on Recognition:
- Look to more qualitative approaches to recognizing contributions
- Non-privileged contributions need to be celebrated more
- Understand motivations and expectations and factor them into recognition
- Do people know how they want to be recognized?
- Drupal has interesting gamification of contributions worth exploring
Ensuring contributors feel appreciated is essential to the success of any open source project. In its 20+ year history, there have been over 5,400 unique contributors listed on the Credits pages for each version released. But even as one of the largest current FOSS projects powering 43%+ of the Internet, this number is inaccurate and low.
The Art of Impactful WordPress Collaboration
Naoko Takano
March 9, 2024 • 9:00 AM CST • Track 2 / Room 102
“You should do a WordCamp” — small encouragement to a contributor can result in big outcomes. Naoko says she wouldn’t have hosted WordCamps without that one suggestion from Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder.
Contributor Statistics:
- 20 self-sponsored contributors
- 60 company-sponsored contributors
- 21 “impactful” contributors
Resources:
- make.wordpress.org — “Year in Core” reports
- Companies set aside time specifically to work on WordPress core
- Learn WordPress — about 4 years old
- One-stop shop for tutorials, lesson plans for teachers, self-guided courses, and online workshops
- As a non-profit, they can host videos on YouTube without ads while still getting analytics and discoverability
- WordPress has a consortium of top agencies working to improve the profile and reputation of WordPress among enterprise clients