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Happy weekend! It's June 16 and we're covering WordCamp Europe 2024, Do the Woo, and much more.
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P.S. If you enjoy reading The Repository, the best thing you can do to support our work is share this issue with your friends and colleagues. The second best thing? Buy a classified ad.
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Four big headlines
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1. Global community gathers for WordCamp Europe 2024 in Torino, Basel to host in 2025
WordCamp Europe 2024 wrapped up in Torino, Italy, yesterday, and as Barn2 co-founder and CEO Katie Keith posted, "I've been scrolling Twitter for about 15 mins and haven't seen one post that's not about #WCEU! I don't remember any other WordCamp ever generating so much buzz."
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In total, 2,584 attendees—including 42% first-timers—from 96 countries descended on the Lingotto Conference and Exhibition Centre for the three-day event, according to Highlights from WordCamp Europe 2024 at WordPress.org.
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On Thursday, Contributor Day brought together 756 people working across 25 teams on everything from important fixes for MIME types to launching new projects for WordPress Playground, including SQLite export with WP-CLI, and translating 79,059 strings across 29 languages.
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On Friday and Saturday, 60 presentations and workshops were held across three tracks. Yoast founder Joost de Valk and WordPressCS maintainer Juliette Reinders Folmer gave the opening keynote address on sustaining open source software projects.
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WCEU 2024 was organized and produced by a team of 167 organizers and 250 volunteers, led by WordCamp veterans Wendie Huis in 't Veld, Juan Hernando and Takis Bouyouris. Reflecting on the eight-month process that led up to the event, Bouyouris said, "We committed ourselves and the team to the principles of transparency, sustainability, privacy, and DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging). We also wanted to make it a fun experience for the organizers and for the 167 volunteers who joined us during the event. I'm very proud of the work that our team did to get us to today."
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The world's largest WordCamp concluded with the news that WordCamp Europe 2025 will be held in Basel, Switzerland, from June 5-7. Swiss community organizer Patricia Brun Torre has shared a behind-the-scenes look at Basel's selection.
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The Repository is a proud media partner of WordCamp Europe 2024.
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2. Mid-year update: WordPress to power 85% of the web
Matt Mullenweg has set a bold, new goal for WordPress, telling WordCamp Europe 2024 attendees during his mid-year update that he wants to power 85% of the web.
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Citing W3Techs, Mullenweg said WordPress’ market share was 43.3% and growing again after flattening out for about a year. In fact, WordPress market share started plateauing in January 2022 after a long and steady rise, according to W3Techs year-on-year usage statistics.
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"It'll be exciting to start putting a few more points on the board here again in our march to free the web," said Mullenweg. "We don't have to be 100% but we could at least make 85% of the web free and then force all the proprietary people to open up with data liberation. That would be a good life goal."
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W3Techs data for June 2024 shows that WordPress market share has remained steady at 43.3% for a fourth consecutive month, up 0.2% compared to June last year and following a brief dip to 42.8% in December 2023. Shopify, the second most popular CMS, holds 4.4% of the market share, up 0.4% on June last year.
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Back in 2015, Mullenweg set his 50% market share goal during an interview with Adam Silver on the KitchensinkWP podcast when WordPress was at 23.3%. At the time, Mullenweg told Silver, "As the percentage increases, it gets harder and harder to grow the market share, and we have to grow the market share by doing things we haven't done in the past… What got us here isn't going to get us there. Once we get to 50%, we can decide something new we want to do."
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Following on from his recent blog post marking WordPress' 21st birthday, Mullenweg spent most of his mid-year update talking about the 11 elements he says made WordPress what it is today and will define its evolution in the years to come. He added a bonus twelfth element, telling attendees that "Playground is going to change everything."
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Also during his mid-year update, Mullenweg asked folks to help come up with a name to replace Playground "blueprints," and called on contributors to join the data liberation project to help counter the rise of proprietary platforms and their big marketing budgets.
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3. Mullenweg accepts speed build challenge during Q&A
"Cue the Rocky training montage. @photomatt is going to take on @jessicalyschik in a Gutenberg Speed Building Challenge," posted core committer Aaron Jorbin after Greyd developer Jessica Lyschik challenged Matt Mullenweg during the WordPress co-founder's Q&A at WordCamp Europe.
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Lyschik, who co-led the development of Twenty Twenty-Four, went head-to-head with Automattic designer Rich Tabor during Jamie Marsland's live Speed Build Challenge on day two of WCEU 2024. Her bold challenge was met with, "Yeah, let's do one!" from Mullenweg, who then turned to Matías Ventura, the lead architect of Gutenberg, and jokingly said, "you gotta train me!"
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During the brief-yet-productive Q&A, Mullenweg offered free WordPress.com accounts to WordPress meetup organizers, or as Taco Verdonschot, Head of Relations at Yoast, posted, "Going into full @Oprah mode, @photomatt chants 'and you get a site' answering @MatteoSpi0's call for help for meetups needing a site."
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Mullenweg also committed to reviewing a proposal for a WordPress people and culture team, promised to fix a security issue involving closed plugins, and revealed that the "gaming of stats systems" needs to be resolved before dashboards can be introduced to the WordPress project.
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4. Do the Woo 4.0 officially debuts, spurred by Slack chat with Mullenweg
According to Dunn, he had been dreaming of a new site to showcase the community-driven network of shows he had built since launching the WooCommerce-focused podcast in 2016. But he said he was done tinkering with his site and just wanted to create content.
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"Longingly, I looked at the opportunity of moving to WordPress.com. In my head, it all sounded great, but I knew what it would take in terms of resources," Dunn said. "I sent a Slack message to Matt Mullenweg and told him what I was thinking about. Two or three weeks later, I had a team to redesign my site, I became a new partner with WordPress.com, and the rest is history."
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The new Do the Woo website is now powered by WordPress.com and features dedicated pages for each of the podcast's 12 shows, including a new enterprise-focused show. A new support option allows listeners to contribute financially to specific shows and hosts who volunteer their time. Listeners can also choose to subscribe to individual shows or opt for the full Do the Woo feed.
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The official launch comes after Dunn announced in March that he had teamed up with WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Jetpack.
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In other news
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WordPress project
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> WordPress 6.6 Beta 2 is available for testing. According to core contributor Mary Baum, the release contains more than 50 updates since Beta 1, including over 40 for WordPress core. Automattic-sponsored contributor Anne McCarthy has published a handy guide for testing WordPress 6.6 (WordPress.org News | Make WordPress Test)
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> Gutenberg 18.5 introduces better tools for section styling, a new custom shadows feature, and the ability to edit a block's custom fields directly in the block itself, thanks to updates to the Block Bindings API (Make WordPress Core)
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> Core contributors are discussing a proposal to introduce dynamic tokens, aka "bits," for externally sourced data in WordPress core. Automattic-sponsored contributor Dennis Snell wants to harness a quirk in the HTML API referred to within WordPress as a "funky comment." (Make WordPress Core)
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> The WordPress Media Corps is inviting media outlets and content creators to self-assess their eligibility to join the experiment. Previously, the media corps had been planning an invite-only process, but Omnisend-sponsored contributor Bernard Meyer says the corps wants to identify qualified media partners in a more streamlined and transparent way that aligns with the spirit of the WordPress ecosystem (Make WordPress Slack)
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> The WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program is calling for interest in the Q4 cohort, scheduled for October-November 2024. The program connects seasoned contributors with newcomers, providing the opportunity for mentees to gain experience contributing to WordPress, while mentors share their expertise and improve their leadership skills (Make WordPress Community)
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WordPress community
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> The WP Community Collective's new Incentivizing DEIB in WP program is offering $200-$2,000 to people working to increase the visibility and frequency of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging topics in the WordPress community and at events (WPCC)
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> The WP World and Seriously, Bud? have joined forces. WordPressers who feature on Bud Krauss' weekly podcast now have a link to their episode on their WP World page, and vice versa. Since launching last year, Marcus Burnette's The WP World has gained over 1,400 members, and Seriously, Bud? has featured interviews with 14 community members (The WP World | Seriously, Bud?)
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> Community organizer Jevilyn Fajardo is the latest recipient of the Yoast Care fund. The Pantheon customer service engineer receives $500 for her work organizing meetups in her hometown, Manila, and supporting other meetups in the Philippines (Yoast)
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> To celebrate Pride month, LGBTQ+PRESS is running a photo drive for the WordPress Photo Directory and offering cash prizes. The initiative is supported by Queeromattic, the collection of queers within Automattic (LGBTQ+PRESS)
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Business, enterprise & acquisitions
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> Do the Woo has launched Scaling Enterprise, WordPress and OSS, a new show hosted by CEOs Brad Williams (WebDevStudios), Karim Marucchi (Crowd Favorite) and Tom Willmot (Human Made) that explores enterprise and open source topics (Do the Woo)
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> Automattic has launched a new affiliate program targeted at agencies. The launch comes after Director of Global Affiliate Marketing, Stacey L. Carlson, announced the company's entry into the affiliate market in April (WordPress.com | LinkedIn)
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> Bluehost is also targeting agencies, this week launching its Agency Partner Program. The affiliate program provides resources, revenue opportunities and free cloud hosting to help agencies and freelancers "take care of their clients," according to Ed Jay, President of Newfold Digital, parent company of Bluehost (Yahoo! Finance)
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> Vertigo Studio SA founder Ionut Neagu has acquired the free Redirection for Contact Form 7 plugin. Neagu, who also owns ThemeIsle and WPShout, is building out his plugin portfolio, recently sharing his approach to buying products that generate between $60,000 and $350,000 per year in revenue (X | In.Space)
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Plugins, themes & products
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> Gravatar has launched Profiles-as-a-Service. Ronnie Burt, Head of Gravatar at Automattic, says the platform's new REST API makes it simpler and more efficient for developers to integrate Gravatar's avatars and profile data into apps and websites. He says his team is also exploring adding more data points, more customization options on public profiles, and options for being a Web3 bridge with decentralized profiles (Gravatar)
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> Marieke van de Rakt and Joost de Valk have launched Progress Planner, a plugin that gamifies website maintenance. The pair are planning to launch a pro version later this year (joost.blog)
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> TranslatePress recently surpassed 10 million downloads. According to Cozmolabs founder and CEO Adi Spiac, "It took us more than 6.5 years to get here (2,463 days to be exact), so I'm incredibly grateful and humbled by this milestone. 🙏🤟" (X)
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Conferences & events
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> Tickets are now available for WordCamp US 2024. This year's flagship conference will be held at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, from September 17-20. New to this year's program is a Showcase Day focused on innovative uses of WordPress (WordCamp US)
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> WordPress Accessibility Day has open calls for speakers and donations. The annual 24-hour event dedicated to promoting and learning website accessibility best practices for WordPress websites will be held on October 9-10, 2024. Registration is free and talks will be live captioned and available after the event on YouTube (WordPress Accessibility Day)
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> WordCamp Asia 2025 organizers have announced the flagship event will be held at the Philippine International Convention Center in Manila from February 20-22 (WordCamp Asia)
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Security
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> WP Rocket experienced a "massive" DDos attack with a ransom demand on Monday. After deciding not to pay the ransom, the company unsuccessfully tried to mitigate the attack internally before switching to Cloudflare. Most services were restored by Tuesday morning (X)
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> WooCommerce developers have patched versions 8.8 and 8.9 to address a cross-site scripting vulnerability affecting pages with the classic checkout (WooCommerce)
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> WPBakery users are urged to update to the latest version after a cross-site scripting vulnerability was patched in version 7.7. Developers also introduced other improvements in this release, including a module manager, element caching and AI support for the Classic editor (WPBakery)
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Help diverse voices in WordPress be heard! Support Inclusion in Tech removes barriers for speakers at WordCamps. Donate and empower SiNC.
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Want to hear WordPressers talk about their lives beyond WordPress in an unexpected conversation? Subscribe to Seriously, BUD? and get a fresh episode every week.
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Meanwhile...
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READ
🪆 Eric Karkovack's quick Q&A with Matt Mullenweg about Hello Dolly (speckyboy)
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🔍 Alex Denning read the entire Google leak (with ChatGPT's help) (Ellipsis)
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🔢 Vikas Singhal collated 50 WordPress stats (instaWP)
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LISTEN
✨ Tammie Lister on getting involved with WordPress core, menopause, and being who you are on social media (Women in WP)
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🏕️ Josepha Haden Chomphosy on what first-timers can expect at WordCamps (WP Briefing)
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👩💻 Birgit Pauli-Haack and Magdalena Paciorek on WordPress 6.6 and Gutenberg versions 18.3, 18.4 and 18.5 (Gutenberg Times)
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WATCH
🍎 Matt Mullenweg on WordPress's recent nod during Apple's WWDC24 keynote (ma.tt)
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🌗 Rich Tabor on why he contributes to the WordPress open source project (rich.blog)
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TITBITS
🔌 Felix Arntz has open-sourced his MU (must-use) plugins, focused on admin UI enhancements and block editor tweaks (X)
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🖼️ Rich Tabor made 720 theme styles with the Assembler theme (rich.blog)
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🎙️ Matt Medeiros argues the case to get excited about WordPress again (The WP Minute)
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👕 Medeiros has also launched a swag store, with 20% of profits donated to the WordPress Foundation (X)
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🏆 WP Engine has won yet another Great Place to Work certification (WP Engine)
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The Repository is a weekly email for the WordPress community by Rae Morey. Thanks to Kinsta, our hosting sponsor, and MailPoet, our email sponsor.
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Send your feedback to [email protected] and help us provide high-quality news written entirely by humans that matters to the WordPress community.
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