photomatt

If you ever check out Gutenberg be sure to give the Markdown block a try. :)

The vast majority of revenue in the WordPress ecosystem is made by hosts other than WP.com. Everyone in the WP ecosystem benefits from increased usage, as it drives more plugins, more themes, more demand for agencies and developers, more books and tutorials about WordPress, et al. It’s all part of the virtuous cycle that has led to WP’s success so far. I’d be far more worried about the WP ecosystem if it started getting smaller and the various constituents were fighting over a shrinking pie.

Just wanted to clarify one thing, that “we lost the accessibility lead.” There were no accessibility leads until one was designated for the 5.0 release. There were three self-appointed accessibility team reps, one of which decided to step back from the group and blog about it. “Team rep” is largely an administrative role, and as I said before it’s self-appointed. Some teams have 5+ reps, and historically they have not been approved by anyone in WordPress leadership, nor do they connote authority or skill.

I was personally surprised to see my face as a "contributor" to ClassicPress, with a link to the Github contributors page that indeed shows my 1,900+ commits... to WordPress.

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/5c2b13dae2a33eafd5eab9039...

https://github.com/ClassicPress/ClassicPress/graphs/contribu...

I think it's confusing to screenshot the faces of all the WP developers, put it on your project homepage, and say "This project exists thanks to all the people who contribute." WordPress itself started as a fork so I fully support the importance of forking, but there's a way to acknowledge WP contributors without making it look like we're endorsing your project. Thank you!

Accessibility has been worked on since the beginning of Gutenberg. If "Automattic" just wanted to be more competitive or operate for its own commercial benefit, it would have been 10x easier and faster to just do Gutenberg on WordPress.com and not do it core-first. Gutenberg being in core means every WordPress host in the world (that all compete with Automattic) will get access to it. It's not proprietary, it's open source. It works with all the plugins and themes out there. It works with the hundreds of billions of posts that have been written in the past 15 years of WordPress. It's community-first.

Hello smacktoward! I'm thrilled you currently make your living on top of WordPress, and hope you can continue to for many decades to come.

"Automattic Automattic Automattic Automattic Automattic" Throughout your comment you attribute a lot to Automattic that is really core, or contributors, or me. There are hundreds of contributors to WordPress (and Gutenberg) that don't have any association with Automattic, and it's not fair to them to attribute anything good or bad about WordPress to a single company.

"I don't think [...] has handled communicating it very well" That's totally fair, and I believe we can always do a better job communicating. We've done a lot, such as with wordpress.org/gutenberg, the messaging in 4.9.8, at pretty much every WordCamp this year, and my big annual addresses the past two years, but we're not reaching everyone. Web hosts and agencies are helping a ton here to educate their customers and clients, and it's very much appreciated.

"It seems reasonable to expect lots of themes and plugins will break when it goes live, especially older ones that haven't been as actively maintained." This is why we have done a wide public release of the beta plugin and it's active on over 600,000 sites now — this is the most widely tested feature ever to come into core. People are running it with every possible combination of other plugins, themes, and hosting environments, and we've been learning a ton and fixing as much as possible beforehand. I don't claim any software is perfect, but this code has had more testers than we ever get for a beta version of WordPress, which is usually just a few thousand.

"My suspicion, even though [...] has denied it strenuously, is that the master plan is to slowly phase out PHP and turn WordPress into a React-only project." There are no secrets, on stage in 2015 I asked all WordPress developers to "Learn Javascript Deeply" because Javascript interfaces talking to REST APIs was the future of the platform. This is how the Customizer has worked for years, but you're correct that Gutenberg is the first major, full feature to be built on our own REST API and does use React. (In fact we were part of getting Facebook to remove the patent clause from React, which paved its adoption in the WP community and with many others.) So you're correct it's part of the master plan, but not that it has been denied at all. There will always be some PHP for the server side of things, but Javascript is the way forward for the interface and wp-admin.

"If the plan really is for WP to become a React project, a whole lot of PHP developers are going to need to become React developers in relatively short order. Some will be able to make that transition, but I worry that many will not." I'm concerned about this too, which is why I've been advocating for PHP-only developers to learn Javascript for 3 years now.

"The more I learn about Gutenberg, the more I wish [...] had just started a second, React-based project and used that as a clean sheet of paper, rather than taking all these ideas and trying to jam them into WordPress to make some sort of software turducken." First, I love turducken. :) But also, the WYSIWYG was in Javascript before, so it's not like editor-modifying requires a new language you didn't know before. The PHP metabox API still works just like before, and we and others are creating tools that allow PHP developers to interact with Gutenberg. But I'll repeat again that if someone wants to be a relevant web developer in a decade I don't think you can be PHP-only, and you should begin learning and mastering Javascript as soon as possible.

If the reason to fork is just Gutenberg, there's an official plugin available (Classic Editor), created and supported by core, that disables Gutenberg and gives you pre-5.0 experience for as long as you'd like to run it. And then you don't lose the infrastructure, updates, security, events, the benefits of the thousands of people who work on making some part of WordPress better every day.

WordPress developers are keenly aware of all of the parts that aren't ideal in the code, and if you look at things where we're able to work in a more de novo fashion (like Gutenberg) you'll see best-in-class approaches and code.

However as you see in some other comments on this thread, backwards compatibility has been key to WP's adoption which can make it challenging to fully iterate the user and developer experience. With Gutenberg we're doing this, and it has generated a huge amount of pushback and even conspiracy theories. Hopefully in a year or two we'll look back at this as something we're not sure why there was even an issue.

The last time people threatened or actually forked WordPress like this was when we first adopted WYSIWYG in version 2.0, in 2005. Part of why WordPress today has 10x the market share of the runner-up is because we think a lot about these decisions, listen to tons of feedback, but are willing to occasionally choose controversial-at-the-time decisions that turn out right in the grand arc of things.

Please check out my "State of the Word" presentation from 2016 and 2017, I tried to make the best case I could for why, perhaps once a decade, it is worthwhile to trade backwards compatibility for future relevancy. The reason I have personally not advocated for that trade-off before was that the reward on the other side was not worth it, but with Gutenberg we have a huge opportunity, and incredible user demand demonstrated by the adoption of the beta plugin, that I think makes it #worthit.

Howdy — lead of WordPress here. When the article was written in January of 2018, I would agree Gutenberg wasn't ready for core. Ten months later, it's come a long way. There have been 41 public releases of Gutenberg, and close to 600,000 sites are using it already. It's the mostly widely tested (and adopted) new feature code we've had in any release of WordPress in my memory. It might not be for everyone, which is why we created the Classic Editor plugin which you can install today, and when 5.0 comes out in a few weeks your site will look and work pretty much exactly like it does today, and you can migrate to Gutenberg at your leisure, or perhaps not at all. (There are lots of ways to post and interact with WordPress, including the command line via wp-cli.)

A big advantage of blocks is they will allow us to simplify many of the different concepts and interfaces throughout WordPress, including our old WYSIWYG sorta-blocks, shortcodes, widgets, menus, and embeds of all types. It solves literally hundreds of interactions where people used to get stuck in our old WYSIWYG and either switch to code view to fix things, or just give up. Like all software, the 5.0 release of WordPress isn't a finish line, it's a starting one. We are already planning for 5.1 and beyond (including minimum PHP updates) and we look forward to bringing the fast, public iteration cycle that Gutenberg has demonstrated to more parts of core.

There were over 1000+ commits made in over a year -- all of those changes and improvements are GPL. (You can make GPL mods to MIT code and release those all as GPL.) If Wix had used the original ZSSRichTextEditor they would have been fine, but they didn't.

The key thing to understand is that being “compatible” with the GPL means that you can take code written under an MIT license , and put a GPL license on it if you want to. The MIT license allows for this, but, the reverse is not true. The GPL does not allow you to take GPL code and change the license to MIT, and it definitely doesn't allow you to take open GPL code, and make it proprietary.

Definitely something we haven't heard lately. Every version of every note is saved, so if something goes wrong with a bad client you can always log into the web interface and look up the history. If it ever happens again contact support and we can look into the specifics.

You nailed it. We wanted the TLD to be open, and anyone will be able to use it regardless of whether they use WordPress or not.

WordPress.com, to be exact. :) We contribute and volunteer a lot for core WordPress.

I agree it can be uncomfortable for people, as is almost everything around compensation. I don't think we're entitled to know, but it is an expression of trust when someone shares it, and thus far with ~99% of people we've hired over 10 years it hasn't been an issue.

I wouldn't stop it -- I'd want to talk about it to understand why. If it was because they were following advice they read somewhere because worried it would influence their offer, I'd try to dispel that myth within the context of Automattic. If they didn't believe me, we probably don't have the level of trust needed to work well together.

Our culture is really built on two-way trust: since we're distributed and seldom see each other you don't know how someone is going about their work, and most of our HR policies come down to the honor system. The company places an incredibly amount of trust in employees, and vice versa people place a great amount of trust in the company, including that we'll do our best to treat them fairly. It's a responsibility the folks on the operations side of Automattic, including myself, take very seriously.

Been thinking about this more and the only possible context I could imagine, related to the original post, could be around salary.

We base compensation on market data, value to the company, and what other people in a similar role make, we also ask what people made in the past and where they hope to be in the future. This does not determine their salary, it's market data for us, and the future part also makes sure that Automattic is a place that can meet their long-term goals and expectations, or if not that's discussed up front.

I've had this conversation about 400 times at this point, while people can sometimes be sensitive around compensation, it's like discussing a health issue with your doctor -- I've seen and heard it all and it's part of a normal days work for me. It's sometimes the source of a nice surprise, as we've had people who've doubled or trebled their salary when joining Automattic which always brightens my day. We've also had people take a small or substantial cut when joining, which isn't ideal, but we determine salaries as I said above, not based on what they say they previously made, and it's good information for the company to have because hopefully one day as our business or their contribution to it grows it'd be great to have them at or above what the market said they could make someplace else. I can only think of only once someone has not joined because of compensation, an engineer at Yahoo who had compensation 3-4x beyond what seemed fair in the market commensurate with his skills or experience.

The OP advice of not saying salary might be appropriate at other companies, I'm not privy to their compensation practices, but it is not correct at Automattic. A few folks in this thread suggested lying, which I would disagree with in any circumstance, much better not to answer -- lying in response to a factual question demonstrates low integrity and most employers, including us, would not want to work with that person.

Automattic is one of too few companies that tries to treat people who live in different countries the same, which is an important distinction from treating people who are from different countries and now live and work in the US the same, which of course every company is legally required to do (though there are still some serious issues around pay equality and even gender, to start). Many companies explicitly try to have offices and hire people in countries where the cost of living and wages are lower to save money; our thought is that the internet makes that obsolete and over time enlightened companies will pay people what they're worth regardless of where they live.

There have been about 5 times someone hasn't wanted to share, every time because they think making a low amount in the past (at a non-profit, in a country where wages are low) will lower their offer, which it doesn't and I try to re-assure. One case comes to mind in 2012 of someone who had attended Stanford but moved back to India because didn't have a visa, and was worried their geography would mean they were paid less, in which case I would have said to not worry about the fact that you're in India because that doesn't matter to Automattic -- if I gave the impression that it mattered whether you were Indian (or any other background) I apologize. We did end up hiring this person and at a similar salary to someone in the Bay Area doing a similar role, though there were some complications with them wanting to be paid to a US bank account, in USD (we try to pay people in the currency of where they live so they're sheltered from forex shifts), and travel to work in the US, which our attorneys advised us would create issues in absence of a work visa, which the person didn't have. They ended up only being with the company 9 months, the last few on a performance plan, but that was based on work after they had joined, not anything to do with the interview or compensation process, just sometimes there isn't a mutual fit. (Over the past 10 years we've had about 60 people be let go or leave, it's definitely not personal.)

Not sure if that was the same person as nodelessness, but if so I feel very bad you thought any of that had to do with you being Indian, and I'm happy to chat or discuss more to clear it up. I also hope the information and context above helps any one who is considering working at Automattic know that we'll do our darndest to create a comfortable and fair environment for everyone.

Howdy -- Matt Mullenweg here.

First, I'm sorry that at some point in your hiring process you got that impression, it is not in line with our philosophy or our actions. We now employ 320 people in 36 countries and with at least that many distinct racial or ethnic backgrounds, including Indian. We aim to hire another 120 in the next year so disqualifying potential candidates based on something they are born with is not just morally odious, it's logically flawed and not something I would tolerate in our organization. (We even help host events like http://accelerate.lgbt/ .)

This is also why we have a distributed model -- we wanted to create a company that where someone chooses to live is not a barrier to them doing great work at Automattic.

The words you put in quotes don't look like something I'd say, and also unusual for my interactions with potential candidates in our hiring process (which is described here - https://hbr.org/2014/04/the-ceo-of-automattic-on-holding-aud... ), if you're willing to share the date when we chatted or any other info I'd love to review my transcripts and understand the context if that was an actual quote, or if it's not I'd like to see what I said that gave you that impression it was a mistake on my part and I want to avoid giving that impression again in the future.

To summarize: Automattic wants to employ people of all backgrounds and regardless of their geography, and I personally believe there is no connection between a person's background, Indian or otherwise, and their ability to be an amazing Automattician.

Not that valuations are the end-all be-all, but Automattic was valued above a billion earlier in the year, and has risen since then: http://www.techmeme.com/140505/p14#a140505p14

If you do this right, there's no "remote", there's no "overseas", there's no day-to-day distinction in how someone works between whether that person happens to live in the country the company was founded or not.

It's worth repeating that I absolutely believe we should improve and dramatically open up immigration in the US, and applaud PG's and other's work there, but in the meantime you don't have to handicap your company because of the current politics around this issue.

Just because someone is on a different kind of contract (say a monthly retainer paid by wire, versus employee of US company paid with direct deposit) doesn't mean you need to treat them differently. Every "Automattician" at Automattic is viewed the same regardless of how their employment contract happens to work, and as you scale larger you can set up subsidiaries overseas to directly employ people. (We look at this once we have about 5 people in a given country.)

Also remote work doesn't mean overseas, there is amazing talent all over the USA too that doesn't happen to live in the SF area.

I really liked this sentence: "The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US."

There are about 7 million people in the Bay area, 322M in the US total, so let's say 98% of the great people in the US are born outside of Bay area. There are no visa issues moving between cities or states in the US, but many many other barriers that have nothing to do with visas.

Thanks for the kind comments on WP, folks who made them.

In terms of Node, at Automattic we also think it's the bee's knees and have a number of projects that are built in it. But it's pretty weak for distribution, PHP/MySQL is still tops.

I think to the extent WP has been successful over the past 11 years it's because we've always been gradually rewriting and refactoring things, and have listened to our users and been driven by a community rather than just a company. We have a vision (democratize publishing) for more than just money, and it drives efforts from education to localization.

VIP has 15 people of the 243 that work for Automattic. It's a great business, and a great deal for enterprises, but not our primary focus as a company.

Thanks!

I'd estimate WP.com is about half of all WP installations, maybe more.

Next up: WordPress in Node.

(j/k, but looking forward to getting more node.js services running as part of WordPress.com.)

Don't pay attention to all of the comments saying there are enough blog platforms in the world already -- they said the same thing when WordPress started.

I signed up and paid to support the project, and even if you don't end up doing this full-time we're looking for a Markdown hacker @ Automattic.

There's no reason you need to maintain all of that -- do a one-click install someplace like Bluehost, Dreamhost, or ZippyKid and they'll manage everything, and do core WP upgrades as well automatically. There's also WP.com.

All are more expensive than 29/yr though.

This is how Automattic / WordPress.com has done interviews for 5 years now. There are some tweaks to do it well that we've learned over time, but there is nothing like seeing someone's actual work to see how they're actually going to work.