WordPress.com is now selling a 100-year plan, one of the longest available in the industry, for a one-time payment of $38,000. It includes managed WordPress hosting (whatever that looks like in 100 years), multiple backups across geographically distributed data centers, submission to the Internet Archive if the site is public, 24/7 dedicated support, and a domain that doesn’t need to be renewed by the customer for a century.
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, limits domain registration to a maximum of 10 years. Auto-renewing after this time requires the customer to renew on time and keep their payment method updated. A 100-year plan removes these uncertainties but still hinges on the registrar staying in business into the next century.
Customers who buy into the plan will need to have superior confidence in WordPress.com, coupled with the belief that domain names will still be important to the fundamental architecture of the web decades from now.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg commented on the difficulties in pricing the 100-year plan during his presentation at WordCamp US 2023, while simultaneously discouraging WordPress product owners from offering lifetime licenses. The distinction here is that the 100-year plan has a finite length of time, even if its future support seems unfathomable at the moment.
“It also got me thinking about lifetime licenses, which I think we should stop doing in the WordPress world,” Mullenweg said.
“If you’ve ever worked with an accountant or an acquirer they don’t like when you have those because it’s essentially an open ended commitment, including often with support. How do you recognize that revenue? Offer a 20 year plan or something. I think when you’re saying ‘lifetime,’ it sort of cheapens the word. If we’re really thinking long-term, what promises we’re making to our customers, I think we should re-examine those practices.”
Mullenweg also said he was inspired by the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit established to foster long term thinking. The organization’s first project is the “Clock of the Long Now,” a mechanical monument designed to keep accurate time for the next 10,000 years:
It is still being assembled deep inside a mountain in west Texas. The Clock provides a rare invitation to think and engineer at the timescale of civilization. It offers an enduring symbol of our personal connection to the distant future.
WordPress.com is building something parallel to this in the digital world, enabling people to create their own virtual, lasting monuments and preserve their homes on the web.
Embedded in the new offering is also a poignant reminder that WordPress.com is a domain registrar, as the company recently made a bid to capture Google Domain customers ahead of their domains being sold off to Squarespace. Even if the new 100-year hosting plan is too expensive for 99.9% of prospective customers, it gives the impression that the company is capable of hosting entrusted domains for the long term.
Nobody, not even WordPress.com, knows what that will look like in 50 years, but it’s an ambitious, thought-provoking offering. What resources will a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) point to 50 years from now? Or will URLs be discarded into the scrap pile of obsolete building blocks as soon as there’s a better, more efficient way to identify web addresses? What does longevity look like in the digital world?
WordCamp US concluded this weekend after gathering nearly 2,000 attendees in National Harbor, Maryland, for the Community Summit, Contributor Day, and main conference days. For the majority of people in the WordPress world who were unable to attend, the recordings of the presentations from project leadership will give you an idea of what to expect in the near future and beyond. These videos were published right away and are embedded below.
WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomposy spoke on “The Future of WordPress,” with an emphasis on how the project can continue to thrive, build resilience, and outlast its current contributors. She encouraged the community to be proactive about expanding their learning and connections. She also reaffirmed the importance of the project’s mission to democratize publishing and the impact that can have in the world.
WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg capped off the event with a presentation titled “What’s Next for Gutenberg,” followed by a Q&A. He highlighted a few features coming in 6.4, including font management, an image lightbox, and the new Twenty Twenty Four default theme.
As WordPress is moving into the Collaboration phase of the Gutenberg project, which will enable multiple authors to edit simultaneously, Mullenweg highlighted the importance of redesigning the admin. This will be the first major redesign since MP6 and is also aimed at improving workflows for administrators.
Mullenweg announced that WordPress has launched a new LMS (Learning Management System) working group. He commented on the benefits and drawbacks of having multiple plugins in the ecosystem that do the same thing. Although the competition can encourage more innovation, it can also lock users into one solution if they aren’t built to be interoperable.
Representatives from Tutor LMS, Learndash, LifterLMS, and Sensei met to discuss using common data models so users can easily switch between solutions. They are working in a new #LMS slack channel to establish industry standards that will preserve user freedom and choice through practical interoperability changes to their products.
Mullenweg also said he would like to see more plugins, such as those handling SEO or site builders, to agree on some data models so that products can operate in a more standardized and performant way, serving users better in the long term.
Check out the presentation below, along with the Q&A that followed. There were more than 80 questions submitted, and those that were missed during Q&A will have answers published to in a future post on WordPress.org.
Landing in Washington DC you immediately feel the history. You feel the weight of the decisions being made in the city and it gives you a sense of pride for belonging to something bigger than yourself. That’s why it was such an apt setting for WordCamp US 2023, on the heels of the 20th anniversary of the CMS. Being around community members and seeing the work they’re doing shows how far we’ve come in 20 years and where the CMS can go in the future.Â
The Gaylord National Resort was buzzing with the excitement of WordPressers eager to discuss the thing they love. People from all over the world gathered to learn, network, and celebrate the thing they love.
The talks were informative, the hallway track was active, and the sightseeing was unmatched. If you missed any of the sessions, they will be up on WordPress.TV.Â
Let’s get into big takeaways from WCUS 2023.
Looking to the Future
2023 marked WordPress’s 20th anniversary. An impressive milestone for anything but especially for a CMS. Talks ranged from accessibility to Core Web Vitals, but all looked at the power of WordPress and where we can go in the next 20 years.
WordPress in Space
The first talk of the conference was presented by JJ Toothman and Abby Bowman from the Web Modernization Team at NASA. They were tasked with the mission to bring NASA.gov into the future using WordPress.Â
The original site was launched in 1994, and has seen updates through the years, but really needed a big overhaul. The challenge wasn’t the design, or even convincing NASA to use WordPress. It was condensing all of NASA’s sites and content into one place so users don’t have to go searching for information.
“Our goal was to basically build a WordPress Mission Control,†Bowman said. “No one should have to have a PHD in astrophysics or memorize the org chart to get information on a certain mission.â€
This process took over a year because there was just so much content. To date the team has 440 users onboarded to the new CMS, they’ve created 3,023 new landing pages, and migrated 68,006 pages.
Because the Web Modernization Team made the site so intuitive, people started picking it up in no time and even suggesting new ways to use existing blocks.
“One of the things we learned early on was to curate the editing experience to get them comfortable with the new editing tools at their disposal. One thing was to create way more block patterns,†Toothman said. “We even pre-filled out some example content that they could play with and understand right away.â€
Another roadblock was teaching the content creators how to use Gutenberg and WordPress. Because there are so many writers from so many different organizations within NASA, reaching each one was a challenge. They ended up looking to the WordPress community as an example of how to do this.
Instead of trying to touch each group, Toothman and Bowman taught a group of super users from each space who could bring their WordPress knowledge to the team.
“The technology part was really easy and the really hard part was the people. We couldn’t have done this without the web content team.”
Abby Bowman
This was a massive project that should be launching any day now. To check out what the site will look like go to https://beta.science.nasa.gov/.Â
The Future of WordPress
Executive Director of the WordPress Project, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, took the stage to talk about the future of WordPress. After 20 years, WordPress is rewriting itself and now it’s time to ask some big questions about how to maintain the CMS for the next 20 and beyond.Â
According to Haden Chomphosy, there are three main areas we need to foster in order to keep WordPress healthy; the software itself, events, and the community. These are the heart and nervous system of WordPress. If the software is fast and accessible, more people will adopt it. If the events are easy to attend and informational, more people will learn how to code with WordPress. And if the community remains a safe place, more people will stay loyal to the CMS for life.
She then went on to say that WordPress can change your life, your community, and the world only if people are able to access it and more importantly learn how to use it.
“When you democratize publishing you’re providing easier access to knowledge, opportunity, and connections. You are giving a voice to the voiceless.â€
Josepha Haden Chomphosy
The future of WordPress comes down to people and education. The thing that sets the CMS apart from others is the community. It’s the most powerful thing about WordPress and if supportive, will propel it into the future and beyond.
Haden Chomphosy left the audience with three questions to consider:
What is the story you want to be able to tell about yourself?
What is the story you want to tell about your time in WP?
What is the story you want WordPress to tell?
What’s Next for Gutenberg
WordPress Co-Founder, Matt Mullenweg, closed out the weekend with a look at what to expect from Gutenberg in the coming years. He began by celebrating the 6.3 release, which was created by 640 contributors to that release. 207 of whom were first-timers. A very impressive showing.
Looking ahead to WordPress 6.4, which will be released in November. This is going to be another underrepresented gender release squad. With that comes the Twenty Twenty-Four default theme. Mullenweg announced that this theme will have a focus on bloggers and content creators.
Font management will be added in 6.4, which allows you to download font files directly from Google and onto your site locally. This will make fonts so much more agile.
A new feature Image Lightbox enables a user to click on an image on the front end and zoom in on it. This was only possible with plugins before.
But possibly the most exciting thing about 6.4 for editors and writers everywhere, me very much included, is Collaboration. Phase 3 of Gutenberg will begin the work on bringing collaborative editing to WordPress. Imagine being able to write and design at the same time as someone else. This will greatly shorten the approval process and make it easier to get content spun up quickly.Â
One of the biggest announcements of the evening was what Mullenweg is calling WordPress LMS. This is bringing four different LMS or Learning Management System plugins together to create a standard for how LMS plugins are built. TutorLMS, Sensei, LearnDash and LifterLMS met this week to look at questions like, can we use some of the same SQL formats? In order to create rules for what an LMS plugin should have. Mullenweg is hoping to do this with other plugins such as SEO or forms plugins. If you are interested in getting involved there is a new LMS channel in the WordPress Slack.
Mullenweg echoed Haden Chomophsy saying, “We are 20 years into WordPress and we are thinking about the next 20 and beyond and creating and thriving.â€
He urged the audience to think in the long term. We don’t just want WordPress around for another 20 years, we want it around for the next 100. We want it to thrive for the next generation and beyond.
A Sense of History, And Long-Term Thinking
WordCamp US 2023 was an exhilarating experience. Thank you as always to the incredible volunteer organizers and speakers who made it all possible. WordPress has experienced a lot in the last 20 years. The community has overcome a global pandemic, and was able to come together and create beautiful website experiences.
Whether we are going to space or supporting the local bakery, WordPress can take you where you need to go. Here’s to the next 20 years of WordPress and the community, there isn’t a group of more passionate people out there.
Gutenberg 16.5 was released this week with the biggest changes landing in the Command Palette. Users now have access to more block-related commands for block transforms and block actions, including the following:
all transforms to the block has defined (e.g. to cover, to gallery, to columns, to file, to group, to media and text, for an image block)
“Together, these new commands not only enrich the command palette’s functionality but also improve the distraction-free mode by offering immediate access to basic functions,” Automattic-sponsored Gutenberg contributor Siobhan Bamber said in the release post.
Improving the discovery of these new commands may prove challenging. Contributors are exploring displaying the contextual actions as suggestions immediately after opening the command palette, to scale with the increasing index of available commands.
“Since the aim of this PR is to add so many commands, let’s not surface any suggestions yet,” Automattic-sponsored designer James Koster said. “We can explore that in a follow-up with a thought-out design which considers how to scale the display of so many commands, if necessary.”
The Command Palette design was also updated in this latest round of version 16.5. Users with a keen eye may notice a new search icon aligned to the right, a reduced width, darker icon color, and more subtle changes.
Gutenberg 16.5 adds more block supports to the Details block, Post Content block, and File block to make them more customizable with controls for colors, block spacing, and padding.
This update includes many more small enhancements and bug fixes, including improvements to the writing flow, build tooling, fluid typography, existing Command Palette commands, Snackbar component, and Global Styles. Check out the 16.5 release post for the full changelog.
WordCamp US 2023 kicked off Wednesday with the Community Summit and the Contributor Day on Thursday. The main conference days begin this morning and will be broadcast via high-definition livestreams throughout the event.
In-person attendees will have live captions on the screen in the Woodrow Wilson and Cherry Blossom tracks. The captions are also available on personal devices with livestreaming captions. Organizers have set up Woodrow Wilson StreamText and Cherry Blossom StreamText, which are also available to those watching remotely.
Livestream viewers can watch for free with no tickets required. Check the schedule for specific times. Presentations you are interested in can be starred and emailed to yourself or printed for easy access.
This year Post Status is celebrating a decade of serving WordPress professionals with its member-supported community. The site was founded by Brian Krogsgard in 2013, and now runs an active Slack community with 2,083 members, a weekly newsletter with 4,300 subscribers, and a job board.
As a testament to the community’s continued growth, Post Status announced it has added WordPress veterans Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt as equity partners who have invested cash in the business. They will also be taking on active roles in leading the Post Status community – de Valk as CTO and van de Rakt as an advisor and editorial contributor.
“Post Status has created the most important networking possibilities for us in the past and helped us grow our WordPress businesses,” van de Rakt said. “It seems only fit to contribute and to take on an active role in the Post Status community at this point.”
Post Status CEO Cory Miller said the organization will be moving forward with “the same vision and values – supporting the business of WordPress, with an emphasis on agency owners.” Co-owner Lindsey Miller will be taking on a new role as CMO.
Although maintaining the professional community remains their first priority, Post Status will be expanding with two new initiatives this year that will benefit both partners and members. The team has soft launched the new poststatus.com, featuring a new Partner Directory that showcases WordPress businesses.
“I believe a healthy growing business ecosystem inside of WordPress is absolutely key to WP continued growth and success,” Cory Miller said.
“We want to get a little more organized, professional as an industry, and that means cooperating, communicating, working together, with Post Status being that collective brand, showcasing the agencies, software and professionals of WordPress better.
“The next step is our directory. We want to say, here’s our professional industry for those looking at WordPress for their web projects.”
In addition to ramping up editorial commentary and analysis on industry trends, with the depth of the expertise of new partners de Valk and van de Rakt, Post Status is in the early stages of planning an annual summit. It will be similar to WordPress’ contributor summit but for businesses and individuals who are making their way in the marketplace.
“The second step is to gather together, talk business and what are we seeing, what are the issues, challenges, and opportunities as an industry,” Miller said. “That naturally gives us focus and initiatives to cooperate on together.
“Most industries have this already.
“Doctors, lawyers, big businesses have these kinds of venues and platforms for conversations about the state of their industry. We need that for WordPress and Post Status is taking next steps to do so.”
These two initiatives are next on the organization’s roadmap, and with the new partnership they now have the resources to execute on them.
“Showcase the collective, that’s our directory,” Miller said. “And gather us together to have the key conversations we need about where we’re going as an industry and community. That’s our summit.”
Sponsors are what keeps the lights on at Post Status, and the organization has historically been focused on driving individual membership for WordPress professionals but is shifting its focus on businesses as members now.
“We want every WP pro in Post Status, this is their home, their trade association,” Miller said. “Those who work at WP companies or with WP as part of their gig, we always want to welcome them in to PS.”
Post Status is one of the few WordPress organizations that has been operating for longer than a decade. Now that the Pressnomics event has been retired for four years, the WordPress community is sorely in need of an event where the business-focused community can connect and and help each other grow WordPress success in the wider industry. Post Status is the organization best-suited to step into this role. To stay on top of the organization’s efforts and plans and to support the business community, join as a member and/or subscribe to the weekly newsletter.
WordPress 6.4 will be shipping with a new default theme, expected in early November. The theme’s project leaders unveiled the designs and concept for Twenty Twenty-Four in an announcement on WordPress.org today.
For those who have complained that past default themes have been too niche or too narrowly focused in design, this theme will take the reverse approach. Contributors are attempting to build the ultimate multi-purpose theme that can be used for nearly any kind of website, highlighting the unmatched flexibility of building with blocks.
“The idea behind Twenty Twenty-Four is to make a default theme that can be used on any type of site, with any topic,” core contributorJessica Lyschik said. “Because of that, and contrary to past years, it has no single topic. Instead, three use cases were explored: one more tailored for entrepreneurs and small businesses, one tailored for photographers and artists and one specifically tailored for writers and bloggers.”
Last year’s default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, was a stripped-back and minimal version of Twenty Twenty-Two, with a strong focus on community-submitted style variations. Like its predecessor, Twenty Twenty-Four will put the spotlight on some of the latest WordPress design features.
“Twenty Twenty-Four will be a block theme fully compatible with all the site editor tooling and it will surface new design tools like the details block or vertical text,” Lyschik said. “Another key intent for the theme is to properly present whole page patterns and template variations so that users don’t need to assemble whole pages themselves, thus easing up their site building process.”
Whole page patterns are a critical feature that all of the best block themes provide, as most people feel daunted when starting from a blank slate. If a whole page pattern is already pre-inserted on a new website install, users are light years ahead in their site building efforts.
Twenty Twenty-Four features the Cardo font for headings and a sans-serif system font for paragraph text. Cardo is an Old Style serif typeface designed by David J. Perry in 2002 for “classicists, biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists.†It grounds the design with a bit of sophistication but should be easy to swap out with the typography management features coming in 6.4.
The initial previews of the theme don’t stray far from many of the traditional website designs you might see browsing businesses or portfolios. It leans more towards providing an invisible framework for the user’s own creations, instead of pushing a single, opinionated design. This design lets the Site Editor and design controls shine as tools that can unlock human creativity on the screen. So far it has received positive feedback on the WordPress.org announcement. Check out the post for more images/video, and information on how contribute to Twenty Twenty-Four’s development.
Organic Themes, one of the oldest WordPress theme shops, was founded in 2009 in the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, which was ground zero for the recent devastating wildfires. Until recently, Lahaina was home to Organic Themes co-founder David Morgan, who hosted the Maui WordPress meetups for years, and co-organized WordCamp Maui in 2015.
Morgan and his co-founder Jeff Milone have been best friends since high school. In 2007, Morgan sold everything and moved to Oahu, working as a freelance designer while living out of his car after arriving.
“While living on Oahu, Jeff and I began working long-distance on freelance WordPress projects,” Morgan said. “This led to the idea of starting a theme business together, and I invited Jeff to Hawaii in 2009. While he was visiting me on Oahu, we flew to Maui and fell in love with the island. We decided to start our business there.”
Organic Themes operated out of Lahaina for ten years before Morgan eventually returned to the mainland to start his family in Sarasota, Florida. Milone still resides in Maui part-time.
“We have friends that have lost their homes,” Morgan said. “We’ve been in touch with old neighbors and friends, and it’s been beyond shocking for us to see what has happened.”
The company recently created the Kokua Lahaina website and apparel products as a way to give back to their community. The site is built on WordPress and WooCommerce and uses the STAX block theme. Organic Themes is donating all profits to the Maui Strong Fund, which provides shelter, food, financial assistance, and other services to those impacted by the wildfires.
Work on WordPress 6.4 is kicking off with a post from Editor Triage Co-Lead Anne McCarthy that highlights everything the team has planned for the release. This will be the third major release of 2023, and is unique in that it’s being led by an underrepresented gender release squad.
Although WordPress is moving into Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, which focuses on collaboration, 6.4 will primarily extend existing features in the block and site editors.
“Initial explorations for phase 3 will continue in the Gutenberg plugin, and any early wins will be added alongside the foundational work already planned in this major release,” McCarthy said.
WordPress 6.4 is anticipated to introduce typography management features, including a Font Library and server-side @font-face CSS generation and printing. This means users will be able to browse a library of fonts in the admin, similar to how they manage media. It will not be dependent on the theme that is activated but will be a library that is extensible for plugin developers.
WordPress 6.4 will also ship with a new Twenty Twenty-Four default theme that will showcase the latest capabilities of block themes.
McCarthy emphasized that the features published in the roadmap are “being actively pursued” but may not represent what actually lands in the final release.
WordPress 6.4 is anticipated to be released on November 7, 2023, with Beta 1 expected on September 26.
WordPressCS 3.0.0 was released this week with what its maintainer, Juliette Reinders Folmer, says are significant changes to improve the accuracy, performance, stability, and maintainability of all sniffs, and its handling of modern PHP. The project is a collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) that are used to validate code developed for WordPress, helping developers meet the requirements of the official WordPress Coding Standards.
This update adds many of the non-controversial rules proposed in March 2020 to the Coding standards guidelines but leaves those that generated more discussion or objections for a future release. Many of the new rules are now available as sniffs in WordPressCS.
Version 3.0.0 includes important architecture changes. Most notably, Composer is now the only supported way to install WordPressCS, as this update includes four run-time dependencies. The release contains breaking changes for those using ignore annotations and those who maintain custom rulesets or have created a custom PHPCS standard based on the project. A detailed upgrade guide is available for these various scenarios.
WordPressCS is largely maintained by Folmer and a small group of volunteers, but the future of the project is in jeopardy if they cannot get funding. Folmer said it is currently in a good place with this release but this will not last long with the pace at which PHP is moving.
“WordPressCS 3.0.0 has cost thousands of hours of work and the vast majority of work has been done by one, mostly unpaid, contributor, with code review support from two fellow maintainers,” she said.
“Unless funding is found to continue maintaining WordPressCS and its dependencies, the future is bleak and maintenance will be halted.”
Folmer is calling on corporation and agency users of WordPressCS to find a way to fund the project’s continued maintenance and development. She elaborated on the dire need to have more contributors involved:
If we are being realistic, the bus factor of WordPressCS is 1, which is the most dangerous situation for any project to be in.
A large part of the WordPress community, including WordPress Core, relies heavily on the WordPress Coding Standards for code quality and security checks and while the community has been pretty vocal with copious complaints about the delayed release, barely anyone has stepped up and actually contributed.
The majority of the work for WordPressCS requires specialized knowledge. Knowledge which can be learned with enough time investment, but in recent years nobody has stepped up to do so.
This is an unsustainable situation and it ends now.
WordPressCS has become one of the most highly used open source tools in the WordPress ecosystem that is now in a vulnerable place with so few contributors. Although many developers commented on the release, thanking Folmer for her efforts, no contributors or corporations have publicly stepped forward to support the project’s continued develpment.
“With over 15 million installations on Packagist and a 400% increase in monthly installation in the past three years alone, WPCS’s popularity is surging and shows no sign of stopping,” Lucas Bustamante, a backend developer specialized in automated tests, commented on the post. “The situation is alarming as WPCS is a foundational tool that flags not only code style issues but also critical security issues, making WordPress a more secure CMS. Letting WPCS fall into limbo poses a risk to the entire WordPress ecosystem.”
