More Takeaways from State of the Word 2024

Miriam Schwab

I was really fortunate to be able to attend the state of the world this year in person, and it was really great that it took place in Madrid. It made it more accessible for a lot of us, especially those in Europe and areas that are closer to Europe than North America. I really enjoyed being in a room full of people who are very passionate and really care about WordPress because it meant that the vibe of this event, it was almost electric and especially having the privilege of hearing about the future plans and vision of WordPress straight from the mass of the people who lead their art project, Josepha, Matt and Matías. It was just really inspiring and it gives a lot of confidence as to the strength of WordPress and its promising future. It was also really nice doing a recap of what was accomplished this past year and looking back on that and a lot was accomplished.

Some of the projects that are planned for 2024 are really interesting, innovative, and exciting, and it will be really interesting to see how they pan out and what they look like and the impact that it has on our favorite open source project. So thank you to the organizers for making this happen. It was really fantastic being able to attend a flagship event like that, and of course, meeting up with friends. I organized a casual lunch on the day of the event just for anyone who was town and wanted to get together. We all had to eat lunch anyways and that was really fun. So all in all, it was a great experience and I hope I can do it again. I look forward to seeing WordPress friends at WordCamp. Asia that’s coming up soon.

Nikolay Krastev

Hi Bob, it’s Nik Krastev from WordPress Sofia Meetup. Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to talk about State of the Word Watch Party in Sofia, Bulgaria. This year we gathered again in a well-known just group in the heart of Sofia, just like last year in 2022, State of the Word coincident with the WordPress Sophia Meetup Christmas party, and for the occasion we also had organized a program that include life just performances, standup comedians, Christmas gift giveaways, and good conversation with the community members. This year we postponed the party to January so that we could focus on watching the state of the world broadcast and hear what Matt had prepared to share. And honestly, again, we had a great time at the event around 60 people gathered to watch the broadcast and afterwards we had the opportunity to discuss what we saw. Talk about how each of us envisions the future of WordPress and exchange knowledge and experience in the festive atmosphere.

The most valuable resource of WordPress meetup is its people, and it’s a genuine pleasure for me when we have the opportunity together, together and talk especially at such a significant event for our community. The group consists of all kinds of people diverse in age and expertise, so we have a great specialist in SEO marketing, copywriting and experts in developing and maintaining WordPress websites and online stores. We also welcome absolute beginners and passionate WordPress enthusiast. Students, managers and agency owners attend our meetups, so having the opportunity to meet with such a diverse, knowledgeable, positive group of people and being able to tap into their knowledge and experience and to learning so many new things is really invaluable and truly inspiring for me.

Patricia Brun Torre

Hi, and thank you Bob for the opportunity to talk here. I’m Patricia from Geneva in Switzerland and I’m mostly a WordCamp and meetup organizer. I watched the State of the Word from home, then we had a local meetup two days later to review it and talk about everything that had been announced.

To be honest, I was pretty frustrated that day not to be able to come and meet up with the warm Spanish community I had met a few weeks earlier at WordCamp Madrid, but anyways.

The biggest takeaway for me is the Data Liberation. How many times I have helped friends move from Wix to WordPress or from an older site. Streamline export and import will ease the process. I have an out of WordPress example in my personal organization, I tried a lot of different note apps and over the years I have changed apps, systems and so on, and this is a pain in the wherever you want and beyond everything, I need to export, archive backup in case I want to reopen an old file, for example. So I use a markdown app for notes now, but with the progress of Gutenberg, I can see the block editor arriving in note apps as well and being able to switch from one note app to another, from a CMS to another, from a third party site which would use the block editor to another, from a system to another, this is great.

And not only archive in an universal system, but also simply copy paste like we can do now between our sites.

Gutenberg is actually beyond WordPress. It’s going to spread all over the internet, and it’s an amazing tool. I really love the progress of Gutenberg. I was an early adopter of the block editor and the site editor in Block themes, even when it was still in beta, and I will never go back to classic themes.

I do not code, so I rely on what other people build. I must say I’m a big fan of the whole Gutenberg project, kudos to Matías Ventura and the whole team.

Another very nice demonstration during the State of the Word was the use of AI for Josepha to announce the next WordCamp US in five languages. I don’t know if they used Heygen or a similar tool, but it’s an incredible advance in AI, especially the lip-syncing, but also the voice and tone retention. And Josepha’s French was perfect. I’ve just made a few videos playing with this and I feel like a real polyglot now. Everything related to AI that Matt announced was also very interesting. I must say I’m better with prompts that I am with code and I feel at ease using AI tools and playing with AI, for now a bit more than a year, and I use it for various contexts in my business or even personal tasks, and the AI solution and plugins for WordPress that already exist are very exciting.

The only thing I was not aligned with is when Matt said in the Q&A that the need for multilingualism would diminish because of AI. While I agree that we can automate a lot of translations, not offering a site to people in their language is not showing them respect. I’m in a very small country with four official languages, and yes, here as everywhere else where people speak more than one language, multilingualism is essential and it’s the least we can do. So we are patiently waiting for phase four of the Gutenberg project and we are using multilingual plugins in the meantime.

All in all, it was a very nice State of the Word’

Thank you. Bye.

Mariano Pérez

Hello, my name is Mariano Pérez. I am from Seville, Spain. I went to the event in person with some friends from a community. What I took away from the event is the new event page that will allow us to do different events apart for the meetups and work camps and the prioritization of the project to the move to track Automattic. Also, the networking was very important. I always asked to meet many relevant people from the Spanish and European community, something we don’t have many opportunities to do. Thank you.