2025·06·10 · 26:55
Panel Discussion “The Future of WordPress” with Francesca Marano, Joost de Valk and Sé Reed.
A Q&A panel on the future of WordPress where I discuss the FAIR Package Manager, contributor funding, and what governance should look like for a project at WordPress’s scale. I talk about why the supply chain security incidents of 2024 were a turning point, what decentralized distribution actually requires in practice, and how the community can move forward without fragmenting. The conversation covers questions from the audience and goes into where I think the ecosystem needs to go over the next few years.
0:02 [Applause] And because I can never stick to a script, the next session was supposed to be a panel with me asking say please. color. we can do this. We're tech
0:35 people. We got this. Um, so I was like, I mean, yeah, we can do a panel. We can ask each other questions and we can, you know, but it's 9 something p.m. Oh, 900 p.m. We had a long day at work in Europe. You had a long evening here. So, we're going to do it a bit differently. Uh, so we're making a Q&A from the public. But first, you that's you. So I actually because well I don't know are there any
1:09 other Italians here in the room? Okay. So in Italy we have this thing that um when you have a show there's always a beautiful half naked woman taking the microphone around. No, no, no. But you I mean go for it. No, but when I was young, when I was young, that was actually one of my dreams to do that job. So, I really wanted to come to the audience and be like, "Hey, do you have something to ask?" But they're
1:40 wired, so I cannot do that. So, I not even this time I can fulfill my dream of being a half naked microphone lady. That's very sad. But bear with me. Next time we'll be better prepared. Um, not even definitely not in the script. Of course it's not because the other dream and that's where I'm throwing your Italian. I think that's that's when I'm
2:11 throwing your curveball. This is has just become a karaoke. No, I'm I'm actually okay with that. I will do then I asked Carrie back on stage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. We'll do we'll do Q&A. We'll do a panel. Song would be really good. Sorry. You're so vain. I am think I bet you think this distribution package is about you, don't you? Okay. Sorry, I had to. It is. You asked for karaoke. I love the karaoke. And also, we joked from the beginning that if
2:43 there was ever going to be another BDFL, everyone knows it's going to be me. But there's not a there's not one. So I cannot also fulfill that dream of mine. Uh okay, this is getting sad. Uh so do does anyone have questions? All the questions are going to be about fair, right? Are we real? Is it No, the question can be about anything. What does anyone have questions? I don't see any hands yet. No, come here. I want to take the microphone to you, but unfortunately you have to come up here.
3:14 Did not see that. So, if you have questions, please come up here and we'll make it a party and then if it's there's I care a lot about Hello. Hi. Hello. Uh, dear friend of mine, I care a lot about contributors. Yes. And I know that there's some contributors that would like to be funded to do some things maybe related to fair. What are your thoughts around how we can fund the
3:46 contributions that could be related to fair? You know, one might think this was a setup question. It is a setup question. It is a set. It was not. Surprise. Um, well, actually, I'm glad you brought that up because I was not speaking as the WP Community Collective in my talk, but I am the CEO of the WP Community Collective. Courtney is also a co-founder and our other co-founders over there in the audience.
4:18 Um, uh, so it's it's good that you brought that up because there are a lot of contribution opportunities, right? new contribution opportunities happening right now. You too can contribute more. However, I, my compatriots and the members of the WPCC, which you too can join, um think that maybe the days of completely extractive volunteer labor should not be
4:50 the norm anymore. Amen. Amen. So, uh we also can't go handing out money to people randomly. Weird. I know. I mean, she's That's where all of that went. I was wondering. That's a joke. We know exactly where it is. And actually, you can also know where the WPCC funds are because we're putting them on the website tonight. They're supposed to already be there. But that's all right. Anyway, point is, how can we fund things? We should probably open up
5:22 an organization that is able to fund contributors for WordPress projects, open source projects in general, adjacent projects like fair. And amazingly, we have done that already. It already exists. Yeah. So, uh, we have this awesome Zen that I didn't bring up with me, but it's over there. Um, can you hand hold that up? Vlad Vlad Vlad Vlad is going to hold it up. There it is. Uh it tells you all about the WPCC and how uh we work so that you can um join and help fund contribution to all
5:55 sorts of things, not just WordPress. Okay, that was a long answer. Thank you. Yeah, that's a lot of work. Extractive labor bad paying people good. Yeah, that's the TLDDR. I got that. More questions. More questions, please. Yes. Yes. We have another brave soul here. try. Hello. I was uh really pleased to hear about the plans to support premium plugins and I'd love to have you expand upon that. So, for the question, historically,
6:28 every premium plugin has to well sort of work around WordPress.org, right? All the guidelines made it very hard to um do things and that led to most plugins having a free and a premium version. I think that with this we'll actually be able to make that a lot easier because you'll be able to find the premium version, install that and we'll need to figure out how you do payments etc. But most that you could do yourself as well. You could just handle the entire system which leads to much much much better
6:59 user experiences because I'll let you Never heard of it. Well, this small plugin, we we we sold quite a few premium licenses and at one point we discovered that a large percentage of our users never installed premium because they didn't know it even though they had bought it. You know, you can put uh notices in the app. Sorry. Oh, we had to
7:30 go there. We had to go there. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you knew that. You did know that. We did know that. We did actually do that. Um, yeah. No, we did that. Um, and it it's just it is very hard for people. And I think that what people have to realize is that what the WordPress a lot of us that are slightly on the other side of 35 um who speak for yourself. Cool. Now, but those of us who started on WordPress
8:03 early on take a lot of stuff for granted that new users just don't do. So, new user experiences for WordPress very often already include plugins and very often have just a lot of these things already installed and they don't think about how to do that and they definitely don't know how to download a zip file and then upload it themselves manually and and click activate and or install and then activate because why wouldn't that be
8:34 one one button? So, there is a lot to do. I'm sorry. H Ajax, sorry. Sorry. I I agree, but core doesn't. Um, no. So, I think we can make that entire system simpler, better for everyone, which makes the premium plug-in economy also better, which I hope will also help with innovation because we badly need it. Absolutely. Thank you. More questions. The boss man has a
9:12 Uh, I have a question. Like last year in October, there was a law passed in European Union called cyber resilience act which is going to affect you know the WordPress core is going to affect all of the plugins. Everyone needs to be compliant and have a CE mark. Uh, how is fair going to tackle that issue? Thank you. Thank you. Um, can we pass this one to Ryan? That's a good question. Who Who wants to take this on? Where's Where's Ryan? Because he's actually far far better at answering this than you. Come on. Come. This is the open. Okay, we're
9:44 moving into the open mic part. Do you have an answer or a question? Oh, you also have an answer. No, no, but we have we have a technical answer, but Ryan has a has a much better technical answer. Sorry. Congratulations, by the way. me too. Um, many of you might know or not that I'm also the president of the open website alliance consisting of typo 3, WordPress, Jumla and Drupal. And we've been the open website alliance was
10:16 created because of the cra. Oh, right. And we are we put a lot of of the time to actually prepare and we we we wrote an open letter to the European Commission. um in two years ago about the role of open source. So um yes, it's going to happen. It's going to happen faster than you think. Um the open source um oh so maybe better like this. Um
10:51 so we'll take care. Please come to us if but you want to you you you mentioned four members but I looked at your website today. Oh wow. Who uses websites? two years ago the world was a different one, right? So um we decided this week that we're going we because we reached out to um to WordPress. Hey guys. To who? To WordPress. Exactly. Oh yeah.
11:23 Okay. Just checking. Yeah. So it's all about Udipus complexes I'm an open person and as as as you heard it before, I'm a p I'm a peaceful person. We should go the the the path of peace, but we should also prepare our communities for these things to happen. We should also um make sure that everybody's informed enough that they can do the right thing. So um please um
11:55 rest assured that we uh are open to anyone who is in the open web right open for other open source um open web minded organizations. So if you think you can be part of it, we will take we will take care of that. I think we can. So, uh, Kareem is was already gesturing that he wanted to see. I can't be up here with these two guys.
12:27 So, just your question. No, it's all of that. We haven't we haven't had a chance to tell you yet. We met with your compatriate today and fair is going to do everything they can to also that I think that's called um collaboration. It is. It is. And so yes, let's uh let's dive into some of this. I you know I think I want to mention as well while we have built fair for WordPress, we have also designed in a
13:00 way that actually any uh software system could actually adopt it. We've not built it specifically for WordPress. So, you know, if Typo3 would like to adopt fair as well, I think uh you know, it's it's open technology and uh we'd love to have other people using it. It would be fair, wouldn't it? It would be it would be you would not believe how many puns we have had over the uh the time when we work on this. So to the CRA point specifically, so the CRA has certain requirements around uh and I know we've talked about this uh directly um has a lot of
13:32 requirements around things like reporting uh ensuring that you have the right contacts for certain things uh ensuring that you mark uh things correctly whether that's the CE mark or explicitly marking things as security releases for example etc. We have built those things into the fair protocol from the start designing it in a way that it basically is impossible to you know not provide that information and we've gone further as well. So I don't want to get too far into the tech details you can go check it out on the repository but our decentralized IDs are tied to
14:04 cryptographic signatures and so actually we can secure the supply chain the whole way throughout while still allowing things like mirrors from hosts and etc. Um, but with all that said, I mean, we're not going to get it perfect and we welcome all of the feedback that we can get. You know, we want to engage people from, you know, whether that is at a security company, whether that's at a host, whether those are, you know, enterprise agencies, whether it is, you know, site builders working with users directly. Uh, you know, no matter what you're doing, we want to have you as part of there. You know, I think, uh,
14:36 Carrie said in in, uh, the talk before, um, you know, none of us are as smart as all of us, right? And uh we want as much feedback and as much collaboration because really the the strength of WordPress over the past 20 years that I've been involved with it has been when we come together as a community to build things together you know not when we go off in silos but when we come together so you know I welcome all the feedback that you have on our CRA uh stuff and uh yeah if there's things that we need to add you know we have designed in a way that we can iterate on that and you know we we intend to do that over the the
15:09 next you know uh Who knows how long? Forever. Yeah. Yeah. Questions. Oh, there's a You can stay here with us. Stay here. Stay. Stay. You can also hire us for wedding, funerals. Uh, Francesca, you can engage with No, because you don't like this at all. You're so uncomfortable. So true. Thank you.
15:43 So, do you need help? From you always. We need help from everyone. From everyone? That's my question. What can I help with? Well, go to fair. Go to fair.pm. Okay. Which actually redirects to our GitHub repo. Okay, I found it. And start reading. Okay. Thank you. Most importantly, start writing. So um it is worth saying I think you know we kind of mentioned there are a lot of like contributors involved with that uh
16:14 this you know you saw many of them in this room uh people who are you know making their involvement public there are also people who are keeping their involvement private for various reasons um but there's also a huge number of other contributors including many watching us right now on the live stream. Hello. Uh and you know they are right now like looking at pull requests and things like that. So, you know, if you want to get your laptop out and start contributing right now, please do. There are people waiting for your call. Uh, so yeah. Also, no karaoke hackathon. I mean, I'm I got a microphone in my
16:45 hand. I am happy to start karaoke right now. We have still three minutes. Should we sing or should we have a question? Oh, are you here to sing? Can you Okay, Jonah is here to sing. Go. Um, what's our message to the market to people we interact with over the next few days who might say incorrectly use the word fork or enterprises who are concerned about man-in-the-middle attacks? How do we succinctly sell this message?
17:17 Thank you. Who wants to reply? Um, do you want to take it? Should I call the other Italian? What's up? Oh, he he usually has more words than I do, but um this this is not a fork, right? It's by definition it's there is no fork. No, that that by definition what we wanted to do was embrace what we could do and enhance the community instead of break it. And I think that's what we what
17:49 we've done. I think fair is not as a technical project not the easiest project to explain to everyone and I'm not you mean package distribution that does that no I mean a package the the the people who understand what a package manager is are probably already like a subset of humanity that's fairly small um it is but the the thing is that if we talk to our distribution partners about this and they know what this means And we get them to use this. The end
18:20 users don't have to know. They don't have to know. They don't have to understand. Well, they can't. I'm just saying they don't have to know. Doesn't sound No. No. But but yeah. No, that's fair. They don't have to understand. They can know. They can they can know. They can if they want to understand. And we can and we can really make it easy for them to use everything. Yeah. So I think as well, you know, something that we have embraced throughout this is this is not a protest. This is not like you know just going and replacing things for the sake of it. Really this is like this
18:51 is the next generation of what we should be building right you know something that we have always had in the WordPress community is a big focus on users and what we can do to actually empower them deliver better things for them. You know, we mentioned before that right now the ecosystem is actually quite fragmented, right? Getting premium plugins or uh you know, plugins that are only hosted on GitHub or you know, whatever uh is actually really difficult if you're a user, right? You have to download zips, you have to get clone or you have to install composer, you know, all of these things. We believe that we have the ability to actually stitch the
19:23 ecosystem back together while also actually just making it better at the same time. [Applause] Jono, is that slogan good enough for and also for ICO? Okay, good. Good. I'm going to go to Wendy and then I'm going to go to Michelle and then I think they're going to kick us out. Oh, but we or the half naked dancing apparently. Yeah, I need to organize better for that
19:56 one. Afterparty with Francesca. All right. So, that was not the message. Sorry. I'm super excited. My question actually aligns with Jonno's question. How? Because I understand a little bit of what you're saying. I also understand I think a little bit of what it could imply. We have another day of word camp tomorrow. I do. We don't know if we do. Well, I
20:28 hope I him. I wasn't involved. I I No, just him. I was already unb Don't ban me again. Let me put it differently. I hope I have another day of work camp tomorrow. Um I will be proud to tell people I was here and uh share the insights I have learned. Can you help me create some simple sentences that I can actually share with people at the word camp to also inspire them to at least go and take a look at your website and maybe join the GitHub
20:59 and the movement and get involved a little bit. I think we can I in fact do it right now. A piece of paper with a cheat sheet. We do. I I have what we call a message house. Yes. Yes. M made by um my lovely wife. Uh karaoke. We could do karaoke while you find it.
21:30 My connection is not the best. We will we will share those. I I mean honestly our marketing and our uh all those things are not the first things we did but they should be things we focus on. And this is a very valid question and I'll be the first to say that a marketing team is a thing worth having. Um, thank you very much. Um, we should fist bump on that. That's right. Don't scorn marketers is really what you No. Yeah. So, I I agree
22:02 and we'll we'll have to put that up on the website as soon as we can. There is some people uh listening who are behind computers who can maybe do that. Thank you. So, one last question from Michelle. Sure. Okay. Point of clarification on some things or maybe one thing, but going back to Zoe's talk at the very beginning and how words matter. I've heard Ryan say open and I want to know if you can clarify open versus free when it comes to the fair
22:33 plan. Uh everybody's looking at me to answer that one. So I'll give it my best uh my best try. Um so you know when we talk about openness in this we are not talking about you know the code just being available right you know I think that is very easy to achieve part of the reason that you know we wanted to be under the Linux foundation's umbrella to understand you know the models that
23:04 existed the ways that you know huge communities across uh you know open source across free software work uh you know was was kind of going with the Linux foundation and seeing what is, you know, best practice. And so, uh, we kind of mentioned, you know, the the sides of it, but we have a technical steering committee that is composed of members who are people that contribute. And we actually changed the Linux def uh Linux Foundation definition slightly to make it a bit broader so that we're making
23:35 sure that we include all types of contribution, not just contributing code. Everybody who contributes uh can kind of become part of the technical steering committee. Technical steering committee then gets to vote and elect the co-chairs. So Carrie, myself and Mika um were elected as the co-chairs. Um and we have rules around how that governance works. Um and then you know that kind of interacts with the technical advisory board and and things like that as well. So you know it is not just openness in terms of hey this is
24:07 this is open source. We're throwing some code out there and kind of good luck. You know, it is all throughout all of these things. Um, you know, and we really want to embrace the the community side of these things and bring everybody together. You know, we don't want this to be, hey, you know, some people over here get power and some people don't. And there's no rules for how any of that happens. It's completely arbitrary. you know we want to build something from scratch following the best practices following the trends and uh and the patterns set by you know great open source communities uh already yeah I
24:38 think that what's important to add here is that the guiding principle was that no single company or person can direct where this goes on it's for all of us and and we have to decide with The future of WordPress. Here we have a message for tomorrow. I just The future
25:09 of WordPress. Next between the a fair sandwich here. I got it. Yeah, that is a fair sandwich. The WPCC is the meat. This is getting the cheese. Probably the cheese that's makes more sense. Like where's taco? Where's Are we okay to say this things? I don't know. I think we might be out of time. I was talking, but I really really want to hear one thing, three words that come to mind when you
25:42 excitement, uh, community, uh, and, uh, openness. All right. Uh, possibility, collaboration. I already did that one. Not karaoke, but that could be close. Um, honestly, I I don't want to even say this just cuz I I'm not like not a fair representative, but fairness. You're right. But not just fairness, like actual fairness. Thank
26:14 you. I'm kind of into it. Um, just one word. Innovation. All righty. Thank you so much for being here on this uh slightly unhinged session. Uh, Takis, please close the session in a proper way, not in the unhinged way. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, guys. I mean, we all sort of witnessed a
26:46 little bit of WordPress history happening in front of our eyes tonight, I think. And if we can get our final slides