WordCampers were delighted to see Matt Mullenweg attend WordCamp St. Louis 201. He took attendees through an informal Town Hall question and answer session. However, before sharing the questions and answers, here were a couple facts Matt shared about WordPress: 1, WordPress passed 50 million sites and 2, WordCamp San Francisco 2011 surpassed selling 1000+ tickets.
Now on with questions:
What is Automattic?
Automattic is a company founded 5 and a half yrs ago. Matt said he felt like services were not being easily addressed and employed people to address those issues (spam, polls, comments, etc.)
Is there a roadmap to mobile for WordPress? How will it change?
Matt laughed and began with, “Ah, the internet in your pocket.”
Matt expressed that at first, mobile development for WordPress was a mistake and said that basically developers were cramming WordPress into phones that could not handle it – too many steps to do things and not very capatible.
For the future, he hopes that mobile capabilities become more streamlined and even with version 3.3, making it more web responsive. He added that currently the Twenty Eleven theme does have responsive design and to try it out.
What can we do to support WordPress?
- Come to WordCamp
- Word of mouth- tell ur friend
- Support and share your WordPress knowledge with others
- Attend local WordPress meetup groups
- Help develop
There were talks in 2010 that WordPress might be acquired by Microsoft?
NO…pure rumor.
What are some plans for WordPress Foundation?
Matt briefly covered that the WordPress Foundation because a 501.3c non-profit organization. He also shared that both the intellectual property and trademark of WordPress were moved under the control of the WordPress Foundation.
He noted that some of the beginning tasks dealt with cleaning up sites that were misusing the trademark.
As for the future, Matt expressed that he Would like to see WordPress Foundation dabble in education and Women in Technology. Also, in terms of WordCamps, the WordPress Foundation would become a financial backup resource in case there were not enough sponsors found.
Are there any future WordPress multi-site plans???
Matt mentioned that currently plugins for multi-site are not that great, however, there are plans to do more network admin cleanups.
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