This past weekend, I attended my first WordCamp — and I have a lot I want to share with you about the experience and the WordPress community, which I’ll do over the next few blog posts.
I want to start with a recap of the WordCamp San Francisco talk I was most looking forward — The State of the Word 2013 by Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress (with Mike Little) and The State of the Word Q&A.
This was the first time I’ve seen him speak and I found Matt (@photomatt) to be professional, charismatic, funny, personal, humble, and engaged with the people who work with it and use it every day. With every word he spoke, he emanated passion for WordPress and the community that surrounds and supports the free open-source software he created 10 years ago. He called out and praised contributors, leaders, and volunteers by name, thanked everyone he could, and expressed gratitude for every member of the community.
WordPress is where it is today because of the people — The People That Attend WordCamps — who donate and volunteer their time to work on it, to constantly improve it, to grow it, to teach others about it…
WordPress Statistics
During his talk, Matt Mullenweg shared some amazing statistics — gathered from the 2013 WordPress Survey taken by 30,000 people in 178 countries — about WordPress, how it is used, and how people are coming together in the community, including:
- WordPress celebrated its 10th anniversary on May 27, 2013 with WordPress Meet Up celebrations in 671 cities around the world. (Meetup.com’s numbers vary slightly)
- In the last 12 months alone, there have been 46+ million downloads of the free, open-source
- 18.9% of the web is powered by WordPress, up 2.2% from last year (survey of the top 10 million sites)
- Of those who use WordPress, 69% use it only as a CMS (Content Management System); 20% use it as a blog/CMS combo; 6% use it for blogging only; and 7% as an application platform (numbers are rounded)
Stats on how WordPress is accessed:
- 98% of those who access the WordPress software do it through the web
- 31% are using iOS Devices
- 30% are using Android devices
- 18% are using Android tablets
- 12% are using a Desktop Application
Stats on the WordPress Repositories:
- 9,334 plugins were submitted to the WordPress Plugin Repository
- 6,758 plugins were accepted after review
- Total number of WordPress plugins available in the repository is now 26,000+
- 336 new free WordPress themes were added last year alone
Stats on WordPress WordCamps
- There have been 315 WordCamps to date
- WordCamp San Francisco was the 72nd WordCamp of 2013 alone
- So far in 2013, there have been more than 1,026 unique WordCamp speakers (including Brian Bourn)
- There have been 1.4 million views of WordCamp videos on WordPress.tv
Matt also shared some details about the WordPress releases:
- WordPress 3.5, or Elvis was released in December 2012, including a new media interface, the new twenty twelve theme, and retina support for the admin interface.
- Matt addressed several questions about WordPress 3.6 and the rumors around the release date for 3.6 (Oscar). He left the release date as simply “soon” and showed a world premier video promoting WordPress 3.6.
- WordPress 3.7 is already underway and is slated to be released in October 2013
- WordPress 3.8 is already planned for a December 2013 release
We’re Huge Fans of WordPress!
At Bourn Creative, we’ve been proudly using WordPress to power all of our web design since 2008 and in that time it has come a very long way. I was excited to hear Matt Mullenweg’s perspective on the growth so far, and his vision and hopes for the future of WordPress.
Listening to Matt, I was overwhelmed with gratitude myself that the WordPress software and the WordPress community exists — and that I get to be a part of it. And I was inspired by his call to action to get more involved … I’m not quite sure how yet, but the right way will present itself I’m sure of it.
Photo from those shared on Matt Mullenweg’s site.
