I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support.
For #wcus contributor day I did some writing, with a post on WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking.
A number of people are trying to brand me as transphobic, so I thought I would list out a number of my personal beliefs so folks coming across this in the future can judge for themselves.
This is not meant to be comprehensive, and in researching this post to make sure I was using the right language to express my beliefs I read through the Yogyakarta Principles and agree with everything in that document, which is much more comprehensive.
A few other points I'll include for context and history:
Matt had posted that he's thinking of moving Tumblr to WordPress -- how will that work? And what is the timeframe for that? (re:https://mastodon.social/@photomatt/111304408763775262)
Migration and portability is a tricky topic, and one I'm thinking about a lot for 2024. If we do it right, there will be minimal perceptive change to the Tumblr experience, it's just changing out how things are stored in the back end. (Kind of like how the Tumblr editor now benefits from Gutenberg but looks nothing like WordPress.)
It's a pretty interesting engineering task, including migrating half a billion blogs. We will tackle it, but I'm not sure when. It's more a "for us" thing to pay down technical debt than something that will impact the user experience. Right now we're focused on streamlining and improving the core user experience, the parts of Tumblr that are the bread and butter of the service and that we hear from users need work.
Are there any plans to bring to Wordpress some Tumblr. features like Asks and Submit? I have been searching a plugin anf it doesn't exist (and would be amazing having it native)
Also, would be so useful the possibility to upload files (like zip) on Tumblr. VK allows you to upload up to 10 per post with 4GiB limit per file, on Telegram is 2GiB for free and up to 10 for message and 4GiB for premium.
I agree we should have a good canonical plugin way to do Asks on WP, and I could see it being a popular feature on WP.com.
On uploading files... probably not. We have a lot of anti-abuse issues with our current media uploads and I can't think of any legit reason to allow .zip files. The other places you mention like Telegram are probably better for that sort of thing. I will say that if you get a business plan or above on WP.com you get direct SSH + SFTP access so you can upload literally whatever you want, and run it on your own domain.
Have you speced out what it would take to make a tool to allow for export of a tumblr blog to a wordpress.com instance?
Tumblr has a full export available, and WordPress has imports and exports for pretty much everything under the sun, largely developed by the open source community. I want to give Tumblr users a chance to tap into the flexibility and customization of WP, but it will be a tricky migration. New technology coming online (including AI) will make it easier.
I’m a long standing WP user as well and one of the aspects that I’ve loved about wordpress has been the ability to customize so much of my blog, particularly adding widgets and extensions that have been developed and tested by the community. Is there any momentum in cross-pollination, if you will, of features that have worked well in WP (and vice versa)?
Really appreciate your kindness in answering these questions. Your post last year about your visions for tumblr and automattic was inspiring and I’m hopeful for the future.
I would like to give Tumblr users as much flexibility as you do in the WP ecosystem, and there is some really cool tech being developer that drastically lowers the cost of that flexibility, like WordPress Playground, which spins up a full WP install in real-time in your browser, with WASM. You don't need a database server, etc, anymore. This is truly revolutionary, and we haven't begun to see the impact. Now making that an accessible product is tricky, kind of like we had transformers and LLMs for years but it was the RLHF and product work OpenAI did that blew up that space, really made people reimagine what was possible. That's what we're working on.
Rebuilding TechCrunch.com in 30 mins with WordPress. 🔥
I've been thinking a lot about the question about what would do differently if starting WP now, the column names was the first answer, I think my "slept on it" answer would be having "starters" separate from plugins and themes that configure them, and we could have a directory and community around.
National Harbor where WordCamp US is this year at night.
Really cool to see WordPress on Hacker News today. 🤠
The founders of WordPress and Drupal, together at the Royal Arts Society in London.
Why do people use WordPress?
