Quick recap on Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2020 keynote address. This was delivered virtually for the first time. Matt recognized how the WordPress community has continued to work together during the past year without the benefit of periodic face-to-face meetups and Wordcamps. Matt did an overview of the three major releases delivered by the WordPress community this past year despite the challenges of the pandemic. He also gave an update on the continued growth of the WordPress platform.
There was a demo of the beta version of WordPress Site Editor. Full Site Editing is the focus of the second phase of the Gutenberg project. It will be the centerpiece of the planned 2021 WordPress platform releases. If you haven’t looked at it, we recommend you view the demo, do some reading, and get a sandbox set up to start understanding how to use these new capabilities. The Site Editor will replace the WordPress Customizer and introduce a number of new block types.
There was a broad ranging Q&A session after keynote and demo. Members of the WordPress community from across the globe submitted questions. There was a lot of discussion around multilingual capabilities which will be the focus of the fourth phase of the Gutenberg project.
You can watch the whole State of the Word 2020 keynote below. We recommend you take the time to understand the strategic direction of the platform and what the planned 2021 updates will mean to you.