WordCamp San Francisco 2013 Wrap-Up

Wow, what an amazing weekend. WordCamp San Francisco has come and gone, only the memories (and what I hope will be a lot of photos) remain of the central WordCamp. Folks from all over the globe came into San Francisco for a weekend of WordPress, community, and open-source software. Just check the #wcsf hashtag on Twitter. There’s still tons of action happening.

WP Engine representatives from every part of the company came to San Francisco, including the entire executive team, and members of the dev team and support teams to meet everyone who came by the WP Engine booth, and to attend sessions at the WordCamp.

It was amazing to meet everyone who came out and said hi. Meeting customers and community in real life is one of the best parts of being a WP Engineer. Thank you for dropping by and getting a WP Engine and a Torque t-shirt to wear. We hope to see photos of those continue to roll in on Twitter and Facebook.

State of the Word

As Matt noted in this year’s State of the Word, WordPress has grown 2.2% to now dominate 18.9% of the internet. Think about what 2.2% growth means in terms of the entire internet, which continues to grow, and you get an idea about how important WordPress is to the next 10 years of the internet.

The platform is experiencing incredible growth, and that’s opening up new opportunities for everyone running WordPress-based businesses. In the last 12 months alone, there have been 46 Million downloads of WordPress.

WordPress is also becoming well-known in the mainstream. Matt shared some research WP Engine did showing that WordPress has brand recognition of about 30% across the entire adult population on the internet. That’s significant brand recognition for any corporate brand, not to mention an open-source project.

Additionally, Matt focused on the development of WordPress mobile as key to the growth of the platform in the next 10 years. As the number of individuals who have mobile internet devices but not computers continues to grow, WordPress has a great opportunity to be the site of record for the internet. Someone will need to produce content for all those devices and all those new people coming online!

You can read more State of the Word analysis at TorqueMag.io

Torque Launches with WP Daily Archives

During WordCamp, WP Engine was excited to release a new WordPress news publication, Torque, The WordPress News Core. Torque is an independently edited publication, but funded by WP Engine. Michelle Oznowicz joined as editor to lead the growth of Torque. The publication launched with a series of new posts from Chris Lema, Brian Krogsgard, Sara Cannon, and Pippin Williamson, and contains all the WP Daily archives.

The Torque launch was one of the big reveals of WordCamp SF. On Friday, the first day of WordCamp, the WP Engine booth had the expected WP Engine t-shirts, stickers, and banners. Saturday night, we launched TorqueMag.io, and transformed the WP Engine booth into the Torque booth, complete with banners, new t-shirts to hand out, and the WP Engine team now wearing the blue Torque t-shirts.

Launching Torque was underway when we heard the news about WP Daily closing. Rather than let all the content that the 8bit team had created disappear, we reached out to see if Torque could step in as the archive for the site. You can visit the WP Daily Archives on Torque for all the WP Daily posts.

We’re excited about the direction for the magazine under Michelle’s leadership. You can read about the goals for the publication on our blog, as well as Michelle’s letter to the editor.

The Largest Contribute Day in History

If you attended the Contribute Day on Sunday (previously known as Dev Day) at Automattic’s new offices, you saw the huge gathering of community members in attendance working on everything from Core to Documentation to Buddypress. I’m not sure what the final count was, but the energy in the room was as high as it had been for the WordCamp itself.

It was a great move to open up opportunities for even non-devs to do their part with documentation and other aspects. That added to the numbers, and kept the energy high. When I left after 5pm, the group was still going strong.

10 Years of WordPress

WordCamp San Francisco had more than 600 attendees in person, and still more tuning in from the livestream. That turnout represents the growing “core” of WordPress as a community. But that’s only a few thousand people at a generous estimate. Looking at the 46 million WordPress sites, blogs, and applications that were built in the past 12 months, and with 30% brand recognition, we know that the platform has established itself as part of the the internet’s foundation.

The growth of WordPress is a massive opportunity for all of us who live and work with WordPress, and WP Engine is proud to be a leader and supporter of the most exciting platform on the internet as it grows up from its first 10 years, to the next 10 years. It’s a terribly exciting time to be a member of this community.

Thanks from all of us at WP Engine. If we don’t see you at a WordCamp between now and then, we’ll see you at WordCamp SF 2014!

Austin, and the entire WP Engine crew.