We are thrilled to announce that we will be opening WordCamp Montréal with a special Question and Answers session with Matt Mullenweg, the founder/evil genius behind WordPress, and we want to know what questions you want to hear answered.
Please post your WordPress question (about the past, present or future of WordPress) in the comments on this post. We will put together a list of the best of them (with some help from the peeps at Automattic) for this special session. Thanks for your help!
Jane Wells too?
In relatedly excellent news, Jane Wells, another Automattic employee and one of the key minds behind the WP 2.7 usability overhaul and community engagement process will also be at WordCamp Montréal. She’ll be presenting about where WP has come since 2.7 and where its headed in the near future.
We’re flattered to have these two celebrity guests at our event, thanks guys!
As weblogs are seen as an identity on the web, why WP isn’t pushing harder in the direction of identity management?
When will WordPress include multilingual support? Not the install in any language kind, the run a bilingual site kind. I know there are plugins and a recent one that looks promising but what about core support?
Dear Matt,
I just you want to how happy I am that you will be in Montreal to meet some WordPress fans. I’ve had blogs with WordPress from the very start and I wanted to tell you how much I’ve appreciated your transparency and accountability with your users, then and now.
I’ve just installed WordPress 2.8 in English and French and it’s beautiful.
I guess I want to hear some thoughts on what we can expect in terms of upcoming trends and applications for the blogging platform.
A WordPress fan,
Diane
We need a universal payment system where any member can be a buyer or a seller. Presently the Paypal and Amazon systems already take 2 cuts (theirs and the credit cards one) that leave little room for any collective website structured as a marketplace (which describes most of the projects I am working on).
Of course it’s the “next step” on the identity ladder that Martin is talking about (identity + security = transaction).
Is WordPress interested in responding to this need in the near future?
How do you decide on what functions to put as core functions instead of a plugin?
Do you think WordPress will ever become a bloated application?
Both questions tie to each other.
I saw this question on a blog and saw that you had taken part of the conversation. It would be appreciated if you could say a few words about it during your talk: Is WordPress.com Bad for WordPress? (Source: http://www.blogherald.com/2009/06/24/is-wordpress-com-bad-for-wordpress/)
Have you given any thoughts on branding WordPress.com and WordPress.org so that it is clearer for everyone? I personally like WordPress Free and WordPress Hosted.
Hello Matt,
I’m a big fan of WordPress.com. It’s always my first recommendation for someone starting on the Web, way ahead of getting hosting and installing your own copy of WordPress or another CMS.
I only have a few grudges about WordPress.com and I would like to hear Matt’s thoughts on them:
1. Themes:
A lot of themes are now pushing the envelope of what a theme is and offering plugin-like functions or options. For example, Tarki (http://tarskitheme.com/) offers multiple sidebars options, pages menu customisation (with external links!), tags and categories display toggles, asides handling, renaming of the “Blog” link in navication and header customisation. Pretty powerful stuff.
The most advanced theme WordPress.com now offers in this vein is Vigilance, which is not even properly localized yet. I guess I’d like to know what is the process for including new themes in the WordPress.com offer. As Jeremy Clarkson would say: “How hard could it be?”.
Are there any plans to offer “premium” themes that would require credits?
2. Tags
My biggest pet peeve with WordPress.com, and the reason I’m contemplating moving my personal blog to a self-hosted installation, is the handling of tags. Specifically, links on tags. Each time I click on a tag inside a post in my blog, I am always surprised to end up on a general WordPress.com tag page. Why can’t I be on my blog’s page for this tag? I understand WordPress.com is a network of blogs, and it needs to underline this somewhere, but doing it on the tag links appears just wrong to me. It’s also a major deal breaker for business use: I’m not going to start tagging posts if these tags can lead my customers or would-be customers straight out of my site.
Couldn’t WordPress use the Flickr model for tag links? Main link remains in the context of the current blog/photostream, and a secondary link (the planet icon on Flickr) leads to the tag search page across the whole site. The site-specific tag page could also feature an invitation to visit the site-wide equivalent page. Flickr gets it right. Just copy them! 😉
And again, I see this as a viable Upgrade option for WordPress.com: remove “network” links from my blog. I understand that’s not the point of WordPress.com, which is why you need to make it a paying option so that it doesn’t become the norm.
So I guess my questions were more like feature requests. Maybe you could talk about how you handle feature requests, then. How does the WordPress.com business influence the roadmap for the WordPress software?
Thanks,
Alexandre
I’d love to hear a response to Is WordPress a Thankless Community?, which contends that WP plugin developers get mostly grief and few thanks. What can WordPress do to better reward and thank users who are developing new features for its platform? How can it create a better community around WordPress?