Top 9.0 Notable Things said by Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp US 2023

1. On (plugin, etc.) licenses in the WordPress space: “I think we should stop doing lifetime licenses (of plugins, services) in the WordPress world… when you say ‘lifetime’ I think it cheapens the word.”

2. On the $36k price tags of Automattic’s new 100 year hosting plan: “It’s a lot… But in some ways, I wonder if it’s too low. We tried to model inflation. Different cost of underlying things like the dot com registration or domain registrations.”

3. On standardizing LMS and making the category a higher citizen in the WordPress ecosystem: “This week, TutorLMS, Sensei, LearnDash and LifterLMS got together…. Can we actually agree on using some of the same SQL formats? Could we make it so that’s not a lockin? Also an “LMS” channel is now in the #WordPress official Slack. Now everyone involved in this space can come together and agree on standards and in the future they can work together better.”

4. WordPress plugins that “kinda do the same thing”: “Open source.. allows innovation happen. Good competition actually makes everyone better. Bad sometimes in that as a WordPress user, like if you go one plugin, you might be kind of logged into it.”

5. According to Matt: “WordPress was the original no-code tool.”

6. Letting go of “baggage” (notice I’m not using the d word – David): “I would just like officially for 2023 to reset all of that to neutral. So, if you think I like something or don’t like something, let’s reset that to zero so we’re not gonna make it another 20 years carrying around a lot of baggage, right?”

7. Someone asked a question, mentioning an attempt to education WordPress (core) developers on accessibility, with Matt’s response: “”One assumes [ordPress developers] don’t know about accessibility standards. And I would actually argue that they care about it quite a bit… they still going to mess it up. There will always be a process. If there’s certain things you literally think they don’t know about, the WCAG 2 .1, do a session and talk to them.”

8. Matt is concerned on how things are labeled and understood in the WordPress admin, and what to see that improved in the admin redesign: “I’m actually thinking about most in the Admin is how much knowledge it pre-supposes… can we name things simpler… media and comment mod needs to be better.”

9. What would Matt do differently at the start of WordPress? “Changing the name of the “ID” column name in the post table in the database” (Although he’s had time to think about this question and has revised it).