State of The Word 2021- Recap Under 5 Minutes

State of the Word is an annual event held every year as a rallying point for the WordPress community. An annual keynote address is delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg on this occasion.

Every year, the State of the Word brings together developers, designers, project managers, and community members to celebrate and discuss WordPress, its future, and how we can collectively improve it.

Due to the pandemic, State of the Word 2020 was moved online for the first time ever. This year, the event was held in New York City.

Let’s take a quick look at the exciting new things that were discussed in the State of the Word 2021.

WordPress Flashback 2021 (What Happened & What Did Not)

State of the Word 2021 speech was a promising one with exciting promises. However, Matt Mullenweg also talked about the new features that were introduced in 2020, and about the delay of WordPress 5.9. Here are the key points from his speech on State of the Word 2021.

Pattern Directory

WordPress.org pattern directory was also released earlier in 2021. It is similar to the WordPress plugin repository, as it hosts design patterns that anyone can use and customize. Anyone can submit beautiful patterns to the pattern directory, without even knowing any coding.

Likewise, the patterns from the directory can be used on any website, where they can be customized further for unique designs.

Openverse

Creative Commons search engine, the global platform that shares educational access to creative works was recently rebranded to Openverse. It can now be found at wordpress.org/openverse.

With the Openverse search, users can access the same results as Creative Commons with revamped search and filter features. The search engine is also being translated to many languages, and translation to more than 10 languages is already completed.

Managing Widgets with Blocks

WordPress deepened its customization options even more by adding blocks editor within the widget section earlier this year. A recorded video showed, how this update can change the designs of widgets in WordPress and its capabilities with endless customization possibilities.

Query Blocks

As Matt said, Query Block is one of the complex blocks ever created for Gutenberg editor. It works like a better application of a group of blocks that can improve how you design and display content on your WordPress website. There are multiple tweaks that you can make to design the responsive queries.

Duotone Color Filters

Duotone colour filters were introduced with WordPress 5.8. Imagine working with a black and white filter, but with the colours being replaced with other colours. That’s what you can do with duotone colour filters. You can use this filter to customize the colours of an uploaded image to your website’s overall aesthetics.

Future of WordPress 5.9

WordPress 5.9 is delayed to January 2022, instead of its original release of December 2021. Matt described how important it is to launch a version that is good to use publicly. WordPress is a platform used by millions and affects billions, and team WordPress.org want to release the new updates only when they don’t find any issues.

Exciting Stats

Now let’s take a look at the 2021 yearly round of WordPress stats that Matt Mullenweg talked about in his speech.

• 76% improvements in language packs used in core.
• 28% new translators, taking the total number to 15,900 people.
• Diverse speaker program saw 25 events happening where 135 participents from 66 cities and 16 countries participated.
• WordPress now powers 43.1% of all the websites in the world increasing from 39.1%.
• 11.6% more theme added compared to 2020.
• 11.63% more download of the software in 2021 than 2020.
• 30+ people contributed to security patches with 1/3rd being new contributors.

What to Expect from WordPress in 2022

Matt also showed some upcoming feature highlights that looked pretty amazing. These features are soon coming live and we can’t wait to use them.

Apart from the features, the WordPress co-founder also put emphasises more collaboration on WordPress core from the top WordPress companies.

Theme Blocks

Theme blocks are an exciting upcoming addition to WordPress 5.9. It will allow you to customize every aspect of your website. Even the ones that were not easy to customize before. This includes your header and footer as well.

What’s more, there are dedicated pre-designed blocks for every part of the website, which is also completely responsive.

Styles

Global styles are being introduced in WordPress 5.9, which will change how we style our website. We won’t know how the styles will look before we implement them. However, global colour, layout, and typography are surely nice additions. It will be even more useful in the WordPress Twenty Twenty One theme.

Pattern Improvements

Patterns are set to be more customizable and robust in action. Coming in 2022, we will be able to use patterns to instantly design the headers and footers as well as the other parts of the website.

5 Minutes for the Future

Do you work or depend on WordPress for your livelihood? Then contributing to WordPress can be a great way of giving back, which will eventually help millions of people.

During the keynote speech on State of The Word 2021, Matt was talking about how just 5% of the work hour on WordPress contribution can be highly beneficiary for WordPress to be an even better platform in the future.

Wrapping Up

2021 was a year of growth for WordPress. The State of the Word 2021 keynote speech promised us exciting upcoming features and the ones that were launched this year.

The speech was preceded by a QA session that you can watch on the live video that was published after the event. Here is the full video of the State of the Word 2021 event.