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Sarah Gooding

WordPress Co-Founder Matt Mullenweg Keynotes Joomla World Conference

Image Credit: Dianne Henning
Image Credit: Dianne Henning
This past weekend Matt Mullenweg joined Joomla fans and contributors for the second Joomla World Conference in Boston, MA. Mullenweg gave the conference’s closing keynote on Sunday and shared some insights gained along the way on his journey with WordPress.

During his presentation, Matt highlighted the mission of WordPress: Democratizing publishing by making it easy for anyone to have a beautiful, functional web presence. But WordPress didn’t start out with this mission, he said. It started because Matt wanted software for his blog and Mike Little left a comment offering to work with him on a fork of B2.

Over the years, the mission to democratize publishing took shape as the software and community grew. WordPress faced rifts and challenges that ultimately helped to refine its mission and values in support of the four freedoms.

If you want to hear a quick, concise history of WordPress, I recommend that you take a few minutes to watch the recording of Matt’s keynote at the Joomla World Conference.

Connection Across Open Source Projects

Also in attendance was WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin, who received a warm welcome from the Joomla community.

https://twitter.com/stevejburge/status/399245948419072000

Nacin blogged prior to the conference:

I’m really glad we’re here, as engagement across communities is vital. Too many web communities are isolated, and I suspect there is a lot the WordPress and Joomla communities can learn from one another.

Matt’s appearance at the Joomla World Conference has inspired WordCamp Miami organizers to invite Joomla users and developers to come to their event next year to share experiences.

As someone who came from Drupal to WordPress, I love to see this kind of connection across open source projects. Exploring ideas and philosophy with other developers who have a different history can be a valuable experience. This is especially true with open source projects as similar as WordPress and Joomla. We’re not in competition with one another. Matt’s keynote address at the Joomla World Conference is a reminder that we’re all working together to make the web a better place.

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18 responses to “WordPress Co-Founder Matt Mullenweg Keynotes Joomla World Conference”

  1. Thanks indeed for blogging this, Sarah and for including my tweet.

    This weekend, you could walk into a bar in Boston and see the leadership of all three big open source CMSs drinking and laughing together. They were sharing what their knowledge and helping each other out. That was something I’ll remember for a long time.

    It took balls to make it happen. Neither Matt and Andrew or the conference organizers really knew what the response will be. There also was quite a bit of criticism of the idea on Twitter before the event. Kudos to all involved – they made it a big success.

    Hopefully this will inspire more conferences to invite outside their bubbles. I know it would make me more likely to attend, based on this past weekend.

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  4. @Steve – Not sure if you remember but in 2010, there was an event held in Dallas, Texas called OpenCa.mp where all three big open source projects came together under one roof. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. It was an interesting event to say the least. There hasn’t been an event like it since. Unfortunately, the openca.mp website is offline.

    Would be cool to see something like that happen again.

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  6. Love this so much! Cross-pollinating ideas between different communities is great.

    Coincidentally, I attended my first-ever Drupal workshop this weekend. I picked up new ideas, albeit very fundamental stuff in the Drupal world (views/modules/blocks), that helped me change the way I think about working with WordPress.

    Riding on a high of new ideas, I went and looked into the documentation for Joomla 3.0, just to see what other concepts and approaches were being taken. When I told some friends about this, they chided me for it.

    So that got me thinking – why chide someone for their choice in software? It’s silly. Let’s move beyond the schoolyard cliques and do something more constructive with the diversity of tools and resources that are available to us. :)

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  10. I was one of those folks who presented at OpenCa.mp and who helped facilitate Matt and Nacin’s attendance at JWC13. I had a motive for both of them, but I hope this time around I got it right.

    All of the open source CMSes combined, with generous rounding up, account for about 30% of the Web. That’s both a big number (time for self-congratulating, OSS world) while also a small number (seriously, people are running non-OSS based CMSes?). I’ve learned an incredible amount from our own Joomla community when I was President of Open Source Matters and meeting our community at events. However, I lived in a bubble. I spent most of my energy focused on solving problems that was likely faced by our OSS brothers and sisters in the WordPress world.

    Then, there was the miss on any collaborative opportunities. Why not have a leader from one OSS community share their story to another OSS community? Why not combine marketing efforts to express our OSS values to the world, encourage hosting providers to work in the best interest of their users, and more?

    OSS communities often spend incredible amounts of time searching internally for answers when they can find them across the internet (or as was the case for Nacin and I, down the hallway). My hope is that Matt’s keynote at our Joomla World Conference can spark some awesome cross-project pollination. What does that look like exactly? I’m not sure, but in the open source spirit, it’s a itch I want to scratch.

    If you’re a WordPress local community leader and are interested in chatting, drop me a line on Twitter at @cozimek.

    There’s too much goodness wrapped in each of our communities to not explore what we might be able to achieve together.

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  12. I have been using Joomla a lot over the past year or so and, I must say, it has been a terrific experience. There is a bit of a learning curve but, once you get the hang of it, Joomla is much better for certain things and the community, though far smaller, is in many ways freer.

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  15. Ryan definitely started something by going out of his way to link Andrew and I together, as well as other developers in our project. I know from my own conversations this weekend, there’s a new perspective on things within our own project. I’m glad we had this opportunity to bring together some of the masterminds within our two projects to compare notes and would love to keep these doors open.

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  16. I echo the sentiments of the many other positive posts here. As the Community Development Manager and a PLT member for Joomla I felt this collaboration was a phenomenal opportunity to share not only our differences but also our similarities. We were able to share stories, histories, and ways in which we could each learn and grow from the other.

    I was privileged to spend several hours in discussion with both Andrew and Matt. Interestingly enough the evening before we were able to have @webchick from Drupal also stop by and share in a chat too.

    It’s exciting to see the open source community realize the true power of joining together to learn and grow. As Ryan mentioned in a tweet, (paraphrased) We’re not competing with each other, that’s like considering your sibling your competition. Let’s continue this positive event and grow stronger as an open source community!

    David Hurley
    @dbhurley

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