WordPress Co-Founder Matt Mullenweg Keynotes Joomla World Conference

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

Fly-on-the-wall at lunch convo b/w a #joomla lead dev @mbabker and a #wordpress lead dev @nacin. More of this needs to happen in OSS. #jwc13

— Ryan Ozimek (@cozimek) November 9, 2013

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.