Send us your questions for the town hall with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg, about to ask a question himself.

Matt loves to answer questions.

The event is only 3 days away and I just realized we never sent out our request for the questions you want us to ask Matt, the founder of WordPress and our celebrity guest at WordCamp Montréal. Here’s your chance!

Matt will be on stage on Sunday afternoon to answer questions from the audience as well as ones posted online. Here’s the talk profile on the talks page. We used the same format when Matt visited two years ago and it worked well. People asked all kinds of WordPress-related questions that gave Matt a chance to both answer and wax poetic on the principles, strategies and motivations behind the creation and development of WordPress.

So what do you want to know about WordPress? Are you curious about some aspect of the history of WP? Wondering why a given feature was never added? Confused about why the three letter word “GPL” starts so many barfights?

Send us your questions using the comment form on this post or use twitter to tweet us @wordcampmtl with your burning queries. If you are also going to be in the room then please mention that in your question so we can keep it ’till the end in case you want to ask it yourself!

See you this weekend!

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16 Responses to “Send us your questions for the town hall with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg

  1. Maxime Jobin says:

    What is the biggest challenge you are working on right now that you think will push WordPress on the next level (that will/ could make it bigger than it is right now) ?

  2. Actually I have 3 questions but they can be combined into one.

    Following the security issue on 22nd of June 2011, where 3 plugins were compromised and altered (not) by their authors, and the resulting call from Automattic to reset everybody’s password. 3 worrying questions come to mind.

    1- How did that happen in the first place?
    2- How did the hackers manage to insert that code in 3 different plugins almost all at once?
    3- How to prevent that from happening again to other plugins in the future?

  3. With the emergence of broad custom post types, has it ever been considered to create a new table and/or meta table for some of these types?
    When using a E-Commerce solution or Social Network(buddypress) we have had over 1 million posts in the post table, and this is in less than 3 months. It would be advantageous if we had the ability to split higher level CPT’s off of the main table. We foresee posts in the multimillions..

  4. Jason Paul says:

    WordPress has the potential to become its own unique kind of social network without relying on the usual social media channels (Something like Tumblr). Are there any plans to dig deeper into this social potential in the open source version?

    Will Custom Post Types be accessible in the App anytime soon?

    Any plans to make the Dashboard more iPad friendly?

  5. I’m curious to know some stats about JetPack and what the take up rate has been like both on WordPress.com and WordPress.org users. What are the most popular features of JetPack as I’m sure not too many people are using all the features, and can we can any hints on what other components are on the horizon for JetPack?

    Bonus question: I’m aware that the beard was recently trimmed after some feedback on Twitter and I was wondering if we can get an update on ‘The State of The Beard’ 🙂

  6. Mark Smalley says:

    How important is NoSQL to the future of CMS and (or) WordPress…?

  7. Are there any plans to introduce functionality within WP Core – or adopt an officially supported plug-in – that would allow people to more easily create multilingual sites? This was discussed a little bit during the Q&A with Matt during WordCamp Montreal 2009 but I haven’t heard much about it since. Thanks!

  8. bruno boutot says:

    At WordCamp Montreal 2009, I had a great conversation with Matt about payment systems. A WordPress payment system would allow communities to set up market places while bypassing the fees asked by credit cards and Paypal-like systems.

    We agreed that it would be a great service for communities. Matt told me that it would be difficult to implement but that it was an interesting problem and that he would talk about it with his team.

    Since I can’t attend WordCamp Montreal 2011, I would appreciate to know if they have worked on this topic and if they intend to develop such a system in the near future. (And please, let me know his answer.)

  9. Yannick Lefebvre says:

    With the introduction of custom posts and with regular posts and pages all sharing the same data model, links stand out as something very different in WordPress with their separate data tables. They also often feel a bit neglected since users are able to enter lots of data about their links but can’t display that data without installing plugins. Are there plans to migrate links to use the custom post architecture and to augment their functionality or is the current functionality coupled with plugins deemed sufficient?

  10. Pingback: Matt Mullenweg will answer questions at the WordCamp Montreal town hall | WPCandy

  11. Now that WordPress is becoming a true CMS and is being used more and more like one (all my own WP projects in the last year have been WP CMS sites with and without blogs), are there plans to integrate real User Roles and Capabilities management in WordPress instead of relying on plugins like Justin Tadlock’s Members?

  12. WordPress development sometimes promotes bad coding practices. Specifically, there are many situations where developers end up creating a nasty mix of view logic (HTML) and application logic (PHP). This usually occurs in the functions.php file of a theme, but is also a problem when developing plugins.

    Are there any plans to address this, and if not, is this something that could be discussed for future releases of WordPress?

    I’ve ended up trying to develop a “home brewed” templating system for all my plugins and have found things to be much cleaner and easier to understand.

  13. Given that WordPress is more and more being used as a CMS, and that Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies now allow us to build more complex product catalogs, what can we expect in terms of new search capabilities to allow visitors to easily query and navigate the hundreds or thousands of posts/articles/products in a website?

  14. Where do you see WordPress in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, (10 years)?