The 2nd Joomla! World Conference was held last month. Last year in San Jose there were keynote speakers from major open source names such as MySQL and Mozilla. This year the team went a step further and invited a speaker from WordPress. Matt Mullenweg is one of the two co-founders of WordPress and also the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

Matt gave his address, but perhaps more importantly he attended the whole day of the conference, speaking with many of us there.

Also at the conference was Andrew Nacin, a WordPress core developer. Andrew was there for a couple of days and spent a lot of time talking with Joomla’s own core developers. I know that the Joomla developers learned a lot from talking at length with someone in a similar position to them, having responsibility for the code on millions of websites.

Not only were two of the top WordPress contributors in attendance, but so was Angie Bryon, a Drupal core developer.

In short, you could walk into a bar in Boston during the Joomla World Conference and see leaders from the Joomla, Drupal and WordPress projects talking to each other. What a great experience!

Matt’s Keynote Presentation

Matt spoke for about an hour on the history of WordPress and Automattic.

He talked about several topics that had direct lessons for Joomla’s development. Matt talked about building a community, making decisions, creating a smooth release cycle, dealing with forks, and more.

Matt also used the keynote to talk about several issues that were news even to WordPress junkies. For example, he mentioned a firm release date for WordPress 3.8 and also explained that he saw automatic updates as perhaps the most important new feature for WordPress.

Here's the full video of Matt's presentation: