ConfPad

How do you tell the world's largest open source community that they have to change? Three years ago WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg exhorted WordPress developers to "learn JavaScript deeply". This announcement kicked off a massive project to re-imagine the editor of the most widespread CMS in the world as an accessible, modern single-page JavaScript application; and in the midst of this change, the WordPress community has confronted deep fear, uncertainty and doubt as over half a million PHP developers began to question whether their skills were now irrelevant. This talk is the story of how we've managed the stress and change of rewriting and recreating a fifteen year old piece of software with new languages, tools and frameworks, without leaving our community behind in the process.