I'm often thinking how to best describe VersionPress. For geeks, it might be a Git version control for WordPress, for regular users it might be the “Time Machine” for their web sites but I always felt that all this is missing something deeper, some underlying message of what we're truly about.

The other day I was listening to some talks from last year's WordCamp San Francisco and amongst them was an interview with Matt Mullenweg. One part especially caught my attention as Matt said something very interesting:

A secure system is more than just WordPress. WordPress is just one part of it. And the key of that secure system, to me, is knowing that there's going to be things wrong with it, no matter what you do, and being able to update that quickly and react quickly. So, it kind of comes down to updates and backups. If you accept the assumption that things will always go wrong – Murphy's law – the ability to go back to a version before it went wrong and to update so it doesn't go wrong again, are the two key things.

And updates have obviously been an obsession of WordPress for 5 or 6 years now. […] And the key is just making sure that people can be up to date and not scared of those updates – and that is the most empowering thing. When people are worried, if they think they click that update button and something breaks that they won't be able to fix, they're not going to do it. And that only needs to happen once before they feel that powerless. They only need to be hacked once before they feel powerless, right? It is a terrible, terrible experience because you know literally something is happening and you don't know how to fix it. You're going to have to pay someone or hire someone or ask for help from someone to get a fix.

So, we're about empowerment. We have to make it so that everyone feels empowered using WordPress every day.

Now, I know that WordPress Core makes great improvements in this area with every release, Automattic offer VaultPress and there are many other contributors to this, but it still sounded like a perfect description of what we are trying do with VersionPress and strongly resonated with me.

So there I was. Sitting in my chair, doing some late-night coding and out of nowhere, the background audio stream said it. Said it better than I ever could. We have to make it so that everyone feels empowered using WordPress every day. Thank you, Matt!