The founding developer of the popular blogging software WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, shared some of his thoughts about what’s next for the platform today. WordPress is completely open source, but Mullenweg founded the company behind the business arm of the product, Automattic.

At the paidContent event today, Mullenweg shared that a new “radically simplified” version of WordPress will be available soon.

On his blog, Mullenweg took things a step further, discussing what he calls the “fourth phase of our evolution.”:

WordPress was first for pure blogging, then became embraced as a CMS (though some people still deny this), is seeing growth and innovation in being used as an application platform (I think we’re about a third of the way through that), and just now starting to embrace social and mobile — the fourth phase of our evolution.

Mullenweg aims to help make WordPress “shorter, simpler, and faster”, making everyone in the word a publisher with the click of a button. He mentions the importance of mobile and social being the future of WordPress, and that we can start seeing the direction the software is going in its official iOS and Android apps.

How will Mullenweg re-imagine and “radically simplify” WordPress as we know it today? “Even though I’m thinking about this all the time I don’t have all the answers yet — that’s what makes it fun.” he shares.

WordPress is set to turn 9 years old this Sunday, and it’s amazing to see how far the platform has come. I can truly say that without WordPress, I’m not sure if I’d be writing this post and have the ability to share it with all of you.