Gavin Anderegg:

Since I last wrote about WordPress, things have gone off the rails. This after a brief period when things were blissfully quiet. Matt Mullenweg stopped commenting for a while, though his company had launched WP Engine Tracker — a site for tracking WordPress-driven websites that moved away from WP Engine. I think this is a bit gauche, but it seems like fair marketing given everything that’s going on. It should be noted that many sites are leaving for Pressable — owned by Mullenweg’s company, Automattic — because of a sweetheart deal.

But the drama ramped up quickly after WP Engine won a preliminary injunction against Automattic on December 10th. The injunction required that WP Engine be allowed to access WordPress.org resources, and that Automattic stop interfering with WP Engine plugins, while the trial moves forward. Ernie Smith wrote an excellent piece with more details on outcome of the injunction, including a note about Mullenweg quitting a community Slack instance with a hammy message. Mullenweg complied with the injunction, though the “loyalty test checkbox” text was changed to a still-required note about pineapple on pizza.

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Then yesterday happened. Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine. This action is blamed on the “the legal attacks started by WP Engine and funded by Silver Lake”, which I think is a gross mischaracterization. WP Engine definitely did not start this.

Automattic noted it would focus its open source hours on “security and critical updates”. The other hours would be redirected to for-profit projects like WordPress.com. This means that the community will be expected to take up the slack if it wants WordPress to improve. I worry that 45 hours a week isn’t enough time to keep WordPress secure and bug-free. Hopefully others will step up, here.

But you know what? In a normal world, having the community taking the lead would be fine. I’d be all for it! The problem is that Mullenweg has final say over some very important parts of the WordPress community. He also seems recently to be acting more childishly and impulsively than usual.

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It’s hard to see how to move forward from here. I think the best bet would be for people to rally around new community-driven infrastructure. This would likely require a fork of WordPress, though, and that’s going to be a messy. The current open source version of WordPress relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls. Joost de Valk, the original creator of an extremely popular SEO plugin, wrote a blog post with some thoughts on the matter. I’m hoping that more prominent people in the community step up like this, and that some way forward can be found.

In the meantime, if you’re a WordPress developer, you may want to look into some other options.

Update: Moments after posting this, I was pointed to a story on TechCrunch about Mullenweg deactivating the WordPress.org accounts of users planning a “fork”. This after he previously promoted (though in a slightly mocking way) the idea of forking open source software. In both cases, the people he mentioned weren’t actually planning forks, but musing about future ways forward for WordPress. Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the push they need to get started. Remember that WordPress.org accounts are required to submit themes, plugins, or core code to the WordPress project. These recent events really make it seem like you’re no longer welcome to contribute to WordPress if you question Matt Mullenweg.