dylan604
9 hours ago
This whole bit of drama really makes me glad I never invested time/energy in WordPress. It's like Real Housewives of Computer Nerds level of whining, and feels just as fake. Regardless of right/wrong, the whole thing has just turned into a 80s made for TV type of situation. There was a much better way at handling this, but somebody had access to social media and the wheels promptly fell off.
1-more
8 hours ago
> Real Housewives of Computer Nerds
OK you've convinced me to get invested in this.
dylan604
8 hours ago
I'm accepting scripts for this unscripted series now. We're still trying to get someone credible attached so we can get it green lit.
Zak
9 hours ago
The nice thing is it's GPL, so the founder/owner can't just take his ball and go home. It's also widely-used/important enough that it will get forked if leadership problems start to make it unusable for too many people.
bigiain
8 hours ago
The problem though, for people who want to use WordPress, is that WP sites fundamentally rely on wordpress.org for downloading and installing plugins and themes, and critically for security updates to plugins and themes. (You can install/update manually, but the standard admin dashbord is set up to make wordpress.org integration by far the best way to do so.)
Yeah, you've got your GPL copy of all the source code. But next week's discovery of vulnerabilities in whatever random plugin gets to be this weeks news means you need to download/install the updated version. Which canonically is found at wordpress.org. We host a couple of dozen sites on WPEngine (and have done for about a decade, very happily with the price, features, and service). Our internal business continuity planning is now investigating ClassicPress, keeping an eye on comms from WPEngine to see what their path forward in terms of keeping WP sites updated without wordpress.org access, and questioning whether it's time to stop using WordPress at all. We already have a few sites that use WP as the admin/publishing tool, and generate the site as static html for hosting via S3/CloudFront - we may make that our standard deployment bit if we had to move all our WP sites off WPE, we may as well investigate other newer tools.
We are certainly having conversations right now with potential new clients warning them of the drama in the WordPress ownership/ecosystem, and advising considering alternative options or at least waiting until the dust settles on Matt's current ill advised crusade.
mingus88
4 hours ago
The update issue doesn’t sound like a big deal. What’s stopping WP Engine from setting up their own mirror system?
CentOS did this to Redhat for decades. They literally stripped out the trademarks and distributed the OS to anyone with no contracts at all. Patches were available same day that RH published them, and were applied from CentOS update servers.
The endgame for WP seems to be that they give up this fight or close their source and act like a real licensed software company. You can’t play GPL until it no longer suits you, then start making insane demands about revenue sharing and all this nonsense.
bigiain
4 hours ago
WPEngine do have their own mirrors. This is what a test theme upgrade this morning tells me:
Downloading update from https://theme-updates.wpengine.com/twentysixteen/twentysixte...
The risk I need to address is what's stopping Matt denying WPE access to that place where all the plugins and themes are published? Where does plugin-updates.wpengine.com get its content from, and how soon is Matt gonna block that? And an arms race of WPE needing to use proxies or other workarounds is not a business grade answer.
As I see things, either
1) the "WordPress community" that Matt thinks he's fighting for step up and tells him "No thanks, we absolutely do not want you to fight this fight" and removes him from power,
2) WPE wins the court case and a judge tells Matt "Nope, you're wrong about trademark law and you're wrong about the GPL and you are going to be held to the claims you made in the past about WordPress the software and WordPress the foundation and wordpress.org the software distribution and update service."
or
3) We are witnessing the start of the end of WordPress being trusted to run almost half of the internet.
nsonha
2 hours ago
Is the plugin repo open source? If so then similar to VS Code, the community can spin up their own marketplace.
dylan604
8 hours ago
Isn't that essentially what caused this kerfuffle? Someone forked it and the original guy got upset about the how/why of the fork?
threeseed
8 hours ago
It’s more that WP Engine is successful and hasn’t meaningfully contributed back to the Wordpress project.
Which I can sympathise with. But this isn’t what open source is about both legally and morally. And there are better ways to achieve this goal than by making a mockery of the Wordpress foundation and harming end users.
mtndew4brkfst
4 hours ago
Hearsay tells me they maintain a small fleet of Wordpress plugins, sponsor conferences, etc. Are those not meaningful contributions to the ecosystem?
nchmy
5 hours ago
The wordpress foundation has never been anything BUT a mockery. It doesnt do anything - it is a shell for Matt's trademark schemes and tax fraud
graeme
8 hours ago
No, no fork at all. There may be a fork though because of how erratically the founder is behaving
gradientsrneat
2 hours ago
> feels just as fake
I suspect some of the controversy is fake. I've heard one of the previous 404 articles, alleging Wordpress training AI on self-hosted Wordpress sites, is fake according a semi-trustworthy source.
Speaking based on my gut feeling, the fact that so many low-caliber Wordpress controversy articles are all arising in quick succession seems odd to me. Some allegations seem credible, but I question to what degree they are newsworthy, given all the other scummier things corporations and institutions do these days. Perhaps now that Wordpress and Tumblr are owned by the same company, Wordpress is now seen as a more valuable target to attack.
QQ00
9 hours ago
but what's better alternative aside from rolling your own CMS?
pembrook
8 hours ago
There’s a million standalone CMS’s (headless) and standalone site builders (ranging from pure technical to no-code to no-design) and even sitebuilders with robust CMS’s attached these days (eg. Webflow).
There’s zero reason to use Wordpress in 2024 imo.
doublerabbit
8 hours ago
> There’s zero reason to use Wordpress IMO in 2024.
Many folk, companies don't have the resources nor skillset to set up a LAMP equivalent for such.
If you want to be the next wonder-host for $CMS be my guest. I recommend Kirby. No database required and only uses text files for its backend.
dylan604
8 hours ago
don't write off those that setup a WAMP and then make it public facing. the time to get a LAMP setup running is pretty close to <1min after a simple double-click on an installer. getting a sane/secure LAMP setup running is an entirely different story that you did not specify as being a qualification.
doublerabbit
8 hours ago
What I was implying was the cost of services, who are you going to host with?
Cost of maintaining, whos going to keep up with latest CVEs?
Cost of domain, registrars, SSL certificates.
Cost of all adds up. A non-tech IT business has minimal resources for all of that. They want "pay $, click, it works". Not a dedicated IT worker to serve all of above.
If you take say a tutor, a bassist, they don't want all that overhead. They want a platform where they can advertise their tutoring costs, a contact form and be done with it. WP isn't ideal but it works.
For someone who can host WAMP/LAMP, fine. But for the average folk, it's not. There was a reason why WP gained popularity to begin with and it was because it was easy to adapt and junior PHP developers were plentiful, just as junior python developers are now.
wkat4242
6 hours ago
> If you take say a tutor, a bassist, they don't want all that overhead. They want a platform where they can advertise their tutoring costs, a contact form and be done with it. WP isn't ideal but it works.
Yeah and especially if they want to update it themselves. Wordpress makes that easy even for the non techies so the customer can do it themselves.
Of course the big Achilles heel of WordPress is the plugins and their vulnerabilities. So really you still need someone technical to keep it up to date, which is often forgotten.
lovethevoid
8 hours ago
Depends on what exactly you're getting out of Wordpress and what you dislike about wordpress. But Ghost, Strapi, Payload, and Craft are all really good CMS.
When it comes to e-commerce, Shopify. Or if open source and control is important to you, Saleor.
replete
7 hours ago
I personally think that the best alternative is statamic. I've built two large sites with it without touching a line of PHP. No themes or crazy plugin dependencies in the manner of Wordpress, so its a roll everything yourself type deal, but the data model building GUI is excellent. Not super interested in selling/explaining it, but certainly I would look into it as a viable alternative - it works how I think CMS's should work, incredibly refreshing after building websites for 20 odd years.
_heimdall
9 hours ago
There really aren't one-to-one replacements for WordPress and the whole ecosystem that comes with it.
I've actually been pretty happy with Pocketbase, though it really straddles the line of rolling your own CMS. You aren't technically writing the db wrapper or visual editor itself, but any functionality you need beyond authentication is up to you to build.
dylan604
8 hours ago
the only winning move is not to play
the funny thing is, to the vast majority of people that use WP, they won't even care if even know about all of the drama. even people that took some sort of WP bootcamp and earn a living managing other people's WP site probably are blissfully ignorant of this drama.
the people that might have some actual interest are the devs that create the various plugins/templates. but as someone else mentioned, if everything goes nuclear and everyone loses their damn minds, a more sane party can just fork the thing and call it something totally different without using the terms like "word" or "press".
bloppe
8 hours ago
I've used Vitepress for little blogs before. Git is the CMS. GitHub will even host it for free.
I cannot believe how much money people are will to pay for blog hosting.
prmoustache
8 hours ago
I am pretty sure the core business of wordpress hosting services isn't blog anymore but all purpose brand/companies websites.