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.

Beauty and the geek?

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.

Isn't that essentially what caused this kerfuffle? Someone forked it and the original guy got upset about the how/why of the fork?

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

I've enjoyed GravCMS [1], another php based CMS that used markdown for its content instead of a database.

For those interested in migrating away, I wrote an exporter from WordPress to Grav [2], which, given recent events, I've pulled back out and am updating again.

[1] https://getgrav.org/ [2] https://github.com/jgonyea/wp2grav_exporter

Basically any web programming stack offers a database editor/admin panel. Imagine a clean phpmyadmin with WYSIWYG editor and full/more control.

Imo it's easier to just roll a fresh rails project and use any admin gem than to write a custom theme for Wordpress

Publii (https://getpublii.com) is open source and super fast, without the need for PHP/MySQL.

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.

This take is ignorant. Automattic is the one going on the offensive, nobody is "attacking" them.

That has absolutely zero to do with PHP itself and everything with the abysmal state of Wordpress code.

Isn’t that a good thing to want though? Something easy to use if you only care about content?

Yes, very odd, since the class name for that new checkbox is even, "login-lawsuit".

He's appeared in several of related threads here on HN. He is always asked about his lawyers, and he repeatedly claims that they're cool with his behavior.

If I'm not mistaken both sides have hired some extremely prominent lawyers (Rachel Kassabian, Neal Katyal).

.org is not the WordPress Foundation, it's just a domain that Matt personally owns and that is managed under the umbrella of Automattic.

Yes, it's confusing.

Yeah, the WordPress foundation is just a façade to pay less taxes. If it were a true Foundation worried about its users Matt wouldn't do so much shit

A long-time WordPress pro friend got booted from the plugin team this morning.

Somebody should that video for Matt where slaps everyone - https://youtu.be/hHZvUeAdzeI?si=4TDBHjwCyK4BnijP

An "SEO Consultant"? You're using the word "contributor" very loosely.

If Wordpress cuts off all your security updates on a whim, and you suddenly have to support that code base...uh, that's a seismic problem.

> What's the risk? You own the code, and you aren't pre-committed to updating to any new versions in the future.

This isn't a static website we're talking about — WordPress is probably one of the most attacked web software in the world given its footprint.

WordPress doesn't do LTS releases or backports either.

And I very much doubt the other 91.6% are onboard with his actions. People just need their income.

At least — or six months salary, which is higher (and even substantially higher) than $30k for I’d guess most people leaving

Thought experiment: Linus is hired by Canonical, adds Ubuntu's kernel live-patching to the kernel itself and removes kexec from the public API surface. Or we pretend it never existed in the first place, and requests and patches to add it are ignored (quite common in commercial open source).

I know there's an extra layer in the WordPress situation, because Matt personally owns wordpress.org, but he very evidently uses that position to further the goals of Automattic.

People have asked for a way to host all the wordpress.org online services themselves. There isn't even a way to configure a different endpoint. I'm sure that'll change after today, in WordPress itself, or in a fork.

Mom and pop are the consumers/victims here. And if 46% of all websites are WordPress, it’s probably likely that it has a monopoly on sites in its domain (e.g. blogging, commerce)

It probably depends on which part of the Sherman act we are talking about.

Section 2, which covers "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce [...]" has been found by courts, I believe, to require 50% market share (or sometimes more) to apply.

But section 1, which applies to "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce [...]", does not as far as I've been able to tell have any market size threshold.

And work of the WP Engine developers would be directed by Wordpress.org, which is just Matt, not the foundation.

From https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-term-sheet.pdf:

Fee. In exchange for the License Grant, WP Engine shall do one of the following:

(a) Pay Automattic a royalty fee equal to 8% of its Gross Revenue on a monthly basis, within fifteen days of the end of each month. "Gross Revenue" means all revenue generated by WP Engine from the sale of its services, calculated without deductions for taxes, refunds, or other costs. WP Engine will also provide Automattic a detailed monthly report of its Gross Revenue within fifteen days of the close of each calendar month, including a product line breakdown of all revenues generated. Automattic will have full audit rights.

(b) Commit 8% of its revenue in the form of salaries of WP Engine employees working on WordPress core features and functionality to be directed by WordPress.org. WP Engine will provide Automattic a detailed monthly report demonstrating its fulfillment of this commitment. WordPress.org and Automattic will have full audit rights, including access to employee records and time-tracking.

(c) Some combination of the above two options.

I don't even think this is about money anymore. Matt may have started this cruzade for money, but at this point is just pettiness and refusal to backpedal.

> It's an invasive agreement designed to give his commercial entity a competitive advantage.

Given how much they sunk into the boat anchor that is Tumblr, and how well Tumblr is doing right now, I'm not surprised they need any competitive advantage they can get.

A WordPress fork without Gutenberg doesn't really work as an alternative for sites built in the last five years or so.

That is absolutely and factually incorrect.

Several of the most popular plugins are maintained by WPEngine.

WPEngine donates/sponsors hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to WordPress community events. Indeed, the convention where Matt went "nuclear" was sponsored by WPE to the tune of $75,000 (and despite these all being supposedly independent entities, somehow WPE was banned from attending by the Foundation. No refund, though).

> So if you're eager to volunteer to be their free labor, be my guest.

Matt is demanding that WPE provide his for-profit company, Automattic, free labor, to be directed as Automattic see fit. Not the Foundation, not the open source project.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't Wordpress open source? WPE is under no obligation to contribute source code or money. If WP is unhappy with the outcome, they should have released their product under a different license.

Yeah, that's unfortunate, but... how many companies contribute back to Next? React? Node? PHP? Postgres? Linux?

They don't get secretly blackmailed and publicly shamed for failure to do so. There are a lot of other WP hosts too (Pantheon, Cloudways, etc.) and they also don't get this same treatment, unless they all silently paid up and we just didn't know...?

Sure, there's a gentleman's understanding that companies with resources should contribute back to the projects they use, but it's not a hard and fast moral or legal code.

It's disturbing and frankly terrifying for all downstream WordPress companies and users for Matt to blow this so out of proportion to the actual crime of "failing to contribute back to open source", which so many of us are guilty of every single day.

Down with rent-seeking!

If a 'company' is just digital landlordism it's not surprising makers don't want to subsidize your free ride...

Its not about revision history. That's just one of 429 contradictory reasons that matt has given for why he's doing this. Dont take ANYTHING that guy says at face value - he's a psychopath

Youre absolutely right though - WP dot com is by far the worst offender of his own standards.

The foundation isn't even 'wordpress.org', it's 'wordpressfoundation.org'. The 'wordpress.org' site is wholly owned and managed by Matt (using Automatic resources from what he's said).

So, it's not just his dual role, it's his triple role.

That was after he made a personal post hating on WPEngine show up on all dashboard of all WPEngine customers.

I read the revisions are often turned off as they cause major issues with database performance. It is a standard feature of wordpress too but them turning it off by default triggered matt

I run a couple of WP instances on a shared hosting service (not WPEngine), and honestly I have no need for the admin news feed. If I knew how to turn it off I would.

That is a weird thing to get upset about.

> WordPress has recently updated their terms of use to reflect this.

That’s… a very odd way of portraying this.

The policy, for like a decade, was:

“The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1foknoq/the_word...

This is a bit of after the fact complaining. Matt invested in WPEngine for many years and it was a-okay then for them to use WP, and in fact WP's own terms said WP was a free to use term for everyone. That was only changed when the legal squabbles started.

The main legal issues are around using "WordPress" and "WooCommerce"

> Matt is also on record criticizing WP Engine for never having donated to the WordPress Foundation.

Donate, perhaps. Sponsor? The Foundation event where Matt "went nuclear" last month was sponsored by WP Engine to the tune of $75,000. And was one of many donations this year.

(Adding insult to injury, the "independent" Foundation banned WP Engine from attending the event they were sponsoring... because they were in dispute with Automattic.)

[dead]

Closer, but--since were already in nerdy nitpick mode here--"renounce" is like "quit" and suggests a distinct change of states. Many users will be technically incapable of "renouncing" WP Engine because they were never linked to it in the first place.

I’m a fan of “repudiate”. It’s got heft to it, like an antique pocket watch.

Try it.

"Please check this box if you want to proceed."

Who is paying the WP.org hosting bills? Is that coming from Matt? The Foundation? Automatic?

Nailed it - his body language is a) never normal and b) never agrees with what he's saying. He's trying to look innocent, folksy etc..., but he cant handle the dissonance.

Everybody sounds insane when they let themselves get involved in internet flame wars.

He's the Elon Musk of PHP.

Yep. And the value they have is _your data_. It'd be a similar situation if Zuckerberg was playing "fealty games" with who could and couldn't get an API key.

> if you rely on a service provided by another organization external to your organization, get an SLA! Get a contract that guarantees you the provision of services you depend on.

Getting "takers" to pay for SLAs/licences is pretty much what Automattic or whoever's behind WordPress dot org wants.

Could be advice from a legal counsel to limit access since they have filed a suit against you?

I imagine if I had a company that asked someone to chip to help cover bandwidth and server resources, and they refused to pony up, I would say you are going to be limited in your access - and this would be another way to limit it.

If someone setup a system to steal all youtube videos and republish them, would it be reasonable for Google to add a captcha and demand that they not use thier bandwidth or content in way they don't like? Would it be cool to have a login system similar if detected?

This is more about access to a site and those servers than it is about being able to clone and use WP code imho.