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CEO of Automattic and co-creator of WordPress Matt Mullenweg disabled the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, some of whom pushed for a new fork of the open-source WordPress project.
While community criticism of WordPress management is not new, the latest brouhaha began in September. Mullenweg was clearly punished WP Engine is a commercial hosting company built on top of WordPress for profit without much return. Things soon escalated (read all about it). here), with WP Engine file a claim after being is prohibited from accessing the main WordPress resources and then to the court Instructed to restore access to WordPress.
In the midst of it all, key figures in the wider WordPress community have stepped forward. Joost de Valk — Creator of the WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and past marketing and communications lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month He published his “Vision for the New WordPress Era”, points to a potential fork in the form of “federated and independent repositories”. Karim MarucciThe CEO of Crowd Favorite, a corporate web consulting firm, echoed these sentiments a separate blog post.
WP Engine He said he was on standby lend a corporate hand.
Mullenweg, in turn, has His opinion was supported by the public new WordPress fork — a term that describes someone taking code from an open source project and creating a copy that can continue its own life with a separate community of contributors. (It is also possible to merge such contributions back into the original project.)
Get a fork
Earlier this week Automattic announced WP Engine will reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to match its contribution, a metric measured in hours per week. This encouraged de Valk Take it to X In announcing his readiness to lead the next release of WordPress on Friday, Marucchi added that “the team is ready.”
Collectively, Falcon and Morocco Contribute approximately 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. But loaded with sarcasm blog post Published this morning, Mullenweg said he deactivated his WordPress.org accounts to “give his independent efforts a push to get off the ground.”
“I strongly encourage anyone interested in trying out different leadership models or aligning with the WP Engine to join their new endeavor,” Mullenweg said.
At the same time, Mullenweg announced that he had deactivated the accounts of three more people with little explanation: Be Reed, Heather Burnsand Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, worth noting president and CEO of a newly established non-profit organization he called the WP Community CollectiveIt is set to serve as a “neutral home for collaboration, contribution and resources” around WordPress and the wider open source ecosystem.
Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, drove to X this morning Expressing surprise at being deactivated, noting that he has not been involved in the project since 2020. About Bluesky, Rand-Hendriksen suggested Mullenweg targeted him and Burns for their previous objections to management at WordPress. He wrote:
So why is he (Mullenweg) targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for good governance, accountability, conflict of interest policy and other things back in 2017. We both left the project in 2019 and apparently he still holds a grudge.
It should be noted that disabling a WordPress.org account prevents affected users from contributing through that channel, either to the main project or to any other plugins or themes they may be involved with. However, as it is Hosted on GitHub also, anyone can fork the project.
In an apparent suggestion, Mullenweg said that any new fork could be called “JKPress” and that they might hold a joint “WordPress + JKPress summit” next year.
“Joost and Karim have some bold and interesting ideas, and I’m really interested to see how they work,” Mullenweg said. “The beauty of open source is that they can take it all GPL code in WordPress and communicate the vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do anything. If they create something awesome, we can even integrate it into WordPress, and the ability to freely move code and ideas between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation.”
