WordPress is in trouble

January 11, 2025

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.

On December 20th, Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org would be on holiday break for an unspecified amount of time. In a post on the WordPress.org blog, he again mentioned being “compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers”. He also invited people to fund legal attacks against him by signing up for WP Engine services, and hoped “time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year”.

This was the first time WordPress.org had ever gone on break, and it was another instance of Mullenweg using a core part of the WordPress community to send a message. WordPress.org returned to service on January 4th, but plugin and theme updates weren’t being reviewed during the holiday break. I’m all for giving volunteers breaks, but this came as a surprise to the community and there was initially no indication when the break would end. Mullenweg’s “woe is me” language around maybe, possibly, being able to find the resources to reopen a core piece of WordPress infrastructure didn’t help things. It further cemented that Matt Mullenweg’s current mood is an important function of whether or not the WordPress community operates smoothly.

While WordPress.org was on break, Mullenweg also reached out to the WPDrama community on Reddit, asking what drama he should create in 2025. A couple of years ago, this sort of thing would have been some tongue-in-cheek fun from a person who’s always been a bit of a goof. These days it comes off a bit differently.

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 also really doubt that 45 hours a week is enough time to keep WordPress secure and bug-free.

And you know what? In a normal world, that would be fine. I’d be all for it! If the community were to take control of the open source project, I think that would be ideal. 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.

Another thing that came to light yesterday was that the WordPress Sustainability committee was shuttered after a core member, Thijs Buijs, stepped down. In a post on the WordPress Slack, Buijs cited the “2025 drama” post on Reddit as the reason he was leaving, and called for a change in WordPress community leadership. In response, Mullenweg responded in part with “[t]oday I learned that we have a sustainability team”, and closed the channel.

The WordPress Sustainability Team had four core members, and 11 people who had contributed on GitHub. As far as I can tell, they were all community members, and none were Automattic employees. Even if it wasn’t producing amazing results, I can’t see what harm it was doing. The sin was pointing out something stupid that Mullenweg did, and having a member wanting change. The optics, especially given current world events, are definitely not great. The wildest part of this to me is that there’s video of Mullenweg — live on stage at Word Camp Europe in 2022 — requesting the creation of the Slack channel he was turning off. Guess that slipped his mind.

All of this bodes poorly for the open source version of WordPress. I think it’s perfectly fair for Automattic to switch gears and focus on for-profit projects — it’s a company after all. The problem is that there’s a void being left. Automattic had, for better or worse, lead the development of both the commercial and open source pieces of the WordPress ecosystem. Now it seems like the community needs to take over, but Mullenweg still holds all the keys.

In the announcement, Automattic said that WordPress.com would be updated to be more in line with the open source version of WordPress. This also makes sense to me, as WordPress.com has always been a weird version of the software. Of course, having slight differences to the core WordPress experience is the argument that Mullenweg initially used to call WP Engine a “cancer”, but who’s keeping track? I’d also like to point out again that Automattic invested in WP Engine in 2011. It also acquired Pressable in 2016, likely because it was a hosting service that offered a “real” version of WordPress, unlike WordPress.com.

It’s hard to see how to move forward from here. I think the best bet would be for people to rally around a 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. These recent events really make it seem like Mullenweg is much less interested in the ideals of open source than he used to be.