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Automation CEO and co-creator of WordPress Matt Mullenweg He disabled the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, two of whom he said planned to lead a new fork of the open source WordPress project.
While community criticism of WordPress governance is not new, the latest brouhaha began in September Mullenweg was publicly punished WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on top of WordPress, is for profit without giving much back. Things soon escalated (read all about it). here), in the WP Engine filing case It was later forbidden From access to the original WordPress resources, and then a court WordPress command to restore access.
Through it all, important people from within the wider WordPress community have stepped up. Just de Valk — creator of the WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and the former marketing and communications lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month Revealed his “Vision for a New WordPress Era”. where he discusses the potential for “federated and independent repositories”. Karim MaruchiCEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorites, echoed similar thoughts. A separate blog post.
WP Engine, meanwhile, Indicates it was on standby Lend a corporate hand.
Mullenweg, for his part, has Publicly support the idea A new WordPress fork – a term that describes when someone takes code from an open source project and creates a copy, which can take on a life of its own with a separate community of contributors.
sarcastically Blog post Published this morning, Mullenweg refers to de Valk and Marucci’s plan as a “fork,” although the two have not announced any such plans — de Valk, however, discussed the idea of ​​creating a federated “mirror” (copy of a repository). For themes and plugins among other changes.
“Having a mirror of WordPress.org doesn’t really solve the problem of a single party controlling our single update server,” de Valk wrote in his post last month. “For that, we need to make sure that those mirrors federate with each other, and share each other’s data and … allow independent themes and plugins to be hosted there.”
In a statement sent to TechCrunch, de Volk reiterated that they don’t plan to fork WordPress with Marucci anytime soon. Conveying the same message to X.
get the fork
Earlier this week, Automattic announcement It will reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine’s own contribution, a metric measured in weekly hours. This inspired de Valk Take it to X In an indication Friday that he intends to lead the next release of WordPress, Marucci added that his “The team is ready”
collectively, the falcon And morocco Contribute approximately 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, Mullenweg said that in order for their independent efforts to “push it off the ground,” he is deactivating their WordPress.org accounts.
“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or join their new endeavors in alignment with WP Engine,” Mullenweg wrote.
At the same time, Mullenweg revealed that he was deactivating the accounts of three others, giving little explanation: be read, Heather BurnsAnd Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it is worth noting, either President and CEO A newly incorporated non-profit to call D WP Community Collectivewhich is serving as “a neutral home for collaboration, contributions and resources” around WordPress and the wider open source ecosystem.
Barnes, a former contributor to the WordPress project, Took X this morning To add to the surprise at his deactivation, note that he has not been involved in the project since 2020. Bluesky, Rand-Hendricksen Recommended That Mullenweg was targeting him and Barnes because of their previous objections to governance at WordPress. He wrote:
So why is he? [Mullenweg] Targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking in 2017 about the need for good governance, accountability, conflict of interest and other issues. We both left the project in 2019 and apparently he still harbors a grudge
It’s worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents the user from contributing through that channel, whether to the original project or involving another plugin or theme. However, as it is Hosted on GitHub Also, someone can still access the code if they want to fork it.
In what was apparently a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, Mullenweg said that any new fork could be called “JKPress” and that they could hold a joint “WordPress + JKPress Summit” next year.
“Joost and Karim have some very bold and interesting ideas, and I’m really interested to see how they work out,” Mullenweg added. “The beauty of open source is that they can take anything GPL code in WordPress And ship their sight. You don’t need permission, you can just do anything. If they create something amazing, we can also integrate it back into WordPress, the ability to freely flow code and ideas between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation.”
This post has been updated to clarify that de Volk and Marucci did not say they planned a fork, and offered a suggestion to create mirrors for plugin and theme repositories, as well as a lead in the next release of WordPress..
