I wrote a piece yesterday about the recent WordPress drama, including this bit. A fun thing I learned while digging into it is that Mullenweg himself requested that the Slack channel for this team be set up live on stage at WordCamp Europe in 2022. When disbanding the team, Mullenweg said, “today I learned that we have a sustainability team”. Maybe he forgot, but setting up this team was — at least in part — his idea.
“WordPress is in trouble” depends on what “WordPress” is.
WordPress the supply chain is currently dependent on wordpress.org. The community is working to route around this by decentralising distribution - see efforts such as AspirePress.
WordPress the software development project is dependent on wordpress.org, and there is no way to route around this unless Matt agrees to give up his DFL position or a fork is created.
WordPress the brand is being tarnished, mostly by Matt’s actions. wpdrama creates a riskier environment when assessing whether to use it as a CMS.
WordPress the community is being denigrated and diminished. Again, I think only a change in governance can resolve that.
Embarrassing behavior for someone that became wealthy off other peoples' open-source contributions.
Dude has gone full Elon at this point. Why hasn’t WP 86’d this guy?
Matt controls the WordPress foundation, owns and operates wordpress.org, is CEO of Automattic, and votes 84% of its stock (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150). AFAICS, there's no one who has the means to remove him.
I think even Elon is looking more normal than Matt at this time
I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team" was, so I clicked the link to the linked website in this story. I was surprised that it was in fact an initiative to do things like "have a dashboard that shows the climate impact of publishing" and "promote static publishing over..." I assume because serving this content (under someone's model) uses less electricity?
Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.
> Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.
This was costing Matt nothing. Zero.
The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.
> I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team"
You still don't.
LLMs use about 1000X the resources of the most poorly designed WP site. The best thing that the WP Sustainability Team can do is retask itself to higher impact problems.
> Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher has described Matt Mullenweg’s move to shut down WordPress’s sustainability team as “bizarrely heinous behavior.”
Is it bizarrely heinous? Or is it just kind of bad? I enjoy WordPress drama, and run a couple of lazy WordPress services, but I don't think that this is actually worth all the spilt ink and tears, relative to all the other injustices a person might choose to concern themselves with.
I was more struck by the fact that the author thinks anyone would or should care what some random tech journalist thinks about something. Person has opinions, news at eleven.
Sounds like he just created a Slack channel where people could chit-chat about "sustainability" much like they chat about football or ESports.
Then he found out these guys actually spend all their working lives implementing plugins that do little more than display "Your site needed 0.04663kg of CO2 to run this year" next to a green leaf.
Seeing how they spent 1,5 years on this and have little more to show than "concepts of a plan" he was right to shut this down.
> spend all their working lives
These were volunteers.
> Seeing how they spent 1,5 years
They didn't.
> he was right to shut this down.
Ignorance is a choice.
One could argue the sustainability team was disbanded in the name of sustainability.
He's been doing so much more: https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
Again, I hold no sympathy for Silver Lake, but I hope they fuck him up good.
> …Mullenweg threatening to physically dismantle their booth in the middle of the show
This is crazy if true.
> “Today I learned that we have a sustainability team,” Mullenweg said.
If this is true: Is there any possible explanation for such a statement where leadership comes out unscathed?
It looks like it was originally just a channel on Slack, that eventually evolved into a “team” without Mullenweg paying much attention to it.
The Sustainability agenda , quoted by the article, appears excessive to me as well - and it resonates with me why Mullenweg is asking for a different approach.
With the dramas going on, shutting down the channel was a dick move , though.
This still reflects badly on the leader:
- Stuff going on you're not aware of?
- Things spiraling out of control/becoming self-directed?
- You forgetting what you did or said a few months/years ago, and getting mad on others in consequence?
- Your intentions not well understood?
All of this is on you (the leader). That's reason for resignation.
The behavior around it is just childish IMO. I wonder how this affects him being able to do his job.
> - You forgetting what you did or said a few months/years ago, and getting mad on others in consequence?
Forgetting? That’s a lot of good faith on your part. Where in the time of people denying everything even with undeniable video/audio evidence and their target audience believes them. If you don’t believe then you were not the target audience and are irrelevant
> All of this is on you (the leader). That's reason for resignation.
Bingo. If someone wants to be the leader, then they have to deal with leadership. That means that everything going on under your leadership is your responsibility. We've let this slide as a society, letting leaders take credit for successes and then blaming others for failures.
He himself clearly showed it's a lie as he admitted on Threads that he started said team. Utterly bizarre.
> If this is true
It's not true. It's a blatant lie, as the embedded video in the article proves.
Mullenweg's behavior is poor, yes, but I wonder how much that will affect Wordpress's market presence. The average person who would use the service isn't likely to hear about any of this.
I've been building websites on WordPress for 15+ years, run a WordPress agency and have many clients who come to us specifically asking for us to use WordPress. I'm seriously considering moving to something else because we use the WP Engine plugin Advanced Custom Fields (pro version) and him pulling the free version from the plugin repo in a hissy fit has made me seriously concerned about the stability of the ecosystem if one guy can do something like that in a fit of pique.
I'm curious what you'd consider moving to. Managed Wix/Squarespace? Ghost, maybe? I honestly haven't dug into that world in many years, I don't know what it looks like these days.
Unless you're at a theme chop shop, then you might as well move onto greener pastures. There are so many alternatives now for website control panels like Wagtail, Payload, and Craft CMS.
No, mostly ground-up custom built themes. I've tried Craft and found it pretty convoluted (althought that might just be familiarity), but will be looking at Wagtail. Still hoping that WP can pull out of the tailspin because it's going to be a huge headache to switch.
ACF is very easily replaced. WPEngine is one of a million WordPress hosts. Move your sites to a company that isn't run by PE shitheads.
This is far too dismissive. We don't use WP Engine for hosting, we only use the ACF plugin. I'm guessing you don't run a WordPress agency. ACF is not "very easily replaced" because we've built the site data structures around it and we'd have to completely rearchitect the sites - at our own cost. "Moving our sites" is not easy either because we have 100+ sites, each of which would involve DNS updates (which we often have to walk our clients through because they don't understand DNS at all) and a complete reconfiguration of our build / deploment process. I don't really understand the motivation behind this comment.
Ah yes, the specific structure of WPE's ownership is sufficient reason to move away from them -- but the behaviour and structure of WP's ownership isnt...
He's making the ecosystem generally unstable and there are a lot of businesses that depend on that stability.
Probably enough to notice, but not in a way that threatens the company to continue operating profitability.
The latest childish tantrum Mullenweg has thrown is this passive-aggressive post where, ostensibly to get a Wordpress fork off the ground, he's deactivated the Wordpress.org accounts of 5 people, including the people who just asked for a change in the governance model of Wordpress. That entire post is a huge ball of bitter passive-aggressive shit couched in "howdy" language. [1]
This includes the account of someone who has not been involved with Wordpress development since 2020. [2] [3]
[1] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
[2] https://heatherburns.tech/2025/01/12/another-day-of-stochast...
Wordpress is more of an OS today.
I took a 12 years hiatus from WP and just went back into actively using it since a couple of weeks now.
The shift went clearly into massive plugins that frees you from all the grunt work that was necessary 10+ years ago.
To me as someone who once wrote plugins on my own, had to develop themes totally by hand using the infamous WP loop etc. this is like going from command line to drag and drop UI.
WP is a OS and Divi, ThriveTheme etc. took over.
I like it, it saves a ton of time.
It saves a ton of time creating. It wastes a lot of time maintaining and cleaning up infections and debugging poor performance.
Is like Dreamweaver but you have to run Dreamweaver all the time your site has visitors and an instance of Dreamweaver for each visitor.
> citing a Reddit thread Mullenweg created on Christmas Eve asking for suggestions to create WordPress drama in 2025.
When it comes to Mullenweg, I am always impressed that there is often some worse behaviour mentioned in the article...
Person exhibiting textbook traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder for years goes into mental meltdown, gets sued and loses preliminary injunction. It's only downhill from there.
> It's only downhill from there.
I just hope it's over quickly and some other ownership model comes into place. WordPress is an impressive & important project, it'd be a shame to lose it because of one lunatic.
TLDR; Mullenweg made a poorly received joke/trolling post on Reddit on Christmas. It could have been perceived as reconciliatory /self deprecating or trolling depending on your perspective. That was the straw in the camel’s back that led the sustainability chief to resign. Mullenweg then disbanded the entire sustainability team which he announced by taunting them on slack.
Yet another Trump win cascade.
Better to prepare for more. Some did it out of conviction. But as we saw with FB the ones that did for other reasons are going to back pedal
When the tide goes out, you can see who's been swimming naked.