I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental breakdown. It’s a sad situation and there’s a lot to learn about open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him should seriously consider an intervention. I can’t believe after two decades he’d just decide to throw it all out in a blazing fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpress) because of some valuation drop or being short on money. I think the dude needs help, and people close to him should try and talk sense into him.
I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only list products that run their billing through Shopify and give Shopify a 15%+ share of all associated revenue.
He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab partner, not of an establish business that helped build the internet as we know it.
Lots of executives at big companies can be petty though, it's nothing new when one is in power and surrounds themselves with yes men. It doesn't mean they're necessarily having a breakdown at all.
What you've observed, quite accurately, is that our bar for emotional intelligence when it comes to corporate executives is the same that we expect from ten-year olds.
Respectfully, it's not. Serious businesses take EQ seriously.
This feels very "no true scotsman" to me. It's accurate if none of the large places I've worked are "serious".
At best, "serious" businesses (which I take to mean large, successful ones) pretend to take EQ seriously.
Engaging with reality as directly as possible is important in business. Emotions are a part of reality, usually a signal about social dynamics.
At the higher levels of serious companies — by which I mean ones trying to win in the market, regardless of size - managers and executives regularly receive training about this.
I can’t say more because this is my alt, but: “executives are childish”, “executives are psychopaths”, etc. are very common, often incorrect narratives. If anything executives should be straightforward and simple.
To return to topic: something is going seriously sideways with Matt, and I wish him the best.
> If anything executives should be straightforward and simple.
Except they almost NEVER are, in fact, the most common trait shown by executives is dishonesty.
But there is every possibility that they were always going to do this.
Wouldn't be the first time a commercial/open source company dedicated the majority of their resources to the commercial side.
sure it’s petty but i still feel that wp engine kinda sucks here
it's somewhat valid though, why continue providing free code for wp engine to resell when wp engine doesn't contribute to open source themselves?
wp engine has also bought out multiple competing hosts, so they're a direct competitor with deep pockets
> wp engine doesn't contribute to open source themselves
At minimum they contribute Advanced Custom Fields, one of the most heavily used plugins. I make no judgement on if they contribute enough, but it's not like they give zero back to the ecosystem.
it's not for you to decide, but for Automattic to decide how much contribution is needed for them to allow you to use their services.
the code of WP is free software. free-as-in-freedom.
the services are not, and never were... they were free-as-in-beer.
RMS taught us about this, and it comes in handy again.
I don't recall voicing an opinion either way. In fact I specifically said I don't know if it's enough, but saying they contribute nothing is factually incorrect. And no lack of contribution would justify taking over ACF in what is essentially a supply chain attack like they did.
The contribute to the ecosystem, a little to the WP code, but use for free the services that Automattic provides.
It's the services that they got cut-off from. They are separate things that to the layman are seen as "wordpress".
> I don't recall voicing an opinion
Well, you mention they contribute to the ecosystem. If it is not your supply chain, you cannot dictate how it is run. You call it an attach, they call it a commercial endeavour.
If "free code" being resold is the issue, then Matt's eve worse of a freeloader, since most of the code in WordPress was provided for free by people not employed by Matt.
> most of the code in WordPress was provided for free by people not employed by Matt
Automattic previously spent ~4k hours a week maintaining wordpress, so I'm not sure what you're on about
Matt's a known liar, and that 4000/hours a week includes a lot of stuff that doesn't involve working on code. (For example, Matt is including time spent censoring the WP forums, and harassing event sponsors in that time.) Given that the bulk of the WordPress team quit last year, I'd be surprised if they're even spending a 100 hours/week as a company right now on anything related to code right now.
But if we're going by hours...the WP Community as a whole probably spent several hundred thousand hours on maintaining or improving WP last week.
> I'd be surprised if they're even spending a 100 hours/week as a company right now.
Even if half the staff quit (they didn't) they'd still have hundreds of employees...
You seriously don't think they had 4 people working on Wordpress full-time?
The staff that quit was the staff that worked on WP. Almost none of the remaining employees worked on it, so yeah I would not be surprised if only 4 people are working on it now and that's the real cause of Matt pulling back on their WP work.
I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you justify something like this https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this fit in?
I'll be honest: I think it's pretty funny, and I think matt probably agrees. Also, as others mention, it's much easier/faster then removing the field and column and validation, yes.
And I wouldn’t want to work with you or Matt. We can behave like adults and I don’t get paid enough to deal with this kind of immaturity.
Here is an alternate possibility
1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine"
2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course
3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes.
Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate narratives
No reasonable developer, given the requirement “remove this checkbox as required by a court order”, would respond by changing it to “I love pineapple on pizza”. There are so many other things that could be possibly done instead: just remove it, hide it with CSS, change it to a “<input type=hidden />”, or change the text to “please check the box” if it was really so hard to remove. I can’t imagine any lone developer or product manager being so petty that they would risk their job to spite a court order. The checkbox is only there because someone higher up wants it to be there.
Lol, this is like every bad stereotype about the general quality of WordPress websites: "Getting rid of a checkbox is too technically complicated, so let's just change the text instead to something completely nonsensical."
I actually find your explanation even less believable than this being a symptom of a crazy person (which I don't necessarily believe it is either).
You can easily verify this wasn't the case by checking archive.is and seeing that the checkbox was removed for a day before the new one was added or checking stories and comments on what happened or looking at the commit history since the repository is open source.
If there were no facts in evidence, it your alternate possibility would still not be plausible since there's no reason the person wouldn't hide the checkbox if they didn't want to delete it but there's also no reason not to just delete it since removing it from the client is as much of a code change as changing the text.
The WPEngine checkbox was removed late in the week, and replaced with the pineapple question after the weekend.
Developers on WordPress.org have stated that the value was not stored, and still is not stored. Matt also said he didn't care if you checked it or not.
WordPress isn't as legacy as those platforms for whom "too hard to change the functionality, just change the text" is common.
That's likely to corrupt the database backend, which now appears to store old "non WP Engine" affirmations in the same location as new "pineapple pizza" affirmations. How will they be able to distinguish?
I don't think the purpose of the checkbox was to collect useful data but an any case storing it as a date would probably solve the issue.
You're assuming they actually care to distinguish. But real answer, barring a brief period where some users may get a cached version, they can likely just use the date of change to determine before and after if necessary.
No, the server-visible name has changed.
3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes.
To some nonsense about pineapple on pizza? Are there any adults left?
Maybe the engineer was debating a LLM on the merits of pineapple on pizza and didn't clear the context history before requesting a code change.
not only would i say this is a possible explanation, i would say it is the obvious explanation - and pretty ridiculous to accuse someone of having a mental breakdown based on this
I fear you are right. Remember they ask $25/monthly for 1 website on pressable, I can run Wordpress open source for 5x month on Linode, and there are ready made installation on docker, digital ocean and so on…
Pressable includes support, global caching, and a bunch of other things you won't get on a $5/month VPS. Also not everyone wants to play system administrator 7 days a week to keep their server from getting hijacked or nuked.
True, but shared hosting providers (like hostinger) offers basically the same, but for cheaper and no pricing per website, even on cheaper plans you can fit five or more sites in.
Of course, it doesn't matter in the end - as long as users have ability to choose a hosting there will be cheaper and "better" options. Shopyfing wordpress would be worse...
There’s value to users in using a service that’s the same as the software. Trust is worth it to consumers. It’s why many still prefer to take their cars to the dealer rather than an Indy shop
I've had 3 cars totaled by dealers and none totaled by indy shops. One was actually messed up by them beyond repair. One was messed up and they wanted more to fix it well beyond the replace cost. The final one just wanted well beyond the replace cost, and I got it fixed for much much less at an indy shop.
Just find a good indy shop. there's a great one 2 blocks from my house at a gas station. discusses all repairs with you, good on preventive maintenance, 1/4 the price of a dealer. Will tell you what repairs you actually need to do and what you don't. Also easier to schedule and pick up and drop off. I have to wait at the mega dealer near me like 15-30 minutes at drop off and pick up. At least the toyota one will let you defer your car wash instead of waiting for it longer. At the gas station I drop the car in the lot and drop the keys in a mailbox. For pickup I go in any day till 10 and pay like I'm buying an energy drink, grab the keys and walk out to the lot to grab it.
So they throw Cloudflare in front of it and get defaced yearly. I've worked for companies (thankfully not in a position dealing with the website) that did just that. Somehow they're even still around a decade later. To be fair though that was actually Bluehost, not a VPS.
That implies you need to dedicate the 5 bucks a month per instance, when you look at how much things are write once and cacheable as heck, you could easily get customers down to pennies per instance per month.
You may be right. Come to think of it, until this drama, the only "community" I believed exists around Wordpress is the network of small businesses specialized in Wordpress hosting, maintenance and consulting for other small businesses. I personally know someone running a sole proprietorship, whose entire income over past ~decade came from such Wordpress jobs.
It might be that this will be the only "community" that remains going forward.
The only interaction i have with wordpress is sleazy small consultancies selling it to clueless mgmt as the magic solution to all their problems. I really have never had a positive impression of wordpress due to this.
I can't even remember all the times I've been suckerpunched with "hey we hired these people to implement <magic wordpress> and its not going so well. They tell us its because our systems are bad and our employees are not doing things right. Can you get with them and see what the <Insert Manager speak for blames you> seems to be....?
ME: The problem is they are some hack shop that "sold you" and bit off more than they could chew and they also don't have a clue about systems integrations.
MGMT: Nope the problem is our employees that have been working here getting "Exceeds expectations" on reviews that are the problem. We have no explanation for why though... So we are hiring McKinsey to come in and do a department evaluation to find out.
One thing to keep in mind, WordPress being open source was an afterthought. It inherited a GPL from b2/cafelog.
If Matt woke up one morning and decided he wanted to make WordPress closed source, he couldn't. But what he could do is force everyone to pay a license fee for the name, and anyone who did not pay he publicly makes hell for them. You could also pretend to encourage them to fork, knowing full well they would be bound by a GPL just like him.
This is actually a very successful business strategy and even has a name: racketeering.
He drives the project long enough that probably no b2 code remains. He could have prepared and take a contributor agreement or some other measures to allow relicensing.
Question however is, whether auch a scheme would have made WordPress successful, or if it thrives from the community, where many assumed that everybody plays on the same field via GPL.
He can also just stop open sourcing his company's work on the product. WordPress is GPL, not AGPL, so they can make any changes you want and use them on Automattic's platforms without ever releasing code to the community again.
Using the GPL is not racketeering. Why would any user expect more rights than a contributor?
I don't understand your point about forking, yes they'd have the GPL but so what? They can control their fork from then on, it doesn't matter if they have to continue open sourcing contributions, in fact it'd be preferable to whatever Matt is doing.
I think you underestimate the work it takes to maintain and more importantly grow such a large open source project. If wp engine can barely contribute today, what are the chances they want to take on the whole thing. Nope they just want to get rich off open source. That's understandable , they are a for profit after all. But at what point does it make sense to give back in terms of either money or time to make improvements to the ecosystem that you depend on.
I agree with Matt's ideals but not the actions. The reality is theres not a whole lot he can do without looking like spoilt kid taking his ball away from the game.
One reason that Reddit's API changes killing the best clients was so poisonous is that the resulting non-exodus showed other companies that they can take user-hostile actions with impunity. A big enough mass of passive and undiscerning users will stay no matter what. Hence there being more freedom to take a strategy like this.
I think Reddit's API changes and more did lead to an Exodus of a good chunk of power users that gave the site more of an identity. But what's worse is the official Reddit clients gamify using Reddit so much that, on the whole, content quality is down significantly, even in the smaller niche subreddits that usually had great stuff. The problem is high quality content isn't profitable, endless scrolling is.
People keep saying this but I haven't noticed any drops in quality. The default subs have always been bad, and the niche subs continue to be good, in my experience. Do you have any specific examples?
Very insightful, didn’t think about Reddit’s incentive to promote low effort garbage over quality content
As someone who has been ingesting a high volume of reddit "content" for the better part of 3 years - the spam/bot problem is _wild_.
I've implemented a handful of methods to detect 'networks' of these bots/spammers/karma farming accounts and, from the subreddits I'm monitoring, it's _more than half_ of the total accounts posting to them. This is across subreddits of all types, sizes and topics. Massive subs, regional subs, local subs, they're all completely inundated with these accounts - and these are the ones that make it through Reddit's own spam detection and whatever each subreddit has in place to handle moderation. These are the posts that do go public, more than half of the _accounts_ I've determined are spam/karma farming/bots. It's an even greater proportion of the _posts_ that belong to these accounts. (Thus, there are more spammers than "real" users, and they're posting more than the "real" users)
And this is with rather elementary methods of determining "spam" from "real" users/content. Those spammers who aren't being very lazy can pretty easily slide through my filters. (I'm detecting 'duplicates' of images and post titles/account descriptions using perceptual hash/simhash and hamming distance only - I'm rolling out text/image vector embedding based duplicate detection now and the numbers are even worse with this in place but I don't have it properly tuned yet) They're literally just re-posting the same content that successful/high karma accounts have previously posted en masse across as many subreddits as they can find/aren't banned from and it's wildly effective.
What's crazy to me is that many of them are in the 6 and 7 digits of karma - obviously spam accounts with > 1,000,000 karma is wild.
It seems to me that Reddit has zero interest in controlling this. Some might argue this is confirmed by the lack of moderation tools available to subreddit mods (which was ultimately the motivation of me building this system - but when they changed the API stuff I changed my goals/intention with it).
This is making the big assumption that power users add to the quality of the site instead of the quantity.
The problem is there communities are hard to build and easy to destroy.
Reddit destroying its user communities causes real damage. Those users don't magically congregate somewhere else.
Reddit has been user hostile since 2014. It's just that as long as you hurt one part of the community the other parts hate you're fine.
The mods are universally hated on reddit and they were the ones most impacted by the changes. The average user either didn't notice or stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.
> The average user... stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.
Still happens, you're just not allowed to talk about it. /r/bannedforbeingjewish (which collated this) is banned,[1] but to give an example, /r/interestingasfuck (13 million subscribers) bans users that are members of /r/Israel.[2]
What's weird is the subs that will ban you for simply commenting in another sub, especially for just one comment, even if your comments are contrary to the theme of the sub.
When r/thedonald was around, I would debate misconceptions americans had about politics in Denmark from time to time (no we're not socialist). And of course I would get banned left and right (but mostly left), and would get the "you post in thedonald, ergo I win"-line regularly.
Reddit was a trash heap then, and it's gotten exponentially worse since. Why anyone go there voluntarily is beyond me. It contains nothing of value.
If you like British panel shows (or any version of taskmaster) then /r/panelshow is pretty great. Not much chatter, but then again, maybe that's part of the appeal lol.
That subreddit could basically not be further from the ones I frequent. There are some ok cycling ones, relatively low traffic, not many people, good content - and especially not only typical computer nerds.
Tech support for niche issues is pretty good there.
Let’s be super clear, [2] does not ban the user for being Jewish as per [1] claims.
There is no way for the mod/bot to know this rather. It is clearly spelt out in the terms.
“You have been banned for participating in a bad-faith subreddit (specifically Israel) which brigades other subreddits and spreads propaganda/disinformation/racism/sexism.”
Personally I don’t use Reddit that much, so I can speak to if this statement is true or not, the mods however do think it is.
There's no other nationality in the world where commenting in the subreddit devoted to that country results in being automatically banned from other subreddits.
I am not surprised. With the amount of misinformation that is produced and disseminated from the highest levels of israeli society. See my other posts on 1) Zionism = racist / supremacist ideology 2) misinformation 3) links to a documentary demonstrating how people are being awakened to the truth (and how they realise they have been lied to) Israelism film on YouTube 4) psyops campaigns both against their own citizens , and Americans etc.
> undiscerning users will stay no matter what
That's one take.
Another is: ecosystem partners are often surprised what users actually value. We all like to think that our contributions are critical, but the Reddit example shows a huge disconnect between the value 3P partners thought they were delivering and what users actually valued.
You're making it sound like Reddit was unusable without API/client in the past though. I'd never used a Reddit client before I started using it at all on mobile. I bet a good chunk of users (esp casually browsing, or frequenting exactly one niche subreddit) just used the web.
Not saying it wasn't user hostile or sucked, it just doesn't match the experience I had (or when I talked to some people).
Reddit is not GPL so while hostile it’s incomparable to WordPress core. The user base of Reddit would have to rewrite from scratch. Wordpress can and will be forked if it comes to it. There are enough businesses relying on it that it would be worth it to re govern it under an alternate name.
People care about content, apis less so, unfortunately.
I've found that the API changes improved the subreddits I was in because it made it harder for spambots to operate. Reddit got away with the changes because ultimately the power users were a tiny fraction of its userbase, and they were using clients that hid the ads so Reddit wasn't making any money from them so Reddit didn't care about their wants.
There is no “we” here. It’s a man making arbitrary decisions about pineapple on pizza. There is no plan and the watch and drawn out nature is indicative of someone reacting to events rather than implementing a plan.
I have 20 years in WP and B2. This is tragic. He needs to be removed or the platform will die making a huge repository of knowledge valueless.
I would hope that this would cause more people to realize that allowing total control of the things you use to be centralized in one person (or business) is bad, but well... quite similar things have happened to plenty of other open source projects before.
Perhaps more indicative of late stage capitalism where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power.
WP engine is pretty obviously the “rent seekers” in this situation. hard to be a rent seeker if you actually built the software
No, pretty easy actually. You can sit and seek rent on something you built.
That's not what "rent seeking" means. Rent seeking is the term for manipulating institutions, customs or laws for the purpose of extracting money without creating anything.
I think the distinction is generally about not creating anything that's broadly useful, putting up a tollbooth but then not using any of the collected toll to improve the road, say. [1]
the reason the rent seeking concept isn’t popular in contemporary classical economics (beyond the partisan association) is that it is pretty ill-defined.
but i think you would be hard pressed to find a scenario where Automattic is the rent-seeker and WP engine is not, given that Automattic both contributed to WP and is actively using their revenue to improve WP, whereas WP engine… isn’t.
Didn't WPE release some of the most popular WP plugins of all time? Advanced Form Fields etc? How is that not contributing to the ecosystem?
I'm not sure it's logically consistent to attack the phrase "rent seeeking" as unclear, then apply it anyway (?!) but muddle the word "contributing" in turn, to reach pre-desired conclusions about which party is at fault. You'll have to clarify for me what branch of neo-classical economics is concerned with assigning fault. Seems entirely removed from economics for me.
More broadly, we're not discussing any of this in the context of "contemporary classical economics" (ie right of centre economics), so I have no idea why you think we'd agree on using those definitions, or why those definitions have pride of place over any others.
How is this unique to "late stage capitalism"? That same sentence can be used mad lib style for any human endevor.
>Perhaps more indicative of ________ where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power
Feudal Europe Roman patrician class British Raj Ming dynasty bureaucrats Latin American drug cartels etc
Point being that the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation
> "late stage capitalism"
The term is 100 years old and was created to refer to everything after WWI. I don't think people using the term would actually subscribe to the idea that human development under capitalism peaked in the 1910s.
Furthermore, the entire concept was developed as a justification for the Nazi party and their economic ideas. Which I think is justification enough that people should stay away from lazy, doomy political tropes.
Don't argue with me about definitions, I'm trying to explain what I think the GP meant and why `the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation` is incorrect.
Capitalism-imperialism: a system based on endless growth and expansionism, where the proletariat in the imperial core is pacified by the crumbs the capitalist give it from the plunder of the colonies; the crumbs also allow the proletariat to buy the goods and services, thus maintaining demand, sort of.
Late stage capitalism-imperialism: the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed, there is nowhere left to expand, except inward, so the capitalists start cannibalizing the proletariat in the imperial core by giving it less and less crumbs, in order to achieve even higher rates of profit; to remain in power, while the masses see their quality of life decline / starve, they need to consolidate more and more power. More than the absolute monarchs ever had.
> the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed
that same sentence canNOT be used to describe any human endeavor in any other epoch. We are in the anthropocene now.
okay sure, going back and forth on definitions is boring.
I just disagree that late stage capitalism imperialism is where we're at. It's not true for the US, or the west or the globe.
Yes we're in the anthropocene, and while that phrase has a negative implication nowadays, it is not true that anthropocene means "low hanging resources" have been consumed leading to uncontrolled rent seeking. It is no more true than a barracuda lurking in a coral is an out of control rent seeker. That's just the nature of barracudas.
Do you know an economic system in the real world that doesn't have this problem?
We spent most of the last 70-years doing a pretty good job of aggressively sabotaging and suppressing any efforts to develop alternative economic systems. Even the few successes one might claim for communism are largely dependent on some kind of concession to allow for capitalism in limited areas. This doesn’t necessarily mean that capitalism is inherently superior, it’s just dominant.
The problem as I see it isn’t simply capitalism=bad, it has produced the greatest expansion of wealth in history after all, but rather it’s just not equipped to be the answer for everything. There are problems and opportunities that exist where capitalism does not have a solution for. Things like healthcare, equitable wealth distribution, and environmental sustainability are the obvious examples that come to mind.
These false dichotomies and unnecessarily tribalistic positions where pure devotion to free market capitalism is demanded are hobbling American society and its ability to maintain stability and take care of its citizens, since every attempt to suggest that some industries should be at least partially socialized, or even mildly regulated, are met with demagoguery and fear mongering. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening here, I am speaking in broad terms.
> These false dichotomies and unnecessarily tribalistic positions where pure devotion to free market capitalism is demanded are hobbling American society and its ability to maintain stability and take care of its citizens, since every attempt to suggest that some industries should be at least partially socialized, or even mildly regulated, are met with demagoguery and fear mongering.
The trouble here is that this is a misunderstanding of what free markets are supposed to be.
The idea of a free market is, if you have an oligopoly which is charging high margins and ripping people off, do you a) break up the cartel and restore competition in order to bring down margins, or b) impose price controls or otherwise regulate the oligopoly while leaving it intact. The premise of free markets is that you do the first one and not the second one.
The problem we have is that you often have one party saying "don't do either of them" and the other party saying "do the second one" and then the first one doesn't happen even though it's the thing you want. The premise here is free market competition, not free market monopolization.
You have a different problem with things like pollution. That isn't something markets are expected to solve, in the same way as you don't expect them to prevent theft or homicide. The problem then is, how do you solve the problem? "Have the government do it" is under-specified. The Soviet Union did not have a sterling environmental record. Outcomes and efficiency both matter, so you can't just give it to some unaccountable bureaucrats or they'll simultaneously drive up the cost of everything with red tape, fail to prevent the pollution, and get captured by incumbents who use the red tape to lock out competitors. So how do you apply competitive pressure to politicians? Maybe change the voting system, e.g. use approval/score/STAR instead of first past the post so you can have more than two viable political parties. Or stop trying to do everything federally and hand more back to the states, so we can have back the laboratories of democracy and have 50 chances to find the right balance instead of just one.
Late stage capitalism is almost indistinguishable from a mental disorder, though.
Eh. Aquia tried a similar stunt with Drupal (centralize all the tings at the community's expense) and that hasn't exactly been a rousing success. I don't have a great feel for how dependent upon the larger dev community the WordPress ecosystem is so maybe it'll work for them?
If was running a major site that depends on Wordpress , or am an agency that makes use of Wordpress extensively I would be very concerned. Irrespective of who is right/wrong, Matt’s actions come across as rash, irrational , and reactive.
Definitely not the type of leader I would want to be leading an open source project I depend on.
From a risk analysis perspective, this would make me question if wp is fit for my company. If the ceo/leader can behave in this way , what are the risks he pulls similarly self destructive moves that jeopardises my sites?
I am have no bone in this fight, I dropped wp back In 2010, due to the multitude of issues with plugins, themes and security. It was easier(and more secure) to roll an app with django/rails.
Though, I think if you are using Wordpress. Either look for alternatives , or look to a fork with better governance.
If Wordpress no longer receives security updates, tons of sites will have to be migrated. Many are not economically efficient to migrate, and will be lost. Given the scope of that ecosystem, this is an extinction event for the Web.
I think "breakdown" is the wrong word: he's always been this way. I think he may have Borderline Personality Disorder. The behavior Matt is engaging in here is called "emotional dysregulation", which is characteristic of BPD, and he has a long history of doing it whenever he faces even the slightest criticism.
In 2010, he attempted to get Ben Cook fired from his day job for writing an essay criticizing his dual role as head of both Automattic and the Wordpress Foundation. Over the last few years, he has waged a disproportionate war against queer users on Tumblr for lightly criticizing his leadership.
Don't forget the time Matt allegedly attempted to extort the WPEngine CEO into coming to work for him [1]
1: https://www.therepository.email/wp-engine-sues-automattic-an...
He has investors to answer to. He has an over evaluation that unless he grows the value of his company he’s screwed. He’s trying to pull in revenue and he’s destroying a competitor to take their customers.
According to crunchbase, Automattic has taken just shy of $1B in funding. Yes, that's a B as in billion.
I wonder where those investors are on returns on that investment and the kinds of changes they want to get them.
> unless he grows the value of his company he’s screwed
What are the consequences, exactly?
I suspect they gave him a timeline to IPO and/or sell or he's kicked out as CEO. His recent actions are those of a man with a deadline and nothing to lose.
Assuming that is the case: WordPress the company only needs to stay stable and valuable until everything goes through; if it burns down after that he's still met his obligations (to an extent).
If you invest in a company and it’s valued at $1,000,000. And you want to make some money. You sell your investment in the company.
If after 5 years revenue doesn’t grow the value is still $1,000,000. Unless the value increases the investors won’t get a return on their investment. Often investment comes with conditions.
So no it’s not as simple as “just needs to stay stable”
That is narrowly correct and widely incorrect
zen question: what is the "everything" that will "go through"?
That's the core problem: there's no exit in sight. None
My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at. And this is a critical detail that I'm fuzzy on. If anyone has context (even links with further info) I'd be very much appreciative.
I have since read the WP Engine complaint. I understand what they are alleging. I'm just not 100% clear on the nitty and gritty details that led there. All I know are the high level about WP Foundation demanding payment from WP Engine.
As a matter of principle, I believe very strongly that a creator has the right to set the conditions upon which their creations are disposed of, and that no one is entitled to services provided by others free of charge in perpetuity. If it is the case that WP Engine was costing WordPress.org a lot of money and that they were the single largest consumer of WordPress.org's web services, then I don't think it is unreasonable for WordPress.org to say "Hey, this is not financially viable for us, we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal."
I hear a lot of people express the opinion that Matt seems unhinged and is trying to "extort" money from WP Engine. But without knowing more that seems, to me, like looters and moochers demanding that other people pay out of pocket for things they want or need. I want there to be more to the story than that.
And for what it's worth I have little difficulty believing that Matt just went about things in all the wrong ways and could have worked things out without resorts to litigation if he wasn't such a jerk about it.
But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights. WordPress.org has to pay for their servers and WP Engine is a for-profit company that is using WordPress.org's services, free of charge, for their own gain. Mutual consideration here seems warranted.
So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using? I've heard accusations that there has been a feud between the two going back years but if those finer details are buried in that story, then why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?
(Before anyone responds, I understand the Promissory Estoppel theory that forms the legal complaint, I'm asking specifically about peoples' understanding, even if speculative, regarding Matt's motivations).
>My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at.
Matt would be allowed to charge for access to Wordpress.org. It's his property. What you can't do is:
make a service publicly available and then threaten a company that it needs exclusive terms
In the lawsuit the judge asked Automattic to come up with a price for access to Wp.org and Matt did not provide an estimate.
>we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal.
In the lawsuit Automattic asked the judge to force WPengine to shut down their mirrors. They want control over the system. Which is also legit, but legally you can't offer public terms for all and then threaten a company with "the nuclear option" unless they agree to a separate set of terms for 8% of revenue.
Wordpress.org could have terms that allow companies to setup mirrors, but they explicitly don't want this, and wordpress.org is hardcoded into Wordpress Core.
Thanks! Your reply added some missing context. Particularly the part about Automatic not wanting WP Engine to host their own mirrors. That definitely casts doubt and suspicion on Matt and Automatic's motivations and helps put into perspective all of the Matt/Automatic "haters" who are siding with WP Engine. Without context like that, it sounds like people are asking others to float the bill for them. But if they are being denied the option to "self-serve" then yeah, there's obviously way more to it.
Isn't he within legal rights in fact to take away certain public services whenever he does want? Assuming that's the case (and that is an assumption), the fact that WPEngine went all in on a half billion dollar business model dependent on Matt is a big risk they took; I would think it would be absolutely top priority on their part to understand the nuts and bolts of the ecosystem they depend on.
It's very complicated and beyond my ability to analyze accurately.
The court filing is here if you'd like to have a look. Some california law around anticompetitive behaviour applies.
I thought of trying to summarize but don't wish to be inaccurate. Obviously this is under litigation so it remains to be seen which headings they win on if any.
But it definitely isn't as simple as being able to selectively withdraw a public service at any point for any reason. If it were the case would have been dismissed already.
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP...
I've read some of it and it's actually compelling reading but it bogs down pretty quick in spin, for example wpe claims they invested hundreds of millions "to serve the community". But the community they are referencing is their own customers. They did not invest millions in core maintenance to my knowledge.
I'm more interested in the colloquial understanding than the legalese. The dev community will probably have a more relevant opinion than the judge imho. As I see it, WP core is free and the "public utility" you mention. But the infrastructure running the plugins has very little precedent it seems, and that's the important part. That's what Matt's pissed about. I don't think there is a good analogy in the Linux ecosystem or anywhere else as to such a massive undertaking as WP that is simultaneously non profit and for profit. And that's where I think it's kind of foolhardy to go head to head with the guy who's managed to staple it all together while they're still standing on it.
The thing he withdrew is their plugin repo access which is not a public service afaik. I can see why Matt is going crazy running servers for hundreds of millions of downloads and people treat it like he's legally obligated to do that. It's an ambitious enterprise and people should be sensitive to the fact that they probably work extremely hard keeping that going.
> In the lawsuit the judge asked Automattic to come up with a price for access to Wp.org and Matt did not provide an estimate.
Automattic and Mullenweg argued that WP Engine should be required file a bond of $1.6 million to ensure that they are compensated for potential costs and damages if it’s later found that the preliminary injunction was granted without sufficient basis.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/judge-sides-with-wp-engi...
That's a separate heading, which the judge rejected completely. From the same article:
>WPEngine’s arguments are persuasive. …the Court finds that any harm to Defendants resulting from the issuance of preliminary injunctive relief is unlikely, as it merely requires them to revert to business as usual as of September 20, 2024. Accordingly, the Court declines to require WPEngine to post a bond.”
> But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights.
The court case isn't about Matt being a jerk, it's about crime.
> WordPress.org has to pay for their servers
Wordpress.org was sold to volunteers as a community asset owned by the foundation not Matt and even Matt's lawyer made public statements to that effect.
Volunteers spent their time building it up, developing in to WordPress core reliance on w.org infra, etc..
Matt has a long history of un-ethical behaviour, and the current WPDrama is extensive. For me alone, the one screenshot of his threats to go to the press with confidential information about someone unless they did what he wants was enough.
Now volunteers find out from court documents that w.org is "Matt's personal website" as he puts it.
Additionally, now many volunteers are banned from the thing they helped build simply for voicing disagreement with his actions which are almost universally accepted as unethical. Many have been banned for reacting to one of his post with with disapproving emojji!!
Matt has built up the foundation through deception and then weaponised it.
> > But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights.
> The court case isn't about Matt being a jerk, it's about crime.
If we're going to get that pedantic, and ignore the "spirit" in which that statement of mine was intended, then it's equally fair for me to point out that no, the legal case is not anything to do with a "crime." It is a civil dispute.
> WordPress.org has to pay for their servers and WP Engine is a for-profit company that is using WordPress.org's services, free of charge, for their own gain. Mutual consideration here seems warranted.
WPEngine allege
> > "As part of the WordPress community, WPE has contributed tens of millions of dollars in ongoing support "
> going to get that pedantic
I didn't think i was being pedantic, sorry.
I don't understand the US Court system but from what i gather, at least Attempted Extortion and breaches of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are crimes.
COMPLAINT FOR:
(1) Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations;
(2) Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations;
(3) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030 et seq.;
(4) Attempted Extortion;
(5) Unfair Competition, Cal. Bus. Prof. Code § 17200, et seq.;
(6) Promissory Estoppel;
(7) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Infringement;
(8) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Dilution;
(9) Libel;
(10) Trade Libel; and
(11) Slander.
WordPress is an open source project, and part of being an open source project is you don't really have a right to demand that people not mooch off of your work, at least as far as most open source licenses are concerned [1]. If you don't like that, well, then open source isn't for you.
The other major complication here is that Matt has thoroughly mixed his several roles together, so you have to spend time untangling what is Matt-personally, what is Matt-as-his-company, and what is WordPress-via-Matt. When you untangle that, the core demand appears to be that Matt (in who knows what role) demanded that WP Engine compensate Matt-the-company for its use of WordPress-via-Matt resources being provided by Matt-personally (that no one knew was being provided by Matt-personally as opposed to WordPress-via-Matt). Given the thoroughly tangled mess of that stuff, and the fact that--in the past--Matt made several steps to untangle the ownership of everything, I am not particularly persuaded by the logic of "I'm just trying to get them to pay their fair share," as they're not being asked to pay the people they should be paying.
> why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?
Because they're asking someone to pay, not the foundation whose resources they are allegedly using, but their largest competitor (a very distinct legal entity).
[1] There are licenses that do have clauses that let you take action, but generally having such a clause makes it not Open Source-compliant, and frequently the relicensing needed to bring the current licenses to that state involves a lot of drama.
WordPress' GPL license guarantees you access to the code and specific rights. It doesn't guarantee you access to the the WordPress database repository of plugins and themes.
WordPress could, in theory, make the repository free for access to all except larger hosting entities that put more of a strain on things, for which there is a fee or throttling. Possibly even indicating this within the WordPress admin UI which flavor of access the user is getting. "Pro" vs "Free" for example.
Note that I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and this is based on my understanding of open source licenses like the GPL over my 20 years working on PortableApps.com.
w.org infra was said to be owned by the foundation for the community.
Automattic's lawyer told the community the same thing.
Volunteers built in to WordPress core dependence on W.Org infra on that understanding. there are over 1500 hardcoded references to W.org infra.
Now those volunteers find out it's "Matt's personal website" and he can do what he likes with it. Including banning volunteers who's livelihoods depend on it for nothing more than reacting to a post with a disproving emojji.
Differentiating IP/copyright/code rights and infrastructure hosting is definitely an important aspect of the feud.
In a perfect world, open source projects would never use private infrastructure (and would certainly not privilege any particular private infrastructure!).
That said, the ability to 'open source' infrastructure (read: have hosting provided by a non-profit or similar attached to the open source project) has always been more difficult (financially, legally, and practically) than simply commiting a license file.
> So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using?
That isn't what happened. The for-profit company Automatic asked for money, and then used their CEO's exclusive control of the non-profit foundation to punish their direct competitor.
It would be an entirely different thing if this was part an initiative to charge commercial users of WordPress.org for the costs they incur the non-profit foundation to stabilize it's funding. Such a thing could have been handled professionally without threats of "nuclear" retaliation.
> But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights
Being a jerk isn't a crime, but it does broadcast a lack of professionalism and mental stability. Those aren't great traits to see in and individual who has unilateral control over infrastructure that you depend on. Those are extremely concerning traits when that individual has demonstrated a willingness to use that control to pursue personal vendettas in childish ways.
The problem the community is facing is that Matt is a weak, single point of failure. To re-establish trust given Matt's actions here, the non-profit needs to no longer be under his control, but under that of an independent board of directors.
20 years at the helm and one major conflict over a half billion dollar business doesnt strike me as particularly weak. Personally I would be much happier if he just keeps on keepin on. The BDFL model has a strong precedent for jerk-ness a la Linus Torvalds
Well said.
I think Matt Mullenweg has every right to take the action he's taking. It really seems like many companies are perfectly happy to exploit open source products.
In this case, it seems like one company makes a lot of money using the Wordpress codebase and doesn't want to make equal contributions. Then they use the money they're making to turn around and sue Wordpress for standing up for themselves.
If I were Matt Mullenweg, you can bet I would be incensed! I'm honestly very surprised that Matt Mullenweg is facing such criticism when he's simply trying to protect IP that he and the community have spent a lot of time and money building together. It's only natural to want to ban the freeloaders, and in any case, it's a little outrageous to think anyone is entitled to access to the resources and creations of others with or without compensation.
I don't think many people have issue with his original complaints. They're responding to the absurd way he's behaved.
There's a right way and a wrong way to handle a conflict, and he's taken a direct route down the wrong way with his foot on the gas.
He would've been wise to read Sun Tzu, 48 laws, all those books on the basics of manoeuvring in a conflict, and found himself some wise and steady council to guide him through this effectively.
Instead he basically burst into a sustained petulant childish tantrum. He was doing things that basically any adult would know not to do.
He was in here, running his mouth in the comments section after legal proceedings had started. With everyone telling him to shut up. And instead he just kept going. And the comments literally then showed up in the legal proceedings against him, as everyone had warned.
Rights and obligations go hand in hand. Yes he had rights, and yes he could have exercised them to the benefit of the open source community (which was extremely important given WPs role in the internet - effectively carrying the beacon of the original internet vs its consumption by big companies).
But he also had obligations stemming from that. He should have played this diligently and carefully. But he didn't. And thus everyone expresses their disappointment in their own ways.
I don't think there's any disagreement about that particular aspect of what kicked this all off (in terms of being incensed about an imbalance of contributions to money being made) - it's the _way_ he went about that, _then_ all the subsequent WPDrama that unfolded (personal attacks, unilateral cancellations, removals, blockages, deletions etc) that has most people concerned.
I've been around WordPress since 2003 (since the fork from B2/Cafelog) and have watched Matt evolve over that time, make a few missteps, act/react with humility, speak conscientiously on a wide range of matters and issues. The actions of the past 12 months seem quite contrary to that established behaviour (speaking from a far perspective & never had met the man in person).
I feel sad whether this is a deliberate or unintentional (mental) path, but am confident that like the drama that created WP's popularity orignally (MoveableType), there will be a path forward for the community - it's the damage that will be done in getting there that's upsetting...
Tens of thousands of us depend on WP directly for our livelihood, and millions more depend on it for their businesses and connections with the world. We all need confidence in the stability of WP or an alternative to use and recommend it. WP was right to sanction WPE. It's spilling over to all of us now though.
I don't think it's a symptom of a mental breakdown. I think it's a symptom of highly successful tech people who, over time, get more enclosed by a "yes-men" bubble and start to think their shit don't stink so much that they then actually start to lose touch with what most of us call "reality". You might call that "a mental breakdown", I call that being an asshole.
Over the past 5 years or so, I've start becoming numb to all of the tech leaders who I used to hold in high regard who I now think are just the boring epitome of self-involved douchebags, e.g. Musk and Andreesen, for example. It just looks like garden-variety power intoxication to me.
There is nobody left to disagree with him, he made sure of that. Disagreeing with him at this point means he's gonna come after you [1], your job [2] or your reputation [3].
1. https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/
Or perhaps is suffering from realization that there's no free lunch on this planet and sometimes it is paid for with drama and even very very rare one may get to be the one who calls the shots. Question is whether one is in position to pull it up when one needs to take the credit back.
He seems do be doing fine, though, perhaps also is having the time of his life, nothing wrong from perspective of other for-profit projects. Wonder who promised this and how was it guaranteed it'd not happen at some point?
Besides LLMs be soon spitting 'wordpress retold' with Cursor and all, and he may have just realized it.
Parasocial sympathetic deflection at its finest.
This is a childish emperor tantrum, stressing everybody beneath him for petty cause.
Respectfully, confidently asserting someone else's mental state or their motives is a mistake. Because there's no way for you to know, it backs you and others into an intellectual corner that is entirely unnecessary and lowers the level of discourse, in addition to being unhelpful when people are experiencing actual psychiatric crises.
> because of some valuation drop or being short on money.
Why is that hard to believe? People have done much worse for much less money.
People would rather believe their leaders broke their brain than to accept that their power is wielded over us for selfish personal gain
I feel for him and the people in his wake. Benevolent dictators of open source are great for productivity until benevolence gives way to malevolence.
At this point, if he stepped down it would be seen as giving in. So highly unlikely until the legal dust settles a bit.
I also agree with other commenters that it's not a mental breakdown but more of a poorly executed strategy that's been in the works for awhile. To take Wordpress more into a closed source hybrid ecosystem.
And at this point, anything Matt does in favor of Automattic's business plan will blow up on social. My bet is this will continue for another 6 months at least until Automattic's revenue increases or flatlines.
But yeah, I'm curious about the mental toll when founders go through these types of hyper public events. The startup world needs a lot more discussion and guidance for mental health.
> Benevolent dictators of open source are great for productivity until benevolence gives way to malevolence.
Autocracy is more efficient, with the best leaders.
Democracy is more stable, with the worst leaders.
The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or democracy with good leaders.
I think it's also pretty common that autocratic leaders go badly quickly. The same focus and dedication that drove them also makes it unlikely they'll suddenly decide to step away cleanly. Instead, they'll decide that everyone else is wrong, they're the ones that really put in all the work, {insert rationalization here}, and fight change.
> The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or democracy with good leaders
If we're talking real-life dictatorships and republics, the latter make much better use of brilliant leaders' talents. In part by not having a power struggle at the end that, on a coin flip, decides if the work survives.
In the short or intermediate term?
I'd argue that democracy is almost always a roadblock to a great leader's ability to execute their vision quickly and fully.
On the other hand, it often wins out in the long run by not losing as much when the inevitable terrible leader comes to power. (As well as providing a pressure release mechanism to prevent populist revolution)
> democracy is almost always a roadblock to a great leader's ability to execute their vision quickly and fully
Quickly and fully, sure. In the end, however, good ideas see daylight. (Even if it means the other side co-opts and renames it!) That doesn’t happen in autocracies because the same people remain in power longer; this means by the time the opposition dies everyone who supported or potentially remembered it (or the opportunity it was meant to capitalise on) is gone.
More than that, republics have historically been far superior at integrating other cultures. That process of appropriation means the source for good ideas is wider than the population, something autocracies can only achieve with money and thus not at scale and in limited scope. (Engineers working for the KSA aren’t changing its culture, they’re building a block.)
All good points!
There can be some mal-incentives in democracies when it's in the opposition's interest for things to fail though (read: positioning for the next election).
Imho, that's more a US problem of an overly-visible executive (whoever that currently is), to the detriment of congressional visibility (i.e. 95% of congress supported this, including your congresspeople).
From a US perspective, parliamentary style systems, with checks to prevent German/Italian/Israeli-style deadlock when the party percentages don't line up, seem the superior implementation.
Agreed. I also think that being an autocratic leader makes it worse, because you get used to yes-sayers around you and the power in general.
Why do you assume that he is suffering from a mental breakdown as opposed to someone who tripped into his position and has always been out of his depth?
As long as money is flowing, nobody gives a damn how shitty you are. Once the money stops, however ...
Not a mental breakdown, but, a memento mori for all of us:
The problem with success is even when success is a reality, it's effects are temporary.
You get hungry even though you have just eaten.
The most telling moment for understanding what's going was Matt responding to successful critics by saying they weren't successful enough
I can't remember exactly what he said, & too much has happened for me to find it with 5 minutes of Googling. Something like "oh yeah well you only got to $2B valuation and it took 1000 engineers, what do you know"
If there is a breakdown here, it's one I've seen before, but wasn't cognizant of until I saw it 100x over at Google, sometimes tragically: you got everything you thought you wanted, but you're bored enough to need a new challenge, but you're not cognizant enough of it to effectively make that choice _before_ your actions show you that you need to.
Doesn't help any that it would amount to "backing down" in this scenario, he can't say that now without people thinking he was forced out somehow.
When I think about this, I also remember:
- the somewhat odd acquisitions over the past few years, Tumblr, that one cross-platform messaging app that got a ton of press for insisting they'd do iMessage....another strong indicator of boredom with the day-to-day, IMHO.
- His clear, repeated, focus is on money. It's never in primary focus, but it's always there, in everything lashing out that is publicized. If you're unhappy, and you're not sure why, and you have everything you thought you wanted, one easy thought train to jump on is "the compensation is not commensurate for the work"
This is a very interesting take, and I am going to largely agree with you here. It really looks like this may be what is going on. This is really a symptom of a much larger phenomenon, in that a society that values material wealth , and only acknowledges a material reality without realising or recognising the metaphysical reality.
Stimulants are a heck of a drug.
he's not wrong about the fears, he's just reacting in a terrible way
Crazy how hosting wordpress, between 2003-2024, your main concern was Chinese/Russian hackers. And in 2025 you main concern should be if Mullenweg will hijack your website for his pissing match.
Also he didn't shut down the sustainability team because he "didn't know about it". He shut it down because their stated goals are a threat to Mullenwegs dictatorship hold over wordpress.
As a content creator, it's mostly dealing with Gutenberg and the new theme editor. I couldn't care less what these people are up to.
Almost to the letter -- https://www.dalmomendonca.com/rules-for-rulers
I wonder if he knows that his personal blog seems to be hosted in the template for a yoga studio in South Lake.
haha
It's crazy how almost overnight Wordpress went from a quiet and unassuming piece of the internet infrastructure to crazy techbro's personal fiefdom.
Suddenly Wordpress's weird technical quirks and idiosyncrasies make sense.
> Now it seems like the community needs to take over, but Mullenweg still holds all the keys.
This move by Matt to pull out of development all but guarantees a fork. The biggest argument against was the work that Automattic was putting into WordPress would be very hard to replicate in a new project. But if the community is going to be expected to do ~all of the work anyway, there's no reason to do that work inside Matt's personal fiefdom.
Has he said he was going to pull out of development? I hadn't read that anywhere in all of this.
https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...
> Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.
> As part of this reset, Automattic will match its volunteering pledge with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem, or about 45 hours a week that qualify under the Five For the Future program as benefitting the entire community and not just a single company. These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates.
5 of those 45 hours are apparently the Executive Director of WordPress.org, so this is actually one full time developer working on WP. That is effectively pulling out, and the remaining time supposedly allocated should be very easy for a fork to replace.
Gotta love the scare quotes around "community".
From the article:
> 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.
source: https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...
>down from nearly 4,000 a week
Do they really pay that many people to work on development? That's 100 fulltime jobs.
Automattic has over 1,700 employees. [0] They had more than 1,900 before the buyouts and departures. [1] With that many people, I’m sort of surprised that they only had around 100 full time staff working on WordPress core.
[0]: https://automattic.com/press/
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240801231830/https://automatti...
Full time employees? 1700 employees from 90 countries sounds to me like they are counting anyone that's ever contributed anything as an employee.
It does seem like throwing investor money at 4000hrs/week open source development was a ZIRP
Ah I see, I thought you were talking about him personally.
He doesn't actually do any development himself at all. IIRC his last commit was something like 15 years ago.
Are you under the impression he himself has been a meaningful contributor in the last decade?
I thought I read a comment somewhere in all of this where he said that he was actually doing coding, yes, but (a) I could well be mistaken and (b) he could well have been talking rubbish.
I think you misinterpreted him funding development. Read the linked article. Should clear you up. He was funding (via Automattic) an estimated 4k+ hours of work per week and is cutting that back to 45. Not himself coding but people that work for him.
I've had a Wordpress blog for about 25 years. This makes me want to turn off automatic updates, since I'm worried he might just go nuclear and flip some sort of kill switch that bricks every blog, or push some ridiculous anti-Wordpress Engine banner to every installation. Of course, not keeping WP up to date is very risky as well.
I'm not even insensitive to his position, even though I don't know full details. But, he's the one acting irrational in all this, so he's the one I'm most scared of.
Consider a static site. They cannot be hacked, they are cheaper to host, and once the files are generated they are immutable
They can certainly be hacked, just like any static site. Web servers have vulnerabilities.
And the files can certainly be edited as they aren’t immutable.
They are less resource intensive and easier to maintain, but aren’t immune.
(Running mostly static sites converted from Wordpress sites, but also running 10 year old+ word press sites that haven’t been changed in forever)
You aren't wrong, but if you use Cloudflare Pages with a static site the only job you have to do for a static site is make sure your Cloudflare account is secure with 2fa etc. Cloudflare will handle the security of everything else.
If you have Wordpress exposed to the internet, there's a lot more security stuff to deal with.
You're not wrong, but compromising a server that exposes nginx configured for static files, sshd, and nothing else is at least an order of mag or two harder. Probably no one is going to drop an nginx 0day on your blog.
And you can run one written in a memory-safe language, like Caddy.
The web server can be hacked so it serves something other than the static HTML you uploaded but there is no 'app' to hack, there's a whole class of problems that can happen on WordPress that can not happen with static sites.
What would hacking an HTML file even mean.
I had a website got hacked when the FTP server running on the shared host got exploited. They added some malware injection code to the index.html file.
After that I added a cron job that compared the hash of the index.html with a precomputed value. Didn't change often enough to be a hassle.
Even if it's remotely possible to hack Nginx... what's the motivation to hack a static site?
There's no DB with juicy data and no compute to abuse for mining crypto or running DDOS attacks.
Similar motivation as hacking a Wordpress site, putting seo spam out there.
There’s less payoff, but people still do it.
yeah but the difficulty in hacking Nginx vs Wordpress must be orders of magnitude more difficult though
trick users into clicking malicious links, host ads, seo link farm, host other questionable content, or some people just like to deface websites
Usually SEO spam link insertion and generic Viagra spam redirects...
you can change the payload sent to users, static or not. If you serve javascript you're serving dynamic, runtime dependency injecting code.
Other siblings have piled on this, but let me just add:
Your source of truth for a static site will never be the deployed contents of the server (even if you do go that route). It will be your local Git repo or possibly your upstream Git forge.
Even in the rare case that such a simple case gets you hacked, you can throw away your entire setup and start over quite easily. Whereas all of the Wordpress/Drupal/etc/etc. options I'm aware of will require you to do your own database backups, if you are self-hosting, or else you are simply hosed (as the attacker could corrupt or erase the source of truth).
If you are with a hosted solution then obviously your security (and backups) will be as good as their security/backups, and all of this will be moot except for pricing.
I understand all this. I didn’t say that static sites are easy to hack or valuable, I responded to GP’s claim “They cannot be hacked”
I think static sites are a good technique that has vastly improved security over dynamic sites, but thinking that using them makes you invincible is faulty.
If it makes you as vulnerable as S3, that's as close to invincible as you're going to get.
Depends on where you host.
The beauty of a static site is you can then put it on something like Github Pages or S3 to give the responsibility of the server to someone else.
Or you can just pay someone to host it and maintain and support the web server for you, for a lot cheaper (often free, like Github Pages).
Good luck hacking an html file served through nginx.
With isso for comments!
This 100%. Host on github and use ghpages and Jekyll with either github supported themes or a theme of your choice.
What about using distro packages? That would insulate you from upstream suddenly turning malicious.
I'm not sure if Debian's packages are kept up to date with security patches, though. The latest changes to the wordpress package[0] were in December 2022 and and May 2024.
[0] https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/w/wo...
Sorry I switched to hugo my https://gioorgi.com and it was easier than expected.
Initially, I only followed the ‘drama’ tangentially, also because I have always considered myself a mere "end user" of Wordpress, even if long-time one (I used it for about 20 years).
For me, the fact that Wordpress.com sold a service based on an "extended" version of Wordpress.org was never a particular problem, but I never thought it was illegal to compete directly with it by taking the open source software and offering a simple hosting service.
Anyway I started to consider to switch from Wordpress to a static site hosted with hugo, retaining the comment system and all the URLs in the original form, more or less.
I was surprised because it took very little time (less 1 week of total work) to migrate my articles (1000+) and the comments.
I used open source tools, and I am a "hugo" newbie, so I make some trade off too.
Never less, I suggest all of you to give a try to hugo+isso (isso is a comment system very light).
What did you use to migrate posts? I'm going to move three WordPress sites (15yr+ running) off soon.
Not the OP but I have migrated to Hugo as well. There's a number of tools to convert to Hugo from a WordPress XML export. I used wp2hugo, IIRC: https://github.com/ashishb/wp2hugo
Dead easy. Took an afternoon to do everything, including fiddling with DNS and trying different themes, etc.
Also very interested in this. I ended up paying for 2-3 years of WordPress.com to host my tiny-traffic blog and I had to pay for a higher tier to handle video (sidenote: fuck wordpress for offering a shitty watered-down WP version on WP.com, you know, literally the thing they complain about WPEngine doing). I'd love nothing more than to migrate away but I've already done a mess WP -> Hugo (or was it Jekyll? not sure) -> Ghost -> WP and I'd like to automate the migration as much as possible. Every other time I spent a while copy/pasting and hand-fixing posts. I know I won't get away from doing that completely but I'd like it be easier.
Hugo is by no stretch of the imagination a drop in replacement for wordpress in my understanding. I understand the average joe uses wordpress for the UI and huge ecosystem, rather than it's technical capabilities (there are a million cms). Yes, technically speaking there is nothing preventing you from reimplementing everything in hugo, nothing except many months of labor
Said differently, the person who will successfully and painlessly migrate wordpress to hugo is not an average case, but a minority.
People use WordPress for its plugins...
> The problem is that Mullenweg has final say over some very important parts of the WordPress community
> THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND (…)
I think the real issue is people being fooled with the false concept of ‘community’, times and times again.
Communities do not exist in practice. What you have is a vast pool of users (in this case I also include plugin and theme devs), and a minority of core contributors, which are either individuals or companies, usually both. Those are driving the project forward and making decisions.
This distribution can be applied to many open-source softwares, but also projects like mozilla, wikipedia, etc.
People do not understand to what extend the no-guarantee of FOSS software is applicable. All your projects can be broken from a day to the next and you cannot expect any compensation.
But that’s ok because you got the software for free, right?
Hopefully many sites will switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola. Way lower costs, lower risk of being hacked (almost impossible actually), and a reliable backup thanks to Git.
I’m running multiple static sites for years already and am very happy with it. It has been very reliable.
I think the popularity of Wordpress comes from the access it gives to non-technical people (plus ecosystem). I am sure someone is smart enough to write a CMS that can effectively do that under the hood, but I don't think it matters to the people who choose Wordpress.
Also, Wordpress already can generate a static site.
I use Hugo for my own site, now, but it's not a WordPress replacement for a lot of use cases. A single techie's personal blog? Sure. A small company that has five or six people who have to post to a website? No. An organization that wants to integrate a sales cart and such, without a full-time developer? Absolutely no.
Until last September I used to encourage non-tech folks to just use WordPress.com and pay for the hosting. It was pricier than DIY solutions, but also I was happy to suggest it to help put $$$ in Automattic's pockets for WordPress development. I'm sad I can't recommend it in good faith anymore.
I set up several websites for non-profits of various types. The thing that WordPress.com has going for it is better security (updates applied promptly), lower pricing than dedicated WP accounts at DreamHost, etc. (typically these kind of providers low-ball the first year), usable by non-technical users, etc.
Trying to teach people to use Git to push an update seems difficult. And teaching them Markdown. And dealing with images.
someorg.wordpress.com is not as nice as someorg.com but there's no domain to be not renewed. There's levels of privileges, etc.
The principal use of Wordpress IME experience is so people can add content without learning markdown and git and so on
There are CMSes that work with static site generators. Static site generators do not imply that the input is markdown, though this is often the usecase. Any CMS that is decoupled from presentation, in fact, could be used for static site generation. Just read the structure and generate an appropriate HTML tree statically. Here are some CMSes with specific thought given to this use:
ect ect
You forgot to mention Wordpress as you also can publish static websites wit it.
Publii is another one with static generation capabilities (https://getpublii.com)
Hadn't looked into that side of things, thanks for the links
With AI that is now possible without wordpress
For a subset, sure, the main barrier to entry is people believing themselves capable of following instructions and caring enough to invest the time. AI enables some people to believe in themselves, but most still won't care enough if there exists another option where they can just login to a web front end and "add post" (granted, GitHub lets you do this too, edit a repo from the front end and add a file, I suspect a GitHub action can be triggered to rebuild a static site from there, then you have free, unhackableish, high performance hosting, but theres still a few concepts to learn, especially wrt DNS, and you don't get any analytics or the e-commerce obviously. Squarespace and Shopify will continue being profitable despite certain things becoming a little easier.
Kinda yeah, but with a lot of caveats.
AI output is in a frustrating half way place where the results are simultaneously better than an amateur and worse than someone with a few years of professional experience.
Makes it very tempting to use, but unless you're good at attention to detail and reviewing the output, it's also by default[0] producing certain tells that make many people very weary — think of the meme "if you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it".
[0] you can get past this fairly easily, but IMO learning that is a skill that only comes to the kind of technical person who would also not have any trouble learning the markup/markdown anyway
Ai is less useful for those people because they cant tell if its right or wrong output
Sure, some of the web is read-only, but what about commenting, contact forms, forums, eCommerce or anything else that requires a proper server? That's a big advantage WP and other full CMS have over static site generators.
A lot of corpsites are wordpress, and are modified once a quarter or so, those should not be running wordpress internet-facing due to its terrible performance and constant susceptibility to vulnerabilities (or that of its themes/plugins landscape due to it being all pure PHP that can do anything). Wordpress is a useful tool to generate static sites though, I've done that before and it's glorious. Use all the friendly authoring tools of WP and then click a button to write out an updated blob of HTML files to be served by Cloudflare or whatever.
As for forums, those almost don't exist anymore, and contact forms and ecommerce are better off being handled by software designed to do that rather than some plugin shoehorned into an early-2000s PHP blogging platform.
For example, contact forms in Hubspot or Salesforce, and ecommerce with Shopify.
Edit to add: If someone's technical enough to be self-hosting Wordpress the open-source project, I would trust them to do a fine job at selecting a more focused alternative OSS project for those "actual server" needs.
Gravity forms is actually quite an amazing form system. Do you have another that handles repeater fields and all the rest with a great ux?
Every ecommerce requirement is better served by iframes than by WordPress plugins.
Sorry, how would shopping cart (list of products to be soon bought) in an iframe is "better" than outputting it straight to the page HTML? Wouldn't it make it hard to design it?
There's almost always an iframe solution for your industry, no matter what you're selling online. If you're selling accommodation, it's Sirvoy. If you're selling events it's TicketTailor, if you're selling restaurant tables or food delivery, there's countless iframe solutions. For other things, there's Shopify and more. There's always a better iframe alternative to Wordpress, that is easier to develop, easier and cheaper for the client, easier for the customer, and safer from hacking. Usually without any maintenance at all.
Or if you're really making some big time e-commerce stuff, then you're better off with bespoke solutions than something hacked together with WordPress.
The benefit of WP is the huge theme and plugin ecosystem. I know of people that started a business just on WP + theme + plugin without any dev expirience or money for a developer
This is basically true, though I'd point out that most of those themes and plugins are hot garbage minefields full of bugs and security vulns, and due to the fact that it's all just wild-west PHP here, a nontechnical WP admin actually making use of the whole wide world of plugins and themes out there is exactly as safe as downloading absolutely any .exe you want while running Windows XP as Administrator without any firewall or antivirus software.
Not disputing the usefulness of the platform, just that it's a risky thing to expose to the Internet.
But Wordpress.org actually contains a well reviewed library of the plugins where the review scores and reviews are actually helpful and have the support forum right there as well. It’s going to be the most difficult part to “fork”
I don't think many will, those are far too difficult to use compared to WP which most people use because its so easy.
Ive got Jekyll sites from over a decade ago still buildable and kicking! Hard to beat the stability of simple software that outputs static web assets.
>switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola
At that point just write your own HTML and never be beholden to some abstraction framework toolkit corporation cooperative ever again.
Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML? You need, at the least, single post pages (for permalinks), an index page, and an RSS feed — all slightly different views of the same content. It gets messy, and at some point you write your own SSG, which somehow becomes worse.
This is without going into how you ideally want an image pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe category pages, …
>Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML?
Yes.
It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction framework toolkit, at least for me.
Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if you wanted to get fancy.
It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you.
Back in the day I'd have clobbered something together with SSIs to have, at least, a single copy of text to maintain, but that gets old quickly.
A determined and focused person can probably make do with single-post pages and a titles-only styled rss.
Hugo and Zola serve a wider audience.
>It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you.
I would argue that's not a "static" website, but even so that's still nothing some smart usage of PHP includes or the like can't easily solve.
The whole point of ssg is to run those "PHP includes" once.
I find markdown to be a more productive way to write prose than HTML. It also shouldn't be too hard to port from one generator to another, given that the content is just markdown.
it isn't "just" markdown though. "top matter" and custom html tags and custom htm in-general kinda breaks the appeal.
Soon enough AI will write most of blog/marketing HTML.
And then we can develop systems that save user prompts, automatically and dynamically regenerating page content as the AI models are updated.
Add simple version control to keep history of changes.
Slap some workflow/approval process.
And you have a product!
Amazing. You just ruined the internet for everyone, making us all wade through heaps of meaningless bullshit, only generated to drive the ad revenue!
And do you know what’s the best part about that? You even made money off of that you can use to purchase the stuff you got ads for! Isn’t that exciting? Thank you for your service!
Yeah I'm sure my 3 line comment is to blame for whatever damage AI does to the internet.
I'll take the compliment anyway :)
You are completely right and the people down voting you are severely deranged. A HTML site + a wysiwyg solution like Surreal CMS is miles better than any site generators, easy to use for the client, and dirt cheap.
I've only been passively following the Wordpress drama. Almost a year ago, Mullenweg blogged about taking a 3 month sabbatical that I found interesting, and I assumed this would have been a period of recharging... but things have seemed to gone off the rails since. Was there any correlational between the sabbatical and current drama, or was that just coincidence?
Did he drink that psychoactive wine?
Surely non-psychoactive wine is just grape juice?
right, let’s try again: Did he drink THAT psychoactive wine?
I'm clearly missing some key context here, judging by the other two comments seeming to know what you're talking about, but I'm none the wiser about what's the deal with him and… Ayahuasca? which I'd never heard of before this thread.
There is some chatter about trend among techies drinking Ayahuasca and suddenly becoming a different person. I was curious if it could be related to the events that unfolded unexpectedly.
Thanks; none of that came up in a quick web search, so I would not have known.
It’s more like a two stage tea made of an MAOI (the first type of antidepressant developed) and psychoactive tryptamines.
Eight ball yoda says… bad trip sitter he did seek, hmm?
The machine elves need to unionize.
interesting. So what does that tea do to people? I’ve read some things and claims and that it’s popular among tech C suit.
The best primary source is the Erowid trip reports vault: https://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Ayahuasca.shtml
First it makes people purge (vomit profusely) because the MAO enzymes normally break down the psychoactives in the stomach, and it reacts violently when the enzymes are inhibited with MAOIs. It's likely a reaction to something else in the plant because the psychoactives absorb into the stomach before they throw up.
The technical name for what happens next is "full disassociation" which can best be described as the brain disconnecting from the sensor organs and then hallucinating whatever it wants in their place. The actual experience people have varies all over the place. Lots of trip reports of people seeing god, or aliens, or seeing their life flash before their eyes.
It's popular among the Silicon Valley crowd in general from my experience, but specifically the ritualistic experience in the Amazon. Freebasing DMT isn't as popular.
Perhaps he tried some Ayahuasca and now "doesn't care about anything" and it reinforced his narcissism.
Ayahuasca (and DMT for that matter) tend to make people not care about anything, so I wonder if he did some and has been affected by it. Just a guess, though.
I don't know about the 'don't care about anything' part - but there's some speculation out there about a "one shot theory" where some people can't handle the psychological impacts of a ayahuasca trip and their brain is scrambled by that 'one shot' and they're never the same.. a number of relatively normal people who do a retreat don't really come back all the way. Combined with the frequency of later onset schizophrenia and while life might feel pretty stable for a middle-aged person, your mental ability is more precarious than most people think.
It makes one speculate how many people out there are just one trip away from having their inhibitions semi-permanently lowered to where they will no longer let the truth go unspoken. If only the neuroplasticity would engage and reconnect just enough neural pathways, what things they would end up "accomplishing" as a result, that they would be too inhibited to see otherwise.
I know a lot of people I would be wary of if they were to consume psychedelics, given how they already act towards people with restraint.
DMT makes people not care about anything? seems like a blanket statement without any basis
Couldn't comment on Ayahuasca, but I've been around plenty of people with varying degrees of enthusiasm for DMT (n-n that is, 5-MEO is a different beast) and I've never heard anything along those lines.
Generally the critique is that it leaves one too unchanged. It's all sparkle and no lasting insight. Fun, but otherwise kind of pointless. Like it's missing its other half.
Is Ayahuasca passé now?
What a wild and disconnected assertion.
I was just saying it's either ayahuasca or a divorce the other day. It's major divorced dude energy.
It went off the rails during his sabbatical. He was ranting about WP "freeloaders" and doxxing random Tumblr users when he was supposed to be on vacation.
Replying to myself here: why the heck are people assuming Ayahuasca? My comment never implied it, nor has Mullenweg mentioned it.
In business, a sabbatical means either you are quitting, going for a long vacation because you hate your job, or burnt out beyond repair and using fancy words like sabbatical before changing careers. Maybe that's made people think he was going to do drugs to chill.
But again, a 2 second google search will show that Mullenweg spoke openly about his plans for a sabbatical before taking it, and has spoken about the sabbatical numerous times afterwards on his blogs, on podcasts, and at conferences. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHPzdmks-HY
The Ayahuasca comments in this thread are the people putting their own narrative on it, and as the OP of the thread, this was not my intention at all. This thread has just become made-up gossip.
I don't understand how (if?) WordPress has popularity among serious professionals. Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a nightmare. Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.
HN seems to grumble about Drupal but even if your only requirement is a PHP server with a MySQL database connect, Drupal (8+) is just as simple to set up as WordPress and infinitely easier to configure. Older versions may have been less user-friendly but really, just click "Content->Add New->Page" and you're already running at the speed of WordPress.
Wordpress is clunky but it never broke backwards compatibility.
HN grumbles about Drupal because many got burnt by picking the wrong horse. Drupal was the biggest CMS in the world and like a safe bet until they told their users they would have to rewrite their 7 code to go to 8 and their users decided they would rewrite to WordPress[1]. Drupal never regained the trust they lost. They extended the life of d7 over and over but never made a compelling replacement. To this day, 7 is still more widely deployed than 8,9 or 10 ever were[2].
I think it's interesting to observe the fate that Python 3 narrowly avoided. Python 3 wasn't a compelling replacement until at least 3.5. In a nearly parallel universe they're all using torch.rb instead of pytorch.
[1]https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/did-breaking-backward...
That's a fair argument. Maybe I'm just biased because I started with Drupal 8.
Honestly, py3 wasn't a compelling replacement until distros started setting dates to remove py2.
I don't understand how `serious professionals` continue to try to trash WordPress using superficial and often uneducated arguments, completely ignoring the fact that it has huge flexibility, a rich ecosystem, many options for using modern development practices and 40%+ global market share.
I worked in exclusively WordPress for many years. "Flexibility" doesn't mean jack if it doesn't adhere to modern development practices itself. "Many options," yes but the core is just cobbled together by amateurs. It has nothing to do with modern PHP development practices; it's basically just a collection of functions. It doesn't use composer; most of the development stacks I've seen are tricks to basically gut its dependency management and rewrite it themselves.
As for a "rich ecosystem" and "40%+ global market share" — popularity has nothing to do with quality.
>> Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a nightmare.
Many of are free, and you can often build your own. You can easily extend it without plugins, but you're doing your future self a favor if you stuck your new features in one (so you can update themes etc easily in the future).
>> Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.
Hard disagree here. Whether you are using ACF for custom fields or post types, doing it manually takes more time but is not that difficult. Its typically a set of actions you wouldn't do often either.
Hate the codebase, don't mind the front-end mostly. A compatible SQL schema rewrite in a different language with lower exposure to risk, and some of the auth issues resolved, I think a lot of people would shift camp.
I have seen national broadsheets using WP as their publish engine. How they actually write copy and approve the article stream might be another matter.
Here in Lithuania it's mostly due to customer demand - customers want for open source systems that could be easily modified, would work "just like the old site did", finding developers would be cheap/easy and if launching and hosting site is cheap too, it's all the better.
When you write down all the demands, there aren't much options left. Drupal and Opencart are used, but WordPress is used for 90% of the sites mostly due to demand/requirements.
Serious professionals write their own plugins or keep a known good list, review plugins before installing them etc.
Drupal even supports the Gutenberg block editor:
I see these questions a lot, but mostly the feel disingenuous. People aren't really that dumb, and most large, functioning systems usually have a material history that leads to where they are at.
The answers really are helpful and will tell folks a lot about the world. If you don't understand how WP and Drupal ended up where they did (and why Joomla, Cake, etc ad infi are no longer around), then I suggest that you try to answer the question your asking, or at least pay some attention to the answers you get.
WP had, for quiet a while, a much better and conceptually easier admin system. Even that system was clunky and hard to train non-tech folks to use. But it was better than Drupal and more interactive than Joomla.
You might not accept that answer, but that really was a lot of it in my experience.
I hate WP for a lot of reasons, but its not like the many "serious professionals" who have built software for it were doing so for unworkable reasons. I found it much of a pain the ass, but if you know what you're doing and develop the correct skill sets it is far from a nightmare.
It's the same way products like salesforce become popular. Network effects. As much it's an architectural nightmare, it is a thing that everyone is familiar with. When you are looking at ecommerce tools, email marketing, analytics, etc they all have some kind of one-click integration with wordpress. If you need developers, wordpress freelancers are a dime a dozen. It's just the thing everybody knows.
WordPress is a very mature project with a long legacy but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it.
I'm imagining some very pluggable and template driven runtime that you can ship very declarative packages for. The spicy take would be to use a Scheme for the templating around some robust Rust core, but that's probably not the widest appeal. Maybe there would be some clever way to bootstrap it out of PHP so that you can keep using shared PHP hosts and they wouldn't have to bring along a new software distribution.
What would replace it?
PHP is unique in that it makes sharing a server trivial and low-resource compared to almost every other solution.
A simple example might be that you can run 100s of PHP forums on a single machine low memory machine but if you want to use discourse (not written in PHP), it requires 10x 20x the resources for a single forum.
This is true about almost every other solution AFAICT.
That's probably the best explanation. There is no real alternative to PHP if you want to host cheap and simple. It's also really easy to deploy WordPress to a shared hoster, just by uploading a few files via FTP/etc and setting up a MySQL connection.
Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?
> Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?
I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth...
I don't think there's a viable alternative to PHP. The nerds here, hate it (and they aren't really wrong). I hate it, but it is undisputed God Emperor of Cheap Hosting. There's nothing that even comes close, for simplicity, speed, robustness, cost, and ubiquity. There are millions of pages of support, years of support forums, and hundreds of thousands of people that can work with PHP at an expert level. Despite the hate, PHP is a mature, modern language, still very much under development, and supported by many corporations. Much of the primitive stuff it started with, has been replaced (I think, rather clumsily, but it works).
The simplest hosting solutions have LAMP ("P" being "PHP"), and there are millions of LAMP servers out there. Every single one can run WP, simply by uploading a few files, creating a MySQL DB/User, tweaking a config, and Björn Stronginthearm's your uncle. Or, with things like WPE, you can click on a button in your control panel dashboard.
Also, non-HN-readers can manage just about every aspect of a WP server, once it's set up. People have made careers from that.
This sucks.
I run a couple of sites. I use WP, because it means that I don't have to waste much time, managing them. I could definitely switch over to a static generator (what I would use, if I didn't do WP), or even write my own sites, using handcoded HTML (I have done that, and have even written my own CMSes, in The Dark Ages). I just don't want to have to do that. The moment I walk away from WP, I am sealing my own fate. It will make it ten times as hard to push the sites over to someone else to manage.
I am an indifferent (at best) Web designer. Almost every person here, could probably code circles around me. That means that working on Web sites is painful and slow, detracting from what I'm actually good at.
This sucks.
>> Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?
>I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth...
Sorry ;)
What's the issue with CGI ?
CGI is fine, but it’s a rather awkward API, and about the worst way to publish a Web site.
I mentioned writing CMSes, and one of them was in Perl (using CGI). I still wake screaming, sometimes, and that was probably 25 years ago.
Yeah, I roughly got that, but in which specific way is it bad ?
It looks like you are wanting to argue on some specifics. I probably won't be able to give you what you are looking for.
With me, it had to do with the languages I wrote (C and Perl), that required CGI to publish. CGI did fine, but it's fairly primitive. Just another system text pipe (which, TBH, is pretty much what is going on, under a Webserver).
But for most folks, CGI is unapproachable. That's what PHP gives people. It was so easy to use, that anyone that could edit an HTML file, could also write powerful programs in PHP. It was integrated into the Webserver, not the system (as far as the user was concerned).
At the time I first encountered PHP, ColdFusion was an industry standard for that kind of thing, but it was a commercial product, locked to a single vendor. PHP gave hosting companies a fairly simple package (for free) they could compile into their Webserver, that would give their customers that power.
Nerds have no issue, using things like CGI, but most folks aren't nerds, and we sometimes have a real hard time, understanding that. Nerds that do, often become rich.
You misunderstand, it's more that I have a very limited knowledge of web programming : besides dumb HTML+CSS, only a small project using JQuery and (then bleeding edge) async JavaScript on the frontend, Python on the server, and... CGI for the communication between them.
So I was literally trying to know more. (And I understand a bit better now, thanks.)
Sorry. I consider CGI to be sort of a “failed experiment of the past,” sort of like Server-Side Includes (shtml). What CGI does, is let anything that can write to a pipe, publish on the Web (you could write a web app with Bash).
I think that anything that will interact with remote browsers, should go through a Webserver. Many utilities actually have their own built-in webservers (not sure that’s always a good thing).
These days everything that would've been CGI is now FastCGI (even PHP). Or in other words, run one server whose only job is to reverse-proxy requests to another server over a slightly different protocol.
It can be used in shared scenarios, but it's nowhere near as automatic as "every file with a particular extension" like PHP...
When Wordpress first came up, PHP was something anyone with $5 could administer, and Python/Ruby required a lot more money and expertise that put them outside the reach of junior hobbyists.
This was before the days of PaaS solutions like AppEngine.
I don't know any PaaS solution that is not at least a magnitude more complex than a simple PHP shared hoster.
As much as I hate PHP, the typical LAMP shared hosting is by far the most simple kind of PaaS.
https://wagtail.org/who-uses-wagtail/ lists a few companies who would care about low resource use due to the sheer amount of traffic they see.
This. If Symfony or Ruby on Rails or Django or Quarkus or NextJS could replace Wordpress, then they would. I myself wrote Symphony for many years (2008 to 2014) and I was certain it could kill Wordpress, but it failed.
The combination of Wordpress's defaults, its ease of use by designers, and the ability for one server to handle hundreds of installments, means that almost nothing can replace it.
What is it about PHP that makes this low-resource scenario possible?
I would say the biggest reason might be that PHP doesn't have to worry about the web server aspect. Apache (or another webserver) serves the requests, PHP just returns the page to Apache. This is one of the ways that Apache can serve hundreds of PHP based sites, cause there's no need to spin up another web server and Apache is pretty fast at what it does.
PHP being low-resource is a fallacy. You either:
- use mod_php which must start an interpreter instance for each request and has to dump all associated resources (db handle and the like) and memory when the request is served
- use something like FPM that has a pool of workers ready to communicate with the web server, which is more or less what every other languages do, if not via fast-cgi just by proxying an application server
Another way is event-driven, async PHP application server, but again it's not any different than similar solutions in other languages.
Now why people think PHP is low-resource ? That's all rose tinted glasses, because back in the days when everyone just used mod_php on cheap shared hosting for low-traffic websites, the execution model made it possible to get away with leaky apps since all memory was flushed at the end of the request.
If you want to go low-resource, use something like Go which is both much faster than PHP and has a lower memory footprint or choose an execution model that shares resources between requests (available in any JS, Python, Ruby, whatever you like).
> [PHP] makes sharing a server trivial
Is that still a thing? Why would an application on a server share anything other than the kernel?
Riddle me this: if my web page is for a local cafe and I've uploaded 5 images and 7 paragraphs is there anything I shouldn't share?
Wordpress optimized hosts will have "servers" sharing the apache, the kernel, the php libs, even the DB instance. The effective burden of an additional host is tiny. Which is perfect for a local cafe's webpage which might be lucky to get a hit an hour.
Now how do you think you'll compete on price by using containers when your competitor can host a 100x the cafe web pages? The cafe owner does not care that they are sharing a php lib instance. They care that their 7 paragraphs appear when the page loads.
Many graphic designers don't know how to work with the template systems of CMSs that attempt to serve multiple websites from a single app instance. Wordpress is kept alive, in part, by designers who feel it is easier to hack than any other system.
Because containers don't really solve any problems in this use case (or many others, honestly) and instead make everything more difficult.
That's just CGI. You could theoretically do the same with any other language, but PHP is just the most popular.
PHP integrates with the server. It does not have the spawn a new process per request like CGI
I think dreamhost runs php as fcgi.
I'm actually not sure that fcgi is that bad, even for other languages, but most shared hosts will probably limit what you can do in terms of resources.
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make.
Not having to spawn a new process greatly decreases the time it takes to process a request, which greatly increases the amount of requests you can serve with a given amount of hardware.
The difference in resource consumption is huge.
It's just a reminder how much "right place at the right time" plays into the phenomenon of ubiquity, from Wordpress to Harry Potter to Zoom to Javascript.
There are countless efforts to make the next Wordpress out there, yet no combination of Scheme and Rust is going to make up for the critical missing ingredient of "right place at the right time".
You mean there aren't already 20 unfinished projects reimplementing Wordpress in Rust?
Not yet there aren't. Perhaps we should form a committee to start a few and ensure that none of them actually have thr critical mass go succeed!
There's no need. Most "rewrite in Rust" projects implement some basic functionality and miss the other 90%, get posted here for self promotion and then get abandoned don't they?
This is the right time. Strike while the iron is hot. People are angry and concerned. Someone just needs to come forward with an attractive way to capitalize on the situation.
But the problem is that if Wordpress disappears overnight, you're left with a sea of alternatives that's 100x larger than when Wordpress rose to popularity.
Ex-Wordpress users are just going to diffuse into all the other decent options that already exist. Or stick with a Wordpress fork that caters to them. Though note that Wordpress isn't going away. How many Wordpress users even know who Mullenweg is?
The idea of cobbling together yet another blog platform that will somehow capture these users better than Wordpress plus all the decent incumbents is some good ol fashioned developer hubris. :P
There are many examples of an entrenched incumbent being displaced by a new killer app. All it takes is the right new features and perhaps a path from the old to the new.
And honestly WP is a great product. No other CMS managed to get so much community around, so many plugins etc
Right timing absolutely, but there was also great product sense there
Drupal feels like it's a bureaucrats paradise. Other CMSs never got there neither
> shake the baggage of being PHP
PHP is why WordPress was a success. PHP is available basically everywhere, for cheap. You can get a $5/month hosting plan that'll give you a VPS with mod_php and mysql and you'll be able to install WordPress. (Also, WordPress put some actual effort into having a quick-and-simple setup process. If you can upload some files onto a server, it can take it from there.) Thus anyone can trivially install WordPress.
There's "better" languages, but even today they tend to require more of you to get a working site deployed.
It's actually a bit surprising that no other languages tries to make server pages the way php and asp3 did.
Of course the model is flawed, but so easy to get started with :)
As I understand, the vulns come because of a big messy codebase and the idea to solve everything with another 3rd party plugin.
Processwire OTOH is fantastic in this regard. Super small and generic core with minimal, close to non-existent attack surface, and a programmatic API that lets you solve custom functionality with a few calls to the content API instead of another plugin.
Leads to practically maintenance free sites.
Almost the security of a static site, with the flexibility and dynamic features of a proper cms.
After having the nightmare of maintaining a dozen WP and Drupal sites in the past, I can now just let the sites chug along for years without intervention.
> I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it.
I imagine that a spiritual successor would have a one-click install in many web hosts, which is all but impossible if not still written in PHP, and then installable through the various turnkey web hosting reseller stacks (e.g. Softaculous).
Then, replicating many of the popular plugins, and getting a whole community of contributors onboard who already make their living off WordPress and have little incentive to adopt something with little traction.
WordPress isn't a code framework; it's a very complete application with a massive ecosystem of plugins that serves as its moat.
> a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage
Plenty of people have made better CMSes, Wordpress is big because it got big, and a lot of people depend on it. And since an enormous number of people are involved with it, your upstart system will never have the capability of Wordpress. Whatever capability you come up with, somebody will have already made a horrible module to install on Wordpress to do it that after 10 years has become almost alright, or at least all of the flaws have been posted on messageboards and everybody knows how to work around them.
Wordpress isn't wordpress because it's good, it's wordpress because it was good enough at the time, and its competition was Drupal and Joomla (or something not PHP.) PHP baggage? PHP isn't PHP because it's good, it's PHP because of mod_php, and cheap hosts. To repeat, your choices: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or figuring out how to run another language on your cheap host, or having to pay to upgrade your hosting account. By far the best option for most people was Wordpress.
If you want to compete with Wordpress, first get a time machine, then go back to that time and write something better in PHP.
meh, if you're gonna cheat with a time machine, then just bring a floppy disc with the various versions of wordpress. as PHP gets updated, just release the newer version of wordpress. it's open source, right?
There is Ghost at least: https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost
However, it has recently shifted to more limited audience. (payed subscription-based content with different tiers)
the baggage is the selling point. there's so many other ways to build a website that aren't wordpress and replicate the core functionality, the reason it sticks around is the huge legacy of plugins written in php that can't be easily replicated.
Every time I read a comment like this about replacing WP and PHP with a successor it just sounds so incredibly out of touch.
I mean no offense OP but it's obvious you have no clue at all about who actually uses WP and why they do it.
Yes, I always see people post comments like "why not just use (some crazy stack of CLI tools, markdown, source control, and CDNs) it's way better for XYZ reason" not realizing that the people behind most WP sites--which constitute something like 25% of the internet--are in general extremely nontechnical people who are posting recipes, sharing knitting patterns, writing travel blogs, archiving family photos, etc., and who have ZERO interest in anything that looks like source code.
And I don't blame them! I run wordpress sites and I sigh with frustration any time I have to insert a custom HTML block, and I am technical. When I'm writing on WP I want it simple and easy.
WP is also not just a CMS where you can drop in something else. It's a colossal ecosystem of plugins, themes, and so on. Some sites run on entire mini-ecosystems within the WP ecosystem, e.g. generatepress/generateblocks/generatecloud.
WordPress is to creating website what Excel is to generic business calculations.
Earlier discussion:
Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650138
WordPress: Joost/Karim Fork
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42662801
Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork
Mullenweg is in trouble, WordPress is gonna be fine.
https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
Without a canonical fork for the community (and crucially plugin authors) to rally around it’ll be a bit like Linux distros without a shared executable format, making life difficult for everyone and making it harder to keep critical mass for any vendor.
That's difficult to do, but time will tell. There are already established forks, there are obvious leaders, there are known mechanisms to go around wordpress.org... something at some point will pick up steam and that'll be that. Maybe it will be Mullenweg himself who will continue to dig his own grave, maybe it will be the lawsuit that will be the final nail in his coffin... who knows. But WordPress will be fine.
And if it isn't, really, who cares. It's not a particularly well built or unique piece of software. Maybe it's time for something else.
I think it would basically take a tech giant going all-in (ie Amazon) and rallying other companies to get this fork into the Linux foundation or something.
WP Engine could do that, and I'd happily throw my support behind it just to spite Mullenweg. They have the funds, the motive and could leverage the existing community, including picking it's leaders and contributors. I wouldn't be surprised that's what happens once the lawsuit is over.
A few folks with a lot of community rep could probably do a lot of good if they to threw support behind a new primary fork.
From his perspective, after everything he has done, others are getting the financial gains and many in the community turned on him and his company. It must be a horrible feeling.
I sort of get what you're trying to do here - an exercise in empathy - but the flip side of this is that he has been made enormously wealthy off the back of thousands and thousands of unpaid volunteer hours on an open source project. It's not only "others" who are getting the financial gains.
Good point and agreed. Do you think for him it is more an issue about how much money WP Engine is making compared to him or the relative influence they have?
I'm not really sure to be honest! He could well be thinking exactly what you said, I was just pointing out the flip side of that argument if that is what he believes, because it would be doing a real disservice to the open source community around WordPress without which he would be nothing.
But... isn't that a core ethos of open-source? That you won't ever come even close to capturing the full value provided by a piece of software... but the nature of the problem is such that the value could never be created unless it was open.
I like to think of this as a "reverse" faustian bargain. By sticking to some agreed upon "moral" agreement of this open contribution and communal governance, you create a huge market that you get to try and least capture a piece of. If you break that bargin, you risk the project. And it isn't like this is some theoretical bit... it has been shown again and again in different communities.
I fundamentally don't understand how you can spend so long in open-source and think that this agreement doesn't apply to you. That may seem "cruel" in that someone else can profit from you... but that was always part of the bargain that made your business exist in the first place.
Or, he's loose off the vine juice.
I’m not a WP user, and I don’t want to ruffle feathers, but I can read and I think WP .com might not be getting the credit it deserves for contributing 4000+ hrs/year to WP development. Some of the contributors to WP are the very best open source developers out there; they look at kernel performance, image encoding corner cases and php, and land fixes. Not sure if Mullenweg is communicating that as clearly as he could, but it’s true. Without contributions like that, I doubt WP would be as well known as it is.
yep I think it's nuts. I have a plugin in the WP directory, and when I first uploaded it kind of blew my mind the service they provide for free. An SVN repo that gives you instant visibility to tens of millions of site owners. Imho Matt has set expectations too high over the decades and now everyone thinks Wordpress grows on trees.
I feel sorry for Matt, someone close to him (family, friend, partner) should help him. It’s not good for him, not good for his company and for Wordpress. I’ve never used Wordpress and I prefer static sites where I have full control, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the usefulness end ease of it. Like many situation, this whole issue would be solved if a couple of the people involved sat down for a coffee, left their ego’s outside, had open minds, and having the willingness to compromise and being sincere ;-)
I'm reminded of Tony Hsieh whose "eccentricity" lead directly to his early death.
If you haven't yet: Now's the best time to migrate away. You should try out Kirby[0]. No affiliation, but this thing sparked my interest in web development again when I first heard about it.
Kirby is only source-available, not open source, and requires a paid license for usage. I think that's a deal breaker for a lot of Wordpress users.
I too have switched to Kirby, should have done so years ago, it’s great to work with and fast out the box.
matt please get your brain worms dealt with, thank you
- someone who has been happily using wordpress for her site since about 2000
I am not supporting either side, but wpengine is a shit company that treats their customers like they are sheeple. They remove critical functions from the original WordPress, selling $1 worth of hosting for $79. Not providing a "hosting" environment but only providing one site per account (additional sites are billed). This is a shitty hosting platform using WordPress' name and not benefiting WordPress itself.
I had a comment where Matt refused to believe what I said about ACF but this doesn't make me hate him. I don't care about wpengine at all and they can go to hell instead of hurting WordPress any further. They are just using an open-source project to make money and not giving back.
People are fighting with the original creator of the software and supporting 3rd party for-profit companies like wpengine. For what reason? This is clear propaganda.
https://getpublii.com/ Yet, anyone?
While they have a Github repo, it is incredibly annoying how it's almost impossible to find any documentation around deployment/hosting. Unless I missing an obvious page
Click the GitHub link. It’s a gui. You (or your parents) publish the static pages somewhere.
Hadn't heard of this but looks like a pretty nice tool. Thanks for sharing :)
Oh that looks nice. I've used Hugo before but for the lite stuff I need it abstracts the content too much. This looks exactly what I want.
Sometimes my friends ask me why I don't use a CMS for my personal site instead of just writing articles as pages on a Ruby on Rails site.
Aside from finding CMSes to be overly heavy and restrictive, this is why. You never know when they're gonna go off the rails (pun intended). If I can't just do everything in vim/notepad++ and a terminal I'm not super interested.
Same reason why I'm skeptical of game toolkits like Unity.
This argument can't hold, how do you know rails isn't going to flip, how do you know linux won't flip. How do you know vim won't flip? I'm sure you have tens if nit hundreds of technologies in your stack that are open source and you never imagined they were going to flip. I have rearly used wp for clients, but i was never under the impression it could go sideways just like most stable software i use.
That's a fair counterargument.
The biggest thing in that category was Mysql "flipping" with the Oracle purchase. But people quickly migrated to postgres (which more-or-less is the same for smallish projects) and MariaDB as a Mysql fork exists as well. And I'm sure some people just kept using Mysql as well without having to do anything.
For all the tech I listed here, I think Rails is the one that would be hardest to a drop-in replacement for. Everything else is "generic." Text editors (not that I particularly care if a text editor is updated frequently (or at all most of the time)) and nix-like environments are basically hot swappable.
But IME when something has some sort of custom environment and that's the only way to deal with it (dashboard, special IDE, etc.) that's when you have the biggest risk of having a bad time.
I find it an interesting question to what degree the design decisions of WordPress are still the right ones in 2025. A PHP backend and frontend running on the same machine, serving dynamically rendered content from a MySql database.
Personally, I prefer to have my content in text files, which are using a DSL similar to Yaml but optimized for use in a CMS. And render it to static html files via Python. A process that happens on a different machine. The html files are then pushed to the server that serves the frontend.
Automattic vs. WP Engine will be ultimately decided in court but this sort of reminds me of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.[0] when Oracle got mad because of Google cashing out hard with Android. It's all about money for Matt....not about WordPress or open source community.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
Just this week I needed to completely revamp my personal website. I went with Squarespace because it's quick to spin up and I don't have to fiddle with tons of plugins and a complicated theme ecosystem. I just need a website that works. I used to use Wordpress for all my previous iterations, but now, it's done. Sad to see it become obsolete by not fixing them broader business and user-friendliness problems.
Good luck migrating to another platform when they jack up the prices. You can pick any host for wp and migrate within minutes. With closed systems like wix and Squarespace you are locked in forever.
> 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.
WP Engine owns several WordPress plugin developers. Does plugin development not count now?
> WP Engine owns several WordPress plugin developers. Does plugin development not count now?
Mullenweg stole the Custom fields plugin from WPEngine. So no, plugin development doesn't could when he can steal the plugin away from you.
You can install all plugins via GitHub if you want.
Anybody know if Mullenweg has recently purchased property in Belize? I'm curious how far along the McAfee curve he's gotten.
Haha this is a brilliant comment. McAfee lived one hell of a life.
Good. As I’ve said in other threads. There are other projects, other CMSes that are perfectly capable of taking over. Let the Wordpress monopoly die and with it this crazy man’s tirades.
Is the entire drama that WordPress is asserting a trademark over 'WPEngine' (i.e. 'WP'), and WPEngine disagrees?
Matt tried to extort money from WP Engine, then blocked their users from receiving updates, stole their plugins, and banned their developers. The filing in WP Engine vs. Automattic gives the details.
> Is the entire drama that WordPress is asserting a trademark over 'WPEngine' (i.e. 'WP'), and WPEngine disagrees?
That is a minor issue in the disagreement.
The bigger issue is that WPEngine had its access to Wordpress cut off on very short notice for questionable reasons.
This obviously had a negative impact on WPEngine’s business, but also on all of the business that WPEngine served. I think the latter part is what has a lot of folks up in arms — the collateral damage was really tone deaf (imho).
The blogosphere is keeping us entertained - with meta drama about blogging itself as growth turns negative.
all this WP drama makes me really grateful about deciding to go with a static site generator.
Astro FTW!
this article opens with "since i last wrote about wordpress", with a link to a previous article. the linked article does the same. it goes seven layers deep! what dedication!
This drama has boggled my mind since the beginning. I've been trying to write about the open web while trying get back into blogging. It's been great to have a bunch to write about, but I sure wish it wasn't happening!
I've also been focusing on the rise of Bluesky and my move from extreme skepticism to tentative acceptance. That's been more fun to write about.
Isn't there a metric like 80% of the web is WP. Wonder who will be the new provider if WP does fold/problems affect running sites.
I thought that was a statistic about PHP. Though WordPress is almost certainly a significant chunk of that.
Some quick searching seems to indicate that the web is about 79% PHP, and that ~44% of websites are using WordPress.
Nah, Wordpress themselves claimed 40% in 2021 (https://wordpress.org/40-percent-of-web/).
The big caveat of course is that wordpress being installed on a domain does not mean that entire domain is powered by wordpress. I'd bet for most of them it's just the landing/marketing pages and/or a blog section.
Hopefully… geocities.
Hmm, crazy narcissist Matt Mullenweg does something for attention at the detriment of everyone else, again?
The problem is that there's a bit of a black hole in CMSs right now where you need developers who want to work on the CMS and ordinary users who can host/create content on the CMS. Strapi was almost there, but alas, headless is not going to cut it for your average business trying to make a website.
Static site generators can be too limited and simple, Drupal is not particularly user friendly, and tons of other CMSs don't have enough plugins for marketers to cram into their sites.
Anyone considering e-commerce now will probably use Shopify instead of WooCommerce. Site builders like Squarespace and Wix are good for simpler sites but not for multi-author news type sites.
I feel like the only option is a fork at this point.
(Disclaimer—I work for Strapi). I would love to know why you think Headless will not cut it or what Strapi could improve. We're seeing many SMBs succeed with it.
I really like Strapi, it's very intuitive, etc. But headless is a headache to set up for a tech illiterate person/org who wants to start some kind of blog or small news site.
I'll give you an example: https://newyorkyimby.com/
This is a relatively simple site that posts housing development news for New York. Ultimately they're not going to need a super complicated front end. Most sites just want a theme and deployment.
If Strapi had a non-headless mode and had themes I'm sure it could be used for the many millions of these small sites that run Wordpress.
Additionally Strapi isn't a great choice for blogs or portfolio sites, it's simply too much to set up for most people. I think the barrier to entry is what prevents it from becoming great. If a random person can start a blog, then more developers are going to want to work on it, meaning more plugins, meaning more of a reason to use Strapi. A feedback loop that got Wordpress to where it is.
Shopify is so big because they make setting up a site extremely easy, and now there are tons of plugins and themes to use on your Shopify store, which only gives people more of a reason to use Shopify.
No it is not. Outside this strange bubble on hacker news, no ine really cares or has ever heard of the creator.
They just use wordpress.
I would love to do a one click transfer to a static site but it’s not easy. I’ve only seen Astro Wordpress kits but paid
If you’re comfortable with php writing an importer for Kirby is simple, checkout their cli YouTube video. Nice modern api and easy to import content. Being flat file if there’s a mistake, just delete the content folder and import again!
Generate a static site from WordPress itself with the Simply Static plugin.
I bet Wordpress will be fine. Too bad Automattic isn’t a public company, bet it would be volatile right now.
Good many then these stupid bot will leave my server alone always looking for wp-config FML.
I’ve been working on a side hobby project for a year in an attempt to solve these problems.
It keeps growing in interest, and the demand has become more than I can handle currently.
If anyone is interested in helping to build an open and secure platform that is an alternative to WordPress, please reach out or comment.
Blog about it and get it on HN?
Yes, this is a really great start.
One of my current clients recently had his WP install taken over, and SiteGround took it down for offensive content.
It’s just a basic informational website for his consulting business, and he never logs into it or makes changes to it. He has no idea how anyone hacked it.
It really baffles me that this is still a thing in 2025, and that people can’t get a basic Shopify type of experience for creating informational websites and blogs where they can set it and forget, and focus on running their business. They should be concerned about how their content website is growing their business and overall bottomline; not if they have been taken over with offensive content or not based off of basic security best practices.
It seems that this is definitely a pressing issue for the web
All the small/medium branding agencies surviving on Wordpress should devote 10% of their devs’ time to core.
Community: rebuilt.
Narcissistic personality disorder[0] is unnoticeable for a person having it, but makes lives of all around them a living hell. Such person is always right, and the 99.99% people around with an opposite opinion/viewpoint are idiots. If some "idiot" is standing up, there comes the retaliation part.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
Hard to care about this drama until it starts to affect functionality. Terraform is still around. Elastic is still around. Reddit and Twitter have no third party apps. I used to have a WordPress blog which I stopped updating for reasons of laziness. I will try to restore the backup and see what happens.
You can actually still use infinity for Reddit it's just a pain to get it.
Please take your meds or seek immediate professional help, Matt.
Is this just an add for another paid CMS?
Might be an ad - I'm not aware of the author's associations - but Craft CMS, which is linked to, has a free version like wordpress.org
Nope. I just prefer Craft, and I think it's a much more stable platform in terms of leadership these days. I also think it provides for a much better developer experience. Just opinions, though. I currently don't monetize my blog in any way — though I should probably change that at some point :)
Just love the way Matt keeps responding to everything in a passive-aggressive tone with a smarmy smile.
A silver lining is that if fewer sites use WordPress, the web won't look nearly as homogeneous as it does now.
Could someone link to a higher-level history of the WordPress situation, going further back? For the benefit of those of us that don't know much beyond the fact that it's an established blogging and website-building platform?
As a fellow newbie, I found this article from Josh Collinsworth to be a very thoughtful and clear overview. It's a bit long but it covers the history prior to the lawsuit.
some good news for a change
I'm still in the camp that Matt is attempting to force a fork because he's done with WP. Maybe he believes it can't live without his magic touch (lmao). Either that or he's lost his mind. :)
> Maybe he believes it can't live without his magic touch (lmao).
If 2025 Matt tried to fork b2/cafelog back in 2003, I think a good number of people in the PHP and blogging communities would have told him to, very kindly, fork off.
Or, all that money and power corrupted him over the years.
I'm there with you. He's could be trying to see how far he can go to get people to fork, and finding out there's literally nothing he can do to make his critics fork on their own dime. If it weren't GPL'd, WPE could fork it, close it, and lock it down. Instead, the parasite has to volunteer to be the next host.
People keep saying "FORK FORK FORK". You have to remember, that all hosts that are deploying WordPress rely on the main provider. Thousands of hosting companies use WordPress deploying after registration and auto-updating the installations. How are you planning to make this kind of a major change? All the plugins that are in wordpress.org. How will you inform every WordPress site owner to go through this type of transition?
I think this "fork" idea comes from a bizarre cancel/woke culture influence.
At this point, I’m planning to move away from Wordpress due to the instability and into a regular wiki based site. Unsure of which at the moment, maybe some suggestions? Prefer static file based rather than host a DB.
Depends on your target user. If you want something really simple for developers, https://github.com/gollum/gollum is pretty neat (is what powers the Wiki system on GitHub), while if you want something simple for people who aren't developers, something like Mediawiki would fit better. Although Mediawiki requires a database, you can use SQLite (which is basically a file on disk as a DB) for it.
Dokuwiki is also a neat old-school alternative that basically treats files on disk as articles/pages, so no (other) DB needed.
Hugo has been wonderful for me. I use it to host my portfolio website. Only thing I dislike is themes can be a pain to edit if you don’t know where things are spread out in the source.
PHP based static file CMS (w/o database) to render markdown on the fly:
* Kirby: https://getkirby.com/ * Grav: https://getgrav.org/ * Statamic: https://statamic.com/
I moved to Azure free static hosting. Push a commit and automatically triggers a deployment via Github Actions.
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/use-cases-and-examples/de...
For flat-file wiki-based websites, you can try dokuwiki [1] which is extremely convenient and of course quite fast for what it's made for.
Kirby has ticked the boxes for me, total control of the admin interface.
Block fields like ACF flexible layouts. Modern and fast with total control of the frontend.
Has been fun to switch and fast.
GravCMS is a flat-file CMS (content is saved to markdown, making it quite portable if you decide it's not for you). There isn't wiki-functionality (auto-create pages that don't exist), however.
I wrote an exporter from WP to Grav [1].
Instead of a wiki, why not a static site generator.
I have used Pelican[1] for over a decade. Strongly recommend if you know Python. You don't need to know Python, but in the off chance that one day in the future you want to write your own plugin...
I've been extremely happy with Directs + Astro (and Svelte for some reactive components). It has a weird license where it is open source but they require you to purchase a license if your company goes over $5 million in revenue. But it's such a nice piece of BaaS.
Instability and WordPress have been related for a long time. Personally, I have found the last few years to be pretty good.
If what you need do is a great fit for a static site, then that will be a much easier to deal with.
For a majority of Wordpress use I am involved in a static site would not offer a majority of the features needed.
If you are hosting a blog then I highly recommend Astro.
https://ghost.org/ perhaps?
ghost is worse than wp imho. Lots of sneaky affiliate links, and they only integrate stuff that does affiliate linking; the self-hosted version calls home as well.
I just launched a drag and drop service myself https://lmno.lol. Use your favorite text editor to edit your Markdown blog file.
No tracking, adverts, paywalls, or bloat. I'm also bringing a little nostalgia back with ASCII art headers (optional of course).
Here's my blog on it: https://lmno.lol/alvaro
Wrote a bit about how I got to build my own service https://lmno.lol/alvaro/blogging-minus-the-yucky-bits-of-mod...
Statamic
TL;DR?
I don't like drama. Why is it in trouble just now and it has not been an ongoing process?
Let’s just rewrite the thing in Laravel, hook all the functions using RunKit7 (or a fork) to implement a plugin compatibility layer, and send the old codebase to the dumpster fire. WP Engine and other hosting agencies, it could be a matter of survival for you.
It's looking more and more like it's a matter of survival for the massive number of sites that run Wordpress but don't host with Wordpress.com.
> Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the push they need to get started [in forking WP]
Ha. IDK buddy, be careful what you wish for.
I think Matt should reach out to Elon Musk to assist him. And I don't mean that in a weird or snarky or "jabbing at Elon/Matt" kind of way. Clearly he is struggling to deal with a competitor and community wanting to impose their will on him, and make him behave like a "good boy" for their benefit (whatever that may be). Unfortunately he doesn't have the kind of "Fuck You" money that Elon has to deal with said interlopers.
I have never liked Wordpress. If it dies, that's ok with me. I just don't like it.
Oh no who could have possibly forseen this .... mumble mumble