If you don’t know what WordPress is or the recent discussions about it, let’s talk. WordPress is a widely used platform that allows people to easily create and manage websites, and lately, there have been some important debates about its future direction that are worth understanding. Let’s break it down step by step so you have a good idea of what’s happening and why people care so much about it.
The Main Player(s)
Let’s talk about the important people and groups:
- WordPress is one of the most popular tools for building websites. It is very flexible and easy to use, which makes it popular with marketing companies that want to create websites without needing special technical skills. WordPress has helped many of these companies offer more services and call themselves web development agencies. This means that businesses that may not have had the technical ability to create websites in the past can now use WordPress to do so, which has made website building much more accessible. However, this has also led to different opinions about the value of these services and whether such agencies can truly be called web development providers.
- Automattic is the company started by Matt Mullenweg, who also co-founded WordPress. Automattic runs many products related to WordPress, including WordPress.com, which is a commercial service that provides hosting and other features for users who want a more streamlined experience. Automattic has a big influence on the WordPress world, and its decisions are often talked about in the community. Because Automattic plays such a major role in the development and direction of WordPress, the choices it makes are sometimes met with mixed reactions, with some supporting the changes and others feeling concerned about how these decisions affect the larger WordPress ecosystem.
- The WordPress Community includes developers, designers, content creators, and users who help with the open-source project. This group helps improve WordPress by giving feedback, making plugins and themes, and joining community events. The community has different views about the direction of WordPress, with some wanting to keep things stable and others wanting more changes. This diversity of opinion is both a strength and a challenge for WordPress. It means that there is always a lot of input, but it also means that reaching agreements can be tough. The community is made up of many different types of people, from beginners to experts, and from hobbyists to professional developers, which adds to the variety of perspectives.
The Events*
- Matt gets a bug up his ass one day about WPEngine and decides to accuse them of freeloading and messing up his software and doing other things he doesn’t like. Initially, people were sympathetic to this, because this is absolutely a thing that companies do with free software and it sucks. However, reactions were muted and WPEngine especially didn’t immediately just roll over and give him what he wanted, so Matt went on to turn up the heat in a follow-up blog post, calling them a “cancer” and telling their customers they should leave.
- WPEngine sends a cease-and-desist in which they also accuse Mullenweg of trying to shake them down for millions of dollars and threatening them if they did not pay up, and oh my goodness they included receipts.
- Mullenweg does not, in fact, cease or desist. Automattic — controlled by Matt — fires back with its own cease and desist, and Matt goes on to comment on X (“formerly Twitter”), and a particular orange site where many other commenters plead with him to shut up for his own good, and on his personal blog.
- When all that only manages to get a quiet murmur in tech news circles, Matt decides to ban WPEngine’s hosted sites from accessing WordPress software updates from WordPress.org, which he controls.
- WPEngine responds with a lawsuit in 11 complaints, using delightfully tasty legal terms like “extortion”, and, oh, also now telling the world that Matt had tried to poach their CEO and then threatened her when she didn’t cooperate, and oh my goodness again there are receipts in the lawsuit! The current executive director of WordPress apparently finds out, from this lawsuit, that Matt was attempting to replace her, and bounces.
- Matt goes on to run his mouth everywhere until he lands a lawyer with a high enough hourly rate to convince him to touch grass for a minute.
- Now the tech news is starting to pick all this up (and this is when traffic starts to spike at r/Wordpress), but still not quite at the volume Matt’s looking for.
- Matt offers employees of Automattic a pretty sweet severance deal if they don’t like the emperor’s new clothes, and over 8% of his staff say “thank you, bye”.
- Matt gets a petty little checkbox added to the wordpress.org login that makes you promise, cross-your-heart, you’re not “affiliated with” WPEngine. What does that mean? Nobody knows and Matt banhammers people for asking.
- Next, Matt directs WordPress.org to steal a popular plugin, managed by WPEngine, used by millions of sites, and rename it, and force-install that onto every site that was previously using WPEngine’s plugin. Matt calls this a “fork”, and says it’s “for security reasons”. This has a direct impact on millions of customers, ties up agencies with inquiries, and absolutely blows up tech news. Matt starts injecting this directly into his veins and slumps back on the floor of his “post-economic” bathroom (this last part might not have actually happened, I’m not sure).
- …and he bans another popular plugin (archive)
- …so some plugin developers begin to move their plugins off of wordpress.org: exhibit a (archive), exhibit b (archive).
Other recaps for those that try to maintain a balanced drama diet:
- https://lwn.net/Articles/991906/
- https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/27/24256361/wordpress-wp-engine-drama-explained-matt-mullenweg
- https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/15/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-drama-explained/
- https://slate.com/technology/2024/10/wordpress-wpengine-matt-mullenweg-drama-explained.html
Lifted almost verbatim from: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1g4pr8f/wordpress_the_software_is_currently_embroiled_in…
You can read more about this discussion on Reddit. Automattic supports changes like the Gutenberg project that, in theory, was intended to make editing easier, but the community grew worried about compatibility, learning new features, and how these changes might affect their current way of working. The Gutenberg editor aimed to bring a modern editing experience similar to other popular platforms, but these changes mean that users have to adapt, and not everyone found the transition easy. The UI, to this day, fails to be clear and useable. A few users appreciate the new features and felt that Gutenberg makes content creation simpler, but others find it disruptive to their current setup.
For more on community reactions, check out this Reddit thread. On the other hand, some people think that using new technologies is important for WordPress to stay competitive as website tools change. The world of website building is constantly evolving, and many feel that WordPress needs to keep up by offering more advanced tools and features that users expect. Without these updates, WordPress might fall behind newer competitors that offer a more modern user experience.
Business Considerations
From a business point of view, these changes are part of a larger trend in the industry to make editing tools more dynamic and user-friendly. Businesses today want platforms that are easy to use, even for people who are not very technical. This topic has also been discussed extensively on Reddit. As with any changing platform, it can be hard to balance new features with what the community wants, but it is often needed to keep growing in the long run. If WordPress does not innovate, it risks losing users to other platforms that offer a simpler or more modern experience. However, too much change can also create frustration for long-time users who prefer the old way of doing things.
For agencies and businesses that use WordPress, these changes bring both good opportunities and some challenges. Businesses that have used the classic editor for years may find it difficult to switch, and there could be additional costs involved in making sure everyone knows how to use the new tools effectively. Businesses need to consider how these changes affect their overall strategy. While Gutenberg could have improved the way content was created, it requires updates to plugins and themes to ensure compatibility. This can be both time-consuming and costly, especially for businesses with complex setups.
The discussions about WordPress’ future show how hard it can be to manage an open-source platform with many users and different opinions. Automattic’s role in leading the project is important, but they must always balance new ideas with what the community needs and expects. It is not easy to keep everyone happy when there are so many different types of users with different needs. Some people want stability, while others want new features, and Automattic has to try to find the best path forward for everyone.
For businesses, staying informed about these changes and adapting to new features will be important to get the most out of WordPress while avoiding any major issues. Keeping up with changes can be challenging, but it is also an opportunity to improve and grow. By understanding the new tools and taking the time to learn how to use them, businesses can make sure they are making the most of what WordPress has to offer. This will help them stay competitive and ensure that their websites are modern, engaging, and effective. Being proactive about adapting to change is key, and businesses that do so will likely find themselves in a better position to succeed in the long term.
One Divi feature is”Color Scheme.” It presets for green, orange, pink, red and its default blue color schemes that influence the colors of borders, buttons and other accents on a baseline Divi theme. What happens if none of those colors jibe with your design? In our case, there were layers of styling rules: baseline WordPress, Divi, Woocommerce, and our styling. It’s great that Divi has Woo specific styling available, but it wasn’t helping what we were trying to accomplish. That’s a lot to wade through and all of those style rendering decisions turn into processor use on your client machines. A site that is intensive to render may perform worse or appear to render in some unpredictable way on some browser. Rather than add to that, setting the color scheme in Divi is one way to output as little styling as possible. The following is my approach for overriding the Divi color schemes and adding a reference for your project.