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Days after web hosting provider WP Engine won a preliminary injunction against WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg and rival hosting provider Automattic, Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org is taking a holiday break.
WordPress.com — a site that provides access to WordPress plug-ins, themes, and other artifacts to the community — will take a break from providing free services, including new account registrations, new plug-ins, themes, photo directory submissions, and plug-in reviews, Mullenweg said in a blog post.
In response, Joost de Walk — the CEO of WordPress-based SEO optimization tool Yoast — wrote a blog post about taking a federated and independent approach to WordPress. His views were supported by enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite’s CEO Karim Marucchi through a separate blog post.
“We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we’re OK being led by a single person who controls everything and might do things we disagree with or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is ‘Democratizing publishing,’ we’ve been very low on exactly that: democracy,” de Walk said.
In his post, de Walk made five points about creating a WordPress Foundation-like entity to lead the project and handing over all community assets, such as themes and plug-ins, to that entity. He also suggested giving the WordPress trademark to the public domain. The WordPress Foundation owns the trademark, and Automattic has an exclusive commercial license for the trademark.
He also said that all plug-in mirrors should be federated, and data should be shared between these servers. In October, after Mullenweg banned WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org, he took control of WP Engine’s Advanced Custom Fields plug-in and forked it with a new name called Secure Custom Fields. De Walk said in his blog post that such situations shouldn’t occur again.
Mullenweg commented on de Walk’s post, saying he should pursue this project under any name other than WordPress. “I think this is a great idea for you to lead and do under a name other than WordPress. There’s really no way to accomplish everything you want without starting with a fresh slate from a trademark, branding, and people’s point of view,” Mullenweg said.
Since Mullenweg and WP Engine locked horns in September, there have been calls about changing the structure of open source WordPress governance. Earlier this month, 20 signatories, including core WordPress contributors, criticized Mullenweg’s actions and urged him to explore “community-minded solutions” in an open letter.
While Mullenweg has been open to the ideas of WordPress forks and even welcomed them, he has rigorously defended the current operating model of the community.
As for the next steps, de Walk said he would talk to leaders in the WordPress community in January to decide the path forward. WP Engine welcomed this initiative in a post on X and committed to working on the project with other leaders.
“WordPress’s success as the most widely used CMS is not the achievement of any one person or a single piece of open source code. It is the result of a global community — thousands of developers, agencies, businesses, and others — who have invested their time, talent, trust, and resources in advocating for, supporting, and building the global WordPress ecosystem and technology,” the company said.
Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. You can reach out to him at im[at]ivanmehta[dot]com
