How to Destroy Your Reputation - Wordpress vs. WP Engine

[Ryuzaki]

At the WordCamp US 2024 convention, Matt Mullenweg (CEO & Co-creator of Wordpress) called out WP Engine for not making enough donations to Automattic (whether that be 5% of their revenue or man-hours), calling them a “cancer to Wordpress” and accusing them of profiteering off of his work (which is open-source). I’m sure (sarcasm here) it has nothing to do with WP Engine likely crushing the Wordpress.com hosting solution. He even asked people to unsubscribe from WP Engine as their hosting provider during his presentation.

Afterwards, there was a big stink about Matt’s presentation since everything related to Wordpress is voluntary and open-source. The community was displeased and Matt doubled down after the conference on X and elsewhere. This resulted in 8.4% of Automattic employees resigning their positions.

Wordpress itself goes on to add a stupid checkbox when you log in or register an account on Wordpress.org, making you agree that you aren’t “affiliated with WP Engine in anyway, financially or otherwise.”

It’s also blocking any Wordpress sites on WP Engine servers from updating or installing plugins and themes via the admin panel.

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WP Engine issued a cease-and-desist and were ignored, and I think WP Engine is now suing for extortion.

Fast forward a week or two and Advanced Custom Fields (which is amazing and was bought by WP Engine a year or two ago) decided to push updates through their own servers instead of through the Wordpress plugin repository, seen as a little bit of jousting towards Wordpress, but realistically more-so just trying to build trust for their userbase ("You can know safely that your updates are coming from us").

Well, Wordpress completely breaks the trust of the entire community by doing two things:

1. They fork the entire ACF free-tier plugin (not surprising since Wordpress itself is a fork of b2/cafelog) and call it Secure Custom Fields (because they updated one security flaw).
2. They make it so that when anyone attemps to update ACF, whether manually or through automatic updates, it’ll swap them over to the new rip-off SCF version, now owned by Automattic.

This is more than just playing dirty. They’re knee-capping the revenue and user-base of probably the best plugin for Wordpress ever and also trying to destroy the hosting side of the company, and will probably work to integrate ACF's native features into the Wordpress core.

One should be reminded that Wordpress was promised to always be a PHP environment, and they gave that up with Gutenberg and the required Javascript and JSON usage for custom blocks, and I’m sure they were salty when ACF solved the custom block problem entirely in PHP.

So now on top of Google falling apart and taking everyone with them, Wordpress (or at least the CEO) has decided to also freak the hell out and irreparably harm their reputation as well. It also shows just how rocky the open-source environment is, especially when you lift up leaders in what should be a decentralized power structure.

It’s like an entire planet of nations, each armed with planet-destroying nukes, and all ready to start using them as soon as one person acts the fool. It’s so strange to see grown adults seemingly go kooky and basically jump off a psychological cliff with no insight into what they look like from the outside. It happens too often. Some people really can’t handle the drug-trip or the ego-trip.

The dumbest part is with how everything in the world right now is polarized and everyone feels compelled to choose a side, and many will choose out of a sense of loyalty, even if that comes with a hint of Stockholm Syndrome. So many people with all their clients are tied so deeply into the Wordpress ecosystem that there's no escape even if they wanted it. So their mind deals with that cognitive dissonance by heaping adoration upon the abuser. That's my opinion on the matter, anyways.

I wonder how much money Automattic kicks back to the original b2/cafelog guy... I have a "wild" guess.

What's your take on the whole thing?

 

[Darth]

My take is that is that Matt Mullenweg appears to be having some sort of mental crisis.

I also do not understand how he can control the entire Wordpress system with no other controls/directors/etc. Not sure what the governance structure is.

 

[bernard]

Wordpress in general seems to be in crisis.

I really don't see much of a reason to use Wordpress anymore. If you want to blog and publish content you have Medium and Substack. If you want to do viral engagement bait, do it on X directly and make real money there. If you want to create something unique, get ChatGPT to code it as a php/jquery one pager or launch some Nodejs site for a real Saas. If you want to do simple business websites, there's Wix, if you want e-comm there is Shopify.

Wordpress is not looking great to me anymore. It was useful for large scale publishing, but no one will do that anymore with AI, where you can autogenerate millions of post statically by clicking a button.

 

[illmasterj]

I really don't see much of a reason to use Wordpress anymore. If you want to blog and publish content you have Medium and Substack. If you want to do viral engagement bait, do it on X directly and make real money there. If you want to create something unique, get ChatGPT to code it as a php/jquery one pager or launch some Nodejs site for a real Saas. If you want to do simple business websites, there's Wix, if you want e-comm there is Shopify.

For corporate lead gen sites I'm seeing more and more moving to HubSpot CMS. It's not at all ideal in many ways but obviously they have a huge user base from the CRM already. Even if they can convert 10% of them to shift from WP to their in house CMS, it's going to be a winner.

 

[bernard]

I think they should move towards Drupal and lean more into AI and using their custom post functionality to create more of an "app engine" of sorts with way more flexibility for a database. Basically make it a very quick way to launch a database, frontend templates and "modules" instead of plugins, to handle data import and manipulation.

 

[Jesse]

It's so interesting watching the Internet sort of implode over the past couple of years.

I mean, I knew it would happen eventually, but it just seems like it has happened so quickly after things were a bit dull for quite a while.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Apparently a newer aspect of this battle is that Matt, in what from a non-legal outside point of view looks like extortion, is asking for 8% of WP Engine's gross (not net!) revenues for using their Wordpress trademark.

The issue is "WP" is apparently not a part of Wordpress' trademark, so there's nothing he can do. This whole thing is "You aren't kicking in enough money. You WILL be take part of this feudal system and send in tribute, or we'll take the land we so graciously allow you to farm from you altogether." It's so sad to see people dive off the deep end.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

There is more to this though. WPE hosts a (allegedly) heavily modified version of wordpress and used to use wordpress hosting etc in all their product descriptions which they've apparently changed now. I think this is one of those stories where there's no good guy. One side looks way worse in public though, I'll agree with y'all there for sure.

But I'm surprised those of us in SEO don't remember what we all used to say about WPE back in the old days - before they even became this current VC owned behemoth. I remember what all the agencies used to say about them back when I started in SEO and haven't given them a second thought since those days. It doesn't sound like they're super awesome now any more than then. Maybe just 'meh kinda wordpress but not which is kinda hosted okish'.

 

[Ryuzaki]

WPE hosts a (allegedly) heavily modified version of wordpress

My understanding from reading one of Matt's statements is that his main gripe (and perhaps the only thing they changed) is that WP Engine changed the number of revisions per each post that would be maintained. I would do this on my own sites too, as to not bloat out the database indefinitely.

I agree that all "wordpress hosting" is overcharged nonsense with a marketing angle to prey on the unaware.

I'd have to say that, at this point, unless Mullenweg gets his brain on straight and see's there's nothing for him to gain out of any of this, the only outcome he's going to achieve is WP Engine forking Wordpress. There's nothing legally stopping them from "creating" Wordengine or something, just like Wordpress did with Advanced Custom Fields, and then copying whatever features Wordpress puts out, even the same day.

In no way, shape, or form does Wordpress possibly benefit from stirring this up, even with WP Engine making gobs of money off of all the volunteer labor. Hurting WP Engine's cash flow doesn't divert that money into Wordpress' pockets. It just creates a new, seriously funded, hungry for revenge player. Which is stupid when your core offering is open source.