By We do not normally cover things like this on our website. However, since this situation is spiraling out of control and we may soon begin recommending clients move on from WordPress, we felt it important to document this situation.
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Below is the most complete timeline we know of on the WordPress vs. WP Engine drama that could upend 43% of the web and radically alter how websites are built and maintained.
Here is a timeline of what has happened
2010 – WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg creates a non-profit called the “WordPress Foundation” ostensibly built to guide the future of the open source CMS. He then trademarks the WordPress brand under his Automattic brand which then gifts the trademark to the WordPress Foundation. Immediately the WordPress Foundation grants Automattic an irrevocable and exclusive trademark license. At the time the WordPress foundation specifically notes that “WP” is not trademarked and Matt requests the community to use this acronym to refer to products made for WordPress instead of using the brand name itself.
2010 – WP Engine is founded in Austin, TX by Jason Cohen an investor, author, and startup founder who at the time was notable for Smart Bear a suite of software tools for developers.
2011 – Automattic, the corporate arm of WordPress, invests in WP Engine.
Jan 2018 – WP Engine accepts an investment from SilverLake capital, Automattic exits their investment from years prior.
Note: In an interview in October of 2024 Matt Mullenweg says Automattic was “forced out” by Silver Lake’s purchase of WP Engine and that Automattic wanted to stay involved with the hosting company.
August 2021 – After spending months developing a unique WordPress plugin we wanted to gift to the community I upload the plugin via my account only for it to be automatically blocked by the WordPress system. After spending hours pouring over documentation trying to figure out what happend I reach out to the WordPress plugin team who informs me that there is a trademark block in using the term “WP” in a plugin name. After posting online it is discovered this block was placed months earlier by the WordPress Core team at (most likely) Matt’s direction without any notification to the community. When an article is written about this and shared, the WordPress community explodes and Josepha Haden, the Executive Director of the WordPress Foundation, promises a fix. A conversation is started by core developers. 3-years later the fix never materializes. During this blow up some community members point out that WP Engine uses “WP” with no problems.
January 14th, 2024 – Matt Mullenweg posts on Slack “W.org belongs to me, it’s not part of the foundation or any trust, I run it in an open way that allows lots of folks to participate…”
July 12th, 2024 – the WordPress Foundation applies for 2 trademarks clearly aimmed at web hosting “Managed WordPress” and “Hosted WordPress”.
September 20th, 2024 – Matt Mullenweg begins sending extortion-like text messages to the CEO of WP Engine demanding she agree to the licensing deal he has offered before he goes on stage. In the messages he threatens to “go scorched Earth nuclear” on the company if they refuse his demands. He sends one final text message before taking stage to give a talk and says he can turn the talk into a simple Q&A if they agree, he is met with no response.
September 20th, 2024 – Matt shocks the audience at an event called WordCamp put on by the WordPress Foundation in which he talks about how private equity like SilverLake can ruin open source ecosystems. WP Engine is the title sponsor for the event at which Matt is using to harm the company’s reputation. Matt tells the audience to ditch WP Engine.
September 21st, 2024 – Matt publishes a blog post on the WordPress Foundation website (.org) titled “WP Engine is not WordPress”. This blog post is then pushed to the admin dashboard of every WordPress installation in the world. In the blog post Matt refers to WP Engine as “a cancer”. In the blog post Matt posits that WP Engine confuses consumers into thinking it is official WordPress hosting, which only his for-profit company has the right to claim. He bases this on the fact that his mother was confused by the brand WP Engine – the same brand he invested in for 7-years.
September 22nd, 2024 – In a Slack message Matt tells community members who are unhappy with the blog post “I do ultimately control WordPress.org and I think this post is appropriate to go into every dashboard of every WP install”
September 22nd, 2024 – Brazilian tech journalist Rodrigo Ghedin writes that it is time for Matt Mullenweg to step down from the WordPress Foundation. The community resonates this idea hoping it will help heal the swiftly growing rift.
September 22nd, 2024 – WordPress fork ClassicPress launches version v2.2 of the CMS promising a faster, bloat-free, classic WordPress experience.
September 23rd, 2024 – WP Engine’s legal counsel sends Automattic a Cease and Desist letter demanding that Matt and Automattic stop their attack on the company and that they preserve all relevant documents and communications. In the C&D letter they include screenshots of the text messages Matt has sent WP Engine exectutives along with social media posts he has made.
September 23rd, 2024 – Automattic’s legal counsel replies with their own Cease and Desist letter claiming that WP Engine is violating various trademarks controlled by Automattic, refusing to accept a licensing deal, and also making a preservation request.
September 24th, 2024 – The WordPress Foundation updates their trademark policy to explicity mention and insult WP Engine.
September 25th, 2024 – The WordPress Foundation blocks WP Engine’s servers from accessing any of the repositories hosted by the WordPress site (.org). This includes the core WordPress code, all plugins, and all themes hosted by the foundation’s infrastructure. This action instantly placed millions of websites that use WordPress in jeopardy of being compromised.
September 25th, 2024 – Dave Martin, an Automattic employee, writes a post titled “My thoughts on Matt’s Comments” largely defending Matt Mullenweg’s actions and comments so far. In his post he resonates the idea that WP Engine profited too much from the common WordPress code and did not give enough back.
September 25th, 2024 – Pressable, a webhosting company owned by Automattic that directly competes with WP Engine, begins running marketing materials directed at WP Engine customers worried about not being able to update thier WordPress sites due to the ban.
September 26th, 2024 – Matt Mullenweg does an impromptu interview with a YouTuber known as “ThePrimeagen” or just “ThePrime”. In the interview Matt reiterates that anyone can use “WP” without any trademark issues (butThePrimegen is not aware of the 2021 block and never brings it up, simply accepting this as reality). Matt also states that WP Engine must be in trademark violation because the name of one plan was “Core WordPres” and that more than 15% of consumers are confused. Matt places the blame on the ‘owners’ of WP Engine for their misbehavior. He also says they don’t give back enough. Matt admits that he spoke at WP Engine’s conference in 2023 as well. When the interviewer asks Matt if he has a paper trail he brings up calendar entires where he had lunches with the WP Engine CEO. Matt starts to read the chat for the interview and says people are saying they don’t like him and that is making him feel bad. Finally, Matt reveals that Automattic only sub-licenses the WordPress trademark to one other company, a massive conglomerate known as “Newfold Digital” previously as “Endurance International”, they own Host Gator, BlueHost, and Yoast. The entire interview Matt appears most upset that WP Engine does not donate enough staff time back to the open source project. This is a known issue in open source communities often called the “Maker-Taker Problem”.
September 26th, 2024 – Scottish web developer Ryan McCue writes a blog post titled “WP Engine Must Win”. In his post he explains that he believes the usage of the term “WordPress” by WP Engine falls under ‘fair use’ and that if Automattic wins it will have a “chilling” effect on the entire web and the WordPress project itself.
September 27th, 2024 – A day after his disasterous live interview the WordPress Foundation offers a temporary reprive to WP Engine users and lifts the ban on WP Engine’s infrastructure. The ban lasted a total of 2-days. They threaten to reinstitute the ban on October 1st.
September 27th, 2024 – Front end engineer Josh Collinsworth writes a post titled “If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed”. In the post Josh discloses he previously worked at WP Engine and Flywheel (a hosting service now owned by WP Engine). He states: “Doing the wrong thing for the right reason doesn’t makes it the right thing.” and “Matt has, for far too long, enjoyed unchecked powers at the top of WordPress—powers which are all too often a direct and flagrant conflict of interest. And while we’ve seen this power abused before, we’ve never seen it on this scale. Some might agree with Matt’s original reasoning. But his egregious actions and reactions since then have utterly nullified any previous merit. A line has been crossed, and the entire community is worse for it.”.
September 28th, 2024 – Matt does an in-person interview with a YouTuber named “Theo” or “t3.gg”. This one is much longer than the other interview he did 2-days prior clocking in at nearly 2 full hours (1 hour, 56 minutes, and 50 seconds). Matt starts the interview off by rattling off things Automattic owns including Tumblr, Beeper, and WordPress VIP the hosting service used by the White House. He claims WordPress is only about half of Automattic’s business. In the first question Matt answers “Yep” when asked if he is the ‘sole owner of WordPress.org’. Matt discusses the relationship of .ORG, .COM, Automattic, and Matt himself which revelase interesting insights most community members were previously unaware of. Matt says WP Engine users complain to Matt directly if their site goes down. In the interview Matt says that he made WP Engine aware that if they did not meet his demands he would cut them off from WordPress.org resources. Previously he had said he took this action due to the Cease and Desist letter. Theo reads a bullet point that Matt says proves he warned them about this, it says nothing about it. The interview continues friendly but with Theo continually trying to get Matt to show specifics which he can never seem to do.
September 30th, 2024 – In response to a user on X (formerly Twitter) Matt affirms he is sole owner of WordPress.org replying “Just me.” when asked who owns it.
September 30th, 2024 – WordPress freelance developer Vernon S. Howard posts on X.com “Matt built an amazing platform and ecosystem; there is no denying that, but it’s time for him to step aside from the foundation so that it can grow stronger. The chaos he has caused over the past week reverberates negatively throughout the community.”
September 30th, 2024 – Automattic owned WordPress.com offers users who switch from WP Enigine 1 free year of hosting along with a 5% donation on their behalf back to the WordPress Foundation.
September 30th, 2024 – Tony Wright, a well-known SEO and SEO / marketing writer, pens a blog post for his marketing agency in Dallas, WrightIMC titled “WrightIMC Stands with WP Engine: Our Commitment to the Best Solutions for Our Clients”. In the post Tony defends WP Engine stating “Mullenweg’s blanket statements fail to recognize the value WP Engine has consistently provided to businesses like ours. WrightIMC has worked with many hosting solutions over the years, and we have rigorously tested and evaluated all significant platforms.”, a decent point about WordPress and how hosting prior to WP Engine was always flawed. WP Engine’s mere presence in the industry forced other hosts to perform better in order to retain clients leading to improved performance and security for WordPress powered websites.
October 1st, 2024 – WP Engine is again banned by WordPress.org from accessing Core, Plugin, and Theme updates. This time WP Engine appears prepared for it and launches a workaround for their clients.
October 1st, 2024 – Matt tells publication “The Repository” that his 8% offer is no longer on the table and that he might just take over WP Engine when this is all over.
October 1st, 2024 – After Matt complains about the expenses of hosting the .org WordPress infrastructure in response to Mr. Vernon S. Howard, the CEO of CloudFlare offers to host it for free. Matt replies to this offer “Thank you! Much respect for Cloudflare. Let’s meet up to discuss how your services can enhance .org’s infrastructure. Would want to understand why debian went with fastly”
October 2nd, 2024 – WP Engine files a lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg. The 98-page filing is filled with things like screenshots of the original WP Engine website showing how they use the term WordPress to refer to their hosting service for the software, screenshots of WP Engine customers claiming they are leaving over the actions taken, text message from Matt to WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner, mentions of interviews Matt has done, and more things that appear damning to Matt and Automattic.
October 2nd, 2024 – Automattic offers any employees at the company a one-time $30,000 or 6-months of salary severance if they want to quit due to not being aligned to Matt’s vision and attacks on WP Engine.
October 2nd, 2024 – Founder of the Drupal project Dries Butaert writes a blog post titled “Solving the Maker-Taker Problem” in which he gives advice to his friend Matt Mullenweg to take different actions such as openly rewarding those who hit certain thresholds of contribution to the WordPress projects and to improve the governance.
October 3rd, 2024 – Automattic publishes a public response to the lawsuit denying any wrong doing.
October 3rd, 2024 – It is announced that 159 employees from Automattic have taken the offer to quit, most work on the WordPress project. This totals 8.4% of the company’s headcount at the time.
October 3rd, 2024 – It is announced that WordPress Foundation Executive Director Josepha Haden who is a salary employee of Automattic has left the company and the community.
October 3rd, 2024 – Matt Mullenweg writes in a comment on Hacker News “Automattic employs ~100 people that work full-time on WordPress.org. I can appoint them into positions on WordPress.org, if I think that’s appropriate”.
October 3rd, 2024 – A former Automattic employee who originally broke the store about Automattic offering staff incentives to quit is threatend with legal action by Matt Mullenweg. She posts screenshots of the entire conversation with Matt in a post on Medium.
October 4th, 2024 – Automattic employee and board member writes “I stayed.” a blog post about why he stayed with the company citing work that changes peoples lives, personal medical debt, and saying Matt has courage to address the Maker-Taker Problem so publicly.
October 4th, 2024 – Naoko Takano who was an Open Source Manager at Automattic writes a brief blog post explaining why she took the offer to leave. In her post she says “I’m resigning because I’m not aligned with the recent strategic decisions taken by Matt in the conflict with WP Engine.” She also agrees that WordPress / Automattic should take action to protect their trademarks, alluding that she disagrees with how Matt has handled this situation.
October 6th, 2024 – X user Kaelon writes a post titled “I exit Founders for a living.” in which he describes the “end-stage founder period” where a creation of some kind outgrows its original founder. He explains this is where WordPress appears to be right now.
October 7th, 2024 – Automattic finally publishes the term sheet provided to WP Engine and a timeline of the claimed trademark discussion leading up to WordCamp US in September where the attacks on WP Engine were made public for the first time. These were alluded to in earlier interviews by Matt and in legal filings but this was the first time they were made public. The term sheet demands are actually worse than Matt had made them sound previously. On top of 8% of gross revenue from all services sold (not just WordPress related) Automattic is demanding detailing monthly report and full audit rights to review the books. Should WP Engine wan to contribute man hours to the project Automattic demands full access to employee records, time-tracking, and full audit rights. Automattic’s terms would also ban WP Engine from forking any Automattic created plugins, even though they are covered under GPL licenses. The timeline shows nothing of substance and just makes claims, even when they could have provided screenshots for discussions such as emails.
October 7th, 2024 – Stattic, a decentralized publishing platform, launches “NotMatt.press” website which reads incldues a quote directly from Matt Mullenweg “If I woke up tomorrow, you know, someone hit my head and I became crazy or evil or something like that, WordPress would be fine. Y’all could fork it. You know, like you could take all of the code, everything that’s been created and make, you know, a NotMattPress, or whatever it is. If I were ever not a good leader, the software could fork.”
October 8th, 2024 – Mary Hubbard, a former Automattic employee, leaves her position at TikTok and rejoins Automattic taking on the Executive Director role for the WordPress foundation. Matt promises she will work on governance, some consider this a sign that he will be stepping back and allowing Mary to run things from here.
October 8th, 2024 – David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails along with platforms like Basecamp and Hey email writes “Automattic is doing open source dirty”. In his blog post he says he doesn’t want to take the side of a big private equity firm, but then discusses how Automattic is the one causing harm. “I care far more about the integrity of open source licenses, and that integrity is under direct assault by Automattic’s grotesque claim for WP Engine’s revenues. It’s even more outrageous that Automattic has chosen trademarks as their method to get their “Al Capone” when up until 2018 they were part owners of WP Engine before selling their stake to Silver Lake!”. He closes with “But I suspect Automattic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to retain WordPress’ shine of open source, but also be able to extract their pound of flesh from any competitor that might appear, whenever they see fit. Screw that.”
October 8th, 2024 – AspirePress writes a post titled “A vision for AspirePress and a community-run .org mirror” in which they outline a roadmap for protecting the WordPress community from actions made by WordPress themselves (or just Matt).
October 9th, 2024 – WordPress.org changes their login form to include a checkbox that reads “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” This causes another massive uproar in the WordPress community.
October 9th, 2024 – Javier Casares, a WordPress contributor, is banned on the official WordPress Slack for stating his opposition to the new checkbox on the login form. In the screenshots he shares of the convesation Matt Mullenweg can be seen chastising Joost de Valk, creator of the Yoast plugin which ironically is now owned by the only official sub-license holder for the “WordPress” trademarks, Newfold Digital. Javier never shows full opposition to the checkbox, but tells Matt that it is unclear and should be improved for clarity before his ban.
October 9th, 2024 – WordPress contributor known as “Megan Byterose” announces she is no longer working on the project “I’ve decided that I want to prioritize my mental (and physical) health and will no longer contribute to the WordPress open source project. The constant worry about the stability of the project and never-ending influx of WordPress-related news has contributed to worsening anxiety symptoms for me and it’s no longer worth it.”
October 10th, 2024 – Matt Mullenweg writes a blog post on WordPress.org titled “Forking is Beautiful” in which he helps announce a new, Matt free, fork of WordPress called “FreeWP”.
October 10th, 2024 – A Github developer releases the “Well Played License” framework aka “WP License”. This is a sarcastic creation pointed directly at perceptions around Matt Mullenweg and his treatment of open source. It reads in part: “Less Profitable Than Matt: Most importantly, anyone can use the WP License without paying or requiring contribution unless they are more profitable than Matt Mullenweg. If your project makes more money than Matt Mullenweg, you are required to contribute 8% of your revenue to Matt.”
October 11th, 2024 – A small change is made that now only allows users to purchase WordCamp conference tickets in the future if they have a .ORG account.
October 12th, 2024 – WordPress .ORG steals the plugin repository for Advanced Custom Fields, a free plugin purchased by WP Engine in June of 2022. They immediately rename the plugin to “Secure Custom Fields”.
October 12th, 2024 – WordPress core contributor Scott Kingsley Clark announces he is no longer helping with the project “I am officially terminating my core contributions and involvement with the WordPress project. This project was something I poured hundreds of hours into and it greatly pains me to just stop here.”
October 12th, 2024 – Matt writes a post on his personal blog “Ma.tt” titled “Everyone’s An Owner”. In the blog post Matt announces that any Automattic employees who did not leave will be given 200 shares of A12 Stock (private shares in the company) as a gift. He values this at approximately $12 million. An extremely credible source told me that Automattic had a headcount of approximately 1,850 people post-exit across all platforms/brands. That means A12 Stock is valued about about $32.43 internally. According to Automattic these values are set biannually by an outside team of accountants.
October 13th, 2024 – The r/WordPress subreddit’s mod team announces they are removing the Mega Thread about the issue and subsequently stopping all mod activity and allowing all content be posted to the subreddit. This will last for at least a week. This announcement comes after Audrey Capital employee (Matt’s investment company), WordPress contributor, and r/WordPress mod “Otto” publicly attacked a community member apparently threatening physical violence to them for their opinions. He has since deleted and apologized for his comments. For those unaware sometimes mods on Reddit will create one big post with all content for an ongoing situation and sticky this to the top of the group. This is colloquially known as a “Mega Thread” or sometimes “MT” for short. When this happens mods tend to delete related topics in their subreddits and instead move those topics to the Mega Thread. The problem with this is that it keeps new posts from moving to the top of the subreddit and gaining it’s own viral karma or going viral on Reddit’s front page or popular page. This could effectively keep a topic from gaining momentum into the greater community keeping negative issues potential reach restricted. The mods were alos not alerting users to this when removing their posts, which at the least gave the appearnce of deleting the posts on behalf of Automattic.
October 13th, 2024 – A YouTuber named “Theo” or “t3.gg” who interviewed Matt on September 28th released a video titled “The WordPress drama keeps getting worse”. In this video Theo doesn’t mince his words or dance around topics very much but directs stern language at Matt directly, a man he was just friendly with 2 weeks prior. Saying things such as “Matt went mad” and “you know what you are doing is shit”. Theo claims in the video he has tried to talk Matt into not taking some of the recent drastic actions he has taken and uses expletives directed at Matt saying he hasn’t returned his text messages recently either, possibly because Matt is ashamed of his own actions.
October 14th, 2024 – Accessibility work at WordPress is temporarily suspended as the 2 developers assigned to this are unable to login to WordPress due to the new check box Matt added and one of them was banned by Matt from the WordPress Slack. Matt suggest perhaps they should be replaced then.
October 14th, 2024 – Matt writes a blog post on his personl site “Ma.tt” titled “Response to DHH”. The post is aimed directly at David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) the creator of Ruby on Rails and various SaaS brands / platforms and is likely in response to David’s post from October 8th titled “Automattic is doing open source dirty”. In Matt’s post he blasts DHH for entering into the drama and positions himself as superior based on scale of companies and communities at one point saying “Why are you still so small?”. Matt does give DHH props and says he inspired much of Automattic’s work but continues his assault on David’s development legacy and personal life. The post concludes with this quote “I’m unsure why you felt you had to insert yourself into this fight with Silver Lake / WP Engine and take their side, but here we are.”
October 14th, 2024 – Reddit user u/mccoypauley writes a post on the r/WordPress subreddit titled “You asked how we’re suffering as a result of Mullenweg’s war with WPE? I just lost a 40 thousand dollar contract over it.” In the post he claims a contract for 2025 for a new website with a budget of $40 was just pulled by the client over the WordPress vs. WP Engine situation and stated the client is reconsidering the CMS entirely at the moment.
October 15th, 2024 – Matt edited his post about DHH from the day prior and makes an apology for what he said. The same post now reads in part “I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake.”
October 15th, 2024 – A WordPress plugin called “Display Posts” announces they will no longer update the WordPress.org repository version of the plugin and recommend users install their plugin manually so they can gain future updates. Display Posts has 100,000 installs on WordPress websites.
October 15th, 2024 – Ivan Mehta at Tech Crunch writes an article titled “Internal blog post reveals Automattic’s plan to enforce the WordPress trademark using ‘nice and not nice lawyers’” exposing an internal blog post at Automattic that appears to show Matt Mullenweg carefully plotted his attack on WP Engine at least months in advance. The article includes this quote “According to an internal blog post a source shared with TechCrunch, Automattic was crafting a plan to get significantly stricter about trademark enforcement across WordPress and its e-commerce platform WooCommerce since at least the beginning of the year. Separate sources have confirmed the authenticity of the post.”. The article also reveals the post was created by the Chief Legal Officer of Automattic at the time, Paul Sieminski and that he left the company in April of this year for a company called Liquid AI. According to Paul’s LinkedIn profile he was the “Head of Corporate Development / M&A” for the last 5-years of his 12-year stint at Automattic. For some reason tech writers like Ivan appear to struggle to make the connection from the 2021 “WP” trademark block and the current debacle.
October 15th, 2024 – An extension for Gravity Forms, Gravity PDF, writes a blog post titled “Installing and Upgrading to the Canonical Version of Gravity PDF”. In the post they announce that they will no longer be using WordPress.org to host the canonical version of their free and open source plugin. The opening paragraph of their post states “WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has weaponized WordPress.org and appropriated the popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin from its creators. This action sets a dangerous precedent, and violates the integrity and security of the platform.”
October 16th, 2024 – Joe Youngblood SEO & Digital Marketing Consulting (hey that’s us!) announces they will start making plugins for WordPress fork and rival ClassicPress in order to ensure they are fully supporting open source CMSes online. In their announcement the agency says they hope this move inspires other developers to do the same.
October 16th – Plugin maker ServMask which makes the popular migration plugin “All-in-One WP Migration” will no longer support users on WP Engine siding with Matt Mullenweg in the escalating war. Serv Mask maintains a list of how they support websites on various hosting solutions and added WP Engine to the list today stating “We are unable to offer full support to WP Engine users due to their lack of contribution to WordPress, which does not align with our principles.” Serv Mask also contributes very little to WordPress. The plugin All-in-One WP Migration is installed on 5 million WordPress websites.
October 16th, 2024 – The head mod and other main mod of r/WordPress stepped down leaving only Otto as the moderator, an employee of Matt Mullenweg’s. Otto explained in a post in the sub that he does not want to be a top mod nor does he really want to mod there any more stating: “Now, to be honest, I didn’t want to be in this position. Frankly, I’m kind of sick of moderating here too, and I really don’t want the job. I was a fan of The Experiment earlier this week, and I was not going to come back for at least the entire week. I haven’t done any moderation since Friday” Otto states that new mods will be selected and but he won’t make those selections until after the coming weekend.
October 16th, 2024 – Plugin Paid Memberships Pro publishes a blog post titled “Paid Memberships Pro v3.3 Release” in which they announce all future updates will be served from their ‘license server’ and not from WordPress.org starting with this current release. The plugin has 90,000 current installs.
October 17th, 2024 – A day after saying no new mods would be appointed until after the weekend, Otto appoints a new mod to r/WordPress. Reddit user u/mds1992 who has been on Reddit for 8-years and gives out good advice in the sub. Should Otto leave, this user would become the new top mod. The community is welcoming to the news.
October 17th, 2024 – Kelly Peterson the former head of domains for Automattic makes a YouTube video titled “A Plea For Automatticians” which is 9 minutes and 22 seconds in length. In the video she recaps her time at Automattic (over 6 years) and expresses her love of WordPress and Automattic itself. She then goes on to claim that Matt has twisted the purpose of the company to pursue financial goals and that leaks about him around certain acquisitions show internal staff are unhappy. She also states she believes Matt is under intense pressure to fix ailing financial figures and appears to believe this is what has sent him on the path of war with WP Engine.
October 17th, 2024 – Directus launches a WordPress competitor on ProductHunt called “NextPress” which uses Next.js and Directus. It is the #5 top product of the day on the site.
October 17th, 2024 – Scott Kingsley Clark’s WordPress.org account is suddenly banned without warning or reasoning.
October 17th, 2024 – The official WordPress.org handle on X blocks Takis Bouyouris the co-founder of WordPress Greece, WordCamp Athens, and WordCamp Europe over criticsms.
October 17th, 2024 – The WordPress foundation posts for the first time minutes of their annual meeting. All 3 board members appear including a candidate for political office in New York. During the meeting the board decides to donate $100,000 to the Internet Archive and to being doing meetings twice per year. 3 Automattic employees are allowed into the meeting as “witnesses” or “guests” one of which appears to be the volunteer treasurer for the WordPress Foundation citing the financials of the organization. The community is speculating about the timing and reasoning for posting, but all in all there’s nothing much here just a standard meeting notes from a non-profit foundation.
October 17th, 2024 – Woo (Woocommerce) begins emailing premium plugin users known to be hosted on WP Engine informing them that WordPress.org (Matt Mullenweg) has banned them and that they should change hosting to Pressable (owned by Automattic).
October 18th, 2024 – WP Engine files a motion for preliminary injunction against Matt Mullenweg and Automattic requesting that the judge keep them from blocking their access to WordPress.org, stop them from stealing their plugins on WordPress.org, keep their customer’s access to WordPress resources, and restore any loss of access or stolen assets. The document also makes other claims including that WP Engine was unaware of the 8% fee until just hours before Matt’s keynote at WordCamp, cancellation requests spiked 14% in September after the .ORG block was made and signups dropped 29%, and that there was a 375% increase in websits installing migration tools in preparation for leaving the hosting service.
Thread on X:
Looks like WPEngine just filed a motion for preliminary injunction against @photomatt and @automattic #WordPress https://t.co/hkjJIvb6PG
— Ryan Duff (@ryancduff) October 18, 2024
October 19th, 2024 – In what some assume is an attempt to keep his private conversations from being leaked publicly, WordPress (.ORG) makes it a violation of their community code of conduct to share private messages without consent.
Source
October 20th, 2024 – Matt writes a blog post on his personal website titled “My Freedom of Speech” in which he argues that WP Engine’s request for injunctive relief is actually a violation of the first amendment. He quotes the first amendment in it’s entirety and states that WordPress.org should not be required by a judge to give WP Engine’s code free hosting. In closing Matt says he will refrain from posting more about the escalating legal war between himself / Automattic and WP Engine until a judge rules on the injunction request in the coming weeks.
October 20th, 2024 – The WordPress.org “Make WordPress” Slack channel, a discussion chat for developers working on various WordPress projects, began requiring the WordPress.org login to signin via Slack’s SSO. Matt claims this is do to the legal requests by WP Engine and that they want to read DMs and other things on the slack channel for their legal discovery.
October 21st, 2024 – The former Head of Programs & Contributor Experience at Automattic, Angela Jin, penned a blog post on her personal website titled “On Community Code of Conducts”. In the post Angela reveals she left Automattic prior to the WordCamp closing keynote in late September where Matt began the full on war with WP Engine. She also discusses in a fairly neutral tone the recent changes to the WordPress Code of Conduct and how both users and admins can abuse a Code of Conduct or as she puts it “weaponize” it. Finally, Angela includes a critique as an outsider now looking at the change stating “…this latest change is something that most people under regular circumstances, will likely readily agree to. However, it contradicts my experience with the Community and Incident Response Teams. We generally tried to avoid making very specific “don’t do this” type rules, opting instead for behaviors we wanted to encourage. Changes to the Code of Conduct usually follow some discussion. The WordPress Incident Response Team is a close-knit group, and I have difficulty believing they would make such a change without public discussion. To my alarm, team members also seem to be voluntarily resigning. And never before, were changes (or anything about Code of Conduct, really) published on /News.
The timing is also suspect, or right, given everything happening in WordPress at the moment. It depends on how you prefer to view it. ”
October 21st, 2024 – X user Daniel Iser (@daniel_iser) posts a breakdown comparisson for web hosting providers and their contributions to the WordPress core coding and their revenue. In the breakdown Daniel shows that many hosting providers contribute far less than they make off of WordPres with Hostinger being the highest rated even when compared to companies who pay to license the WordPress trademark like BlueHost, GoDaddy is the worst.
October 23rd, 2024 – Automattic responds to WP Engine’s request for a moved up hearing on their injuction request. In the response it appears Automattic’s lawyers claim WordPress.org and the WordPress Foundation are wholly independent entities and that even though WordPress.org is heavily integrated into the open source CMS that the website belongs solely to Matt Mullenweg who can make any decisions about access to the site and its resources as he sees fit and positions this as common knowledge.
Here is an excerpt: “WordPress.org is not WordPress. WordPress.org is not Automattic or the WordPress Foundation, and is not controlled by either. To the contrary, as Plaintiff itself acknowledges, WordPress.org is Mr. Mullenweg’s responsibility. Mr. Mullenweg has no contracts, agreements, or obligation to provide WP Engine access to the network and resources of WordPress.org. WP Engine points to no terms, conditions, or permissions that entitle them to such access. Nevertheless, WP Engine, a private equity-backed company, made the unilateral decision, at its own risk, to build a multi-billion dollar business around Mr. Mullenweg’s website. In doing so, WP Engine gambled for the sake of profit that Mr. Mullenweg would continue to maintain open access to his website for free. That was their choice.”
October 23rd, 2024 – The judge does not appear to have been moved by Matt / Automattic’s arguments that WordPress.org is not WordPress and granted WP Engine’s request for an order to shorten time to hear motion for a preliminary injuction. This will be held on November 26th, which is still a long time for Automattic to cause damage to their rival corporation.
October 24th, 2024 – Security engineer Scott Arciszewski, known for his work in making open source projects secure, writes a blog post titled “AspirePress is What the WordPress Community Needs Today” where he formally announces he has joined the AspirePress project to create an independent plugin repository for WordPress.
October 25th, 2024 – WP Engine releases their own timeline events in a post titled “Ensuring Stability and Security: Recent Timeline”. While most are written in chronlogical order descending from the earliest events this one is written in ascending order with the most recent events at the top. The timeline appears aimmed at concerned customers who might be considering leaving as it focuses largely on what WP Engine is doing to navigate the choppy waters and leaves out spicy details such as the text messages sent by Matt to their CEO. Their post starts off by saying “We’re keenly aware of the impact recent events have had on the WordPress community and ecosystem, and we’re deeply grateful to the many partners and customers who have stood by WP Engine and trust us to serve you in the face of unprecedented and unwarranted attacks and attempts to disrupt our platform.”
October 26th, 2024 – The website Bullenweg.com which has been a useful place to store information about the ongoing issue and which we refer to in our resource links below, deletes all content and deletes their social media presence on X. The website now posts only a claim that they went offline due to legal threats by Matt Mullenweg stating “Bullenweg.com is no longer available following threats of legal action from Matthew Mullenweg.”. Matt had previously stated in a comment on Hacker News that he liked the website. All portions and PDFs on the site have been erased. The homepage also includes a quote from what appears to be a message from Matt Mullenweg to the anonymous owner of Bullenweg which reads: “Platforming the claims in the lawsuits, in particular, is shaky ground. I encourage you to read this article:
https://www.vulture.com/article/piers-morgan-apologizes-jay-z-beyonce-uncensored-jaguar-wright.html
It is important to me to know who is behind Bullenweg, and I believe the legal system provides ample opportunities to do so. That will take a few weeks, or if you reveal yourself now we can discuss next steps.”
Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4
October 26th, 2024 – WordPress core contributor and plugin make Andy Fragen pens the blog post “WordPress on Hiatus” where he announces he is pausing his core contributions and explains why. Writing in part “It’s not my intention to stop contributing, but it is for now. I’m very disappointed that Matt has chosen to make the Community suffer because of his legal maneuvering with Silver Lake. Let’s be clear, the Community is suffering because of his actions.”
October 28th, 2024 – The WordPress.org plugin repository has suspended a plugin managed by WP Engine. The plugin “Better Search Replace” was temporarily taken down by the plugin team for a “full review” and was unavailable for several hours before users reported it coming back online.
October 28th, 2024 – WordPress plugin Paid Memberships Pro writes a blog post titled “Leaving WordPress.org: Here’s Why and What It Means for Paid Memberships Pro Users”. In the post the plugin’s creator, Jason Coleman, details how Matt allegedly threatened him via the WordPress Slack when he announced they would be removing their plugin from the .ORG repository stating: “Two days after we closed the Paid Memberships Pro listing in the .org repository, Matt sent a direct message to me (Jason) on the WordPress.org Slack Workspace threatening to “take over your listing and make it a community plugin like we did to ACF”.”. Jason nor Paid Memberships Pro are directly affiliated with WP Engine. Jason is also a bbPress Contributor, Core Contributor, Translation Contributor, and WordCamp Speaker.
October 28th, 2024 – Long time WordPress contributor Carrie Dils announces she is no longer contributing to the WordPress project via her WordPress.org bio and her X account saying: “I love the WordPress community. I am deeply saddened by the actions of Matt Mullenweg and, as of October 2024, will no longer contribute my time to The Project as a volunteer.” Carrie was a Documentation Contributor, Test Contributor, WordCamp Organizer, and WordCamp Speaker.
October 30th, 2024 – Matt does an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference with the Editor and Chief of the Silicon Valley tech website, Connie Loizos, that is also a WordPress VIP client. Prior to the interview beginning we are told that this is a “fireside chat” and that we will hear Matt’s side of the story. The talk is mostly Matt defending his actions and attacking those who disagree at one point even claiming that most everyone against him is a WP Engine customer (note, I personally disagree with Matt’s actions and we host most clients on competitors to WP Engine and WordPress.com, as of writing we only have 1 WP Engine client and accept WordPress SEO clients no matter where they are hosted). While the entire discussion feels friendly to Matt, Connie does a good job throughout of getting some answers you might be curious about, Matt also openly shows glee about WP Engine’s claims of losses due to his “scorched Earth nuclear campaign” during the talk. During the talk Matt claims he convinced 1 CEO of a public company who told him to quit the attack to change their mind and admits Automattic is basically at break-even currently and that they are starting a marketing/PR campaign including magazine covers and it feels like this fireside chat is the kick off for such endeavors as he pauses a moment to thank Connie for having him there. The r/WordPress subreddit largely appears to believe this interview did little to make them agree with him.
October 30th, 2024 – Automattic and Matt’s attorney, Neal Kumar, has filed a motion to dismiss WP Engine’s request for injunctive relief. The 34 page document makes a wide array of arguments to this end including this one: “Separate from the WordPress software, from Automattic, and from the Foundation, is a website that Matt supports called WordPress.org (the “Website”).” and “Rather than honestly face and constructively address its own business choices and conduct, WP Engine instead has chosen without justification to attack Automattic and Matt. WP Engine is attempting through the Complaint and a corresponding public pressure campaign to blame Defendants for its own decisions and to obtain access rights and free services to which it has no legal (or moral) rights.”
October 31st, 2024 – Matt does a brief interview with CIO.com where he admits to “going crazy” over the situation with WP Engine. From the article by journalist Evan Schuman “Mullenweg, in an interview Thursday with CIO, lamented that WP Engine “could have avoided all of this for $32 million. This should have been very easy,” and he then accused WP Engine of having engaged in “18 months of gaslighting” and said, “that’s why I got so crazy.””
The article also cites an IT analyst, Melody Brue, as saying that “she sees the nasty battle between these two entities as a heads-up to CIOs, and a good reason to carefully rethink their open source strategies.”
November 4th, 2024 – After several days of quiet and calm on this issue, Automattic has released a blog post that appears aimed at executives and others who are concerned about the WordPress ecosystem’s long-term viability and the recent drama. Titled “Defending Open Source: Protecting the Future of WordPress” it is largely a better and more cogently written version of Matt’s earlier diatribe against WP Engine making and attempting to substantiate the same claims / statements. It sometimes reads like someone trying to write a political speech, which can be off putting and makes it feel more pushy than it probably should. The post leaves out quite a bit of relevant facts in an attempt to bias the reader in Automattic’s favor too. In the post Automattic restates many of Matts earlier claims including that Silver Lake is abusing the WordPress trademark and has been for years and that the company is essentially stealing from the WordPress ecosystem. In particular, the article focuses on demonizing Private Equity firms such as the one that buy into WP Engine characterizing them as thieves or “looters”, of course Automattic fails to mention that several private equity firms are their financial backers as well. To this end the article highlights private equity’s direct involvement with software projects like Magento and Talend. At one point it reads as if Automattic is simply jealous of WP Engine’s success or possibly even afraid of them as competition stating “WP Engine proceeded to acquire key assets across the WordPress ecosystem. These include advanced custom fields, Better Search Replace, WP Migrate, Flywheel, Array Themes, and StudioPress (Genesis Framework). It then leveraged these acquisitions to extract maximum value from those ecosystems and their communities through aggressive marketing, promotion, and cross-selling.”. Growth via mergers and acquisitions is some scary nightmare as they attempt to portray it here considering Automattic also works to grow through such acquisitions inside of and out of the WordPress community including Beeper, Tumblr, Pressable, Pocket Casts, and Day One.
The article never makes mention of the more nefarious parts of this story such as Matt’s text messages to the CEO of WP Engine, blocking millions of sites from accessing repository updates, stealing code repositories from WP Engine, unveiling that WordPress.org is Matt’s personal website, poaching WP Engine staff, or verbally attacking and excommunicating WordPress community members and contributors who did not agree with the way the situation was handled. Automattic also fails to mention that their own recent publicly released revenue figures were over $430 million with a $7.5 billion valuation. Much of that value coming from the non-profit community which freely contributes to various components of the WordPress project such as plugin and theme developers. Finally, the article makes claims about using the name “WordPress” in various services like hosting and development stating no one is allowed to use the term in a ‘service’ name without a license, they demanded 8% gross revenue from WP Engine for such a license.
November 4th, 2024 – Late in the evening of November 4th WP Engine’s counsel filed legal documents in response to Automattic’s filing a few days ago. Among those documents is included excerpts from Matt’s interview at TechCrunch Disrupt which specifically disagrees with what his lawyers claim, along with information proving WordPress.org had never before been claimed to be Matt’s personal website. The response quotes Matt from his Disrput interview as saying that complying with the injunction will cause him / WordPress.org no harm, discusses how intertwined the WordPress software and .ORG website are, states that WP Engine’s TrustPilot rating is much higher than both Automattic and WordPress.com’s, and includes this statement which I belive does an amazing job at capturing the issue of ownership of WordPress.org extremely well: “Simultaneously, for more than a decade Mullenweg has held wordpress.org out as a community asset and invited- if not required community members like WPE and many others to donate thousands of hours of free labor to create and improve its content, purportedly for the community’s benefit. At no time did Mullenweg ever disclose to these volunteers that their labor was serving to personally enrich him, and that he secretly reserved the right to ban any or all of these volunteers from wordpress.org if he felt like it, after having relied on and taken advantage of the efforts and goodwill of those volunteers. Defendants must face the consequences of their deception, manipulation and greed.”
Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4
November 5th, 2024 – PluginVulnerabilities.com publishes a blog post titled “Matt Mullenweg’s 18+ Month Timeline of Interactions About “Trademark Abuse” With WP Engine Keeps Shrinking” which claims that the potential timeline for any meetings to have taken place between Automattic and WP Engine about the supposed trademark infringement is not the 18 to 20 months that has been claimed previously. The authors use Matt’s TechCrunch Disrupt interview to adjust the timeline provided by Automattic and break it down into the discussions Matt claims to have had with the WP Engine CEO, Heather Brunner, over the same period. They claim that his own statements show discussions with Heather Brunner for most of 2023 were about leaving WP Engine and going to work for WordPress/Automattic instead. The author’s argue that if Automattic’s claim of a timeline of discussions is to be believed that no real discussions about trademarks started until February of this year, Matt was not involved in those talks either as he had decided to take a sabbatical during what he argues was a trying time for him.
November 6th, 2024 – Automattic launches a website called “WordPressEngineTracker.com” where they track the number of websites they believe are leaving WP Engine for another hosting service since Matt’s attack on the company began in September. As of writing the tracker claims 16,180 websites have switched from WP Engine to some other hosting service. At the “Essentials” hosting level which is $20 / month that equals about $323,600 / month in losses Automattic is claiming WP Engine is suffering because of attacks by Matt Mullenweg, WordPress.org, and Automattic or roughly $3,883,200 / year. The website also offers a CSV download of websites, has a Github which shows work started on it back in October on the 10th, has contributions from Allan Cole an employee of Automattic, and includes a hyper-text link trying to get users to visit the hosting options page on WordPress.org. This will make it extremely hard IMHO for Automattic’s attorneys to argue they were not trying to harm WP Engine’s business, they built a website to gloat about it.
Source 1, Source 2, Reddit Thread
November 19th, 2024 – PeepSo, a community plugin that gives websites social media functions, decided to close their .ORG repository saying in part “There was a series of unsettling actions from the WordPress.org side, including banning developers, disabling plugin updates to client sites, and even taking over an entire plugin. We have thus lost our trust in the WordPress.org platform, the WordPress Foundation itself, and most importantly the man who seems to wield the ultimate power in the entire ecosystem.” The free version of their plugin can be downloaded from their website still.
Our Recommendation to Clients
WordPress has become untenable. In the past few weeks the single person who controls both the non-profit and for profit versions the web’s largest CMS has unleashed a fury on the community ostensibly to combat what he perceives as a take over by one of the world’s biggest private equity firms, Silver Lake.
In his quest Matt Mullenweg has made millions of websites vulnerable to hack, attacked long-time supporters, and most recently outright stolen a plugin repository on the WordPress site.
I encourage ALL website designers, developers, SEOs, and marketers to start exploring other options, this situation is spiraling out of control and fast. We do not have a preferred option as of yet and will update this post if and when such a time arises.
My Request for Open Source Forks
If you are forking WordPress and looking to build an Open Source CMS empire like Matt did I (and hopefully most of the community) have a few requests for you in terms of governance and product.
- Governance – Please have a board that includes active community members. Even if you have iron fist total control, at the very least allow us to have someone representing the interests of the community.
- Product – Please give us features that probably should exist instead of requiring plugins. For example title tags and meta descriptions, multiple authors, and updated document dates
- Governance – Please use a better carrot and stick technique. Matt’s carrot is microscopic (you can pay more $$ to sponsor events!) and the stick is huge (insults you pulblicly, blocks your access, tries to steal your users, ands steals yhour plugins0
- Governance – Consistency and Transparency. When we spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours creating a plugin only to hit an automated block in 2021 the first thing we did was review all news and documentation, but could never find anything excpet for that our name was allowed. If you’re going to change decades-long nomenclature at least document it publicly so the community can adapt.
- Revenue – Please don’t use a revenue model that would require others to quit forking and performing other accepted open source standards.
- Revenue – Please don’t take actions to bolster your revenue that put users at immediate risk.
Resources
- The Mullenweg/WPE Thing on GitHub by Adrienne L. Travis
- WP Drama subreddit – https://old.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/
- Bullengweg, a list of Matt’s “Bull” – https://bullenweg.com/
- NotMattPress subreddit – a place dedicated to discussing moving on from WordPress as a community – https://old.reddit.com/r/NotMattPress/
- Timeline of WordPress drama by Lukas Dürrenberger – https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2024/10/08/timeline-of-the-wordpress-drama/