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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Timeline
Our Recomendation to Clients
My Request for Open Source Forks
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.
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 monther 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 companies 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 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 – 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 – 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.
Our Recomendation 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 percieves as a take over by one of the world’s biggest private equity firms, SilverLake.
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.