WordPress Is in Trouble

I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental breakdown. It’s a sad situation and there’s a lot to learn about open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him should seriously consider an intervention. I can’t believe after two decades he’d just decide to throw it all out in a blazing fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpress) because of some valuation drop or being short on money. I think the dude needs help, and people close to him should try and talk sense into him.

Crazy how hosting wordpress, between 2003-2024, your main concern was Chinese&#x2F;Russian hackers. And in 2025 you main concern should be if Mullenweg will hijack your website for his pissing match.<p>Also he didn&#x27;t shut down the sustainability team because he &quot;didn&#x27;t know about it&quot;. He shut it down because their stated goals are a threat to Mullenwegs dictatorship hold over wordpress.

&gt; Now it seems like the community needs to take over, but Mullenweg still holds all the keys.<p>This move by Matt to pull out of development all but guarantees a fork. The biggest argument against was the work that Automattic was putting into WordPress would be very hard to replicate in a new project. But if the community is going to be expected to do ~all of the work anyway, there&#x27;s no reason to do that work inside Matt&#x27;s personal fiefdom.

I&#x27;ve had a Wordpress blog for about 25 years. This makes me want to turn off automatic updates, since I&#x27;m worried he might just go nuclear and flip some sort of kill switch that bricks every blog, or push some ridiculous anti-Wordpress Engine banner to every installation. Of course, not keeping WP up to date is very risky as well.<p>I&#x27;m not even insensitive to his position, even though I don&#x27;t know full details. But, he&#x27;s the one acting irrational in all this, so he&#x27;s the one I&#x27;m most scared of.

Sorry I switched to hugo my <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gioorgi.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gioorgi.com</a> and it was easier than expected.<p>Initially, I only followed the ‘drama’ tangentially, also because I have always considered myself a mere &quot;end user&quot; of Wordpress, even if long-time one (I used it for about 20 years).<p>For me, the fact that Wordpress.com sold a service based on an &quot;extended&quot; version of Wordpress.org was never a particular problem, but I never thought it was illegal to compete directly with it by taking the open source software and offering a simple hosting service.<p>Anyway I started to consider to switch from Wordpress to a static site hosted with hugo, retaining the comment system and all the URLs in the original form, more or less.<p>I was surprised because it took very little time (less 1 week of total work) to migrate my articles (1000+) and the comments.<p>I used open source tools, and I am a &quot;hugo&quot; newbie, so I make some trade off too.<p>Never less, I suggest all of you to give a try to hugo+isso (isso is a comment system very light).

&gt; The problem is that Mullenweg has final say over some very important parts of the WordPress community<p>&gt; THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND (…)<p>I think the real issue is people being fooled with the false concept of ‘community’, times and times again.<p>Communities do not exist in practice. What you have is a vast pool of users (in this case I also include plugin and theme devs), and a minority of core contributors, which are either individuals or companies, usually both. Those are driving the project forward and making decisions.<p>This distribution can be applied to many open-source softwares, but also projects like mozilla, wikipedia, etc.<p>People do not understand to what extend the no-guarantee of FOSS software is applicable. All your projects can be broken from a day to the next and you cannot expect any compensation.<p>But that’s ok because you got the software for free, right?

Hopefully many sites will switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola. Way lower costs, lower risk of being hacked (almost impossible actually), and a reliable backup thanks to Git.<p>I’m running multiple static sites for years already and am very happy with it. It has been very reliable.

I don&#x27;t understand how (if?) WordPress has popularity among serious professionals. Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a nightmare. Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.<p>HN seems to grumble about Drupal but even if your only requirement is a PHP server with a MySQL database connect, Drupal (8+) is just as simple to set up as WordPress and infinitely easier to configure. Older versions may have been less user-friendly but really, just click &quot;Content-&gt;Add New-&gt;Page&quot; and you&#x27;re already running at the speed of WordPress.

I&#x27;ve only been passively following the Wordpress drama. Almost a year ago, Mullenweg blogged about taking a 3 month sabbatical that I found interesting, and I assumed this would have been a period of recharging... but things have seemed to gone off the rails since. Was there any correlational between the sabbatical and current drama, or was that just coincidence?

WordPress is a very mature project with a long legacy but I&#x27;m surprised that there hasn&#x27;t been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it.<p>I&#x27;m imagining some very pluggable and template driven runtime that you can ship very declarative packages for. The spicy take would be to use a Scheme for the templating around some robust Rust core, but that&#x27;s probably not the widest appeal. Maybe there would be some clever way to bootstrap it out of PHP so that you can keep using shared PHP hosts and they wouldn&#x27;t have to bring along a new software distribution.

Earlier discussion:<p><i>Aligning Automattic&#x27;s Sponsored Contributions to WordPress</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42650138">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42650138</a><p><i>WordPress: Joost&#x2F;Karim Fork</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42662801">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42662801</a><p><i>Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42667766">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42667766</a>

Mullenweg is in trouble, WordPress is gonna be fine.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;adrienne&#x2F;aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7fc225d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;adrienne&#x2F;aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...</a>

From his perspective, after everything he has done, others are getting the financial gains and many in the community turned on him and his company. It must be a horrible feeling.

Anybody know if Mullenweg has recently purchased property in Belize? I&#x27;m curious how far along the McAfee curve he&#x27;s gotten.

I feel sorry for Matt, someone close to him (family, friend, partner) should help him. It’s not good for him, not good for his company and for Wordpress. I’ve never used Wordpress and I prefer static sites where I have full control, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the usefulness end ease of it. Like many situation, this whole issue would be solved if a couple of the people involved sat down for a coffee, left their ego’s outside, had open minds, and having the willingness to compromise and being sincere ;-)

I’m not a WP user, and I don’t want to ruffle feathers, but I can read and I think WP .com might not be getting the credit it deserves for contributing 4000+ hrs&#x2F;year to WP development. Some of the contributors to WP are the very best open source developers out there; they look at kernel performance, image encoding corner cases and php, and land fixes. Not sure if Mullenweg is communicating that as clearly as he could, but it’s true. Without contributions like that, I doubt WP would be as well known as it is.

If you haven&#x27;t yet: Now&#x27;s the best time to migrate away. You should try out Kirby[0]. No affiliation, but this thing sparked my interest in web development again when I first heard about it.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getkirby.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getkirby.com&#x2F;</a>

matt please get your brain worms dealt with, thank you<p>- someone who has been happily using wordpress for her site since about 2000

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpublii.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpublii.com&#x2F;</a> Yet, anyone?

I find it an interesting question to what degree the design decisions of WordPress are still the right ones in 2025. A PHP backend and frontend running on the same machine, serving dynamically rendered content from a MySql database.<p>Personally, I prefer to have my content in text files, which are using a DSL similar to Yaml but optimized for use in a CMS. And render it to static html files via Python. A process that happens on a different machine. The html files are then pushed to the server that serves the frontend.

Automattic vs. WP Engine will be ultimately decided in court but this sort of reminds me of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.[0] when Oracle got mad because of Google cashing out hard with Android. It&#x27;s all about money for Matt....not about WordPress or open source community.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...</a>.

Sometimes my friends ask me why I don&#x27;t use a CMS for my personal site instead of just writing articles as pages on a Ruby on Rails site.<p>Aside from finding CMSes to be overly heavy and restrictive, this is why. You never know when they&#x27;re gonna go off the rails (pun intended). If I can&#x27;t just do everything in vim&#x2F;notepad++ and a terminal I&#x27;m not super interested.<p>Same reason why I&#x27;m skeptical of game toolkits like Unity.

Just this week I needed to completely revamp my personal website. I went with Squarespace because it&#x27;s quick to spin up and I don&#x27;t have to fiddle with tons of plugins and a complicated theme ecosystem. I just need a website that works. I used to use Wordpress for all my previous iterations, but now, it&#x27;s done. Sad to see it become obsolete by not fixing them broader business and user-friendliness problems.

Hard to care about this drama until it starts to affect functionality. Terraform is still around. Elastic is still around. Reddit and Twitter have no third party apps. I used to have a WordPress blog which I stopped updating for reasons of laziness. I will try to restore the backup and see what happens.

&gt; Then yesterday happened. Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine. This action is blamed on the “the legal attacks started by WP Engine and funded by Silver Lake”, which I think is a gross mischaracterization. WP Engine definitely did not start this.<p>WP Engine owns several WordPress plugin developers. Does plugin development not count now?

Good. As I’ve said in other threads. There are other projects, other CMSes that are perfectly capable of taking over. Let the Wordpress monopoly die and with it this crazy man’s tirades.

Is the entire drama that WordPress is asserting a trademark over &#x27;WPEngine&#x27; (i.e. &#x27;WP&#x27;), and WPEngine disagrees?

The blogosphere is keeping us entertained - with meta drama about blogging itself as growth turns negative.

Could someone link to a higher-level history of the WordPress situation, going further back? For the benefit of those of us that don&#x27;t know much beyond the fact that it&#x27;s an established blogging and website-building platform?

all this WP drama makes me really grateful about deciding to go with a static site generator.<p>Astro FTW!

this article opens with &quot;since i last wrote about wordpress&quot;, with a link to a previous article. the linked article does the same. it goes seven layers deep! what dedication!

WordPress is amazing and we should all support open source Matt over dark finance backed companies.

Isn&#x27;t there a metric like 80% of the web is WP. Wonder who will be the new provider if WP does fold&#x2F;problems affect running sites.

Hmm, crazy narcissist Matt Mullenweg does something for attention at the detriment of everyone else, again?<p>The problem is that there&#x27;s a bit of a black hole in CMSs right now where you need developers who want to work on the CMS and ordinary users who can host&#x2F;create content on the CMS. Strapi was almost there, but alas, headless is not going to cut it for your average business trying to make a website.<p>Static site generators can be too limited and simple, Drupal is not particularly user friendly, and tons of other CMSs don&#x27;t have enough plugins for marketers to cram into their sites.<p>Anyone considering e-commerce now will probably use Shopify instead of WooCommerce. Site builders like Squarespace and Wix are good for simpler sites but not for multi-author news type sites.<p>I feel like the only option is a fork at this point.

I would love to do a one click transfer to a static site but it’s not easy. I’ve only seen Astro Wordpress kits but paid

No it is not. Outside this strange bubble on hacker news, no ine really cares or has ever heard of the creator.<p>They just use wordpress.

A silver lining is that if fewer sites use WordPress, the web won&#x27;t look nearly as homogeneous as it does now.

I bet Wordpress will be fine. Too bad Automattic isn’t a public company, bet it would be volatile right now.

Good many then these stupid bot will leave my server alone always looking for wp-config FML.

I’ve been working on a side hobby project for a year in an attempt to solve these problems.<p>It keeps growing in interest, and the demand has become more than I can handle currently.<p>If anyone is interested in helping to build an open and secure platform that is an alternative to WordPress, please reach out or comment.

It seems that this is definitely a pressing issue for the web

People keep saying &quot;FORK FORK FORK&quot;. You have to remember, that all hosts that are deploying WordPress rely on the main provider. Thousands of hosting companies use WordPress deploying after registration and auto-updating the installations. How are you planning to make this kind of a major change? All the plugins that are in wordpress.org. How will you inform every WordPress site owner to go through this type of transition?<p>I think this &quot;fork&quot; idea comes from a bizarre cancel&#x2F;woke culture influence.

All the small&#x2F;medium branding agencies surviving on Wordpress should devote 10% of their devs’ time to core.<p>Community: rebuilt.

Narcissistic personality disorder[0] is unnoticeable for a person having it, but makes lives of all around them a living hell. Such person is always right, and the 99.99% people around with an opposite opinion&#x2F;viewpoint are idiots. If some &quot;idiot&quot; is standing up, there comes the retaliation part.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Narcissistic_personality_disorder" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Narcissistic_personality_disor...</a>

Is this just an add for another paid CMS?

Please take your meds or seek immediate professional help, Matt.

Just love the way Matt keeps responding to everything in a passive-aggressive tone with a smarmy smile.

some good news for a change

I&#x27;m still in the camp that Matt is attempting to force a fork because he&#x27;s done with WP. Maybe he believes it can&#x27;t live without his magic touch (lmao). Either that or he&#x27;s lost his mind. :)

At this point, I’m planning to move away from Wordpress due to the instability and into a regular wiki based site. Unsure of which at the moment, maybe some suggestions? Prefer static file based rather than host a DB.

TL;DR?<p>I don&#x27;t like drama. Why is it in trouble just now and it has not been an ongoing process?

I have never liked Wordpress. If it dies, that&#x27;s ok with me. I just don&#x27;t like it.

&gt; Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the push they need to get started [in forking WP]<p>Ha. IDK buddy, be careful what you wish for.

Let’s just rewrite the thing in Laravel, hook all the functions using RunKit7 (or a fork) to implement a plugin compatibility layer, and send the old codebase to the dumpster fire. WP Engine and other hosting agencies, it could be a matter of survival for you.

I think Matt should reach out to Elon Musk to assist him. And I don&#x27;t mean that in a weird or snarky or &quot;jabbing at Elon&#x2F;Matt&quot; kind of way. Clearly he is struggling to deal with a competitor and community wanting to impose their will on him, and make him behave like a &quot;good boy&quot; for their benefit (whatever that may be). Unfortunately he doesn&#x27;t have the kind of &quot;Fuck You&quot; money that Elon has to deal with said interlopers.

Oh no who could have possibly forseen this .... mumble mumble