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WordPress Is in Trouble

Since I last wrote about WordPress, things have gone off the rails. This after a brief period when things were blissfully quiet. Matt Mullenweg stopped commenting for a while, though his company had launched WP Engine Tracker — a site for tracking WordPress-driven websites that moved away from WP Engine. I think this is a bit gauche, but it seems like fair marketing given everything that’s going on. It should be noted that many sites are leaving for Pressable — owned by Mullenweg’s company, Automattic — because of a sweetheart deal.

He also invited people to fund legal attacks against him by signing up for WP Engine services, and hoped to have the “time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year”. The wildest part of this to me is that there’s video of Mullenweg — live on stage at Word Camp Europe in 2022 — requesting the creation of the Slack channel he was turning off. Of course, having slight differences to the core WordPress experience is the argument that Mullenweg initially used to call WP Engine a “ cancer ”, but who’s keeping track?

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