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Automattic CEO and co-creator of WordPress Matt Mullenweg has disabled the accounts of several members of the WordPress.org community, two of whom he says are spearheading a new fork of the open source WordPress project.
While community criticism of WordPress governance is not new, the latest brouhaha began in September when Mullenweg publicly chastised WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on WordPress, to profit without giving much return. Things soon escalated (read all about it here), with WP Engine a process later it was forbidden to access the key resources of WordPress, and then a court instructed WordPress to restore access.
In the midst of all this, key figures in the wider WordPress community have stepped up. Joost de Valk – creator of the SEO tool focused on WordPress Yoast (and elder marketing and communications for the WordPress Foundation) – last month published his “vision for a new era of WordPress”, where he discussed the potential of “federated and independent repositories”. Karim MarucchiCEO of web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, gathered similar thoughts in a separate blog post.
WP Engine, meanwhile, indicated that it was on standby to lend a corporate hand.
Mullenweg, for his part, has he publicly supported the idea of a new WordPress fork – a term that describes when someone takes the code from an open source project and creates a copy, which can take on a life of its own with a separate community of contributors.
In a loaded sarcasm blog post published this morning, Mullenweg refers to the plans of de Valk and Marucchi as a “fork”, although the duo has not announced any such plans – de Valk, however, discussed the notion of creating ” federated” mirrors (a copy of the repository) for themes and plugins, among other changes.
“Just having WordPress.org mirrors still doesn’t really solve the problem of a single party controlling our single update server,” de Valk wrote in his post last month. “Therefore, we need to make sure that those mirrors federate with each other, and share each other’s data and … allow independent themes and plugins to be hosted there.”
In a statement sent to TechCrunch, de Valk argued that at no point did they plan to fork WordPress, along with Marucchi. broadcast the same message on X.
Make a fork
Earlier this week, Automattic announced will reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine’s own contribution, a metric measured in weekly hours. This pushed de Valk to take to X Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next version of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his “the team is ready.”
Collectively, the Falcon and Morocco contributes about 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, Mullenweg said that to give his independent effort the “push it needs to get off the ground,” he was deactivating his WordPress.org accounts.
“We strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join their new endeavor,” Mullenweg wrote.
At the same time, Mullenweg revealed that he was also deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Be Reed, Heather Burnsand Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it’s worth noting, is president and CEO of a new non-profit enterprise called him The WP Community Collectivewhich sets out to serve as a “neutral home for collaboration, contribution and resources” around WordPress and the wider open source ecosystem.
Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, brought to X this morning to express surprise at his deactivation, noting that he had not been involved in the project since 2020. Over on Bluesky, Rand-Hendriksen suggested that Mullenweg was targeting him and Burns because of their previous objections to governance at WordPress. He wrote:
So why is he (Mullenweg) targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, and other things back in 2017. We both left the project in 2019, and apparently still have a grudge.
It should be noted that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents users from contributing through that channel, either to the core project or to any other plugins or themes that may be involved. However, as it is hosted on GitHub too, someone is always able to access the code if they wanted to fork it.
In what was apparently a language hint, Mullenweg said that each new fork could be called “JKPress”, and they could have a joint combination “WordPress + JKPress” next year.
“Joost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I’m really curious to see how they work,” added Mullenweg. “The beauty of open source is that they can take everything the GPL code in WordPress and deliver his vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s amazing, we can even join it back in WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to flow freely between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation.”
This post has been updated to provide clarification that de Valk and Marucchi did not say they were planning a fork, and that a suggestion was made to create mirrors for plugins and theme directories, while also offering guidance to the next version of WordPress..
