The WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained

September 27, 2024 12:16 PM

The world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites, is going through a very heated controversy. The core issue is the fight between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress.
posted by brundlefly (25 comments total)

I deeply hope this is something I will never need to know or care about.


/ traumatized web dev on the verge of retirement.
posted by supermedusa at 12:30 PM on September 27 [10 favorites]

"so, like, wordpress has this bad reputation for getting your site hacked if you don't update it every 2 minutes, because it's all PHP spaghetti code... so I just threw the switch that prevents wp engine clients from auto-updating their plugins and themes, that should show them.... a phone call, for me, from Irony itself?"
posted by Rhomboid at 12:32 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

I'm a long-term WordPress user (since it was b2) but I've only used it for my personal site and never paid attention to the wider ecosystem or news about it. So is this dispute actually about something or is it more of a shakedown? From the explainer it seems like Automattic is saying it's the one and WP Engine is saying it's the other and I don't know enough to decide who's blowing hot air.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:43 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

I read that explainer earlier and (no shade to the OP) did not feel like it explained too much. I found this explainer was better for me. I use self-hosted WordPress so this affects me in a "there is no ethical web development under capitalism, it seems' way but not immediately. Matt M. appears to be a billionaire doing billionaire things including weird threatening "I will blow up your company when I do my keynote" texts that seem unhinged. WP Engine is a huge company making money off of an open source product and they probably should have contributed something back. They're both being sort of terrible here. I continue to read more about it in the attempt to figure out if there is anyone to root for besides me and my smol webhosts.
posted by jessamyn at 12:43 PM on September 27 [9 favorites]

I have been a WP dev since v1 and have had clients who use wpengine as their hosting solution, though in at least one case that proved to be a bad idea and they went back to self-hosting on their own server in their own office (also a bad idea if you don't have dedicated server techs to keep all of the non-wp software on it up-to-date).

Anyway, WPEngine's tools are mostly pretty good, but some of their internal "rules" are not great for highly-customized WP instances. Par for the course, I'd guess.

WordPress itself is generally pretty OK, though I feel their initiative to move to their "gutenberg" architecture was both slow and rushed and subsequently (as a developer) it's a real mess in places. That said, WordPress' biggest organizational problem, from my outside and specific perspective, is that their core dev group, from the architects thinking big thoughts to the fingers-on-keyboards internal developers, do not have a feel for what the vast majority of web sites using WP-as-a-content-manager do, or what might be useful to those users. WP still believes the only group of users that matter are people running "bicycle blogs" and the like, with new software features and decisions made with only those people in mind. Some of the core thinking and architecture behind the "gutenberg" project are frankly insane when considering what the majority of websites are trying to do.
posted by maxwelton at 1:04 PM on September 27 [4 favorites]

I use WordPress for a bunch of sites hosted by different providers (Reclaim Hosting, for one).
I also help teach my students to make WP sites, hosted by our university.
Should I rethink these strategies?
posted by doctornemo at 1:54 PM on September 27

Unless there's something going on here that is not visible to anybody outside of the immediate parties involved, Mullenweg is blowing every ounce of goodwill he has gained over the past 20 years (and then some) in one quick shot.

Maybe WP-Engine isn't perfect but there is documentation of Matt trying to extort them. It's insane. I have no idea of the world in which he thinks this was going to end well for him.
posted by tubedogg at 2:14 PM on September 27 [3 favorites]

This is real "let's you and him fight" territory for me. I don't use WordPress, but from my perspective this is two roughly equal-sized companies having some kind of bizarre spat in which neither side comes out looking particularly good. Mullenweg looks like he's try to extort the WPEngine people out of spite/malice/ego, while they look parasitical for building a sizable business off FOSS they don't contribute back to. Like I said I don't use WordPress at all so I can just eat this big bowl of popcorn, but if you do I'd worry at least a little bit. Per usual, using the actual open source thing rather than someone else's add-on services and repackaging/whatnot is an option.
posted by axiom at 2:25 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

maxwelton: That said, WordPress' biggest organizational problem, from my outside and specific perspective, is that their core dev group, from the architects thinking big thoughts to the fingers-on-keyboards internal developers, do not have a feel for what the vast majority of web sites using WP-as-a-content-manager do, or what might be useful to those users.

My work has me straddling a bunch of different open source and commercial CMS and digital publishing ecosystems, so I don't feel like I can speak as a Wordpress insider, but one of the things this conflagration really highlights, IMO, is that the community has one person effectively in charge of several critical and sometimes conflicting jobs:

1. Running a nonprofit that controls an open source software project used by large swaths of the internet, and many commercial businesses
2. Deciding the "road map" of features that become an official part of that open source software, or receive ongoing maintenance and improvement
3. Via control of the Wordpress trademark and the "bully pulpit" of project leader, defining what constitutes "good citizenship" in the Wordpress world versus parasitism and exploitation of the open source commons everyone depends on
4. Running one of the largest commercial businesses that makes money off of that open source project

You mentioned Gutenberg, and how you don't feel it aligns with the underlying needs of many Wordpress users, and I tend to agree. However, it allows Wordpress.com (Matt's commercial business) to compete with "visual site-building tools" like Squarespace, which are slowly but surely eating Wordpress's lunch in the small business market the way Wordpress ate the lunch of "blogging software" in the late aughts and early teens. Some Wordpress users and businesses like that visual editing system, some hate it, but fundamentally it's how Squarespace does things, and Matt's commercial business is in a long-term existential battle for the small business site-building market now, not blogging or publishing per se.

In theory, the magic of open source is that you can still build your own stuff with it — turn off the Gutenberg "visual page editor" and use a more traditional bloggy interface, or install a bunch of other plugins to give yourself an editorial calendar instead of a list of posts on your dashboard, etc. Or start a business that uses Wordpress as its base but builds, like, community art collaboration on top of it and sells subscriptions to local galleries. Whatever. You have different needs than the ones Matt is prioritizing, but there's not necessarily a conflict.

What's happening here is that Matt is using his overlapping roles to simultaneously:

1. Set the priorities of the Wordpress open source project such that each version of Wordpress makes it easier for his commercial business to compete with its biggest competitor.
2. Define other successful companies in the Wordpress ecosystem as "parasites and freeloaders" if they don't contribute back… by dedicating money or engineering hours to the priorities he set.
3. Define the things his competitors spend their money and engineering hours on as "bastardizing and forking and ruining wordpress," even if that work is used by others who have similar needs.

Anyways, I'm rambling, but it's a tangled situation on a lot of fronts. The problem of private equity rolling in and "extracting value" from open source products that were built and maintained by volunteers is a real and serious problem. Matt is the absolute worst person to tackle this problem, though, because most of the effective ways of solving that problem involve relinquishing the direct control he uses to shape the project's direction and profit from the results.posted by verb at 2:33 PM on September 27 [8 favorites]

I guess this explains somewhat why Matt seemingly randomly posted the last 12 years of his "personal non-profit donations" on Threads recently...?
posted by gwint at 2:39 PM on September 27

Also note that WordPress owns Tumblr and recently announced they are going to migrate all Tumblr blogs to WordPress, which would likely be one of the largest software migrations ever. Before that there was the whole selling your Tumblr data to AI companies thing.
posted by gwint at 2:43 PM on September 27 [4 favorites]

Here's another pretty good explainer from Josh Collinsworth which is long but gets into the details of the spat pretty decently without adding more drama to it for the most part.
posted by jessamyn at 2:53 PM on September 27 [1 favorite]

"Silver Lake and WP Engine put their customers at risk, not me" says the person who intentionally turned off access to the security updates. I hope that what comes out of this is WP Engine putting the dev time that Matt has been complaining about into creating a new and better system for distributing Wordpress updates and themes, etc. that isn't centralized in wordpress.org and thus not able to be controlled and weaponized by such a petulant child of a CEO.
posted by metaphorever at 3:00 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

I guess this explains somewhat why Matt seemingly randomly posted the last 12 years of his "personal non-profit donations" on Threads recently...?

Yes. I don't mean this in the pejorative right-wing sense, but that was definitely a virtue signal. It was Matt saying, "I have donated lots of money to charity, while they have spent theirs in self-serving ways" — while ignoring the fact that he also gets to determine what constitutes charity versus self-interest.

Again, that isn't to say that that WPEngine meets any specific definition of "giving back," just to point out that right now, the person who is empowered to make the determination has a significant conflict of interest and is going gonzo scorched earth about it.
posted by verb at 3:08 PM on September 27 [1 favorite]

As i have been pointing out in multiple places lately, it's pretty hypocritical of Matt to criticize people for being owned by private equity firms when fucking BlackRock is one of Automattic's major investors.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:15 PM on September 27 [6 favorites]

while they look parasitical for building a sizable business off FOSS they don't contribute back to.

The FOSS world works best when everyone contributes, it's true.

It's also true though that there are a lot of ways to be open source, and one of those ways is to have a license where certain categories of users (say, commercial entities, or commercial entities with over $X in annual revenue) need to pay some amount or make some other kind of contributions to use the product. WP apparently decided not to go that way, maybe in part because they figured it would limit their adoption rate/market penetration and encourage forks/rivals.

To come after the fact and punish someone for using your product exactly as licensed is problematic and feels like wanting to have it both ways. They could have just changed their licensing structure for future versions to require companies like WP to start paying something. That might have also started a war or rebellion, but as a move it seems much more defensible to me.
posted by trig at 3:32 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

To come after the fact and punish someone for using your product exactly as licensed is problematic and feels like wanting to have it both ways.

Indeed, it's also rich because Wordpress itself started not as an original project by Matt but a fork of b2, a different open source blogging project that was seeking donations and contributions at the time and languished after Wordpress swept the blogging scene. There's nothing wrong with that — it's literally what the GPL license is meant to facilitate! — but it feels indicative of the weirdness in this specific situation.
posted by verb at 3:42 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

They could have just changed their licensing structure for future versions to require companies like WP to start paying something.

Fun fact, they actually can't, because they don't have a CLA, and they're a fork of b2/cafelog which also didn't have a CLA. So they'd have to clean-room reimplement literally everything in order to get off GPL.

(Which is probably why Matt is desperate to extort his competitors for money, lmao. He'd relicense in a heartbeat if he could.)

Incidentally, i have a rough timeline/outline which i'm trying to keep updated, it's over here.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:52 PM on September 27 [5 favorites]

I feel like this is the thread adrienneleigh and i have been training for for years
posted by verb at 4:27 PM on September 27 [3 favorites]

I'm firmly in the "php is fractally wrong" camp, so have kept WordPress far away on principle, but I'm certainly enjoying the popcorn. Thank you adrienneleigh, verb, et al for the informed commentary.
posted by bcd at 4:40 PM on September 27 [1 favorite]

I'm firmly in the "php is fractally wrong" camp

If you haven't touched it for years, you might give it a try again sometime—it's grown up into quite a nice little language with a fantastic ecosystem!

(WordPress is an awful CMS, though, with a terrible codebase and an even worse database schema. Definitely not The Best of PHP. I build on actually-good CMSes in my professional and personal lives, and i only touch WP if someone pays me a lot of money.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:46 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

adrienneleigh, you may be pleased then to note that my largely WP-based business went from being fairly well-paid to not over the past few years as there are now lots and lots and lots of devs in the space, many willing to work for peanuts.

(I tried a couple of clients on Drupal probably before it was really time to do so, and that didn't work out well. I'd poke my head in to see if it's better or what the new hotness is, but I'm old and tired now.)
posted by maxwelton at 5:25 PM on September 27

This is nothing less than Matt letting his true self shine through.
posted by Brilliantcrank at 5:51 PM on September 27 [1 favorite]

maxwelton: I'm never pleased to know that colleagues are struggling, even if they use systems i think are bad! (I'm an underemployed freelancer myself.) I hope things get better for you!

verb is the guy to talk to about Drupal (no really, he's well-known elseweb as one of THE GUYS to talk to about Drupal), but if you want to MeMail me, i can also suggest some other awesome PHP-based CMSes that i think are super great for client work!
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:52 PM on September 27

So, if you bought the Divi plugin for WP and used it to build a website hosted elsewhere, how would this affect you? Asking for my company.
posted by blue shadows at 6:19 PM on September 27