Matt Mullenweg bans WordPress support accounts for perceived intent

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has blocked the accounts of several WordPress.org users, two of whom are said to have planned to spearhead a new fork of the open-source WordPress project.

While public criticism of WordPress governance is not new, the latest brouhaha began in September. Mullenweg was publicly criticized WP Engine, a marketing company built on top of WordPress, to profit without much return. Things soon escalated (read all about it Here), and write to WP Engine a a case after that happened prohibited from getting the essentials of WordPress, and then the court ordered WordPress to restore access.

In the midst of all this, the main figures of the WordPress community have progressed. Joost de Valk – the developer of the standard SEO tool for WordPress Yoast (and the past marketing and communications’ advance WordPress Foundation) – last month published his “vision for a new era of WordPress,” where he discussed the possibility of “institutional and independent repositories.” Karim MarucciThe CEO of online consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed similar sentiments separate blog post.

WP Engine, meanwhile, indicated that it is on standby lend a hand to the company.

Mullenweg, for his part, said he publicly supported the idea of the new WordPress fork – a term that describes when someone takes the code from an open project and creates a copy, which can take on a life of its own with a special group of contributors.

Full of sarcasm blog post published this morning, Mullenweg refers to the plans of de Valk and Marucchi as a “fork,” although the two have not announced such plans – de Valk, however, discussed the idea of ​​creating a unified “mirror” (backup copy) for themes and plugins, among the changes other.

“Just having WordPress.org mirrors no longer solves the problem of one team managing our single server,” de Valk wrote in a blog post last month. “For this reason, we need to ensure that the lenses are compatible, and share data with…

In a statement sent to TechCrunch, de Valk also said that there is no time when he plans to weaken WordPress, and Marucchi. giving the same message on X.

Get a fork

Earlier this week, Automattic he announced would limit their contribution to the open source WordPress project to match what WP Engine provided, a metric measured in hours per week. This caused Valk to leave go to X On Friday to indicate that he was ready to lead the next release of WordPress, Marucchi added that “the team gets ready.”

All together, and Falcon and Morocco devote around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, Mullenweg said that in order to give their independent efforts “the push they need to get off the ground,” they are suspending their WordPress.org accounts.

“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try the leadership model or partner with WP Engine to join their new endeavor,” Mullenweg wrote.

At the same time, Mullenweg revealed that he was also suspending the accounts of three other people, without elaborating further: Be Reed, Heather Burnsand Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it’s worth noting, is President and CEO of a newly incorporated non-profit organization to be invited and WP Community Collectivewhich aims to be a “neutral home for cooperation, contributions, and support” around WordPress and the open source environment.

Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, went to X this morning expressing surprise at his suspension, noting that he has not participated in the project since 2020. In Bluesky, Rand-Hendriksen he encouraged that Mullenweg targets him and Burns for rejecting their control over WordPress. He wrote:

Why is he (Mullenweg) targeting me and Heather? Because we started talking about the importance of good governance, accountability, the unanimity of interest rates, and other things back in 2017. We all left the project in 2019, and apparently they still have a grudge.

It’s worth noting that disabling a WordPress.org account prevents the user from contributing through the system, whether it’s the main project or any other plugins or themes they may have. However, as hosted by GitHub Also, anyone can still find the code if they want to crack it.

In what appears to be a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, Mullenweg said that any new fork could be called “JKPress,” and that they might have a “WordPress + JKPress summit” next year.

“Joost and Karim have a number of bold and exciting ideas, and I’m excited to see how they work,” said Mullenweg. “The beauty of open source is that they can take everything GPL code in WordPress and send their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. When they create something that’s amazing, we can integrate it into WordPress, the ability for code and ideas to flow freely between projects is part of what makes open source a technology engine. “

This post has been edited to make it clear that de Valk and Marucchi did not claim to have fixed the fork, and that the idea was created to create a plugin gallery and theme repository, and to provide guidance for the next release of WordPress..