Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has disabled the accounts of several members of the WordPress.org community, both of whom suggested plans to spearhead the push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project. While public criticism of WordPress governance is not new, the latest brouhaha began in September when Mullenweg publicly condemned WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on top of WordPress, for making a profit without giving much back. Things escalated (read all about it here), with WP Engine filing a lawsuit after being banned from accessing the main WordPress resources, then a court ordered WordPress to restore access. Amidst all this, key figures from the wider WordPress community have stepped forward. Joost de Valk – creator of the WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former head of marketing and communications for the WordPress Foundation) – last month published a “vision for a new WordPress era,” in which he discussed the potential of “federated and independent repositories.” Karim Marucchi, the CEO of the web consulting company Crowd Favorite, echoed these thoughts in a separate blog post. WP Engine, meanwhile, indicated that it was ready to lend a hand to the company. Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the new WordPress fork – a term that describes it when someone takes the code from an open source project and creates a copy, which can live on its own, with a separate community. While Mullenweg refers to de Valk and Marucchi’s plan as a “fork”, it actually appears to be more about creating a “mirror” (copy instead of syncing to the main repository) for themes and plugins that can share data between each other. “For that, we need to make sure that the mirrors join together, and share each other’s data and… In a statement sent to TechCrunch, de Valk confirmed that no one wants to design WordPress. Get forked Earlier this week, Automattic announced it would reduce its contributions to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine’s own contributions, a metric measured in hours per week. This spurred de Valk to take to X on Friday to show that he is willing to lead in the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that “the team is ready.” Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute about 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, in a sarcastic blog post published this morning, Mullenweg said that in order to give his independent efforts a “push to the bottom,” he disabled his WordPress.org account. “I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try a different leadership model or align with WP Engine to join a new venture,” Mullenweg wrote. At the same time, Mullenweg also announced that he disabled the accounts of three other people, with little explanation: Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it should be noted, is the president and CEO of a newly incorporated nonprofit organization called the WP Community Collective, which will be a “neutral home for collaboration, contributions, and resources” in WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem. . Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning to express his surprise at his inactivity, as he has not been involved with the project since 2020. On Bluesky, Rand-Hendriksen suggested that Mullenweg targeted him and Burns because of their previous objections to the government in WordPress. He wrote: So why him [Mullenweg] targeting heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, etc. in 2017. We both left the job in 2019, and apparently he still holds a grudge. Please note that deactivating your WordPress.org account prevents affected users from contributing through the channel, be it core projects or any other plugins or themes they may be working on. However, since it is also hosted on GitHub, anyone can still access the code. In what appears to be a suggestion, Mullenweg said that the new fork could be called “JKPress,” and that it could hold a “WordPress + JKPress” meeting next year. “Joost and Karim have some bold and interesting ideas, and I’m really interested to see how they turn out,” Mullenweg added. “The beauty of open source is that you can take all the GPL code in WordPress and deliver your vision. You don’t need permission, you can do things. If they create something amazing, we can integrate it back into WordPress, the ability for code and ideas to flow freely among projects is part of what makes open source an engine for innovation. This post has been updated to clarify that de Valk and Marucchi are not planning to fork, and hope to create a mirror for the plugin and theme repositories, and also offer leadership in WordPress releases the next.
Matt Mullenweg disabled the WordPress account of a contributor he said planned to create the project
