CEO of Automattic and co-creator of WordPress Matt Mullenweg has disabled the accounts of several members of the WordPress.org community, two of whom it says were planning to spearhead a new fork of the WordPress open source project.
While community criticism of WordPress governance isn’t new, the most recent brouhaha began in September, when Mullenweg publicly condemned WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on top of WordPress, for profiting without giving much away. Things soon escalated (read all about it here), with WP Engine filing a lawsuit after being denied access to key WordPress resources, and then a court ordered WordPress to restore access.
Amongst all of them, important figures from the wider WordPress community have stepped up. Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former head of marketing and communications for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his “vision for a new era of WordPress,” where he discussed the possibilities for “federated and independent repositories.” Karim MarouchiCEO of web business consultancy Crowd Favorite echoed similar sentiments separate blog post.
WP Engine, meanwhile, indicated that it was on hold to lend a corporate hand.
Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly championed the idea of a new WordPress fork — a term that describes when someone takes 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. And loaded with sarcasm blog post published this morning, Mullenweg refers to de Valk and Marucchi’s plans as a “fork,” even though the duo hasn’t actually said that’s on their roadmap — de Valk did, however, discuss the idea of creating federated “mirrors” (a repository copy) for themes and plugins.
“Just having WordPress.org mirrors also doesn’t solve the problem of a single party controlling our single update server,” de Valk wrote in his post last month. “For that, we need to make sure that these mirrors mesh with each other, and share data with each other, and … allow independent themes and plugins to be hosted there.”
In a statement sent to TechCrunch, de Valk reiterated that at no point did they plan to separate WordPress, with Marucchi conveying the same message to X.
Fork
Earlier this week, Automattic announced that it would reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine’s contribution, a metric measured in weekly hours. This prompted de Valk to go to X on Friday to say he was willing to lead the next version of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that “the team is ready.”
collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute approximately 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the “boost it needs to take off,” he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts.
“I strongly encourage anyone looking to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join their new endeavor,” Mullenweg wrote.
At the same time, Mullenweg also revealed that he was deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: It’s Reed, Heather Burnsand Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it’s worth noting, is president and CEO of a newly formed non-profit organization called the WP Community Collectivewhich aims to act as a “neutral home for collaboration, contribution and resources” around WordPress and the wider open source ecosystem.
Burns, a former WordPress contributor, went to X this morning to express surprise at its deactivation, noting that it had not been involved with the project since 2020. On Bluesky, Rand-Hendriksen is suggested that Mullenweg was targeting him and Burns because of their previous objections to WordPress governance. He wrote:
So why is he? [Mullenweg] targeting heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for good governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies and other things in 2017. We both left the project in 2019 and apparently still hold a grudge.
It’s worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents the user from contributing through this channel, whether it’s the core project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with. However, as it is hosted on GitHub Also, anyone can still access the code if they want to split it.
In a seemingly unusual suggestion, Mullenweg said that each new fork could be called “JKPress” and they could hold a joint “WordPress + JKPress Summit” 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 it all the GPL code in WordPress and send their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s awesome, we might even merge it back into WordPress, that the 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 clarify that de Valk and Marucchi did not say they were planning a fork, and that there was a proposal to create mirrors for the plugin and theme repositories, while also offering to lead the next version of WordPress.
