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Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg deactivated the accounts of several members of the WordPress.org community, two of whom he says were planning to launch a new fork of the open source WordPress project.
Although community criticism of WordPress management is not new, the latest storm started back in September when Mullenweg publicly punished WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on WordPress, for profit without much return. Things soon escalated (read all about it here), with documentation of the WP engine a lawsuit after it was forbidden from accessing key WordPress resources, and then in court ordered WordPress to restore access.
In between all of this, key figures from the wider WordPress community have come forward. Joost de Valk — creator of SEO tool Yoast focused on WordPress (i former head of marketing and communications for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his “vision for a new WordPress era,” where he discussed the potential for “unified and independent repositories”. Karim MarucciCEO of enterprise consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed similar sentiments separate blog post.
WP Engine, meanwhile, indicated that it is in standby mode lend a corporate hand.
Mullenweg, for his part, is publicly supported 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.
In pregnant sarcasm blog post published this morning, Mullenweg describes de Valk and Marucchi’s plans as a “fork,” though the duo hasn’t announced any such plans — de Valk has, however, discussed the idea of creating federated “mirrors” (copies of repositories) for themes and plugins, among other changes.
“Just having a WordPress.org mirror also doesn’t really solve the problem of one party controlling our single update server,” de Valk wrote in a post last month. “For that, we have to make sure that these mirrors are unified with each other, 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 fork WordPress with Marucchi transmitting the same message to X.
Get a pitchfork
Earlier this week, Automattic announced it would reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to match WP Engine’s own contribution, a metric measured in weekly hours. This prompted de Valk to lead to X on Friday to show he’s willing to lead the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his “the team is ready.”
Together, hawk and Morocco contribute about 10 hours per week to various aspects of the open source WordPress project. However, Mullenweg said he deactivated their WordPress.org accounts to give their independent efforts “the push they need to get off the ground.”
“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join their new effort,” Mullenweg wrote.
At the same time, Mullenweg revealed that he was also deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation: Be Reed, Heather Burnsand Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it’s worth noting, did president and CEO newly established non-profit organizations called the WP Community Collectivewhich intends to serve as a “neutral home for collaboration, contributions and resources” around WordPress and the wider open source ecosystem.
Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning express surprise at her deactivation, noting that she 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 managing 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 he’s clearly still holding a grudge.
It’s worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents a user from contributing through that channel, whether it’s the core project or any other plugins or themes they’re involved with. However, as it is hosted on GitHub also, anyone can still access the code if they want to fork it.
In what appeared to be a tongue-in-cheek 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 genuinely curious to see how they succeed,” added Mullenweg. “The beauty of open source is that it can accommodate anything GPL code in WordPress and send your vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s great, we might even merge it back into WordPress, that ability to freely flow code and ideas 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 have not said they plan to fork, and that a proposal has been made to create a mirror for the plugin and theme repositories, while also offering guidance on the next release of WordPress.
