Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, two of whom he says planned to spearhead a new fork of the open source WordPress project.
While community criticism of WordPress’s governance isn’t new, the latest brouhaha kicked off back in September when Mullenweg publicly chastised WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built atop WordPress, for profiteering without giving much back. Things soon escalated (read all about it here), with WP Engine filing a lawsuit after it was banned from accessing key WordPress resources, and then a court ordered WordPress to restore access.
In amongst all this, key figures from within the wider WordPress community have stepped forward. Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former marketing and communications’ lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his “vision for a new WordPress era,” where he discussed the potential for “federated and independent repositories.” Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed similar thoughts in a separate blog post.
WP Engine, meanwhile, indicated it was on standby to lend a corporate hand.
Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion of a new WordPress fork — a term that describes when someone takes the 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 a sarcasm-laden blog post published this morning, Mullenweg refers to de Valk and Marucchi’s plans as a “fork,” though the duo haven’t announced any such plans — de Valk, did, however, discuss the notion of creating federated “mirrors” (a repository copy) for themes and plugins, among other changes.
“Just having mirrors of WordPress.org also doesn’t really 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 those mirrors federate with each other, and share each others data and….allow for independent themes and plugins to be hosted there.”
In a statement sent to TechCrunch, de Valk reiterated that at no point were they planning to fork WordPress, with Marucchi conveying the same message on X.
Get forked
Earlier this week, Automattic announced it would reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine’s own contribution, a metric measured in weekly hours. This spurred de Valk to take to X on Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his “team stands ready.”
Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the “push it needs to get off the ground,” he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts.
“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort,” Mullenweg wrote.
At the same time, Mullenweg revealed he was also deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it’s worth noting, is president and CEO of a newly incorporated non-profit called the WP Community Collective, which is setting out to serve as a “neutral home for collaboration, contribution, and resources” around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem.
Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning to express surprise at her deactivation, noting that she hadn’t been involved in the project since 2020. Over on Bluesky, Rand-Hendriksen suggested that Mullenweg was targeting him and Burns because of their prior objections to governance at 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 apparently he still holds a grudge.
It’s worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents the user from contributing through that channel, be it to the core project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with. However, as it’s hosted on GitHub too, anyone is still able to access the code should they wish to fork it.
In what was seemingly a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, Mullenweg said that any 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 work out,” Mullenweg added. “The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation.”
This post was updated to provide clarification that de Valk and Marucchi didn’t say they planned a fork, and that a suggestion was made to create mirrors for the plugins and themes repositories, while also offering to lead on the next release of WordPress.
