The board needs to oust the CEO.
“Matt’s war against WP Engine has been polarizing and upsetting for everyone in WordPress, but most of the WP community has been relatively insulated from any real effects. Putting a loyalty test in the form of a checkmark on the WordPress.org login page has brought the conflict directly to every community member and contributor. Matt is not just forcing everyone to take sides, he is actively telling people to consult attorneys to determine whether or not they should check the box,” the anonymous contributor I spoke to told me. “It is also more than just whether or not you agree to a legally dubious statement to log in. A growing number of active, dedicated community members, many who have no connection with WP Engine, have had their WordPress.org accounts completely disabled with no notice or explanation as to why. No one knows who will be banned next or for what… Whatever Matt’s end goal is, his ‘tactics,’ especially this legally and ethically ambiguous checkbox, are causing a lot of confusion and mental anguish to people around the world.”
This is the sort of behavior that causes irreparable damage to a brand. Psycho.
What a weird thing to do! They can sue each other until the cows come home for all I care but dragging the community into it like this comes off as petty imo. Musky even.
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i did just that a few minutes ago. closed my account and removed my one Plugin from the repo. if the statistics in wordpress.org are correct it was used by ~20k sites (though that number is hard to believe and seemed way too large for the usw case for a long time). It can still be found in github but will no longer get any updates since I haven’t used wordpress myself for quite some time and with the current shitstorm i don’t see a reason to invest any time in it.
This whole thing just makes me want to steer clear of wordpress entirely.
I’m not sure what in the history of WordPress would have encouraged anyone to do otherwise.
The efficient and clean code? /s
I’ve been using WP for personal projects for something like 15 years.
Nothing I’ve ever created has been that big, but I generally liked the tools nonetheless.
But now I think I’m out. I try to adhere to a rule where I don’t support rich weirdos as much as possible, and as such that’s why I use Lemmy to begin with. And don’t buy from Amazon. And don’t use Twitter any more. Etc.
So my next project now will totally be on new software. And hey, maybe I won’t have to use PHP ever again so this could be a win.
Don’t judge PHP by what you saw in WordPress. Modern PHP is amazing, WordPress had horrible code when it started and they definitely didn’t fix things afterwards. It’s a horrible slow mess of a code. Look at some modern PHP (for example this api of mine ) to compare.
Thanks for sharing a modern php codebase. It makes me confident that giving it up and switching to Python was the right choice.
lol
Imagine going to the slowest and ugliest interpreted language there is and feeling superior about it.
Like, modern Python is basically what PHP was at its lowest point, PHP 4 (20 years ago).
No, it’s worse. PHP never had shit like virtual environments and a million different incompatible package managers.
Virtual environments are a great thing.
Have you tried Ghost?
Based on entries to his personal blog and social media posts, Mullenweg has been on safari in Africa this week. Mullenweg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cherry on top, lmao. Of course he’s off doing rich white CEO things.
Homeboy going to shoot a Giraffe for the trophy room.
I remember when I thought Matt’s awfulness was only going to affect Tumblr, how naive of me
Fork or CEO getting booted out in 3… 2… 1…
Welp I’m done, just started talking to my clients about moving to SquareSpace.
I’m gonna start checking out Ghost, at this point. This is ridiculous.
And if Ghost doesn’t work, then ClassicPress it is.
I run a WordPress site but I’m not a developer.
It seems like automatticuses the community for free development and profits from it. They in turn develop and support it, heck they created it.
However, with foss its free for WP engine to use and they dont like it. So they are throwing a hissy fit and making out its about the community and giving back. BS.
I assume it will fork.
I think not even Automattic so much as Matt is the one mad about WP Engine. Maybe a few others there more closely involved with the code. Almost a decade ago I tried out for a support role there. Most people seemed pretty chill but he struck me as a bit odd (not that I interacted with him but I was present for a few company All Hands).
So much for the goodwill of fediverse integration.
Luckily I moved to Hugo static site generator 3 years ago… peweff… I love PHP, but boy Wordpress was going down hill back then. And still is to this day. Introducing “features” nobody asked for. And at the same time makes your site slow.
As someone that made enough money to make a freelance career from moving people off of awful WordPress sites, WP’s reputation has been in the toilet for a decade, easily. The CMS market has been strong for a long time, and there are countless better options out there.
With the push towards API backends and static sites, WP should have died years ago. I still cannot believe it’s so popular.
Which other options would you recommend?
If you want a standard CMS, you can’t really go wrong with Umbraco. Some people are turned off by .NET, but for developer experience alone it’s the best I’ve ever worked with.
There are many good choices, if you’re looking for something more lightweight. Kirby, IndieKit, Concrete5, even Ghost are all solid. I also remember hearing about ClassicPress a while back, that was a fork of WP made during some technical and business decisions that some in the community didn’t agree with - never used it though, and it’s a fork of a time when the WP codebase was a joke.
.NET? … yea no … if you really need a CMS, try https://ghost.org/
It’s not early 2000’s Slashdot. .NET and C# have been solid choices for software development for years, and Umbraco in particular is open source and probably the most welcoming CMS I’ve known when it comes to contributions.
.NET & C# is still all coming from Microsoft. Since I don’t use Microsoft products or Windows, I never liked C#. I know there are now maybe open-source and support under Linux, I will never forget. I will never forgive. NO!
Not quite. .NET is owned by the .NET Foundation, and while it’s heavily influenced by Microsoft, it’s an independent entity. C# is owned by Microsoft, but frankly they’ve put together what was even then far more advanced than anything Java could do even now.
To be blunt, back in the 2000’s it was this exact mentality that pushed me towards C#. Instead of people bitching and starting holy wars about Java, Ruby, and other languages, the .NET community just quietly got on with things and built some fantastic tooling. Furthermore, it was one of the communities that helped me go from hapless junior to someone able to give technical talks on what I had learned, or even speak to giants in the industry like Jon Skeet.
Are you now, or have you ever been… a WP Engine customer?
Nope. I have used WordPress on a blog or two, but I didn’t know what WP Engine was until a couple of weeks ago.
Sorry if you took that as a literal accusation, it was meant to be some light-hearted McCarthyism satire cast upon this whole sad state of affairs.
I’d just like to point out that WordPress is GPL, so anyone could do whatever they want with the code, including Auttomatic. If people using the software in a way that, although uncool, is totally something they agreed to, the best bet would be to leave WordPress as-is and spin continued development into a new product with a new license. Would people like it? No. Do people like this, though? Hell no.
The GPL is not a “whatever” license.
No, but it’s basically a “I can use it to build my billion-dollar business and keep the profits if I want” license. The only real catch is that if I decide to modify the code and distribute it, I’m required by the license to share those changes with whoever gets the modified version. There’s nothing in the GPL that stops me from being a downstream freeloader, and I can stay on whatever version I like—no one’s forcing me to update to newer ones with terms I don’t agree with. Forking and modifying for my own needs is totally fine, as long as I slap the same GPL on the changes if I hand them out.
Wp engine can go fuck itself
Agreed, but so can Matt Mullenweg and Automattic
