WordPress Is in Trouble

https://anderegg.ca/2025/01/11/wordpress-is-in-trouble

by ulrischa • 2 years ago

631 430 2 years ago

Let’s just rewrite the thing in Laravel, hook all the functions using RunKit7 (or a fork) to implement a plugin compatibility layer, and send the old codebase to the dumpster fire. WP Engine and other hosting agencies, it could be a matter of survival for you.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

It's looking more and more like it's a matter of survival for the massive number of sites that run Wordpress but don't host with Wordpress.com.

ge96• 2 years ago

Isn't there a metric like 80% of the web is WP. Wonder who will be the new provider if WP does fold/problems affect running sites.

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

I thought that was a statistic about PHP. Though WordPress is almost certainly a significant chunk of that.

Some quick searching seems to indicate that the web is about 79% PHP, and that ~44% of websites are using WordPress.

SV_BubbleTime2• 2 years ago

Hopefully… geocities.

paxys• 2 years ago

Nah, Wordpress themselves claimed 40% in 2021 (https://wordpress.org/40-percent-of-web/).

The big caveat of course is that wordpress being installed on a domain does not mean that entire domain is powered by wordpress. I'd bet for most of them it's just the landing/marketing pages and/or a blog section.

pryelluw• 2 years ago

At this point, I’m planning to move away from Wordpress due to the instability and into a regular wiki based site. Unsure of which at the moment, maybe some suggestions? Prefer static file based rather than host a DB.

nabaraz• 2 years ago

I moved to Azure free static hosting. Push a commit and automatically triggers a deployment via Github Actions.

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/use-cases-and-examples/de...

fullstop• 2 years ago

https://ghost.org/ perhaps?

withinboredom2• 2 years ago

ghost is worse than wp imho. Lots of sneaky affiliate links, and they only integrate stuff that does affiliate linking; the self-hosted version calls home as well.

_fat_santa• 2 years ago

If you are hosting a blog then I highly recommend Astro.

Kiala• 2 years ago

Statamic

diggan• 2 years ago

Depends on your target user. If you want something really simple for developers, https://github.com/gollum/gollum is pretty neat (is what powers the Wiki system on GitHub), while if you want something simple for people who aren't developers, something like Mediawiki would fit better. Although Mediawiki requires a database, you can use SQLite (which is basically a file on disk as a DB) for it.

Dokuwiki is also a neat old-school alternative that basically treats files on disk as articles/pages, so no (other) DB needed.

wingmanjd• 2 years ago

GravCMS is a flat-file CMS (content is saved to markdown, making it quite portable if you decide it's not for you). There isn't wiki-functionality (auto-create pages that don't exist), however.

I wrote an exporter from WP to Grav [1].

[1] https://github.com/jgonyea/wp2grav_exporter

a_vanderbilt• 2 years ago

Hugo has been wonderful for me. I use it to host my portfolio website. Only thing I dislike is themes can be a pain to edit if you don’t know where things are spread out in the source.

esher• 2 years ago

PHP based static file CMS (w/o database) to render markdown on the fly:

* Kirby: https://getkirby.com/ * Grav: https://getgrav.org/ * Statamic: https://statamic.com/

stefanos82• 2 years ago

For flat-file wiki-based websites, you can try dokuwiki [1] which is extremely convenient and of course quite fast for what it's made for.

[1] https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

ThinkBeat• 2 years ago

Instability and WordPress have been related for a long time. Personally, I have found the last few years to be pretty good.

If what you need do is a great fit for a static site, then that will be a much easier to deal with.

For a majority of Wordpress use I am involved in a static site would not offer a majority of the features needed.

BeetleB• 2 years ago

Instead of a wiki, why not a static site generator.

I have used Pelican[1] for over a decade. Strongly recommend if you know Python. You don't need to know Python, but in the off chance that one day in the future you want to write your own plugin...

[1] https://getpelican.com/

addedlovely3• 2 years ago

Kirby has ticked the boxes for me, total control of the admin interface.

Block fields like ACF flexible layouts. Modern and fast with total control of the frontend.

Has been fun to switch and fast.

xenodium• 2 years ago

I just launched a drag and drop service myself https://lmno.lol. Use your favorite text editor to edit your Markdown blog file.

No tracking, adverts, paywalls, or bloat. I'm also bringing a little nostalgia back with ASCII art headers (optional of course).

Here's my blog on it: https://lmno.lol/alvaro

Wrote a bit about how I got to build my own service https://lmno.lol/alvaro/blogging-minus-the-yucky-bits-of-mod...

bogzz• 2 years ago

I've been extremely happy with Directs + Astro (and Svelte for some reactive components). It has a weird license where it is open source but they require you to purchase a license if your company goes over $5 million in revenue. But it's such a nice piece of BaaS.

SV_BubbleTime2• 2 years ago

Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the push they need to get started [in forking WP]

Ha. IDK buddy, be careful what you wish for.

pluc5• 2 years ago

Mullenweg is in trouble, WordPress is gonna be fine.

https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

softwaredoug3• 2 years ago

Without a canonical fork for the community (and crucially plugin authors) to rally around it’ll be a bit like Linux distros without a shared executable format, making life difficult for everyone and making it harder to keep critical mass for any vendor.

cm2012• 2 years ago

A few folks with a lot of community rep could probably do a lot of good if they to threw support behind a new primary fork.

pluc5• 2 years ago

That's difficult to do, but time will tell. There are already established forks, there are obvious leaders, there are known mechanisms to go around wordpress.org... something at some point will pick up steam and that'll be that. Maybe it will be Mullenweg himself who will continue to dig his own grave, maybe it will be the lawsuit that will be the final nail in his coffin... who knows. But WordPress will be fine.

And if it isn't, really, who cares. It's not a particularly well built or unique piece of software. Maybe it's time for something else.

egypturnash2• 2 years ago

matt please get your brain worms dealt with, thank you

- someone who has been happily using wordpress for her site since about 2000

system25• 2 years ago

I am not supporting either side, but wpengine is a shit company that treats their customers like they are sheeple. They remove critical functions from the original WordPress, selling $1 worth of hosting for $79. Not providing a "hosting" environment but only providing one site per account (additional sites are billed). This is a shitty hosting platform using WordPress' name and not benefiting WordPress itself.

I had a comment where Matt refused to believe what I said about ACF but this doesn't make me hate him. I don't care about wpengine at all and they can go to hell instead of hurting WordPress any further. They are just using an open-source project to make money and not giving back.

People are fighting with the original creator of the software and supporting 3rd party for-profit companies like wpengine. For what reason? This is clear propaganda.

egypturnash2• 2 years ago

I just use Wordpress on my own hosting. If not for this whole feud I don't think I'd ever have heard of wpengine. shrug

gorkish• 2 years ago

Oh no who could have possibly forseen this .... mumble mumble

karaterobot• 2 years ago

I've had a Wordpress blog for about 25 years. This makes me want to turn off automatic updates, since I'm worried he might just go nuclear and flip some sort of kill switch that bricks every blog, or push some ridiculous anti-Wordpress Engine banner to every installation. Of course, not keeping WP up to date is very risky as well.

I'm not even insensitive to his position, even though I don't know full details. But, he's the one acting irrational in all this, so he's the one I'm most scared of.

internetter2• 2 years ago

Consider a static site. They cannot be hacked, they are cheaper to host, and once the files are generated they are immutable

prepend5• 2 years ago

They can certainly be hacked, just like any static site. Web servers have vulnerabilities.

And the files can certainly be edited as they aren’t immutable.

They are less resource intensive and easier to maintain, but aren’t immune.

(Running mostly static sites converted from Wordpress sites, but also running 10 year old+ word press sites that haven’t been changed in forever)

CIPHERSTONE• 2 years ago

This 100%. Host on github and use ghpages and Jekyll with either github supported themes or a theme of your choice.

daitangio3• 2 years ago

With isso for comments!

ptx• 2 years ago

What about using distro packages? That would insulate you from upstream suddenly turning malicious.

I'm not sure if Debian's packages are kept up to date with security patches, though. The latest changes to the wordpress package[0] were in December 2022 and and May 2024.

[0] https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/w/wo...

huijzer• 2 years ago

Hopefully many sites will switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola. Way lower costs, lower risk of being hacked (almost impossible actually), and a reliable backup thanks to Git.

I’m running multiple static sites for years already and am very happy with it. It has been very reliable.

Dalewyn3• 2 years ago

switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola

At that point just write your own HTML and never be beholden to some abstraction framework toolkit corporation cooperative ever again.

hu33• 2 years ago

Soon enough AI will write most of blog/marketing HTML.

boscillator• 2 years ago

I find markdown to be a more productive way to write prose than HTML. It also shouldn't be too hard to port from one generator to another, given that the content is just markdown.

akho4• 2 years ago

Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML? You need, at the least, single post pages (for permalinks), an index page, and an RSS feed — all slightly different views of the same content. It gets messy, and at some point you write your own SSG, which somehow becomes worse.

This is without going into how you ideally want an image pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe category pages, …

carlosjobim3• 2 years ago

You are completely right and the people down voting you are severely deranged. A HTML site + a wysiwyg solution like Surreal CMS is miles better than any site generators, easy to use for the client, and dirt cheap.

lbhdc• 2 years ago

I think the popularity of Wordpress comes from the access it gives to non-technical people (plus ecosystem). I am sure someone is smart enough to write a CMS that can effectively do that under the hood, but I don't think it matters to the people who choose Wordpress.

hombre_fatal3• 2 years ago

Also, Wordpress already can generate a static site.

jzb2• 2 years ago

I use Hugo for my own site, now, but it's not a WordPress replacement for a lot of use cases. A single techie's personal blog? Sure. A small company that has five or six people who have to post to a website? No. An organization that wants to integrate a sales cart and such, without a full-time developer? Absolutely no.

Until last September I used to encourage non-tech folks to just use WordPress.com and pay for the hosting. It was pricier than DIY solutions, but also I was happy to suggest it to help put $$$ in Automattic's pockets for WordPress development. I'm sad I can't recommend it in good faith anymore.

jazzyjackson3• 2 years ago

The principal use of Wordpress IME experience is so people can add content without learning markdown and git and so on

woleium• 2 years ago

With AI that is now possible without wordpress

internetter2• 2 years ago

There are CMSes that work with static site generators. Static site generators do not imply that the input is markdown, though this is often the usecase. Any CMS that is decoupled from presentation, in fact, could be used for static site generation. Just read the structure and generate an appropriate HTML tree statically. Here are some CMSes with specific thought given to this use:

https://decapcms.org/

https://getkirby.com/

https://tina.io/

https://statamic.com/

ect ect

claudiulodro• 2 years ago

Sure, some of the web is read-only, but what about commenting, contact forms, forums, eCommerce or anything else that requires a proper server? That's a big advantage WP and other full CMS have over static site generators.

xp842• 2 years ago

A lot of corpsites are wordpress, and are modified once a quarter or so, those should not be running wordpress internet-facing due to its terrible performance and constant susceptibility to vulnerabilities (or that of its themes/plugins landscape due to it being all pure PHP that can do anything). Wordpress is a useful tool to generate static sites though, I've done that before and it's glorious. Use all the friendly authoring tools of WP and then click a button to write out an updated blob of HTML files to be served by Cloudflare or whatever.

As for forums, those almost don't exist anymore, and contact forms and ecommerce are better off being handled by software designed to do that rather than some plugin shoehorned into an early-2000s PHP blogging platform.

For example, contact forms in Hubspot or Salesforce, and ecommerce with Shopify.

Edit to add: If someone's technical enough to be self-hosting Wordpress the open-source project, I would trust them to do a fine job at selecting a more focused alternative OSS project for those "actual server" needs.

carlosjobim3• 2 years ago

Every ecommerce requirement is better served by iframes than by WordPress plugins.

disiplus• 2 years ago

The benefit of WP is the huge theme and plugin ecosystem. I know of people that started a business just on WP + theme + plugin without any dev expirience or money for a developer

xp842• 2 years ago

This is basically true, though I'd point out that most of those themes and plugins are hot garbage minefields full of bugs and security vulns, and due to the fact that it's all just wild-west PHP here, a nontechnical WP admin actually making use of the whole wide world of plugins and themes out there is exactly as safe as downloading absolutely any .exe you want while running Windows XP as Administrator without any firewall or antivirus software.

Not disputing the usefulness of the platform, just that it's a risky thing to expose to the Internet.

Saris• 2 years ago

I don't think many will, those are far too difficult to use compared to WP which most people use because its so easy.

jdeibele• 2 years ago

I set up several websites for non-profits of various types. The thing that WordPress.com has going for it is better security (updates applied promptly), lower pricing than dedicated WP accounts at DreamHost, etc. (typically these kind of providers low-ball the first year), usable by non-technical users, etc.

Trying to teach people to use Git to push an update seems difficult. And teaching them Markdown. And dealing with images.

someorg.wordpress.com is not as nice as someorg.com but there's no domain to be not renewed. There's levels of privileges, etc.

graypegg• 2 years ago

Ive got Jekyll sites from over a decade ago still buildable and kicking! Hard to beat the stability of simple software that outputs static web assets.

ezekg• 2 years ago

I'm still in the camp that Matt is attempting to force a fork because he's done with WP. Maybe he believes it can't live without his magic touch (lmao). Either that or he's lost his mind. :)

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

I'm there with you. He's could be trying to see how far he can go to get people to fork, and finding out there's literally nothing he can do to make his critics fork on their own dime. If it weren't GPL'd, WPE could fork it, close it, and lock it down. Instead, the parasite has to volunteer to be the next host.

ValentineC2• 2 years ago

Maybe he believes it can't live without his magic touch (lmao).

If 2025 Matt tried to fork b2/cafelog back in 2003, I think a good number of people in the PHP and blogging communities would have told him to, very kindly, fork off.

Or, all that money and power corrupted him over the years.

noja2• 2 years ago

https://getpublii.com/ Yet, anyone?

rglover• 2 years ago

Hadn't heard of this but looks like a pretty nice tool. Thanks for sharing :)

imilk• 2 years ago

While they have a Github repo, it is incredibly annoying how it's almost impossible to find any documentation around deployment/hosting. Unless I missing an obvious page

noja2• 2 years ago

Click the GitHub link. It’s a gui. You (or your parents) publish the static pages somewhere.

Danieru2• 2 years ago

Oh that looks nice. I've used Hugo before but for the lite stuff I need it abstracts the content too much. This looks exactly what I want.

Spunkie• 2 years ago

Crazy how hosting wordpress, between 2003-2024, your main concern was Chinese/Russian hackers. And in 2025 you main concern should be if Mullenweg will hijack your website for his pissing match.

Also he didn't shut down the sustainability team because he "didn't know about it". He shut it down because their stated goals are a threat to Mullenwegs dictatorship hold over wordpress.

pwillia72• 2 years ago

Almost to the letter -- https://www.dalmomendonca.com/rules-for-rulers

bsimpson2• 2 years ago

I wonder if he knows that his personal blog seems to be hosted in the template for a yoga studio in South Lake.

justinator• 2 years ago

As a content creator, it's mostly dealing with Gutenberg and the new theme editor. I couldn't care less what these people are up to.

DonHopkins• 2 years ago

Mullenweg Before:

https://www.youtube.com/live/Qq1SBFzByDw?t=28744s

Mullenweg After:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HblPucwN-m0

legitster3• 2 years ago

It's crazy how almost overnight Wordpress went from a quiet and unassuming piece of the internet infrastructure to crazy techbro's personal fiefdom.

Suddenly Wordpress's weird technical quirks and idiosyncrasies make sense.

lenova3• 2 years ago

I've only been passively following the Wordpress drama. Almost a year ago, Mullenweg blogged about taking a 3 month sabbatical that I found interesting, and I assumed this would have been a period of recharging... but things have seemed to gone off the rails since. Was there any correlational between the sabbatical and current drama, or was that just coincidence?

mrtksn4• 2 years ago

Did he drink that psychoactive wine?

ben_w4• 2 years ago

Surely non-psychoactive wine is just grape juice?

653• 2 years ago

Perhaps he tried some Ayahuasca and now "doesn't care about anything" and it reinforced his narcissism.

Ayahuasca (and DMT for that matter) tend to make people not care about anything, so I wonder if he did some and has been affected by it. Just a guess, though.

Analemma_• 2 years ago

It went off the rails during his sabbatical. He was ranting about WP "freeloaders" and doxxing random Tumblr users when he was supposed to be on vacation.

lenova3• 2 years ago

Replying to myself here: why the heck are people assuming Ayahuasca? My comment never implied it, nor has Mullenweg mentioned it.

system25• 2 years ago

In business, a sabbatical means either you are quitting, going for a long vacation because you hate your job, or burnt out beyond repair and using fancy words like sabbatical before changing careers. Maybe that's made people think he was going to do drugs to chill.

amazingamazing• 2 years ago

I bet Wordpress will be fine. Too bad Automattic isn’t a public company, bet it would be volatile right now.

causality0• 2 years ago

Anybody know if Mullenweg has recently purchased property in Belize? I'm curious how far along the McAfee curve he's gotten.

askonomm• 2 years ago

Haha this is a brilliant comment. McAfee lived one hell of a life.

electriclove2• 2 years ago

From his perspective, after everything he has done, others are getting the financial gains and many in the community turned on him and his company. It must be a horrible feeling.

frereubu6• 2 years ago

I sort of get what you're trying to do here - an exercise in empathy - but the flip side of this is that he has been made enormously wealthy off the back of thousands and thousands of unpaid volunteer hours on an open source project. It's not only "others" who are getting the financial gains.

electriclove2• 2 years ago

Good point and agreed. Do you think for him it is more an issue about how much money WP Engine is making compared to him or the relative influence they have?

addisonj• 2 years ago

But... isn't that a core ethos of open-source? That you won't ever come even close to capturing the full value provided by a piece of software... but the nature of the problem is such that the value could never be created unless it was open.

I like to think of this as a "reverse" faustian bargain. By sticking to some agreed upon "moral" agreement of this open contribution and communal governance, you create a huge market that you get to try and least capture a piece of. If you break that bargin, you risk the project. And it isn't like this is some theoretical bit... it has been shown again and again in different communities.

I fundamentally don't understand how you can spend so long in open-source and think that this agreement doesn't apply to you. That may seem "cruel" in that someone else can profit from you... but that was always part of the bargain that made your business exist in the first place.

hooverd• 2 years ago

Or, he's loose off the vine juice.

treyd2• 2 years ago

WordPress is a very mature project with a long legacy but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it.

I'm imagining some very pluggable and template driven runtime that you can ship very declarative packages for. The spicy take would be to use a Scheme for the templating around some robust Rust core, but that's probably not the widest appeal. Maybe there would be some clever way to bootstrap it out of PHP so that you can keep using shared PHP hosts and they wouldn't have to bring along a new software distribution.

hombre_fatal3• 2 years ago

It's just a reminder how much "right place at the right time" plays into the phenomenon of ubiquity, from Wordpress to Harry Potter to Zoom to Javascript.

There are countless efforts to make the next Wordpress out there, yet no combination of Scheme and Rust is going to make up for the critical missing ingredient of "right place at the right time".

andrewmcwatters• 2 years ago

This is the right time. Strike while the iron is hot. People are angry and concerned. Someone just needs to come forward with an attractive way to capitalize on the situation.

nottorp2• 2 years ago

You mean there aren't already 20 unfinished projects reimplementing Wordpress in Rust?

raverbashing• 2 years ago

And honestly WP is a great product. No other CMS managed to get so much community around, so many plugins etc

Right timing absolutely, but there was also great product sense there

Drupal feels like it's a bureaucrats paradise. Other CMSs never got there neither

greggman72• 2 years ago

What would replace it?

PHP is unique in that it makes sharing a server trivial and low-resource compared to almost every other solution.

A simple example might be that you can run 100s of PHP forums on a single machine low memory machine but if you want to use discourse (not written in PHP), it requires 10x 20x the resources for a single forum.

This is true about almost every other solution AFAICT.

andix3• 2 years ago

That's probably the best explanation. There is no real alternative to PHP if you want to host cheap and simple. It's also really easy to deploy WordPress to a shared hoster, just by uploading a few files via FTP/etc and setting up a MySQL connection.

Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?

munchler2• 2 years ago

What is it about PHP that makes this low-resource scenario possible?

jjk7• 2 years ago

That's just CGI. You could theoretically do the same with any other language, but PHP is just the most popular.

smarx007• 2 years ago

https://wagtail.org/who-uses-wagtail/ lists a few companies who would care about low resource use due to the sheer amount of traffic they see.

adolph• 2 years ago

[PHP] makes sharing a server trivial

Is that still a thing? Why would an application on a server share anything other than the kernel?

lkrubner2• 2 years ago

This. If Symfony or Ruby on Rails or Django or Quarkus or NextJS could replace Wordpress, then they would. I myself wrote Symphony for many years (2008 to 2014) and I was certain it could kill Wordpress, but it failed.

The combination of Wordpress's defaults, its ease of use by designers, and the ability for one server to handle hundreds of installments, means that almost nothing can replace it.

samuell• 2 years ago

As I understand, the vulns come because of a big messy codebase and the idea to solve everything with another 3rd party plugin.

Processwire OTOH is fantastic in this regard. Super small and generic core with minimal, close to non-existent attack surface, and a programmatic API that lets you solve custom functionality with a few calls to the content API instead of another plugin.

Leads to practically maintenance free sites.

Almost the security of a static site, with the flexibility and dynamic features of a proper cms.

After having the nightmare of maintaining a dozen WP and Drupal sites in the past, I can now just let the sites chug along for years without intervention.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage

Plenty of people have made better CMSes, Wordpress is big because it got big, and a lot of people depend on it. And since an enormous number of people are involved with it, your upstart system will never have the capability of Wordpress. Whatever capability you come up with, somebody will have already made a horrible module to install on Wordpress to do it that after 10 years has become almost alright, or at least all of the flaws have been posted on messageboards and everybody knows how to work around them.

Wordpress isn't wordpress because it's good, it's wordpress because it was good enough at the time, and its competition was Drupal and Joomla (or something not PHP.) PHP baggage? PHP isn't PHP because it's good, it's PHP because of mod_php, and cheap hosts. To repeat, your choices: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or figuring out how to run another language on your cheap host, or having to pay to upgrade your hosting account. By far the best option for most people was Wordpress.

If you want to compete with Wordpress, first get a time machine, then go back to that time and write something better in PHP.

dylan604• 2 years ago

meh, if you're gonna cheat with a time machine, then just bring a floppy disc with the various versions of wordpress. as PHP gets updated, just release the newer version of wordpress. it's open source, right?

dageshi• 2 years ago

Every time I read a comment like this about replacing WP and PHP with a successor it just sounds so incredibly out of touch.

I mean no offense OP but it's obvious you have no clue at all about who actually uses WP and why they do it.

levocardia• 2 years ago

Yes, I always see people post comments like "why not just use (some crazy stack of CLI tools, markdown, source control, and CDNs) it's way better for XYZ reason" not realizing that the people behind most WP sites--which constitute something like 25% of the internet--are in general extremely nontechnical people who are posting recipes, sharing knitting patterns, writing travel blogs, archiving family photos, etc., and who have ZERO interest in anything that looks like source code.

And I don't blame them! I run wordpress sites and I sigh with frustration any time I have to insert a custom HTML block, and I am technical. When I'm writing on WP I want it simple and easy.

WP is also not just a CMS where you can drop in something else. It's a colossal ecosystem of plugins, themes, and so on. Some sites run on entire mini-ecosystems within the WP ecosystem, e.g. generatepress/generateblocks/generatecloud.

marcolussetti• 2 years ago

WordPress is to creating website what Excel is to generic business calculations.

ValentineC2• 2 years ago

I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it.

I imagine that a spiritual successor would have a one-click install in many web hosts, which is all but impossible if not still written in PHP, and then installable through the various turnkey web hosting reseller stacks (e.g. Softaculous).

Then, replicating many of the popular plugins, and getting a whole community of contributors onboard who already make their living off WordPress and have little incentive to adopt something with little traction.

WordPress isn't a code framework; it's a very complete application with a massive ecosystem of plugins that serves as its moat.

kemayo• 2 years ago

shake the baggage of being PHP

PHP is why WordPress was a success. PHP is available basically everywhere, for cheap. You can get a $5/month hosting plan that'll give you a VPS with mod_php and mysql and you'll be able to install WordPress. (Also, WordPress put some actual effort into having a quick-and-simple setup process. If you can upload some files onto a server, it can take it from there.) Thus anyone can trivially install WordPress.

There's "better" languages, but even today they tend to require more of you to get a working site deployed.

jopsen2• 2 years ago

It's actually a bit surprising that no other languages tries to make server pages the way php and asp3 did.

Of course the model is flawed, but so easy to get started with :)

nicce2• 2 years ago

There is Ghost at least: https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

However, it has recently shifted to more limited audience. (payed subscription-based content with different tiers)

notatoad• 2 years ago

the baggage is the selling point. there's so many other ways to build a website that aren't wordpress and replicate the core functionality, the reason it sticks around is the huge legacy of plugins written in php that can't be easily replicated.

blueaquilae• 2 years ago

Is this just an add for another paid CMS?

frereubu6• 2 years ago

Might be an ad - I'm not aware of the author's associations - but Craft CMS, which is linked to, has a free version like wordpress.org

GavinAnderegg3• 2 years ago

Nope. I just prefer Craft, and I think it's a much more stable platform in terms of leadership these days. I also think it provides for a much better developer experience. Just opinions, though. I currently don't monetize my blog in any way — though I should probably change that at some point :)

voytec• 2 years ago

Narcissistic personality disorder[0] is unnoticeable for a person having it, but makes lives of all around them a living hell. Such person is always right, and the 99.99% people around with an opposite opinion/viewpoint are idiots. If some "idiot" is standing up, there comes the retaliation part.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...

renewiltord• 2 years ago

Hard to care about this drama until it starts to affect functionality. Terraform is still around. Elastic is still around. Reddit and Twitter have no third party apps. I used to have a WordPress blog which I stopped updating for reasons of laziness. I will try to restore the backup and see what happens.

mfashby• 2 years ago

You can actually still use infinity for Reddit it's just a pain to get it.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Earlier discussion:

Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650138

WordPress: Joost/Karim Fork

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42662801

Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42667766

beshrkayali• 2 years ago

I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental breakdown. It’s a sad situation and there’s a lot to learn about open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him should seriously consider an intervention. I can’t believe after two decades he’d just decide to throw it all out in a blazing fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpress) because of some valuation drop or being short on money. I think the dude needs help, and people close to him should try and talk sense into him.

dangrossman• 2 years ago

I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only list products that run their billing through Shopify and give Shopify a 15%+ share of all associated revenue.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

One reason that Reddit's API changes killing the best clients was so poisonous is that the resulting non-exodus showed other companies that they can take user-hostile actions with impunity. A big enough mass of passive and undiscerning users will stay no matter what. Hence there being more freedom to take a strategy like this.

forgetfreeman• 2 years ago

Eh. Aquia tried a similar stunt with Drupal (centralize all the tings at the community's expense) and that hasn't exactly been a rousing success. I don't have a great feel for how dependent upon the larger dev community the WordPress ecosystem is so maybe it'll work for them?

daitangio3• 2 years ago

I fear you are right. Remember they ask $25/monthly for 1 website on pressable, I can run Wordpress open source for 5x month on Linode, and there are ready made installation on docker, digital ocean and so on…

chrismsimpson• 2 years ago

Perhaps more indicative of late stage capitalism where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power.

TeMPOraL• 2 years ago

You may be right. Come to think of it, until this drama, the only "community" I believed exists around Wordpress is the network of small businesses specialized in Wordpress hosting, maintenance and consulting for other small businesses. I personally know someone running a sole proprietorship, whose entire income over past ~decade came from such Wordpress jobs.

It might be that this will be the only "community" that remains going forward.

kedean• 2 years ago

He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab partner, not of an establish business that helped build the internet as we know it.

legitster3• 2 years ago

One thing to keep in mind, WordPress being open source was an afterthought. It inherited a GPL from b2/cafelog.

If Matt woke up one morning and decided he wanted to make WordPress closed source, he couldn't. But what he could do is force everyone to pay a license fee for the name, and anyone who did not pay he publicly makes hell for them. You could also pretend to encourage them to fork, knowing full well they would be bound by a GPL just like him.

This is actually a very successful business strategy and even has a name: racketeering.

vasco• 2 years ago

I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you justify something like this https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this fit in?

Nectar05167• 2 years ago

I would hope that this would cause more people to realize that allowing total control of the things you use to be centralized in one person (or business) is bad, but well... quite similar things have happened to plenty of other open source projects before.

MrSkelter• 2 years ago

There is no “we” here. It’s a man making arbitrary decisions about pineapple on pizza. There is no plan and the watch and drawn out nature is indicative of someone reacting to events rather than implementing a plan.

I have 20 years in WP and B2. This is tragic. He needs to be removed or the platform will die making a huge repository of knowledge valueless.

MattGaiser• 2 years ago

because of some valuation drop or being short on money.

Why is that hard to believe? People have done much worse for much less money.

wahnfrieden• 2 years ago

People would rather believe their leaders broke their brain than to accept that their power is wielded over us for selfish personal gain

simple10• 2 years ago

I feel for him and the people in his wake. Benevolent dictators of open source are great for productivity until benevolence gives way to malevolence.

At this point, if he stepped down it would be seen as giving in. So highly unlikely until the legal dust settles a bit.

I also agree with other commenters that it's not a mental breakdown but more of a poorly executed strategy that's been in the works for awhile. To take Wordpress more into a closed source hybrid ecosystem.

And at this point, anything Matt does in favor of Automattic's business plan will blow up on social. My bet is this will continue for another 6 months at least until Automattic's revenue increases or flatlines.

But yeah, I'm curious about the mental toll when founders go through these types of hyper public events. The startup world needs a lot more discussion and guidance for mental health.

ethbr14• 2 years ago

Benevolent dictators of open source are great for productivity until benevolence gives way to malevolence.

Autocracy is more efficient, with the best leaders.

Democracy is more stable, with the worst leaders.

The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or democracy with good leaders.

I think it's also pretty common that autocratic leaders go badly quickly. The same focus and dedication that drove them also makes it unlikely they'll suddenly decide to step away cleanly. Instead, they'll decide that everyone else is wrong, they're the ones that really put in all the work, {insert rationalization here}, and fight change.

pluc5• 2 years ago

There is nobody left to disagree with him, he made sure of that. Disagreeing with him at this point means he's gonna come after you [1], your job [2] or your reputation [3].

1. https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/

2. https://kindness.is/examples/2010/mullenweg-the-coward/

3. https://ma.tt/2024/12/inc-hit-piece/

MattDaEskimo• 2 years ago

Parasocial sympathetic deflection at its finest.

This is a childish emperor tantrum, stressing everybody beneath him for petty cause.

jamestimmins• 2 years ago

Respectfully, confidently asserting someone else's mental state or their motives is a mistake. Because there's no way for you to know, it backs you and others into an intellectual corner that is entirely unnecessary and lowers the level of discourse, in addition to being unhelpful when people are experiencing actual psychiatric crises.

gspencley3• 2 years ago

My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at. And this is a critical detail that I'm fuzzy on. If anyone has context (even links with further info) I'd be very much appreciative.

I have since read the WP Engine complaint. I understand what they are alleging. I'm just not 100% clear on the nitty and gritty details that led there. All I know are the high level about WP Foundation demanding payment from WP Engine.

As a matter of principle, I believe very strongly that a creator has the right to set the conditions upon which their creations are disposed of, and that no one is entitled to services provided by others free of charge in perpetuity. If it is the case that WP Engine was costing WordPress.org a lot of money and that they were the single largest consumer of WordPress.org's web services, then I don't think it is unreasonable for WordPress.org to say "Hey, this is not financially viable for us, we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal."

I hear a lot of people express the opinion that Matt seems unhinged and is trying to "extort" money from WP Engine. But without knowing more that seems, to me, like looters and moochers demanding that other people pay out of pocket for things they want or need. I want there to be more to the story than that.

And for what it's worth I have little difficulty believing that Matt just went about things in all the wrong ways and could have worked things out without resorts to litigation if he wasn't such a jerk about it.

But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights. WordPress.org has to pay for their servers and WP Engine is a for-profit company that is using WordPress.org's services, free of charge, for their own gain. Mutual consideration here seems warranted.

So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using? I've heard accusations that there has been a feud between the two going back years but if those finer details are buried in that story, then why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?

(Before anyone responds, I understand the Promissory Estoppel theory that forms the legal complaint, I'm asking specifically about peoples' understanding, even if speculative, regarding Matt's motivations).

ethbr14• 2 years ago

Differentiating IP/copyright/code rights and infrastructure hosting is definitely an important aspect of the feud.

In a perfect world, open source projects would never use private infrastructure (and would certainly not privilege any particular private infrastructure!).

That said, the ability to 'open source' infrastructure (read: have hosting provided by a non-profit or similar attached to the open source project) has always been more difficult (financially, legally, and practically) than simply commiting a license file.

moshegramovsky• 2 years ago

Well said.

I think Matt Mullenweg has every right to take the action he's taking. It really seems like many companies are perfectly happy to exploit open source products.

In this case, it seems like one company makes a lot of money using the Wordpress codebase and doesn't want to make equal contributions. Then they use the money they're making to turn around and sue Wordpress for standing up for themselves.

If I were Matt Mullenweg, you can bet I would be incensed! I'm honestly very surprised that Matt Mullenweg is facing such criticism when he's simply trying to protect IP that he and the community have spent a lot of time and money building together. It's only natural to want to ban the freeloaders, and in any case, it's a little outrageous to think anyone is entitled to access to the resources and creations of others with or without compensation.

jcranmer• 2 years ago

WordPress is an open source project, and part of being an open source project is you don't really have a right to demand that people not mooch off of your work, at least as far as most open source licenses are concerned [1]. If you don't like that, well, then open source isn't for you.

The other major complication here is that Matt has thoroughly mixed his several roles together, so you have to spend time untangling what is Matt-personally, what is Matt-as-his-company, and what is WordPress-via-Matt. When you untangle that, the core demand appears to be that Matt (in who knows what role) demanded that WP Engine compensate Matt-the-company for its use of WordPress-via-Matt resources being provided by Matt-personally (that no one knew was being provided by Matt-personally as opposed to WordPress-via-Matt). Given the thoroughly tangled mess of that stuff, and the fact that--in the past--Matt made several steps to untangle the ownership of everything, I am not particularly persuaded by the logic of "I'm just trying to get them to pay their fair share," as they're not being asked to pay the people they should be paying.

why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?

Because they're asking someone to pay, not the foundation whose resources they are allegedly using, but their largest competitor (a very distinct legal entity).

[1] There are licenses that do have clauses that let you take action, but generally having such a clause makes it not Open Source-compliant, and frequently the relicensing needed to bring the current licenses to that state involves a lot of drama.

InsomniacL4• 2 years ago

But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights.

The court case isn't about Matt being a jerk, it's about crime.

WordPress.org has to pay for their servers

Wordpress.org was sold to volunteers as a community asset owned by the foundation not Matt and even Matt's lawyer made public statements to that effect.

Volunteers spent their time building it up, developing in to WordPress core reliance on w.org infra, etc..

Matt has a long history of un-ethical behaviour, and the current WPDrama is extensive. For me alone, the one screenshot of his threats to go to the press with confidential information about someone unless they did what he wants was enough.

Now volunteers find out from court documents that w.org is "Matt's personal website" as he puts it.

Additionally, now many volunteers are banned from the thing they helped build simply for voicing disagreement with his actions which are almost universally accepted as unethical. Many have been banned for reacting to one of his post with with disapproving emojji!!

Matt has built up the foundation through deception and then weaponised it.

graeme3• 2 years ago

My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at.

Matt would be allowed to charge for access to Wordpress.org. It's his property. What you can't do is:

make a service publicly available and then threaten a company that it needs exclusive terms

In the lawsuit the judge asked Automattic to come up with a price for access to Wp.org and Matt did not provide an estimate.

we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal.

In the lawsuit Automattic asked the judge to force WPengine to shut down their mirrors. They want control over the system. Which is also legit, but legally you can't offer public terms for all and then threaten a company with "the nuclear option" unless they agree to a separate set of terms for 8% of revenue.

Wordpress.org could have terms that allow companies to setup mirrors, but they explicitly don't want this, and wordpress.org is hardcoded into Wordpress Core.

shkkmo• 2 years ago

So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using?

That isn't what happened. The for-profit company Automatic asked for money, and then used their CEO's exclusive control of the non-profit foundation to punish their direct competitor.

It would be an entirely different thing if this was part an initiative to charge commercial users of WordPress.org for the costs they incur the non-profit foundation to stabilize it's funding. Such a thing could have been handled professionally without threats of "nuclear" retaliation.

But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights

Being a jerk isn't a crime, but it does broadcast a lack of professionalism and mental stability. Those aren't great traits to see in and individual who has unilateral control over infrastructure that you depend on. Those are extremely concerning traits when that individual has demonstrated a willingness to use that control to pursue personal vendettas in childish ways.

The problem the community is facing is that Matt is a weak, single point of failure. To re-establish trust given Matt's actions here, the non-profit needs to no longer be under his control, but under that of an independent board of directors.

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

Not a mental breakdown, but, a memento mori for all of us:

The problem with success is even when success is a reality, it's effects are temporary.

You get hungry even though you have just eaten.

The most telling moment for understanding what's going was Matt responding to successful critics by saying they weren't successful enough

I can't remember exactly what he said, & too much has happened for me to find it with 5 minutes of Googling. Something like "oh yeah well you only got to $2B valuation and it took 1000 engineers, what do you know"

If there is a breakdown here, it's one I've seen before, but wasn't cognizant of until I saw it 100x over at Google, sometimes tragically: you got everything you thought you wanted, but you're bored enough to need a new challenge, but you're not cognizant enough of it to effectively make that choice _before_ your actions show you that you need to.

Doesn't help any that it would amount to "backing down" in this scenario, he can't say that now without people thinking he was forced out somehow.

When I think about this, I also remember:

- the somewhat odd acquisitions over the past few years, Tumblr, that one cross-platform messaging app that got a ton of press for insisting they'd do iMessage....another strong indicator of boredom with the day-to-day, IMHO.

- His clear, repeated, focus is on money. It's never in primary focus, but it's always there, in everything lashing out that is publicized. If you're unhappy, and you're not sure why, and you have everything you thought you wanted, one easy thought train to jump on is "the compensation is not commensurate for the work"

ismail4• 2 years ago

This is a very interesting take, and I am going to largely agree with you here. It really looks like this may be what is going on. This is really a symptom of a much larger phenomenon, in that a society that values material wealth , and only acknowledges a material reality without realising or recognising the metaphysical reality.

wordofx2• 2 years ago

He has investors to answer to. He has an over evaluation that unless he grows the value of his company he’s screwed. He’s trying to pull in revenue and he’s destroying a competitor to take their customers.

mfer• 2 years ago

According to crunchbase, Automattic has taken just shy of $1B in funding. Yes, that's a B as in billion.

I wonder where those investors are on returns on that investment and the kinds of changes they want to get them.

terminalbraid• 2 years ago

unless he grows the value of his company he’s screwed

What are the consequences, exactly?

larodi• 2 years ago

Or perhaps is suffering from realization that there's no free lunch on this planet and sometimes it is paid for with drama and even very very rare one may get to be the one who calls the shots. Question is whether one is in position to pull it up when one needs to take the credit back.

He seems do be doing fine, though, perhaps also is having the time of his life, nothing wrong from perspective of other for-profit projects. Wonder who promised this and how was it guaranteed it'd not happen at some point?

Besides LLMs be soon spitting 'wordpress retold' with Cursor and all, and he may have just realized it.

ismail4• 2 years ago

If was running a major site that depends on Wordpress , or am an agency that makes use of Wordpress extensively I would be very concerned. Irrespective of who is right/wrong, Matt’s actions come across as rash, irrational , and reactive.

Definitely not the type of leader I would want to be leading an open source project I depend on.

From a risk analysis perspective, this would make me question if wp is fit for my company. If the ceo/leader can behave in this way , what are the risks he pulls similarly self destructive moves that jeopardises my sites?

I am have no bone in this fight, I dropped wp back In 2010, due to the multitude of issues with plugins, themes and security. It was easier(and more secure) to roll an app with django/rails.

Though, I think if you are using Wordpress. Either look for alternatives , or look to a fork with better governance.

akho4• 2 years ago

If Wordpress no longer receives security updates, tons of sites will have to be migrated. Many are not economically efficient to migrate, and will be lost. Given the scope of that ecosystem, this is an extinction event for the Web.

throwpoaster3• 2 years ago

Stimulants are a heck of a drug.

micromacrofoot4• 2 years ago

he's not wrong about the fears, he's just reacting in a terrible way

hn_throwaway_992• 2 years ago

I don't think it's a symptom of a mental breakdown. I think it's a symptom of highly successful tech people who, over time, get more enclosed by a "yes-men" bubble and start to think their shit don't stink so much that they then actually start to lose touch with what most of us call "reality". You might call that "a mental breakdown", I call that being an asshole.

Over the past 5 years or so, I've start becoming numb to all of the tech leaders who I used to hold in high regard who I now think are just the boring epitome of self-involved douchebags, e.g. Musk and Andreesen, for example. It just looks like garden-variety power intoxication to me.

amyjess• 2 years ago

I think "breakdown" is the wrong word: he's always been this way. I think he may have Borderline Personality Disorder. The behavior Matt is engaging in here is called "emotional dysregulation", which is characteristic of BPD, and he has a long history of doing it whenever he faces even the slightest criticism.

In 2010, he attempted to get Ben Cook fired from his day job for writing an essay criticizing his dual role as head of both Automattic and the Wordpress Foundation. Over the last few years, he has waged a disproportionate war against queer users on Tumblr for lightly criticizing his leadership.

Implicated2• 2 years ago

Don't forget the time Matt allegedly attempted to extort the WPEngine CEO into coming to work for him [1]

1: https://www.therepository.email/wp-engine-sues-automattic-an...

bsder• 2 years ago

Why do you assume that he is suffering from a mental breakdown as opposed to someone who tripped into his position and has always been out of his depth?

As long as money is flowing, nobody gives a damn how shitty you are. Once the money stops, however ...

lolinder4• 2 years ago

Now it seems like the community needs to take over, but Mullenweg still holds all the keys.

This move by Matt to pull out of development all but guarantees a fork. The biggest argument against was the work that Automattic was putting into WordPress would be very hard to replicate in a new project. But if the community is going to be expected to do ~all of the work anyway, there's no reason to do that work inside Matt's personal fiefdom.

frereubu6• 2 years ago

Has he said he was going to pull out of development? I hadn't read that anywhere in all of this.

lolinder4• 2 years ago

https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...

Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.
As part of this reset, Automattic will match its volunteering pledge with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem, or about 45 hours a week that qualify under the Five For the Future program as benefitting the entire community and not just a single company. These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates.

5 of those 45 hours are apparently the Executive Director of WordPress.org, so this is actually one full time developer working on WP. That is effectively pulling out, and the remaining time supposedly allocated should be very easy for a fork to replace.

Gotta love the scare quotes around "community".

hn8726• 2 years ago

From the article:

Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine.

source: https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...

653• 2 years ago

Hmm, crazy narcissist Matt Mullenweg does something for attention at the detriment of everyone else, again?

The problem is that there's a bit of a black hole in CMSs right now where you need developers who want to work on the CMS and ordinary users who can host/create content on the CMS. Strapi was almost there, but alas, headless is not going to cut it for your average business trying to make a website.

Static site generators can be too limited and simple, Drupal is not particularly user friendly, and tons of other CMSs don't have enough plugins for marketers to cram into their sites.

Anyone considering e-commerce now will probably use Shopify instead of WooCommerce. Site builders like Squarespace and Wix are good for simpler sites but not for multi-author news type sites.

I feel like the only option is a fork at this point.

vcoisne• 2 years ago

(Disclaimer—I work for Strapi). I would love to know why you think Headless will not cut it or what Strapi could improve. We're seeing many SMBs succeed with it.

653• 2 years ago

I really like Strapi, it's very intuitive, etc. But headless is a headache to set up for a tech illiterate person/org who wants to start some kind of blog or small news site.

I'll give you an example: https://newyorkyimby.com/

This is a relatively simple site that posts housing development news for New York. Ultimately they're not going to need a super complicated front end. Most sites just want a theme and deployment.

If Strapi had a non-headless mode and had themes I'm sure it could be used for the many millions of these small sites that run Wordpress.

Additionally Strapi isn't a great choice for blogs or portfolio sites, it's simply too much to set up for most people. I think the barrier to entry is what prevents it from becoming great. If a random person can start a blog, then more developers are going to want to work on it, meaning more plugins, meaning more of a reason to use Strapi. A feedback loop that got Wordpress to where it is.

Shopify is so big because they make setting up a site extremely easy, and now there are tons of plugins and themes to use on your Shopify store, which only gives people more of a reason to use Shopify.

hoofhearted2• 2 years ago

I’ve been working on a side hobby project for a year in an attempt to solve these problems.

It keeps growing in interest, and the demand has become more than I can handle currently.

If anyone is interested in helping to build an open and secure platform that is an alternative to WordPress, please reach out or comment.

TheRealPomax• 2 years ago

Blog about it and get it on HN?

hoofhearted2• 2 years ago

Yes, this is a really great start.

One of my current clients recently had his WP install taken over, and SiteGround took it down for offensive content.

It’s just a basic informational website for his consulting business, and he never logs into it or makes changes to it. He has no idea how anyone hacked it.

It really baffles me that this is still a thing in 2025, and that people can’t get a basic Shopify type of experience for creating informational websites and blogs where they can set it and forget, and focus on running their business. They should be concerned about how their content website is growing their business and overall bottomline; not if they have been taken over with offensive content or not based off of basic security best practices.

mg• 2 years ago

I find it an interesting question to what degree the design decisions of WordPress are still the right ones in 2025. A PHP backend and frontend running on the same machine, serving dynamically rendered content from a MySql database.

Personally, I prefer to have my content in text files, which are using a DSL similar to Yaml but optimized for use in a CMS. And render it to static html files via Python. A process that happens on a different machine. The html files are then pushed to the server that serves the frontend.

tqwhite• 2 years ago

I have never liked Wordpress. If it dies, that's ok with me. I just don't like it.

einpoklum• 2 years ago

Could someone link to a higher-level history of the WordPress situation, going further back? For the benefit of those of us that don't know much beyond the fact that it's an established blogging and website-building platform?

glenstein• 2 years ago

As a fellow newbie, I found this article from Josh Collinsworth to be a very thoughtful and clear overview. It's a bit long but it covers the history prior to the lawsuit.

https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt

pluc5• 2 years ago

https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

tannhaeuser• 2 years ago

The blogosphere is keeping us entertained - with meta drama about blogging itself as growth turns negative.

macspoofing• 2 years ago

Is the entire drama that WordPress is asserting a trademark over 'WPEngine' (i.e. 'WP'), and WPEngine disagrees?

csa• 2 years ago

Is the entire drama that WordPress is asserting a trademark over 'WPEngine' (i.e. 'WP'), and WPEngine disagrees?

That is a minor issue in the disagreement.

The bigger issue is that WPEngine had its access to Wordpress cut off on very short notice for questionable reasons.

This obviously had a negative impact on WPEngine’s business, but also on all of the business that WPEngine served. I think the latter part is what has a lot of folks up in arms — the collateral damage was really tone deaf (imho).

throw16180339• 2 years ago

Matt tried to extort money from WP Engine, then blocked their users from receiving updates, stole their plugins, and banned their developers. The filing in WP Engine vs. Automattic gives the details.

KolmogorovComp• 2 years ago

The problem is that Mullenweg has final say over some very important parts of the WordPress community
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND (…)

I think the real issue is people being fooled with the false concept of ‘community’, times and times again.

Communities do not exist in practice. What you have is a vast pool of users (in this case I also include plugin and theme devs), and a minority of core contributors, which are either individuals or companies, usually both. Those are driving the project forward and making decisions.

This distribution can be applied to many open-source softwares, but also projects like mozilla, wikipedia, etc.

People do not understand to what extend the no-guarantee of FOSS software is applicable. All your projects can be broken from a day to the next and you cannot expect any compensation.

But that’s ok because you got the software for free, right?

runxel• 2 years ago

If you haven't yet: Now's the best time to migrate away. You should try out Kirby[0]. No affiliation, but this thing sparked my interest in web development again when I first heard about it.

[0]https://getkirby.com/

addedlovely3• 2 years ago

I too have switched to Kirby, should have done so years ago, it’s great to work with and fast out the box.

eltondegeneres• 2 years ago

Kirby is only source-available, not open source, and requires a paid license for usage. I think that's a deal breaker for a lot of Wordpress users.

capitanazo77• 2 years ago

I would love to do a one click transfer to a static site but it’s not easy. I’ve only seen Astro Wordpress kits but paid

addedlovely3• 2 years ago

If you’re comfortable with php writing an importer for Kirby is simple, checkout their cli YouTube video. Nice modern api and easy to import content. Being flat file if there’s a mistake, just delete the content folder and import again!

marc_io2• 2 years ago

Generate a static site from WordPress itself with the Simply Static plugin.

daitangio3• 2 years ago

Sorry I switched to hugo my https://gioorgi.com and it was easier than expected.

Initially, I only followed the ‘drama’ tangentially, also because I have always considered myself a mere "end user" of Wordpress, even if long-time one (I used it for about 20 years).

For me, the fact that Wordpress.com sold a service based on an "extended" version of Wordpress.org was never a particular problem, but I never thought it was illegal to compete directly with it by taking the open source software and offering a simple hosting service.

Anyway I started to consider to switch from Wordpress to a static site hosted with hugo, retaining the comment system and all the URLs in the original form, more or less.

I was surprised because it took very little time (less 1 week of total work) to migrate my articles (1000+) and the comments.

I used open source tools, and I am a "hugo" newbie, so I make some trade off too.

Never less, I suggest all of you to give a try to hugo+isso (isso is a comment system very light).

CrimsonRain• 2 years ago

What did you use to migrate posts? I'm going to move three WordPress sites (15yr+ running) off soon.

joshstrange• 2 years ago

Also very interested in this. I ended up paying for 2-3 years of WordPress.com to host my tiny-traffic blog and I had to pay for a higher tier to handle video (sidenote: fuck wordpress for offering a shitty watered-down WP version on WP.com, you know, literally the thing they complain about WPEngine doing). I'd love nothing more than to migrate away but I've already done a mess WP -> Hugo (or was it Jekyll? not sure) -> Ghost -> WP and I'd like to automate the migration as much as possible. Every other time I spent a while copy/pasting and hand-fixing posts. I know I won't get away from doing that completely but I'd like it be easier.

jzb2• 2 years ago

Not the OP but I have migrated to Hugo as well. There's a number of tools to convert to Hugo from a WordPress XML export. I used wp2hugo, IIRC: https://github.com/ashishb/wp2hugo

Dead easy. Took an afternoon to do everything, including fiddling with DNS and trying different themes, etc.

gtsop2• 2 years ago

Hugo is by no stretch of the imagination a drop in replacement for wordpress in my understanding. I understand the average joe uses wordpress for the UI and huge ecosystem, rather than it's technical capabilities (there are a million cms). Yes, technically speaking there is nothing preventing you from reimplementing everything in hugo, nothing except many months of labor

Said differently, the person who will successfully and painlessly migrate wordpress to hugo is not an average case, but a minority.

system25• 2 years ago

People use WordPress for its plugins...

zo1• 2 years ago

I think Matt should reach out to Elon Musk to assist him. And I don't mean that in a weird or snarky or "jabbing at Elon/Matt" kind of way. Clearly he is struggling to deal with a competitor and community wanting to impose their will on him, and make him behave like a "good boy" for their benefit (whatever that may be). Unfortunately he doesn't have the kind of "Fuck You" money that Elon has to deal with said interlopers.

Destiner• 2 years ago

all this WP drama makes me really grateful about deciding to go with a static site generator.

Astro FTW!

breaker-kind• 2 years ago

this article opens with "since i last wrote about wordpress", with a link to a previous article. the linked article does the same. it goes seven layers deep! what dedication!

GavinAnderegg3• 2 years ago

This drama has boggled my mind since the beginning. I've been trying to write about the open web while trying get back into blogging. It's been great to have a bunch to write about, but I sure wish it wasn't happening!

I've also been focusing on the rise of Bluesky and my move from extreme skepticism to tentative acceptance. That's been more fun to write about.

pupppet• 2 years ago

Just love the way Matt keeps responding to everything in a passive-aggressive tone with a smarmy smile.

NKosmatos• 2 years ago

I feel sorry for Matt, someone close to him (family, friend, partner) should help him. It’s not good for him, not good for his company and for Wordpress. I’ve never used Wordpress and I prefer static sites where I have full control, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the usefulness end ease of it. Like many situation, this whole issue would be solved if a couple of the people involved sat down for a coffee, left their ego’s outside, had open minds, and having the willingness to compromise and being sincere ;-)

tootie2• 2 years ago

I'm reminded of Tony Hsieh whose "eccentricity" lead directly to his early death.

tylershuster3• 2 years ago

I don't understand how (if?) WordPress has popularity among serious professionals. Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a nightmare. Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.

HN seems to grumble about Drupal but even if your only requirement is a PHP server with a MySQL database connect, Drupal (8+) is just as simple to set up as WordPress and infinitely easier to configure. Older versions may have been less user-friendly but really, just click "Content->Add New->Page" and you're already running at the speed of WordPress.

akadruid1• 2 years ago

Wordpress is clunky but it never broke backwards compatibility.

HN grumbles about Drupal because many got burnt by picking the wrong horse. Drupal was the biggest CMS in the world and like a safe bet until they told their users they would have to rewrite their 7 code to go to 8 and their users decided they would rewrite to WordPress[1]. Drupal never regained the trust they lost. They extended the life of d7 over and over but never made a compelling replacement. To this day, 7 is still more widely deployed than 8,9 or 10 ever were[2].

I think it's interesting to observe the fate that Python 3 narrowly avoided. Python 3 wasn't a compelling replacement until at least 3.5. In a nearly parallel universe they're all using torch.rb instead of pytorch.

[1]https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/did-breaking-backward...

[2]https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal

tylershuster3• 2 years ago

That's a fair argument. Maybe I'm just biased because I started with Drupal 8.

Nectar05167• 2 years ago

Honestly, py3 wasn't a compelling replacement until distros started setting dates to remove py2.

tootie2• 2 years ago

It's the same way products like salesforce become popular. Network effects. As much it's an architectural nightmare, it is a thing that everyone is familiar with. When you are looking at ecommerce tools, email marketing, analytics, etc they all have some kind of one-click integration with wordpress. If you need developers, wordpress freelancers are a dime a dozen. It's just the thing everybody knows.

ggm• 2 years ago

Hate the codebase, don't mind the front-end mostly. A compatible SQL schema rewrite in a different language with lower exposure to risk, and some of the auth issues resolved, I think a lot of people would shift camp.

I have seen national broadsheets using WP as their publish engine. How they actually write copy and approve the article stream might be another matter.

donohoe• 2 years ago

> Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a nightmare.

Many of are free, and you can often build your own. You can easily extend it without plugins, but you're doing your future self a favor if you stuck your new features in one (so you can update themes etc easily in the future).

> Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.

Hard disagree here. Whether you are using ACF for custom fields or post types, doing it manually takes more time but is not that difficult. Its typically a set of actions you wouldn't do often either.

debesyla3• 2 years ago

Here in Lithuania it's mostly due to customer demand - customers want for open source systems that could be easily modified, would work "just like the old site did", finding developers would be cheap/easy and if launching and hosting site is cheap too, it's all the better.

When you write down all the demands, there aren't much options left. Drupal and Opencart are used, but WordPress is used for 90% of the sites mostly due to demand/requirements.

heyjones• 2 years ago

Drupal even supports the Gutenberg block editor:

https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg

pacifika2• 2 years ago

Serious professionals write their own plugins or keep a known good list, review plugins before installing them etc.

i_have_an_idea• 2 years ago

I don't understand how `serious professionals` continue to try to trash WordPress using superficial and often uneducated arguments, completely ignoring the fact that it has huge flexibility, a rich ecosystem, many options for using modern development practices and 40%+ global market share.

tylershuster3• 2 years ago

I worked in exclusively WordPress for many years. "Flexibility" doesn't mean jack if it doesn't adhere to modern development practices itself. "Many options," yes but the core is just cobbled together by amateurs. It has nothing to do with modern PHP development practices; it's basically just a collection of functions. It doesn't use composer; most of the development stacks I've seen are tricks to basically gut its dependency management and rewrite it themselves.

As for a "rich ecosystem" and "40%+ global market share" — popularity has nothing to do with quality.

scarecrowbob• 2 years ago

I see these questions a lot, but mostly the feel disingenuous. People aren't really that dumb, and most large, functioning systems usually have a material history that leads to where they are at.

The answers really are helpful and will tell folks a lot about the world. If you don't understand how WP and Drupal ended up where they did (and why Joomla, Cake, etc ad infi are no longer around), then I suggest that you try to answer the question your asking, or at least pay some attention to the answers you get.

WP had, for quiet a while, a much better and conceptually easier admin system. Even that system was clunky and hard to train non-tech folks to use. But it was better than Drupal and more interactive than Joomla.

You might not accept that answer, but that really was a lot of it in my experience.

I hate WP for a lot of reasons, but its not like the many "serious professionals" who have built software for it were doing so for unworkable reasons. I found it much of a pain the ass, but if you know what you're doing and develop the correct skill sets it is far from a nightmare.

gigatexal• 2 years ago

Good. As I’ve said in other threads. There are other projects, other CMSes that are perfectly capable of taking over. Let the Wordpress monopoly die and with it this crazy man’s tirades.

gjvc• 2 years ago

some good news for a change

asdfman123• 2 years ago

It seems that this is definitely a pressing issue for the web

kmeisthax• 2 years ago

Then yesterday happened. Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine. This action is blamed on the “the legal attacks started by WP Engine and funded by Silver Lake”, which I think is a gross mischaracterization. WP Engine definitely did not start this.

WP Engine owns several WordPress plugin developers. Does plugin development not count now?

burnte• 2 years ago

WP Engine owns several WordPress plugin developers. Does plugin development not count now?

Mullenweg stole the Custom fields plugin from WPEngine. So no, plugin development doesn't could when he can steal the plugin away from you.

pacifika2• 2 years ago

You can install all plugins via GitHub if you want.

Tokkemon• 2 years ago

Just this week I needed to completely revamp my personal website. I went with Squarespace because it's quick to spin up and I don't have to fiddle with tons of plugins and a complicated theme ecosystem. I just need a website that works. I used to use Wordpress for all my previous iterations, but now, it's done. Sad to see it become obsolete by not fixing them broader business and user-friendliness problems.

system25• 2 years ago

Good luck migrating to another platform when they jack up the prices. You can pick any host for wp and migrate within minutes. With closed systems like wix and Squarespace you are locked in forever.

_zagj• 2 years ago

A silver lining is that if fewer sites use WordPress, the web won't look nearly as homogeneous as it does now.

mrkramer• 2 years ago

Automattic vs. WP Engine will be ultimately decided in court but this sort of reminds me of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.[0] when Oracle got mad because of Google cashing out hard with Android. It's all about money for Matt....not about WordPress or open source community.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

lakomen• 2 years ago

TL;DR?

I don't like drama. Why is it in trouble just now and it has not been an ongoing process?

tommek4077• 2 years ago

No it is not. Outside this strange bubble on hacker news, no ine really cares or has ever heard of the creator.

They just use wordpress.

joshchernoff• 2 years ago

Good many then these stupid bot will leave my server alone always looking for wp-config FML.

tchbnl• 2 years ago

Please take your meds or seek immediate professional help, Matt.

wwarner• 2 years ago

I’m not a WP user, and I don’t want to ruffle feathers, but I can read and I think WP .com might not be getting the credit it deserves for contributing 4000+ hrs/year to WP development. Some of the contributors to WP are the very best open source developers out there; they look at kernel performance, image encoding corner cases and php, and land fixes. Not sure if Mullenweg is communicating that as clearly as he could, but it’s true. Without contributions like that, I doubt WP would be as well known as it is.

elendee4• 2 years ago

yep I think it's nuts. I have a plugin in the WP directory, and when I first uploaded it kind of blew my mind the service they provide for free. An SVN repo that gives you instant visibility to tens of millions of site owners. Imho Matt has set expectations too high over the decades and now everyone thinks Wordpress grows on trees.

MiddleEndian2• 2 years ago

Sometimes my friends ask me why I don't use a CMS for my personal site instead of just writing articles as pages on a Ruby on Rails site.

Aside from finding CMSes to be overly heavy and restrictive, this is why. You never know when they're gonna go off the rails (pun intended). If I can't just do everything in vim/notepad++ and a terminal I'm not super interested.

Same reason why I'm skeptical of game toolkits like Unity.

gtsop2• 2 years ago

This argument can't hold, how do you know rails isn't going to flip, how do you know linux won't flip. How do you know vim won't flip? I'm sure you have tens if nit hundreds of technologies in your stack that are open source and you never imagined they were going to flip. I have rearly used wp for clients, but i was never under the impression it could go sideways just like most stable software i use.

MiddleEndian2• 2 years ago

That's a fair counterargument.

The biggest thing in that category was Mysql "flipping" with the Oracle purchase. But people quickly migrated to postgres (which more-or-less is the same for smallish projects) and MariaDB as a Mysql fork exists as well. And I'm sure some people just kept using Mysql as well without having to do anything.

For all the tech I listed here, I think Rails is the one that would be hardest to a drop-in replacement for. Everything else is "generic." Text editors (not that I particularly care if a text editor is updated frequently (or at all most of the time)) and nix-like environments are basically hot swappable.

But IME when something has some sort of custom environment and that's the only way to deal with it (dashboard, special IDE, etc.) that's when you have the biggest risk of having a bad time.

system25• 2 years ago

People keep saying "FORK FORK FORK". You have to remember, that all hosts that are deploying WordPress rely on the main provider. Thousands of hosting companies use WordPress deploying after registration and auto-updating the installations. How are you planning to make this kind of a major change? All the plugins that are in wordpress.org. How will you inform every WordPress site owner to go through this type of transition?

I think this "fork" idea comes from a bizarre cancel/woke culture influence.

mildweed• 2 years ago

All the small/medium branding agencies surviving on Wordpress should devote 10% of their devs’ time to core.

Community: rebuilt.

silexia• 2 years ago

WordPress is amazing and we should all support open source Matt over dark finance backed companies.

WordPress Is in Trouble

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