WordPress in Crisis: Lawsuits, Power Plays and a Community on Edge

Welcome to the Real CMS Lawsuits of Silicon Valley starring Matt Mullenweg: WordPress founder, Automattic CEO and candidate for the worst millennial ever award. The Wordpress drama is real, it's a hot mess and currently moonwalking across legal minefields with all the chill of a toddler holding a lit sparkler. If you have a WordPress site this could affect you.

What is Wordpress? The Internet's Golden Child

Wordpress is only the most wildly popular open source CMS (Content Management System) on the internet. It's used by at least 40% of websites, from those blogs no one reads to enterprise sites you'd assume had something fancier. It's open source, meaning "for the people" and for years, it kind of was. Developers around the globe built free plugins, wrote documentation and relied on the Wordpress ecosystem for their livelihood. Those blogs and enterprises built on Wordpress (not to mentioned the developers) have a huge stake in the platform continuing to work.

But this open source experiment is going off the rails and no one really knows what is going to happen. Business owners who are skeptical of the drama have decided maybe they shouldn't develop in Wordpress. And that's bad news for Wordpress developers.

Revenge of the Nerd

So what happened? In a surprising move last month Matt Mullenweg (founder of Wordpress, Automattic CEO) decided he had a beef with WP Engine. WP Engine is only one of the most respected and used WordPress hosts in existence. For eons prior to this, WP Engine and Automattic were peaceful WordPress ecosystem dwellers. Then Matt spontaneously decided WP Engine wasn’t pulling its weight and called them a "cancer" to WordPress. On a podcast. Publicly. 

Matt then blocked WP Engine from the infrastructure that allows Wordpress sites to update plug-ins. In other words he blocked tens of thousands of websites paid for and owned by businesses and individuals from vital security updates that put all of their websites at risk. This impacts real businesses. The kind of businesses that pay for things like hosting, development and not getting hacked. Innocent bystanders on the internet who have done nothing wrong other than have their site developed in Wordpress at their own expense.

Naturally, WP Engine responded the only way you can when learn that you're the villain in someone else’s keynote: They lawyered up. And the lawsuits commenced.

Community Trust in Wordpress is Shook

Wordpress developers who have dedicated years contributing code and learning to build on the platform reported "grief and anguish" as a result of Matt's behavior. Not since the Gutenberg editor dropped have so many developers needed emotional support. (Gutenberg is spectacularly bad.)

Automattic slashed its open source contributions by 99% and dissolved key teams. That included the "Sustainability Team" which is ironic because this situation is anything but sustainable. This has prompted some side characters to file lawsuits claiming that the instability has led to the loss of contracts and sometimes even the failure of their web development businesses. Imagine getting sued so hard people you've never met start suing you? Peak main character energy.

And when people start saying things like, “Maybe the IRS should look into this” you know you’ve reached full chaos mode.

Why Does this Matter?

If you build, manage or stare at a Wordpress site all day, then this drama matters. You've got the Wordpress "benevolent dictator for life" suddenly acting drunk with power and not so benevolent. We've now learned that if Matt decides he doesn't like something he will absolutely cut it off from the Wordpress matrix. 

What started as a little internet nerd feud has grown into a full blown existential crisis for the world's most used CMS. This saga is a test of how open source platforms balance leadership, governance and community trust. Wordpress's future depends on its ability to belong to the community once again.

Look, we love a good tool but we’re not married to just one. At Geary Company, we don’t believe in forcing every website into the same WordPress shaped box. Sure, it’s popular. Sure, it’s powerful. But it’s not always the right fit. There are other CMS options out there that come with fewer mood swings and more flexibility. We like to keep our website developments low drama and high function.

Who knows what the future holds for Wordpress? If this saga continues, we might just take WordPress off the shelf for a while. Not because we’re petty but because we believe our clients deserve platforms built on trust, not on Twitter beefs.