It’s hard to see how to move forward from here. I think the best bet would be for people to rally around a new community-driven infrastructure. This would likely require a fork of WordPress, though, and that’s going to be a messy. The current open source version of WordPress relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls. Joost de Valk, the original creator of an extremely popular SEO plugin, wrote a blog post with some thoughts on the matter. I’m hoping that more prominent people in the community step up like this, and that some way forward can be found.
[…]Update: Moments after posting this, I was pointed to a story on TechCrunch about Mullenweg deactivating the WordPress.org accounts of users planning a “fork”. This after he previously promoted (though in a slightly mocking way) the idea of forking open source software. In both cases, the people he mentioned weren’t actually planning forks, but musing about future ways forward for WordPress. Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the push they need to get started. Remember that WordPress.org accounts are required to submit themes, plugins, or core code to the WordPress project. These recent events really make it seem like you’re no longer welcome to contribute to WordPress if you question Matt Mullenweg.
↫ Gavin Anderegg
I haven’t wasted a single word on the ongoing WordPress drama yet, but the longer Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO and thus owner of WordPress, keeps losing his mind, I can’t really ignore the matter any more. OSNews runs, after all, on WordPress – self-hosted, at least, so not on Mullenweg’s WordPress.com – and if things keep going the way they are, I simply don’t know if WordPress remains a viable, safe, and future-proof CMS for OSNews.
I haven’t discussed this particular situation with OSNews owner, David Adams, yet, mostly since he’s quite hands-off in the day-to-day operations and has more than enough other matters to take care of, but I think the time has come to start planning for a potential worst-case scenario in which Mullenweg takes even more of whatever he’s taking and WordPress implodes entirely. Remember – even if you self-host WordPress outside of Automattic, several core infrastructure parts of WordPress still run through Automattic, so we’re still dependent on what Mullenweg does or doesn’t do.
I have no answers, announcements, or even plans at this point, but if you or your company depend on WordPress, you might want to start thinking about where to go from here.
23 years ago I started writing my own blog php script, my blog still works with it! Yes, WordPress came and take the world, but it never conquered my small server and my blog. I still write every day, receives comments, a lot of views, attacks from any kind of bot (mostly believing I have wordpress and attacking its vulnerabilities), what I want to tell is… yes, you can avoid using it, you can use a different CMS, and you can even disconnect it completely from WordPress.com if you need to. Matt Mullenweg can’t have control of everything, that’s the nice thing about Open Source code, he can cry whatever he wants, but you are in control of your database, your code, your backups (please, backup! ), so It’s going to be a little expensive, but you can migrate your content to whatever you want, and that makes Matt feel panic
I believe that 90% of the WordPress pages only use 10% of WordPress’s functionality. There’s room for a CMS like yours to become popular for people who will not be doing woocommerce integrations, complex image galleries or advanced layouts and themes.
I got this link via the Late Night Linux podcast and it’s absolute gold:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100523152636/http://wpblogger.com/matt-should-resign.php
Mind you, this link is from 2010! Look at the comments!
To me it seems Matt Mullenweg needs medical help, or stop using drugs. It’s actually sad.
ClassicPress.net is a healthy fork or WordPress that works wonderfully. They have their own repository now too and are setting the model for a successful WordPress fork. I agree, Matt is ruining WordPress for web developers that make a living developing sites and themes for our clients.
And their site is reachable via IPv6 which means functionality like updates work from IPv6-only hosts, unlike the antiquated infrastructure of wordpress.com.