General Wordpress VS WP Engine

[fdk]

I can't quite believe that I've not heard about this issue until reading through this thread this morning. I work for a charity and we use WordPress for our whole website, which has millions of visitors each year. If something happens to WordPress, it would have the potential to severely affect our operations - we wouldn't have the funding in place to be able to pay £100,000+ to a professional website development company to rebuild what we've got now, and our website and functionality is so extensive that it would undoubtedly cost at least this, if not more, for a professional job.

I have read through the thread and looked at some of the drama on X, but still struggling to find out exactly where we are with this situation right now - can anybody provide a TL;DR, or current update on the WP situation?

 

[Arantor]

tl:dr; WP want WPE to give them a ton of cash, and did a variety of things that were hurting WPE. The court has now told WP to pack it in and return the access etc to WPE back to how it was before it kicked off.

The back and forth has included WP hijacking the popular ACF plug-in (including the paid version) which they’ve always been able to do but tacitly agreed not to. This is unprecedented and has lead to a lot of plug-in devs having second thoughts.

Assuming they comply, little now will change until the proper court date unless Matt has another tantrum.

 

[fdk]

tl:dr; WP want WPE to give them a ton of cash, and did a variety of things that were hurting WPE. The court has now told WP to pack it in and return the access etc to WPE back to how it was before it kicked off.

The back and forth has included WP hijacking the popular ACF plug-in (including the paid version) which they’ve always been able to do but tacitly agreed not to. This is unprecedented and has lead to a lot of plug-in devs having second thoughts.

Assuming they comply, little now will change until the proper court date unless Matt has another tantrum.

Great summary, thanks for that!

I've always been amazed at the functionality offered by WordPress, and in no doubt that is mainly thanks to the developers of plug-ins. Without them, everything our charity does for example would be absolutely impossible. We use a lot of the free plug-ins and a fair few ones that we've had custom-made, but as it is not my area generally to deal with the website maintenance I don't have full details. Nevertheless, the work we do would be so much more complicated and ultimately would mean we were able to help a lot less people.

I'm glad to hear that access has been, or should be, restored to the previous state imminently. Hopefully the upcoming legal action will cause all parties to reflect and decide that an amicable resolution is best for all parties, both in terms of reputation and also financially.

 

[Arantor]

We shall see what comes next but it’s fair to say that Matt (head of WP) has history for being a petulant man child. Trouble is, he’s a petulant man child with access to a significant amount of money.

I expect him to comply with the court’s ruling (he has 72 hours) but give it till just after Christmas and I think he’ll find a whole new way to be petulant.

He is still peeved that he was pushed out of owing a stake in WPE by their current investors.

 

[CTS]

Think of the millions of legit companies and organizations that base their website on wp.

In 2008? GM was kept afloat because they employed tens of thousands of workers.

Too big to fail means if wp implodes, so does millions of legit websites.

 

[Arantor]

Too big to fail means if wp implodes, so does millions of legit websites.

Yes and no.

The reality is that in the event of Automattic collapsing, someone will pick up the pieces. Probably someone like WPEngine, maybe a coalition of WPEngine, Kinsta and a few other of the more specialised WP hosts.

It's also not like there aren't other CMS options out there. Drupal, Joomla, CraftCMS, Statemic and others.

 

[Tyrsson]

I can 100% assure you there are others being built as I type this. The thing that absolutely amazes me is that WP has remained as popular as it has. Maybe the drama that is ongoing will really get some folks looking at viable alternatives. There is a lot of room for improvement with today's stack compared to the core WP codebase.

From a dev point of view, let's face it. "The Loop" sucks and it sucks badly.

 

[Arantor]

The thing is, ClassicPress has admirably demonstrated why forking doesn't work in practical terms, so then you start looking at 'other CMSes' which by definition has to include the full weight of the ecosystem. And that's something a lot of the projects currently going at this haven't understood: WP's strength is not WP, its strength is the sheer scale of its ecosystem which started life 20 years ago when WP started.

If you were to actually look at WP today, aside from Gutenberg you'd have to go digging to understand what had changed between 10 years ago and now, because much of where it changed was in subtle ways (e.g. full site editing) - but the size and scale of the ecosystem is why it keeps going. It happened to be in the right place at the right time to make a seismic shift and its ecosystem has propped it up ever since.

It's also why Matt going after individual leaders in the ecosystem is such the bad move that it is because it tells other premium plugin authors 'hey, maybe you should think about finding another plugin ecosystem to live in if you want to keep having income'.

Yes, you can absolutely replace a WP blog with CraftCMS or Drupal in a small scale of time, but the more plugins you have to replicate, the harder that task is and the more upfront effort that will be required to get there - and for almost anyone, that equates to a cost that has to be borne by someone.

 

[Arantor]

In other news, Matt is so upset by this court injunction that the community Slack instance for community discussions... he's ragequit it.

I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.

It was all fine when other people were giving you free labour and you were parasitically exploiting it, of course.

 

[Cedric]

lol. I'm surprised he hasn't launched into the air yet with his arrogant attitude. There must be a rocket up his ass sometime soon.