WordPress War: Grab Your Popcorn for Automattic vs WP Engine

Automattic blocks plugin updates for sites hosted on WP Engine.
The gloves are off.

Update 29/9: wordpress.org is the OpenSource community & foundation, the commercial hosting company is wordpress.com owned by Automattic. WP Engine is a commercial host of Wordpress - a direct competitor to wordpress.com. The WordPress trademark is owned and managed by the WordPress Foundation, wordpress.org,

But speaking this week at WordCamp US 2024, a WordPress-focused conference held in Portland, Oregon, Mullenweg pulled no punches in his criticism of WP Engine. Taking to the stage, Mullenweg read out a post he had just published to his personal blog, where he points to the distinct ā€œfive for the futureā€ investment pledges made by Automattic and WP Engine to contribute resources to support the sustained growth of WordPress, with Automattic contributing 3,900 hours per week, and WP Engine contributing just 40 hours.

Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ā€˜cancer to WordPressā€™ and urges community to switch providers | TechCrunch

Here is the core as I understand it: WP Engine is not contributing to the Open Source ecosystem. They donā€™t have to, technically, but should. Thatā€™s how this works - you give back to the community.

WP Engine is using resources developed by Automatticā€™s wordpress.com (User login system, Update servers, Plugin directory, Theme directory, Pattern directory, Block directory, Translations, Photo directory, Job board, Meetups, Conferences, Bug tracker, Forums) and security patches.

But WP Engine is not giving back to the WordPress ecosystem, nor to wordpress.com - WP Engine is owned by Private Equity and making $400m revenue.

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Hope it sends people to Ghost. WP is so bad.

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WP users believe all these plugins and settings and config and security scans and updates and caching and and general madness is normal. Itā€™s 20 year old tech, on PHP. Built to run fine over a 28.8k modem.

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Interesting developments reported by 404 media.

You have to denounce affiliation with WP Engine to log in to the Wordpress Community. I donā€™t think this will end well.

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It sent me to Ghost!

This drama is getting worse by the day:

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Iā€™m curious about Ghostā€™s take on this topic. I hope @John considers to write an article about this topic. Not to review this drama itself but how Ghost thinks about open-source, 3rd party Ghost services (like managed hosting services other than ghost pro) etc.

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Iā€™ve got one in progress - feels like an important time to share how we think about these things. Thanks for the prompt!

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Automattic, owned by Wordpress founder Matt, has launched https://wordpressenginetracker.com/

ā€¦ tracking the number of websites that have left WP Engine.

You can also download a CSV with all sites hosted on WP Engine.

Epic stuff.

This is really getting childishā€¦

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When one commercial entity, wordpress.com, publishes the client list of another commercial entity that is also a direct competitor, WP Engine, in order to facilitate poaching of their clientsā€¦ I think thatā€™s a really, really bad idea.

Burning down the house by Talking Heads comes to mind.

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