Wordpress Drama

If true that Matt makes >$700 million/yr from wordpress.com https://medium.com/@shreyzone/wordpress-open-source-under-a-veiled-threat-dfa814cefc7e, then he really isn't bothered if regular WordPress users are impacted by this drama or if folks decide to fork WordPress. It does not change his financial position. And with 43% of the web using WordPress, loosing a couple percentage won't impact him at all - like the Automattic employee's who left over his actions, he would probably be fine with those free WordPress users leaving too.

Almost a third of that goes immediately to payroll (and that's with conservative estimates based on 1700 employees), and doesn't account for taxes or all the business expenses related to software development and hosting.

I've seen a lot of reports that Matt himself is worth around $400m, but that is mostly based off of Automattic's value as well.

So basically he could screw almost half the internet on a whim

That is why forking exists (y). The biggest reason that Wordpress is successful is that it is the most widely recognized platform and has a huge community of third-party resource providers and service providers. There already exist several projects based off of Wordpress (such as ClassicPress), and if Matt does seriously destroy the Wordpress community as it is, they could easily just shift to a fork and abandon Wordpress entirely. It would be difficult, and it is unlikely but there are quite a number of large agencies already looking at alternatives because of Matt's behavior.
 
More importantly, Advanced Custom Fields cannot be updated,

It’s pretty shameful that a content management system ecosystem as big as Wordpress is still so reliant on 3rd party plugins for actual content management.

Matt should have invested some of the ungodly amount of dev hours that have gone into Gutenberg into making Wordpress a better CMS and made a native version of ACF.
 
Matt should have invested some of the ungodly amount of dev hours that have gone into Gutenberg into making Wordpress a better CMS and made a native version of ACF.
Well to be fair, the core function of ACF, you can do without the plugin. Like internally, ACF is just a post meta. You could implement it the same way or as a custom taxonomy. WordPress gives you everything you need for that for you to just build it.

It just happens to be that ACF has a nice UI attached to it where you can use this without modifying any code. And since I get it that many users probably don't need custom fields, I feel like it's ok that it is a plugin.

But they really really REALLY should implement a 2FA login system. Which is missing. In 2024. THAT is a shame.
 
the core function of ACF, you can do without the plugin.

The core functionality is too bare bones, it's not good enough.

I tried to do something as simple as an FAQ page on a site a few weeks ago with ACF core after not using it in a while. Design a single FAQ component on the front end, and have the client manage their own FAQs on the back end, thinking surely I can do that with the basic version, but repeater fields are locked behind the pro version, so no can do.

That's basic content management, it should be built in - with a nice UI.

they really really REALLY should implement a 2FA login system.

Yeah, that's also inexcusable out of the box.

The other glaring omission is basic media management and ability to organise media into folders. I can't bare to build a site with an significant amount of media without being able to keep it organised these days, and therefore having to fork out for a plugin to add something as basic as folders / tagging.
 
That is why forking exists (y). The biggest reason that Wordpress is successful is that it is the most widely recognized platform and has a huge community of third-party resource providers and service providers. There already exist several projects based off of Wordpress (such as ClassicPress),
Good point. I did switch some of my my WP to Classicpress a while back, but gave up and went back because several plugins I relied on were not available/working well. e.g. Rankmath instead of Yoast. Other plugins such as country identification of user for correct (EU) tax application. Maybe I will revisit Classicpres as I'm sure it has improved.

The other issue was their support forum on some really horrible forum software and overzealous moderating
 
It’s pretty shameful that a content management system ecosystem as big as Wordpress is still so reliant on 3rd party plugins for actual content management.

Matt should have invested some of the ungodly amount of dev hours that have gone into Gutenberg into making Wordpress a better CMS and made a native version of ACF.
Given how petty Matt is, it's likely coming soon.
 
I don't mean to derail the discussion, but let me say that there is another solution out there. JOOMLA+YOOTHEME= ANYTHING. Those who use them know what I mean. I never liked WordPress.
 
I don't mean to derail the discussion, but let me say that there is another solution out there. JOOMLA+YOOTHEME= ANYTHING. Those who use them know what I mean. I never liked WordPress.
You mean Mambo? History repeating itself here under a different brand.
 
@eva2000 Confirmation that Matt wants to have fun with wp-engine and making money and WordPress can basically do whatever he wants? Despite everything I think Matt is right about the whole thing.
 
Joomla is actually a website creation site. It's better than wordpress.

By what metric?
  • Coding is fairly equivalent to Wordpress.
  • Security is at around the same level of Wordpress, though I have seen more issues with Joomla.
  • Third party support is worse than Wordpress.
    • Quality is generally worse.
  • Ease of us... Is a toss up. Some things are easier, but some things are more complicated.
    • If you consider third-party, it is much worse.
You can look up comparisons and generally most will lean towards Wordpress.

Wow more news Matt has now poached WPEngine developer which takes WP GraphQL plugin with it to Automattic to become a canonical community plugin on WordPress.org


That was probably in discussion months before Matt threw the grenade at Wordcamp. ****ty time for the dev to have to make the announcement though 🤣.

@eva2000 Confirmation that Matt wants to have fun with wp-engine and making money and WordPress can basically do whatever he wants? Despite everything I think Matt is right about the whole thing.

Non-competes are not legal in California, so this really doesn't even matter in regards to the other actions. He was also trying to openly poach other people as well recently, including the CEO of WP Engine, but again none of that is illegal or even unheard of in tech.
 
It seems a bit exaggerated to me...

Screenshot (8).webp
 
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