We run this website on WordPress. About half of our clients make some sort of use of WordPress. You’ve probably already seen that it powers 40% of all websites on the dozens of articles that have covered the drama. Here’s a rundown of what’s happening and whether it might affect your website.

What’s happening?

• The fight is largely between Automattic and WPEngine, two for-profit companies that both provide services around the WordPress platform, which is free and open-source.
• Automattic’s advantage is that its CEO (Matt Mullenweg) happens to be the creator of the WordPress platform itself and therefore has considerable control over its non-profit/open source aspect.
• Automattic’s claims (amongst others) are that WPEngine is in breach of WordPress’s trademark in a way that confuses customers to make them think WPEngine is part of WordPress. They have asked for 8% of WPEngine’s revenues as the licensing fee for the trademark.
• WPEngine denies any trademark breach, saying that their use “WordPress” is clearly descriptive of their service.
• Both companies are suing each other.
• In addition, WordPress itself (through Matt) has retaliated against WPEngine in the following ways:
  • Blocked them from getting theme/plugin updates from the official WordPress directory.
  • Made a tickbox when signing into WordPress’s dev/community hub that you are not affiliated with WPEngine (effectively banning them and anyone who works with them).
  • Taken forcible control of Advanced Custom Fields, a very popular plugin built by WPEngine, inheriting direct control over all of their users. This was done citing security issues and the plugin was renamed to Secure Custom Fields.

For more information about that last action, see the excellent article Did Automattic commit open source theft? by Gergely Orosz who makes the analogy that this would be like Apple forcibly taking control of the Spotify app (and its customer base) in the Apple app store and locking Spotify’s developers out.

How does this affect me?

• If you are a WPEngine customer, there is no change at this stage. WPEngine have been allowed to take a copy of WordPress’s directory of plugins/themes and they are able to push updates to your website from their own servers.
• If you are not a WPEngine customer and are using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, there’s now 2 versions – pope and antipope. If you do nothing, you will stay on the version that WordPress has taken control of. If you want to keep using the WPEngine one (including any features WPEngine adds), you will need to do a one-time manual upload from the ACF website and then WPEngine will be able to provide you with updates.
• You may also want to watch the status of other plugins/themes that your website uses, whether you’re a WPEngine customer or not. There have been at least some plugins that are choosing not to list in the WordPress directory in protest of WordPress/Automattic’s actions so there may be other plugins/themes that fork forcing you to choose a version.

What about the future of WordPress?

That’s up in the air. There has been a lot of speculation about this, especially in light of other erratic/Musk-like behaviour by Matt Mullenweg around the controversy.

For small/medium website operators we don’t think anything will change in the long-term. WordPress is likely here to stay although it’s not out of the question that it eventually splits into 2 or more forks. Either way, there is a huge demand for what WordPress is doing (40% of websites) so either 1 or more future versions of WordPress will fill the gap. Looking for other solutions at this point is going to be a lot more time-consuming and expensive than it’s worth.

However if you are at enterprise level, we agree with Gergely Orosz’s article (here’s the link again): the fact that a plugin was taken control of without the knowledge or consent of the makers or the website owners who are using it does mean that WordPress as a platform cannot currently be relied on for the type of control and stability that an enterprise probably needs.