Three Recent Events Signal WordPress Troubles

By info@nitaienterprises.com

Three events, including a $500,000 investment, indicate a parallel WordPress community is growing. Three unrelated events have occurred in the world of WordPress and content management systems that could determine the direction in which content is published on the web. Two of the developments are directly related to WordPress and appear to be working together.

Parallel WordPress Community
There is a movement to build a parallel community and infrastructure to WordPress.
This community aims to empower users and developers alike by fostering collaboration and innovation beyond the traditional boundaries set by the current WordPress governance.
The goal is to create stability for WordPress and ensure that it remains the most popular content management system in the world.
By doing so, we can enhance the overall user experience and provide broader options for developers, ensuring that creativity and diversity can flourish.
Recent events surrounding the Automatic-Mullenweg dispute and WP Engine have led to actions that could eventually wrest control of WordPress from Automatic and Matt Mullenweg.
Alternative WordPress Community: Part 1
This second approach to building an alternative WordPress community has received significant support from GoDaddy in the form of a half-million dollar donation to the nonprofit The WP Community Collective, a group whose goal is to create an independent open-source ecosystem for WordPress support.

This initiative highlights a growing trend among users seeking more resilient solutions that benefit from collective knowledge and shared resources.

GoDaddy explained: GoDaddy… has just invested half a million dollars in the WordPress community through a donation to the WP Community Collective, an initiative focused on funding and empowering WordPress contributors. This financial support is used to provide financial, operational, and promotional support within the broader WordPress community. GoDaddy’s contribution to the WP Community Collective… aims to strengthen open source communities by providing resources to the designers, developers, and other contributors who make the Internet work.

What’s interesting about GoDaddy’s funding is that one of GoDaddy’s investors, BlackRock, is also an investor in Automattic. BlackRock recently reduced the value of its stake in Automattic, which is currently said to be less than 1%.

Second news: Post Status WordPress

Community becomes a non-profit
The second part of the alternative WordPress community is an investment by Joost de Valk in a real WordPress enterprise community founded 15 years ago. Joost makes it a non-profit and creates a board of directors for it.

According to the announcement: “We are excited about this community and the history that has made Post Status what it is today: a true heart of the WordPress community, where thoughts flow freely, agreements are made, and mutual support abounds. Over the past few months, it has become abundantly clear that Post Status is a very important place for the community to come together and discuss all things WordPress. A place with some moderation, but also with true freedom of speech (within the limits of respect for all) and the freedom to have different opinions. We want to enshrine these freedoms even more firmly. “That’s why (Marieke and Myself) are buying Post Status.”

Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast SEO plugins, has recently become a vocal advocate for moving WordPress governance to a more democratic model and creating a parallel WordPress structure that secures and stabilizes the distribution of WordPress themes and plugins.

Third development: WordPress federated directories

The WordPress community is currently discussing decentralizing the distribution of plugins and themes so that WordPress.org, controlled by Automatic and Matt Mullenweg, is no longer the sole source. Decentralization would eliminate this control by distributing the software through multiple channels.

Karim Marucchi (LinkedIn profile), known in the WordPress community as a leading enterprise WordPress developer, has written about how to secure the supply chain regarding the safe and reliable availability of plugins and themes.

He wrote: “Securing the supply chain and starting modernization The first step is to address what Joost calls federated and independent repositories. We need to show the world that we have a secure supply chain. To create a community plugin, we must immediately form a collaborative group between independent contributors, multiple hosting companies, agencies, and the broader product community within our ecosystems. Designed from the ground up to prevent any company or entity from disrupting the supply chain.

Joost de Valk recently wrote about the importance of a federated repository: “We need to supplement WordPress.org updates with other sources so that what happened with Advanced Custom Fields does not happen again. Many hosts are currently experimenting with or already using WordPress.org mirrors. This creates problems: statistics on active downloads and installations, for example, are no longer reliable. Having only WordPress.org mirrors doesn't really solve the problem of having a single party controlling our single update server. To do that, we need to make sure those mirrors are connected and sharing data with each other, and as Karim suggested, allow hosting of independent plugins and themes outside of the wordpress.org repository. I call this federated and independent repositories, in a nutshell: FAIR. "I'm already talking to several hosts about this and would welcome anyone who wants to participate in those discussions so we don't do duplicate work."

There is now a project called AspirePress that aims to decentralize WordPress and is growing in popularity. AspirePress aims to become a mirror repository and eventually a decentralized distributed model, which is reflected in their tagline at the top of every page.

“Decentralize. Distribute. Democratize.”

AspirePress is committed to being a true open source WordPress community project.

“AspirePress is a community-driven open source project that aims to provide resources and tools to improve the lives of WordPress developers around the world. We are focused on creating a mirror package to distribute plugins and themes for free to WordPress users, no matter who they are or where they are located.

Aspire Press is an example of how members of the WordPress community are taking steps to decentralize WordPress so that one entity can’t unilaterally take control of someone else’s plugin and replace it with their own, as Automatic and Matt Mullenweg did with WP Engine’s wildly popular ACF plugin, which was completely replaced by a rebranded version controlled by Automatic.

Challenges and Developments in the WordPress Community

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were Stanford University students who at some point decided that it would be in the best interest of their company to hire an experienced CEO to succeed them, and that is exactly what happened. Google’s founders stayed with the company, but the CEO position was filled by someone they trusted. Google is one of the largest and most influential companies in the world and an example of founders who have successfully handed over control to more experienced hands. So there is certainly a precedent for a company founder successfully handing over control of their company to someone else to grow it.

There are other examples in the open-source community as well:

The Joomla! CMS is an open-source fork of Mambo CMS.
Originally developed by Netscape, Mozilla evolved into the Mozilla Foundation, an independent organization dedicated to open-source ideals.
The Python programming language was developed by Guido van Rossum, who remained the “benevolent dictator” until he relinquished control to a board-based governance model in 2018.
MariaDB, a fork of MySQL (following its acquisition by Oracle), is managed by the MariaDB Foundation.
These examples of successful transitions in for-profit and open-source organizations demonstrate that changes in direction and control can lead to growth. The three evolutions discussed in this article reflect the incremental changes happening at WordPress, a platform that supports thousands of jobs and generates billions of dollars in revenue worldwide. Stakeholders who have invested in the stability of WordPress can view these advancements as steps toward that goal.

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January 29, 2025