Thoughts on Wordpress vs WP Engine

Wordpress has been in the web news a lot recently and even made it into the mainstream UK news sites. Unfortunately this has been for all the wrong reasons which I will not recap here. Instead you can read the full story over on TechCrunch, as well as a few other sites. Google, Bing or your favourite search engine will throw up plenty more coverage.

I don't use Wordpress anymore, having deleted my Wordpress account back in April 2023. So for me this whole saga is neither here nor there. My personal feeling is that at the beginning of this drama Matt Mullenweg had the moral upperhand in expecting companies who make millions out of the open source Wordpress community to give back more than the bare minimum to that community. Sponsoring a few WordCamps is not enough. Unfortunately morals don't really come into it in the business world and the license Wordpress was released under does not oblige any payment, in-kind or otherwise. So Automattic decided to sue WP Engine to pay a significant license fee for using "Wordpress" in their hosting plans. WP Engine simply renamed their plans.

However his actions since then were morally wrong. He's kind of lost his way here. Disconnecting WP Engine from the Wordpress.org plugin platform raised alarm bells in the wider community, with many thinking "am I next"? Then taking control of the ACF plugin appears to be bordering on theft the way it was done. I am not a specialist in this area at all, but that's what it looks like to me and probably many others who are not open source license experts. Again, it has the wider community wondering "is my plugin next"?

I sometimes wonder if Automattic have forgotten the fact that the Wordpress CMS became so immensely popular precisely because it was open source, because there was no fee, no expectation to contribute if you didn't want to. In any case for the sake of the Wordpress community and in fact the open source community in general, I hope they can settle their differences asap.

Coming back to my reasons for leaving Wordpress. They were the opposite of what got me using it in the first place. When I started using Wordpress it was to make the business of creating websites more straight forward and procedural, as well as to have the backing of a large community. With time it became gradually more complex to simply go in and write a post or edit some content. I am quite OK using a plain text editor and don't need fancy WYSIWYG tools, let alone the Gutenberg editor which split the Wordpress community long before the latest drama.

I am very happy now with my own 500 line PHP script that generates my site through a GitHub Action and publishes it on GitHub Pages. I am also happy writing my posts using GitHub's editor. It helps me concentrate on the content, not the design or the CMS. Without all the drama getting in the way!