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Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

(techcrunch.com)
465 points impish9208 | 2 comments | 11 Jan 25 18:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.534s | source
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rmccue ◴[11 Jan 25 23:44 UTC] No.42669910[source]▶
This isn’t unexpected; I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker as well. I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.

Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...

(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)

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pathartl ◴[12 Jan 25 04:26 UTC] No.42671273[source]▶
Been following your posts since the beginning of this. We met a while ago after a Milwaukee WordCamp and I remember talking about API v2 and how WP was going to be brought into the modern era.

Honestly, the project just feels stagnant to me. I get wanting to support plugins/the community for as long as possible, but I fear not having a sensible web framework has done nothing but given credence to the common criticism that WP shouldn't be taken seriously.

From my perspective as an owner of a small open source project, Matt's comments have been petty and vindictive. I personally probably will never touch the platform again. There's too many other frameworks out there, whether you want something similar like Statamic, Grav, Drupal.. or if you want to build with an actual app framework with Laravel, ASP.NET Core, etc.

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pclmulqdq ◴[12 Jan 25 05:50 UTC] No.42671574[source]▶
Honestly, my first response to this whole fiasco was "people still use WordPress?" It turns out to still be very popular despite HTML infrastructure subsuming many features that WordPress used to offer (on one side) and competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing.
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1. acomjean ◴[12 Jan 25 13:46 UTC] No.42673486[source]▶
The plugin system is pretty amazing, and block themes allow really much better styling/ management of sites.

It’s not perfect but its easy to use and a lot of people know how to use it.

We switched our non profit to using it so we could have more people helping post content. We could teach something else, but this was fairly easy..

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2. castillar76 ◴[13 Jan 25 01:06 UTC] No.42678871[source]▶
Yep. I’ve tried to avoid it but for groups where less technical people need to be able to edit pages and contribute content, WP continues to be the go-to solution. The last time around I tried to avoid it but after trying everything I could find, I gave up and installed it again. I’d love to see some alternatives spring up, but the plugin and theme ecosystem is so large I think it’d be hard to replace anytime soon.