Our New AI Website Builder

Speaking of WordPress, hows the entire WordPress debacle going with Matt Mullenweg?

Development has dropped off a cliff over the last couple of months. The release cycle has moved from quarterly to yearly. He's basically taking his ball and going home. My guess is we'll see more internal initiatives like this AI builder instead of focusing on the core product.

This would be an okay strategy if his core product wasn't in such a state of disrepair. I've seen multiple issues on Github projects from Automattic developers saying "this would be easy to fix upstream but we're not allow to fix anything in WordPress right now." It's pathetic and actively harming his own business.

They're still battling out in court, with a timeline that extends into 2027. Meanwhile: (very quick summary) Matt's pulled his developers off the project, and the release schedule has slowed. Some commercial vendors have increased their support, while others have pulled back. Meanwhile the ecosystem of devs and agencies basically shrugged it off. If we need to get rid of Matt we will (with big vendor support), no big deal.

I believe it is actually Pretty Big Deal™.

No big deal on splitting the community in half? Matt will not go and you will have half the people supporting him, half forking the project. Actually less than half on each side, when you count in the people that will completely leave the ecosystem...

For 99.99% of the people, it doesn't matter. Even if Wordpress stopped getting updates today, the code already works and it's open source, thanks in part to Matt for maintaining it for 20 years.

It was just the weekly Internet drama of the programming niche probably pumped by Youtubers and influencers in need for content to drive views and then by memes. Barely anything of substance was actually written about it.

After all, if Matt were such a negative factor in the project, it would be trivial to just take all the code and fork it and then for all the developers to just move to the new project. The fact that this didn't happen shows that there is non-trivial infrastructure being provided that is separate from the open source project. How do such smart people as programmers fail to understand this when they repeatedly conflate the open source project with the whole trademark/plugin hosting thing is beyond me. Does nobody question the whole thing before pointing fingers and picking their pitchforks?

I've seen a Youtuber who interviewed to Matt in one video and the Youtuber himself raised the point of hosting costs, and then in a next video they conflate the two concepts as if they had completely forgotten about everything they said and heard. It's surreal.

"it's pathetic that no other company benefiting from WordPress has stepped up either"

^<-- hard to justify doing so when Wordpress' package ecosystem (the open source platform) is tethered to Wordpress.org (matt's personal website)

They just laid off 16% of workers

https://www.theverge.com/news/642187/automattic-wordpress-la...

Splitting the community in half? Nah. If Matt needs to go, the community who is more interested in just making money (we're not "post economic" like Matt) will move aggressively to cut him out like cancer.

Sure he controls a scary amount of the ecosystem NOW, but we've seen big vendors express interest in hosting repositories, and major plugin vendors move quickly to secure their distribution and update models.

My tiny agency has already mitigated many risks and shifted our support towards developers who see a future PostMatt™

We'll be fine because WordPress belongs to us, not Matt.

IMO in my experience wordpress, as a project regardless of hosting, is coasting but in audience acquisition and new feature production.

They aren't acquiring new customers faster than they are losing existing customers. Squarespace and similar products are to eating it's proverbial lunch among a large portion of their audience (small to medium businesses who just want a website that is easy to update).

If some of the biggest hosters forked wordpress and started adding features that their customers are asking for, that wordpress the organization were ignoring or slow to produce, I think it would be a good thing. Providing wordpress the org with some motivation to compete.

Copium. Wordpress is dead. Argue all you want. 5 years from now the trajectory of installs/users/commercial opportunity will show that the last year was more than enough to incentivize/motivate the current and potential users to reach for something else. I say this as someone who makes my primary income managing a very large WP/WC shop.

Sure, WP isn't going away overnight. But it's dead in the water at this point. Literally like a dead whale, still going to support an ecosystem for some period of time. Though, it's peak is behind us and the unwinding was accelerated immeasurably.

I love how you used the phrase "Wordpress is dead," and not the really trendy term everyone has been throwing around since January of last year.

WordPress is so dead. Vibecoding a page using next.js and using something like sanity so they can make their own changes gets clients so much more for less than WordPress ever did.

Disrepair is too right. 5k issues and 1.7k open PRs on the Gutenberg GitHub repository.

I wish this all had happened before Full Site Editing was put into .org.

Also, good luck sending in a PR and getting it merged. Unless you are part of Matt’s inner circle, it isn’t happening. Even the most basic bug fix PRs are routinely ignored.