It's strange to receive texts like “Is this WordPress drama crazy or is it being exaggerated”?
In the 15 years I've been running WPBeginner, I never thought I'd have to write a blog post about a WordPress industry drama. My focus with the blog has always been to provide high quality free WordPress tutorials for non-technical beginners and small business owners.
But unfortunately, we've reached a point where there's a lot of misinformation and fear being spread about WordPress by click-hungry media and influencers.
This is causing panic among some website owners, agencies and company employees. Some people ask questions about whether WordPress is still safe and whether they should look for an alternative CMS option for their websites.
In this post, I want to explain what this latest WordPress drama is about, who it affects, and what you can do to protect your sites.
TLDR: No, this is NOT the end of WordPress and your websites are safe.
My disclaimer:
I am not a trademark attorney or legal expert. I'm writing this post for WPBeginner blog readers who are worried about what's going on. I've spent the last 18 years in this community and I love WordPress. These are my opinions based on my industry experience and what I have read online. I have no inside knowledge of the situation. I reserve the right to change my mind if I learn new information.
Now that we've got that out of the way, let's get straight into what's happening around this WordPress drama between WP Engine and Automattic.
What is this WordPress drama about? (Short summary)
Short summary: There is a legal dispute between two WordPress companies (WP Engine and Automattic) related to a trademark dispute. Due to their influence, escalations occurred that resulted in a lot of negative PR for the WordPress ecosystem. The vast majority of WordPress sites are NOT affected by this at all.
The whole thing started when two large companies in the WordPress industry were in a legal dispute over a trademark dispute.
Automattic is a company founded by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. They are the developers of WooCommerce, the WordPress.com hosting service, the Jetpack plugin, and more.
WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting company owned by a major Silver Lake private equity firm.
Automattic owns the exclusive commercial rights to use the “WordPress” trademark. They asked WP Engine to negotiate a licensing agreement that included either payments to Automattic OR increased contributions to the free, open source WordPress project.
As the parties failed to reach an agreement, Matt made the dispute public at the annual WordCamp conference in the US, where he claimed that WP Engine, despite being a company with over $400 million in revenue, Dollars don't give enough back to the free, open source WordPress project.
As things escalated, both companies sent each other a formal cease and desist (C&D) letter. Due to the legal threats, Matt, co-founder of WordPress, banned WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org servers.
This meant that customers with websites on WP Engine hosting could no longer receive updates from WordPress.org servers.
The ban was later temporarily lifted to protect users and allow WP Engine to build its own update servers. Because WordPress is open source, the WP Engine team was able to create their own updater to ensure users can receive software updates on their hosting platform.
On October 1st, the server ban officially came into effect again. Shortly thereafter, WP Engine filed a federal lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg.
Due to the escalation, the WP Engine team was banned from accessing their WordPress.org accounts. This means that the WP Engine team can no longer release updates for its WordPress plugins from the official WordPress.org servers.
One of WP Engine's plugins is Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is popular among developers and used by over 2 million websites. To ensure security updates are available to all users, the WordPress.org team forked the ACF plugin, renamed it Secure Custom Fields (SCF), and took over the original ACF plugin directory page without WP Engine's consent. The reasons cited were maintaining and providing updates to users who were unaware of the drama.
This decision was not well received and sparked many negative comments from developers, influencers and press outlets.
At the time of writing this post, all other WP Engine plugins are still available for download in the WordPress.org plugin directory. However, the WP Engine team is still blocked, so they cannot use the WordPress.org servers to produce updates.
In summary, the cause of this WordPress drama is a heated trademark dispute between WP Engine hosting company Automattic and Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress).
Since WP Engine has filed a federal lawsuit against Automattic, I believe that only the courts can decide the outcome unless the parties reach an amicable settlement outside of the courts. The official WordPress Twitter account tweeted that the situation could be resolved under the following conditions:
If WP Engine dropped its lawsuits, apologized and settled for trademark use, feel free to access the plugin directory listing.
Meanwhile, Secure Custom Fields is a community plugin and open to contributions. We know you can't log in to .org…
– WordPress (@WordPress) October 14, 2024
Is this the end of WordPress?
The answer is NO. Absolutely not.
WordPress Services over 43% of websites on the Internet, and it is bigger than any single person or company. The vast majority of small business owners and WordPress users don't even know about this ongoing drama because it simply doesn't affect them.
I spoke to a local small business owner who is my personal trainer and he was completely unaware of the negative press surrounding WordPress. When I briefly told him about it, he said the following:
“I won't switch from WordPress because some big companies have a trademark dispute. “It’s important to me that my website works and my business grows.” – Sean Nelson, founder of Hustle Training 360.
The reality is that the WordPress software you used to build your website has not changed.
If you use popular plugins like Elementor, WPForms, WooCommerce, AIOSEO, Duplicator and literally over 60,000 others, they are still the same.
Something as big as WordPress simply doesn't end because two companies have a trademark dispute.
By and large, only a small proportion of users are affected, and I'll tell you how to find out if your site is affected and what you can do about it.
Is my website affected by this?
The vast majority of users and websites using WordPress are NOT affected by this legal dispute between Automattic and WP Engine.
If you are using a free plugin developed by WP Engine and you are NOT on their hosting platform, your websites will be affected as you will not be able to receive updates for these free plugins from WordPress.org.
Here are WP Engine's popular free plugins that are blocked from sending updates from WordPress.org servers:
- Advanced custom fields
- Nitro pack
- Better search by replace
- WP Migrate Lite
- WP Offload SES Lite
- frost
- Genesis blocks
- Custom Genesis Blocks
- For the full list, see Plugins created by WP Engine.
What can you do to protect your WordPress site?
As I said before, if you don't use the plugins created by WP Engine, you don't need to do anything.
Your WordPress site is secure and operational.
However, I always recommend creating regular WordPress backups and using a firewall like Cloudflare (see more WordPress security tips).
Now, if you use the plugins created by WP Engine, depending on your personal preferences, you will either need to install the WP Engine updater plugin to continue receiving updates or find an alternative.
What should I do as a WordPress agency with worried customers?
You can send them a link to this blog post and reassure them that WordPress is still safe and by far the best open source CMS option on the market.
A trademark dispute between two companies NOT Change the fact that WordPress powers 43% of all websites (and counting). There are more than 60,000 free WordPress plugins and thousands of free WordPress themes on the market that make it easy to create any type of website you want.
Progress in WordPress core development continues and WordPress 6.7 is coming soon.
Here are more insights into WordPress market share and trends.
My final thoughts
Despite everything that's going on, I still love WordPress and I believe in our amazing WordPress community.
I have spent more than half of my life in the WordPress community and will continue to do everything in my power to support the community and our users. Check out my recent post about contributing to the WordPress ecosystem.
Finally, I truly hope that the two respected companies involved in the lawsuit can come to an agreement soon so that we can all focus on advancing WordPress and democratizing publishing and commerce around the world.
As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner and look forward to continuing to serve you in the years to come.
Best regards,
Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner
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