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Happy Friday! It's October 4 and we're covering the Automattic vs. WP Engine feud, Josepha Haden Chomphosy's departure, WordPress trademark use, Pressable, and more.
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Note: There’s been a lot on so we haven’t kept our usual Friday schedule. Please bear with us as we try to keep on top of what’s happening.
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This week's headlines
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1. WP Engine sues Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, alleging abuse of power and extortion
It's been a wild week. Or, as YouTuber Theo Brown says it in his latest video, "The level of insanity here is just hard to put into words."
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On Tuesday, WP Engine filed legal action against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, accusing the rival hosting company and its CEO of abuse of power, attempted extortion, and leveraging trademark law for anti-competitive purposes. The lawsuit is the latest volley in the two-week-old feud after Mullenweg called WP Engine a "cancer to WordPress" and accused the company of profiting off the WordPress project and violating trademarks.
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Earlier today, The Verge's Emma Roth reported that lines between the WordPress open source project, the WordPress Foundation, and Automattic are blurring. "Cool cool cool, the #WordPress drama is now the #1 story on @verge 🙃," posted former Pagely marketer Dave Amirault, linking to Roth's story, Matt Mullenweg: 'WordPress.org just belongs to me'.
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2. 159 people leave Automattic, WordPress Executive Director steps down
WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy has left Automattic, along with 159 other employees who accepted a severance package offered to those who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg's handling of the ongoing WP Engine feud.
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In a blog post yesterday, Mullenweg said Automattic employees were offered $30,000 or six months salary, whichever was higher, but they had to accept before 8pm UTC on October 3. Those who took the offer had their access to Automattic cut off that evening and can't be rehired by the company.
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On X, long-time core committer Peter Wilson posted, "Josepha's leadership is one of the reasons I am an active contributor to WordPress. I am exceptionally pleased to have had the opportunity to work with her over the years. Good luck with whatever comes next, Josepha."
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GoDaddy-sponsored contributor Courtney Robertson said watching Haden Chomphosy's journey over so many years had had a profound impact on her. "It has been an honor to work alongside you. Thank you," she posted.
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Nearly 80% of the people who left Automattic worked for the company's Ecosystem / WordPress areas (Dotorg) compared to 18.2% from Cosmos, the division that oversees apps like Pocket Cast, Day One, Tumblr and Cloudup.
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3. Automattic clarifies WordPress trademark use, warning hosting companies
Automattic has put hosting companies on notice, publishing a "legal perspective" on how the WordPress trademarks can be used to describe the use of the open source software for hosting purposes.
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According to Neil Peretz, Associate General Counsel at Automattic, users of the WordPress software have "nominative fair use" rights. TL;DR: anyone can say, "I built a website with WordPress" or "I offer hosting for websites built on WordPress software,” but you can't call a service "WordPress hosting."
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Posting on X, lawyer Richard Best, who's been writing about WordPress legal issues since 2015, asked for clarity: "When you say 'does not include the right to use the ... marks in a manner that suggests one is offering a product or service that comes from WordPress', who or what exactly do you mean by 'WordPress'? Clarity here would be helpful."
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The Repository contacted several hosting companies for comment. Tom Zsomborgi, Kinsta's Chief Business Officer, said, "We are following closely the case and the happenings in the WordPress community/industry, which is impacting all WordPress-based businesses; it is a developing story, but that's all we know now."
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4. Pressable caught in controversy over mistimed campaign
Pressable has copped a lot of flak since publishing a contentious landing page that went live shortly before WP Engine was banned from WordPress.org on September 26. However, according to a source at the Automattic-owned hosting company, they didn't know about the impending ban and the landing page had been a pre-planned, programmatic marketing campaign.
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The landing page targets WP Engine customers, encouraging them to "Move from WP Engine to Pressable and we'll cover the costs." An accompanying tweet promises to help customers "break free from your WP Engine contract." Contract buyouts are not new or unusual between hosting companies, and neither are landing pages designed to entice customers away from competitors. But Pressable's timing couldn't have been worse.
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"It was unfortunate timing," the source said. "Unfortunately, there was no coming back once we learned about the dotorg situation, which happened about 20 minutes or so after we tweeted the landing page, so we just let it ride."
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WP Engine cited Pressable's landing page in its court filing this week, claiming that Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg had sought to "capitalize on the chaos" as part of an alleged campaign to "sow fear and doubt" in WP Engine customers and get them to breach their hosting contracts.
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In other news
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WordPress project
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> Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince has offered to donate the capacity to power WordPress.org after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg posted on X that replacing him would require someone wealthy enough to subsidize WordPress.org, which services 30,000 requests a second at its peak. Posting on Hacker News, Mullenweg said Fastly had also offered to donate its services to WordPress.org (X | Hacker News)
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> All new plugin submissions to WordPress.org are now checked automatically by a new Plugin Check plugin developed by the WordPress Performance and Plugin Review teams. Posting on X, Hostinger-sponsored plugin reviewer David Pérez said the change was a "Big step forward for the Team, as we save time for most obvious checks and more!" (WP Tavern)
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> Two months after the new Learn WordPress site and learning pathways were launched, learner satisfaction is on average around 93% (Make WordPress Training)
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WordPress community
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> Core contributor Andy Fragen shared insights into the development of the automatic plugin rollback feature that shipped with WordPress 6.6, including the critical role of testing and collaboration with hosting companies (WP Tavern Jukebox)
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> The WP Minute has published an up-to-date timeline of what's happened so far in the Automattic vs WP Engine feud, including news, community takes, and livestreams (The WP Minute)
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> Human Made co-founder Noel Tock and Matt Medeiros discuss the ongoing feud between Automattic and WordPress, the implications for the WordPress community, and the potential for an independent WordPress.org fork (The WP Minute+)
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Plugins, products & themes
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> WP Engine's ACF team has announced an alternative update mechanism for its free plugin after its developers had their access to WordPress.org cut off as part of the company's recent ban. Product manager Iain Poulson has published a guide to updating to a new version of ACF that ensures future updates for the plugin will be available to users in the WordPress admin as normal. With over 2 million active installations, ACF users relying on the free version can no longer automatically update to the latest version of the plugin via WordPress.org. ACF Pro users remain unaffected, as updates for the Pro version continue through advancedcustomfields.com (ACF)
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> WP Remote CEO Akshat Choudhary, who also runs BlogVault and MalCare, has launched a WordPress update mirror called Morpheus. He said the host-agnostic updates service for sites that run on WordPress works by mirroring updates to the WordPress.org repositories. "The intent behind Morpheus is to allay community fears and foster peace of mind. We hope that it will forestall knee-jerk reactions with respect to losing access to the WordPress repository," Choudhary said. (WP Remote)
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> WooCommerce 9.4 will now be released on November 4, two weeks later than originally planned, to align with the upcoming WordPress 6.7 release (WooCommerce)
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Conferences & events
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> WordCamp Sydney organizers are keeping an eye on the feud between Automattic and WP Engine ahead of next month's event, scheduled for 2-3 November. WP Engine is a Platinum sponsor and three of the company's employees, including long-time community organizer Ricky Blacker, are scheduled to speak. WordCamp Sydney organizer Wil Brown said WordCamp Central had informed him there was no current ban on the hosting company's involvement in WordCamps. "Of course the situation is dynamic and could change but currently there is no change to WordCamp Sydney," Brown said. "The organizing team have discussed the situation and we have options should things escalate." (WordCamp Sydney)
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> Regular tickets to WordCamp Asia 2025 sold out yesterday shortly after they were released. Micro-sponsor tickets are still available and a third ticket drop is expected ahead of next year's event, scheduled for February 20-22 in Manila, Philippines (WordCamp Asia)
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> WP Accessibility Day will be held on October 9-10 and will feature 24 talks over 24 hours. The global event is dedicated to promoting and learning website accessibility best practices for WordPress websites (WP Accessibility Day)
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> The Italian WordPress community is hosting Core Days, a next gen event aimed at core developers, on November 8-9, 2024, in Rome (Core Days)
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> InstaWP will host AnyoneCanWP, an online hackathon, from October 11-26, 2024. Topics will be revealed on October 5, with a total cash prize pool of $10,000 (WP Tavern)
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> WooSesh 2024 is scheduled for October 29-30 and will feature 33 speakers, 22 sessions, and the annual Seshies Awards (WP Tavern)
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> WordCamp Delhi is scheduled for November 30 to December 1, 2024, in New Delhi. Early bird tickets are still available (WordCamp Delhi)
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Security
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> Patchstack is warning LiteSpeed Cache users that another vulnerability has been discovered in the popular plugin, affecting more than 6 million websites. The unauthenticated stored XSS vulnerability was patched in version 6.5.1 on September 25 (Patchstack)
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Meanwhile...
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🤷🏼♀️ 27% of WordPress folks polled in a survey think the Automattic vs WP Engine conflict is meaningless (X)
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🫶🏼 James Huff wrote about his 20 years working with WordPress (macmanx.com)
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The Repository is a weekly email for the WordPress community by Rae Morey. Mike Johnston is our proofreader. A big thank you to Kinsta, our hosting sponsor, and MailPoet, our email sponsor.
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Send your feedback to [email protected] and help us provide high-quality news written entirely by humans that matters to the WordPress community.
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