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Happy Friday! It's November 15 and we're covering WP Engine's antitrust claims, the release of WordPress 6.7, this year's Web Almanac, and more.
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This Week's Headlines
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1. WP Engine Expands Legal Fight Against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg with Antitrust Claims
Overshadowing this week's release of WordPress 6.7 (more below), WP Engine has expanded its lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg to include antitrust allegations, accusing the rival hosting company and its CEO of holding "monopoly power" in the WordPress ecosystem.
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The amended complaint, which now spans 144 pages — up from its original 62 — alleges that Automattic and Mullenweg are using the WordPress trademarks to block WP Engine from the WordPress community as a means to "extort monopolistic pricing."
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The revised filing highlights four relevant markets that WP Engine argues have been impacted by Automattic and Mullenweg's conduct: content management systems, WordPress hosting services, custom fields plugins, and WordPress plugin distribution. WP Engine claims that Automattic and Mullenweg have "willfully acquired and maintained" monopoly power in these markets, citing demands that WP Engine pay an "arbitrary" 8% royalty as evidence of anticompetitive behavior under the Sherman Act, United States legislation that prohibits monopolistic business practices.
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2. WordPress 6.7 "Rollins" Debuts Twenty Twenty-Five, Zoomed Out View, Block Bindings UI
WordPress 6.7 "Rollins," named after jazz legend Sonny Rollins, was released Tuesday. The new Twenty Twenty-Five default theme, Zoomed Out mode, updates to the Styles interface, and a new UI for the Block Bindings API are among the highlights in this release.
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As content creator Bud Kraus notes in his overview of WordPress 6.7 for InstaWP, this release focuses on improving what's already in WordPress and lays the groundwork for the admin redesign.
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The release didn't quite go off without a hitch. Shortly after it was made available, folks reported seeing 502 "Bad Gateway" error messages on WordPress.org. Posting on the WordPress.org Status Blog, Automattic's Chief Systems Wrangler Barry Abrahamson said WordPress.org had experienced "network saturation" of the hosting provider's network that hosts some of site's infrastructure.
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3. WordPress Retains Top CMS Spot with 35.6% Market Share as Growth Slows
HTTP Archive's annual state of the web report reveals WordPress’s market share grew just 0.6% on mobile over 2023-34. Wix is the second most popular CMS with 2.8% market share, followed by Joomla (1.5%), Squarespace (1.5%) and Drupal (1.2%).
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According to the report’s authors, Jonathon Wold from Guildenberg and Lora Raykova and Niko Kaleev, both from NitroPack, WordPress’s global dominance stems from two main factors: a community that maintains and improves the functionality of the open-source project, and the CMS’s flexibility in serving a wide range of websites and users.
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The report also highlights Elementor’s dominance in the page builder market, with 56% market share on mobile, followed by WPBakery (21%), Divi (14%), SiteOrigin (2%), and Oxygen (1%).
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The authors note that the WordPress Core Performance Team has “exceeded expectations” in its efforts to improve the performance of the WordPress software, merging a significant number of updates across each major release since the team’s formation in 2021.
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4. Automattic's 'WP Engine Tracker' Site Fuels Ongoing Tensions with WP Engine
ICYMI, Automattic launched WP Engine Tracker last week. The "Automattic thingamajig" shows how many websites have left WP Engine since WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg began his war against the hosting company in September. At the time this email was sent, the number sits at 19,200 sites.
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The site includes a "top destinations" section showing where these sites are migrating, with Pressable, Bluehost, and SiteGround among the most popular choices. A downloadable CSV lists all the domains WP Engine currently hosts, including staging and production sites.
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The WordPress community's reception to the website has been generally negative, with developer and educator Brian Coords summing up how many folks feel: "This has nice design/dev, but it's sad to see talent and resources poured into increased negativity in the community, criticism without substance, tearing down instead of building up. Just sad that's what WordPress is becoming a symbol for."
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In Other News
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WordPress Project
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> The Sustainability Team wants to team up with the Drupal Innovation team to address the maker-taker imbalance in open source communities (Google Docs)
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> The Design Team has shipped a new theme for the Make WordPress landing page at WordPress .org (Make WordPress)
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WordPress Community
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> Developer Duane Storey has raised privacy concerns around how WordPress handles API requests, revealing that website data—like site URLs, plugin information, and system details—is transmitted to WordPress.org without explicit user consent. A member of the WordPress Security Team, speaking on background, told The Repository the data transfer was "nothing new" but noted that there was a "strong case" that this data provided WordPress.org owner Matt Mullenweg, who also runs Automattic, an unfair competitive advantage (Duana Storey)
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> WordPress's brand tone and voice are friendly but unclear, could be more professional, and users want a more formal and technical tone, according to a WPShout survey (WPShout)
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> The Indian WordPress community is mourning the shock passing of WordCamp Kerala organizer Sharankrishna V.P. just two days after last week's event (WordCamp Kerala)
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> The Automattic vs WP Engine dispute has unsettled freelancers, challenging their client relations and trust in WordPress's stability, says Eric Karkovack (The WP Minute)
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Business, Enterprise & Products
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> This week's WP Product Talk livestream tackled the dilemma faced by freemium plugin owners on whether to keep hosting on WordPress.org. Jack Arturo, the creator of WP Fusion, voiced frustration with Automattic's influence after his plugin's listing was overshadowed in Google Search by WordPress.com results that funneled users toward paid subscriptions on its platform. Arturo's comments reflect growing concerns over CEO Matt Mullenweg's control, particularly after WordPress.org, which Mullenweg owns, recently took over Advanced Custom Fields. While Amber Hinds of Equalize Digital suggested it was too soon for developers to abandon ship, the panel agreed that hosting plugins on WordPress.org now carries new risks for developers (YouTube)
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> As part of Freemius's 10th-anniversary celebrations, the company donated 100% of its revenue on November 12 to Girls Who Code, with support from over 50 businesses (Freemius)
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Plugins, Products & Themes
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> WooCommerce 9.4, released this week along with a stable 9.4.1 update, introduces improvements to the Product Collection and Product Details blocks, new customization options for Express Checkout, and enhanced search functionality within WooCommerce (WooCommerce)
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> Awesome Motive has released OnePageGA, a simple one-page dashboard for those struggling to understand Google Analytics 4 (OnePageGA)
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> SureCart co-founder Adam Preiser celebrated his plugin's rise to become the second most popular ecommerce option for WordPress, surpassing Easy Digital Downloads (X)
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> Paid Memberships Pro has released two of its add-ons, Goals Progress Bar and Donations, for free during November to support businesses taking part in Giving Tuesday (Paid Memberships Pro)
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> WordPress.com has released a new, free site speed tool that evaluates loading speed, Core Web Vitals, and historical performance (WordPress.com)
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> Elegant Themes has released another public alpha ahead of its Divi 5 release (Elegant Themes)
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> Snicco founder Calvin Alkan says his frustration with the WordPress admin experience inspired him to create CommandUI, an accessible, keyboard-driven tool for navigating the software that has been a hit with power users (WP Tavern)
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Security
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> The WordPress Security Team has pushed a forced update to sites running Really Simple Security after the discovery of a critical vulnerability in the plugin. The flaw allows attackers to remotely access any account, including administrator accounts, if two-factor authentication is enabled. Wordfence researcher István Márton described it as one of the most serious vulnerabilities reported in the company's 12-year history. Previously known as Really Simple SSL, the plugin is free on WordPress.org and has over 4 million active installs (Wordfence)
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> Patchstack processed 1,571 valid vulnerability reports, helped close nearly 1,000 plugins in the WordPress.org plugin repository, and paid $17,000 USD to ethical hackers during October as part of Cyber Security Month (Patchstack)
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> Wordfence is urging WPLMS users to update to the latest version after disclosing an arbitrary file read and deletion vulnerability in the LMS, plugin which has more than 28,000 sales on Envato Market (Wordfence)
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> Wordfence has launched an end-of-year bug bounty program with the aim of awarding more than $100,000 in bounties to over 1,000 submissions (Wordfence)
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Events
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> Developer Ryan Fernandes has taken out first place in AnyoneCanWP, InstaWP’s online hackathon, winning $3,000 for his website TenantSync (AnyoneCanWP)
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> PressConf 2025 tickets went on sale this week. The business conference is scheduled for April 23-26, 2025, in Tempe, Arizona (PressConf)
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> Voting in the fourth annual Monster's Award 2024 closes on November 20 (TemplateMonster)
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Black Friday / Cyber Monday
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> Hostinger surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers about their shopping preferences and spending habits ahead of BFCM (Hostinger)
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> The WP Weekly's Black Friday Deals page is live (The WP Weekly)
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> LayerWP's Ben Townsend has launched Project Giving Black, a BFCM campaign inviting businesses to donate to charities (LayerWP)
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Classifieds
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Want to get your brand in front of the most influential people in the WordPress ecosystem?
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Meanwhile...
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🎙️ Nathan Wrigley and Rae Morey unpack an "uneventful 3 months" on their quarterly podcast, What Just Happened? (WP Builds)
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🕴️ Ever wished you had a business card handy? Gravatar's got you covered (Gravatar)
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🎓 rtCamp's latest group of 20 trainees were selected from 1,300 interviews and 72,000 registrations (rtCamp)
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🤖 DocsBot AI creator Aaron Edwards on his entrepreneurial pivot to AI and his "build-in-public" approach (Do the Woo)
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🎁 WP Mayor is celebrating 14 years with a $4,000 birthday giveaway (WP Mayor)
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📝 Kinsta's Roger Williams recommends aiming to create at least 50 pieces of content before worrying about analytics and optimization (The WP Minute+)
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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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