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Happy Friday! It's December 13 and we're covering calls for governance reform, WP Engine's injunction win, Automattic's AI acquisition, the State of the Word, and more.
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1. WordPress Contributors and Community Leaders Call for Governance Reform in Rare Open Letter
A group of WordPress contributors, including long-time core committers and community leaders, has called for changes to how the open-source project is governed. The group is urging co-founder Matt Mullenweg to work with the community instead of continuing to act unilaterally as a benevolent dictator for life.
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In an open letter titled "Dear WordPress community: We stand with you," the contributors object to Mullenweg's consolidation of power, the ongoing lack of transparency in project decision-making, and the opaque handling of trademark licensing and hosting recommendations. They also object to Mullenweg's control over all WordPress infrastructure.
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The group provided The Repository with first access to the letter. To protect the signatories—who fear retaliation if named publicly—their identities and roles have not been disclosed publicly. The Repository has verified each of the 19 signatories (and counting) in the group, which comprises senior and influential figures across the WordPress project and community.
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"We believe there has been a major breakdown in trust between Matt Mullenweg and the WordPress community stemming from actions he's taken since WordCamp US 2024," the letter states. It adds, "the volatility of the self-governing BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) model has become clearer than ever."
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The letter comes amid Mullenweg's ongoing legal battle with WP Engine and Tuesday's preliminary injunction.
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2. WP Engine Wins Injunction Against Automattic as Mullenweg Exits Post Status Slack in Protest
404 Media's Samantha Cole also covered the story, reporting that Mullenweg "rage quit" Post Status Slack. Several hours after Post Status members had finished discussing the preliminary injunction, Mullenweg posted, "It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to [sic] working on WordPress after this. I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine." He added, "I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted" before asking Post Status leadership to delete his account and all personal information.
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On X, Mullenweg reshared developer Brian Essig's post: "This is actually bullshit. Agree with him or not, the court is forcing an open source maintainer into providing services to a user. What's next, a company finds a bug and a court orders a maintainer to fix it?"
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Mullenweg also reshared a supportive post by OSS Capital's Joseph Jacks, who said, "Important case to follow. I stand fully with Automattic. Requiring open source projects to act in ANY specific way is unconstitutional and violates free speech."
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Conversely, Gergely Orosz, who writes The Pragmatic Engineer, didn't mince his words, posting on X, "The sad story of how Automattic became the villain they painted WP Engine to be. A judge delivers swift justice for WP Engine - and more embarrassment for Automattic. What was the point of Automattic damaging WordPress and themselves - all for nothing?"
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Meanwhile, Automattic and Mullenweg have started complying with the court's orders. The WP Engine Tracker website has been updated to remove the domains.csv files. So far, 28,180 domains have left WP Engine since September 21.
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And in related news, WordPress VIP's CEO Nick Gernert reassured customers and partners that the enterprise host's platform remains unaffected by the legal battle.
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3. Automattic Buys WPAI to Integrate AI Solutions Into WordPress
As part of the deal, WPAI's team—James LePage, Greg Hunt, and Ovidiu "Ovi" Galatan—will join Automattic to "integrate AI into the WordPress ecosystem, creating groundbreaking tools for users and developers," according a post on X.
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CodeWP and AgentWP are set to be discontinued, with their underlying technology repurposed for new Automattic products, according to WPAI's announcement.
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On LinkedIn, LePage thanked WPAI's supporters, posting, "A massive thank you to our early adopters for their belief and feedback; our users and developers for challenging and supporting us; our investors for fueling our vision; our amazing team for their dedication and creativity; and the industry leaders and mentors who kept us moving in the right direction 💚"
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4. State of the Word heads to Tokyo with panel on WordPress's future in Japan and beyond
Unlike previous years, the event will feature a panel discussion, "The Future of WordPress in Japan and Beyond," exploring what's next for WordPress in Japan and how its innovations and cultural insights could shape the platform's global future. Panellists include Mullenweg, mgn CEO Hajime Ogushi, and Genki Taniguchi, the Director of Hosting at Sakura Internet.
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It's the second time the State of the Word will be hosted outside of North America. Last year's event was held in Madrid, Spain.
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- The Meta and Design teams have launched new designs for Make WordPress and the Photos Directory. This refresh is part of an ongoing effort to establish a consistent design language across WordPress .org (Make WordPress.org | Make WordPress.org)
- Openverse now features a dark mode (Make Openverse)
- WordPress 6.7 featured 23 performance-related improvements but experienced modest regressions for block themes, including a ~3.5% increase in Largest Contentful Pain (LCP), according to a Performance Team report. The team is working to address these issues in the upcoming 6.8 release (Make WordPress Core)
- The latest update on the WordPress Developer Blog covers style book improvements, new block editor rendering filters, WordPress Playground PR testers, stabilized experimental support keys, DataViews and DataForm updates, and changes to core blocks like Query Loop and Social Link (WordPress Developer Blog)
- In the final Developer Hours session of 2024, Automattic-sponsored contributors Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher will cover everything you need to know about WordPress Playground, including tools, workflows and using Playground for testing and support (Meetup)
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- Luehrsen // Heinrich CEO Hendrik Luehrsen critiques WordPress's shift away from its lean, extensible core to bundling in niche features, which he argues disrupts its modular philosophy, undercuts the plugin ecosystem, and risks alienating its developers and users. He calls for a return to WordPress's foundational values through strategies like canonical plugins to maintain flexibility and sustainability (KrautPress)
- Responding to Luehrsen's critique, Emilia Capital's Joost de Valk analyzes WordPress's stagnant market share, growing competition from SaaS platforms like Shopify and Wix, and challenges like technical stagnation, security concerns, and usability issues. de Valk calls for clearer direction, enhanced core APIs, a unified admin UI, and prioritizing modularity to address evolving user needs while maintaining WordPress's flexibility and community-driven ethos (joost.blog)
- Greyd developer Jessica Lyschik was victorious in her battle with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg during last Friday's WordPress Speed Build Challenge. Mullenweg showed frustration with alignment, padding and border on his site, admitting he would never have found some options "in a million years." (WP Tavern)
- Podcaster Bud Kraus has launched "How I Met BobWP ❤️" a tribute to the podcasting legend and wrangler of Do the Woo (howimetbobwp.blog)
- Fränk Klein from WP Development Courses says WordPress is becoming an "up-market solution." Writing about the challenges and opportunities for WordPress projects in 2025, he writes ,"Rather than being the one platform to power everything web-related for businesses, [WordPress] will exist alongside other specialized, best-in-class tools." (WP Development Courses)
- Core Days 2024, held in Rome, Italy, last month, included hands-on demonstrations focused on advanced developer topics, speed networking, and a workshop on Data Views. Greyd developer Jessica Lyschik tied with YITH's Francesco Grasso in a WordPress Speed Build Challenge (YITH) | Tammie Lister and Elementor's Miriam Schwab discuss their experiences at Core Days 2024 (Do the Woo)
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- WooCommerce is working to make its core plugin 100% WCAG-compliant by June 2025, in line with the European Accessibility Act. The eCommerce platform has partnered with 10Up and Equalize Digital to address accessibility issues, with a conformance report planned to demonstrate compliance with WCAG and European standards (Do the Woo)
- Gravatar has partnered with Identity Digital Inc. and Nova Registry to offer free domain names for one year (LinkedIn)
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→ Plugins, Products & Themes
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- Developer Robert DeVore has been on a roll releasing new plugins recently, this month dropping Bluesky Feed for WordPress® and Stats for WordPress®, in addition to a bunch of other free plugins last month (Robert DeVore)
- Elegant Themes has released a fifth public alpha ahead of its upcoming Divi 5 release (Elegant Themes)
- WP Engine has released dynamic plugin loading for its eCommerce customers, allowing plugins to be optimized to load on a page-by-page basis rather than having all active plugins load on every page (WP Engine)
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- Awesome Motive has patched a payment refund and subscription cancellation vulnerability in its popular WPForms plugin, which has over 6 million active installations. Researcher villu164 reported the security flaw to Wordfence's Bug Bounty program and received $2,376.00 for their discovery (Wordfence)
- Patchstack is running a "Santa's Challenge" bug bounty program until December 17 focused on XSS, CSRF, arbitrary file download, privilege escalation, and sensitive data exposure vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes (X)
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- Voting in The WP Awards has been extended to December 20 (The WP Weekly)
- This year's Monster's Awards have been announced across 25 categories recognising the best WordPress products (Template Monster)
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Put your brand in front of the WordPress community and support independent journalism.
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🗣 Ten excellent publishing talks from WordCamp US 2024, including Disney and Pew Research Center (PublishPress)
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🦋 Can Bluesky hold onto its positive vibe? The WordPress community hopes to make it work (The WP Minute)
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⚡ Matt Mullenweg has been knocked out of the first round of "The Worst Person in Tech" (Google Forms)
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🎙️ ActivityPub creator Matthias Pfefferle is joining Do the Woo as a new host (Do the Woo)
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❄️ WordPress.com users can add falling snow to their blogs websites (WordPress .com)
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👀 Matt Medeiros says Webflow's evolution from a niche design tool to a fully-fledged platform is something to watch closely (The WP Minute)
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