Happy weekend! It's January 11 and the drama continues. We're covering Matt Mullenweg's challenge to Joost de Valk, Automattic's reduced contributions, the WordPress 6.8 squad, the WordPress Sustainability Team's dissolution, and Patchstack's rejection.

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THIS WEEK'S HEADLINES

1. Matt Mullenweg pushes back on Joost de Valk's bold plan for WordPress leadership


WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has made it clear he's not interested in ceding control of the open source project, today challenging Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi to fork the project in his own post about breaking the status quo.

After de Valk called for an end to Mullenweg's reign as WordPress's BDFL leader on December 20, Mullenweg said it was a "great idea" for de Valk to lead a different project under a different name. "There's really no way to accomplish everything you want without starting with a fresh slate from a trademark, branding, and people point of view," Mullenweg commented on de Valk's proposal.

Read the full story: Joost de Valk's Bold Plan for WordPress Leadership Faces Mullenweg's Resistance

Mullenweg has said many times that he plans to work on WordPress for the rest of his life, most recently during last month's State of the Word.

While de Valk's proposal has drawn wide-ranging support from contributors and business leaders across the WordPress ecosystem, many prominent voices have remained quiet.

de Valk told The Repository that many people had been in touch — both publicly and privately — to back him. "We're of course very happy to see that, and will use that momentum in the coming weeks to get working on the idea of Federated and Independent Repositories," he said. "We'd still love to work with everyone in the community on making it better for all of us."

Meanwhile, 10up founder Jake Goldman praised the efforts of contributors doing the "quieter, less grandstanding work of continuing to organize and move releases forward." He said it was "tiresome" seeing social attention dominated by community members who hadn't released meaningful open source software in years.

2. Automattic cuts WordPress contributions to match WP Engine


Automattic is significantly scaling back its contributions to WordPress, matching WP Engine's 45 pledged hours to the open source project for the duration of their legal dispute.

Read the full story: Automattic Scales Back WordPress Contributions to Match WP Engine Amid Legal Battle

The move means Dotorg, the company's division dedicated to the WordPress project, is effectively and temporarily shutting down while employees are redeployed to work on Automattic's for-profit projects. As of January 1, 2025, the division employed 104 people who contributed 3,539 hours per week as part of Five for the Future.

Some of those who've updated their WordPress.org profiles to show reduced hours include WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard (5 hours), Gutenberg's technical manager Héctor Prieto (1 hour), Community Team rep Isotta Peira (1 hour), Lead Developer Dion Hulse (1 hour), Community Team Program Manager Hari Shanker (1 hour), marketing rep Nicholas Garofalo (2 hours), and Anne McCarthy (no hours).

Automattic's announcement prompted a burst of activity in Post Status Slack where Yoast founder Joost de Valk said he was ready and willing to lead the next releases of WordPress. Several business owners and developers committed their teams and resources to help, while WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg reposted a tweet poking fun at de Valk.

Meanwhile, on the WordPress Community Team blog, Weglot-sponsored contributor Juan Hernando, posting on behalf of several non-Automattic Program Managers, reassured event organizers that the team was still available to support upcoming events.

3. WordPress 6.8 release team announced


WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg is set to lead the smallest release team since WordPress 5.7. The WordPress 6.8 squad, timeline and focus were published today, revealing just 10 people have been called up to join the team.

Mullenweg will serve as Release Lead, a role he traditionally takes on. 10up's Jeffrey Paul and StellarWP's Michelle Frechette will handle Coordination as part of a joint role merging release coordination and marketing. Joe McGill (10up), Jonathan Desrosiers (Bluehost) and George Mamadashvili (GoDaddy) will serve as Tech Leads. Whodunit's Jb Audras will handle triage, Tammie Lister will lead design, Google's Felix Arntz will again lead performance, and Test Team rep Krupa Nanda will serve as Test Lead.

Desrosiers, who stepped in to help assemble the team following Automattic's move to scale back its contributions, said WordPress 6.8 would be a "polish and bug fix" release. He said after evaluating current active initiatives, it was likely fewer features would be ready to ship in the next major release.

WordPress 6.8 is scheduled for general release on April 15, with Beta 1 expected on March 4 and a release candidate on March 25.

Ten people led the WordPress 5.8 release, and before that only nine people were on the 5.7 squad. The number of people on a WordPress release team peaked at 30 people on the 6.3 team.

4. Mullenweg shuts down WordPress Sustainability Team


Members of the fledgling WordPress Sustainability Team have been left reeling after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg abruptly dissolved the team this week—an action veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher described as "bizarrely heinous behavior." She also called Mullenweg a "stone cold asshole."

Read the full story: Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash

Sustainabilty Team rep Nora Ferreirós, whose question during the Q&A at WordCamp Europe 2022 led to the creation of the team's Slack channel, said that despite facing high expectations with few resources, the team did its best to move things forward.

"I don't believe this is actually about ROI or usefulness, but, in my opinion, we succeeded in demonstrating that many people in this community — including those from other teams, projects, or even companies — are concerned about the sustainability of the WordPress project and are willing to collaborate and contribute if given the necessary support (for which I am truly grateful)," Ferreirós said in an email to The Repository.

"All of these people [who are helping to bring sustainbility to WordPress] are still there. And although I haven't yet decided how, they will continue to have my support."

For more on what the team was working on, Nahuai Badiola recorded a podcast featuring all four reps for SustainWP, a podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress.

5. Patchstack: WordCamp Europe 2025 rejection "insulting"


Oliver Sild says the rejection of his security company's sponsorship application for WordCamp Europe 2025 is "insulting" after it was revealed that WordCamp Central turned down Patchstack for not contributing enough to WordPress.

Read the full story: Patchstack Rejected as WordCamp Europe 2025 Sponsor, CEO Calls it "Insulting"

While WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg responded on X, describing the rejection email as "crappy" and promising to look into it, his post wasn't enough to shut down the backlash on social media.

"I can't think of another company that's done as much to – quite literally – protect the WordPress ecosystem and user-base as much as Patchstack has," posted Scale Math founder Alex Panagis.

Patchstack Community Manager Maciek Palmowski reminded folks that the company helped remove over 1,000 vulnerabilities from the WordPress.org repository last October. "And yet... somehow not enough," posted security expert Kathy Zant, who also noted that Patchstack's managed vulnerability disclosure program is free.
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IN OTHER NEWS
→ Good Reads
  • WordPress.org resumed full services on January 4 after the surprise holiday break (The Repository)
  • On Christmas Eve, Matt Mullenweg caused a stir on Reddit when he asked folks for ideas to fuel his WordPress drama in 2025 (WP Tavern)
  • Nick Hamze, Automattic's former Chief Swag Officer, called for "more weirdness" in theme design (The Repository)
  • WordPress Community Team celebrated a beautiful DEIB moment on stage at WordCamp Sylhet after it was uploaded to WordPress.tv (Making WordPress Slack)
  • WebTNG.com's David McCan's 2025 predictions include an LLM in WordPress core for translation and a page builder revival led by Divi 5 and Etch (WebTNG)
  • Podcaster Matt Medeiros predicts Automattic will continue ripping off the Band-Aid and the community will decentralize in 2025 (The WP Minute)
  • Podcaster Brian Coords' wish for WordPress in 2025 is a clearly defined roadmap that's effecuted effectively (briancoords.com)
→ WordPress Project
  • Polyglot Eleni Stergatou named first Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship recipient to attend WordCamp Europe 2025 (The Repository)
  • WordPress Community Team is inviting organizers to host events on International Women's Day (WP Tavern)
  • Plugin Review Team reviewed 7,382 plugins and approved 2,983 plugins in 2024 while detecting more issues (Make WordPress Plugins)
  • In 2024, Themes Team reviewed 1,926 themes and approved 1,566, including 549 block themes (Make WordPress Themes)
  • Plugin Check plugin will soon include updates made by plugin authors to plugins already in the WordPress.org directory (Make WordPress Plugins)
  • WordPress Hosting Team welcomed new reps Zunaid Amin, an engineer at Rocket.Net, and Lucas Radke, a product manager at WordPress VIP (Make WordPress Hosting)
  • WordPress Themes Team reps Alexandru Cosmin (sponsored by Extend Themes), Ganga Kafle (sponsored by Rank Math) and Shiva Shanker Bhatta (founder and CEO of AF Themes) staying on for another year (WP Tavern)
  • Automattic's Justin Tadlock published the latest guide to what's new for developers (WordPress Developer Blog)
  • WordPress.org's Matrix server is shutting down (Make WordPress)
→ Business, Enterprise & Products

    • Automattic showcased the website it built for noma, one of the world's most famous restaurants (Automattic)
    • Progress Planner's new pro version features interactive challenges, with live webinar scheduled for January 30 (Progress Planner)
    • The Newsletter Glue team teased its new event plugin, EventKoi (X)
    • SEO consultant Jono Alderson launched Edge Images, a plugin that applies performance optimizations to <img> markup (Plugin Directory)
    • WordPress.com's free and open source Studio app now syncs directly with its hosting platform (WordPress.com)
    • Developer Robert DeVore released a script developers can use to prevent their plugins being used by WordPress.com hosted websites (Robert DeVore)
    → Security
    • GiveWP users urged to update to the latest version following disclosure of an unauthenticated PHP Object Injection vulnerability (Patchstack)
    • A high severity Unauthenticated PHP Object Injection disclosed in UpdraftPlus: WP Backup & Migration plugin (Wordfence)
    • The WordPress Popular Posts plugin is vulnerable to arbitrary shortcode execution in all versions up to, and including, 7.1.0 (Wordfence)
    → Events & Awards
    • ACF Pro again won The WP Awards, with WooCommerce, Elementor, Wordfence and The Admin Bar making up the top five (The WP Weekly)
    • ColorCode, a one-day conference, coming to Buffalo, NY, on May 3 (X)
    • WordCamp Europe 2025 released tickets and launched a diversity scholarship. Call for speakers also open (WP Tavern)
    • WordCamp Asia 2025 organizers Mehr Bala and Dan Tabifranca shared how Filipino culture will feature in the upcoming event, from February 20-22 in Manila, Philippines (Do the Woo)
    → 2024 recaps from contributors, business owners, and agencies
    MEANWHILE...
    🗄️ Adam Zieliński turned WordPress into a markdown editor, git client and git server (Adam's Perspective)

    🍑 Kyle Van Deusen says web developers are assholes (The Admin Bar)

    👀 Mario Peshev marked World Introvert Day (Mario Peshev)

    👑 Micro.blog's Manton Reece's support the "mad king" (manton.org)

    🔨 Taco Verdonschot wants Matt to stop pounding (tacoverdo.com)

    Seth Godin on the magic of the commons (seths.blog)