WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has again taken to WordPress.org to falsely claim community members have forked WordPress, this time also announcing plans to deactivate the accounts of five past and present contributors who’ve called for governance reforms within the project.
Last October, Mullenweg posted on WordPress.org that “forking is beautiful” and he was “very proud to announce” that former Snopes COO Vinny Green had started a WordPress fork called FreeWP.
“We strongly encourage anyone who disagrees with the direction WordPress is headed in to join up with Vinny and create an amazing fork of WordPress. Viva FreeWP!” Mullenweg wrote.
Green clarified on X that he had not forked WordPress, posting, “I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear.”
On Saturday, Mullenweg alleged that Yoast founder Joost de Valk and Crowd Favorite CEO Karim Marucchi had also forked WordPress. In a blog post laced with sarcasm, he belittled de Valk and Marucchi’s experience and contributions to WordPress, calling their supposed fork “JKPress,” and announcing he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts to “make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground.”
“Joost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I’m genuinely curious to see how they work out. The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things,” Mullenweg said.
“If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation.”
He also wryly suggested that a joint WordPress and JKPress summit could be held in a year’s time, “giving us a true chance to try something different and see how it goes.”
Last month, de Valk called for an end to Mullenweg’s BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) leadership of WordPress, declaring that Mullenweg was “no longer benevolent.” A major component of de Valk’s plan for a “new era” of WordPress is the creation of federated and independent repositories to decentralize plugin and theme hosting, allowing for alternative hosting outside of WordPress.org. de Valk’s proposal was backed by Marucchi, who also published a plan to support business continuity in the WordPress ecosystem.
Following Mullenweg’s post, de Valk clarified on X, “Let’s be clear: Karim and I asked for and proposed change inside the #WordPress project. *We* did not talk about a fork.” Marucchi posted a similar message on X, while de Valk added in Post Status Slack: “I think that if a fork ends up happening, we literally all lose. The question is, does that loss become less big than just keeping on doing what we’re doing.”

Since Mullenweg’s feud with WP Engine went public last September — prompting WP Engine to launch legal action — there have been renewed calls for change in how WordPress is governed. de Valk’s push is the boldest yet, as many in the WordPress community remain silent or speak out anonymously for fear of repercussions.
Last month, 20 veteran core committers and contributors published an open letter calling on Mullenweg to propose “community-minded” solutions to address their objections to how WordPress was governed. In November, core committers and contributors also voiced concerns about a “culture of fear” driven by Mullenweg’s “outsized control” and the potentially career-ending consequences of opposing him.
Mullenweg’s blog post on Friday also announced that he was deactivating WordPress.org accounts belonging to Sé Reed, Morten Rand-Hendriksen, and Heather Burns, though it’s unclear why he included them as they are not currently collaborating with de Valk or Marucchi on any projects.
Rand-Hendriksen, now a Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning, and Burns, a UK technology policy consultant, left the WordPress project in 2019 over their objections to its governance model and leadership structure.
In December 2018, Rand-Hendriksen launched the WordPress Governance Project during his session at WordCamp US. Members of the project met regularly during 2019 but when it became clear that WordPress leadership would never officially support the project, it stalled. Rand-Hendriksen and his co-founder, Rachel Cherry, eventually abandoned the project.
On Bluesky, Rand-Hendriksen suggested that Mullenweg was targeting him and Burns due to their past objections to WordPress governance: “So why is he targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, and other things back in 2017. We both left the project in 2019, and apparently he still holds a grudge.”
Burns took to X to express her surprise at having her account canceled, posting that she hadn’t logged into WordPress.org since February 2020. In a blog post laden with colorful language, she further criticized Mullenweg, accusing him of harassment.
“So I can’t believe that I have to say this: but no, I am not planning a fork of WordPress. No, I am not conspiring to plan a fork of WordPress. No, I am not in contact, never mind conspiratorial cahoots, with any of the other people cited in the blog post. No, I am not a member of or contributor to the WordPress project, in any way, nor have I been for just days short of five years now, and yesterday was the perfect demonstration of why,” wrote Burns.
While Burns is no longer involved in the WordPress project, her most recent public interaction with Mullenweg was last October over a blog post she wrote about two women who are suing Mullenweg and his investment firm, Audrey Capital, over alleged wrongful termination and sexual harassment.
Meanwhile, Reed previously led the WordPress Marketing Team and is now President and CEO of the newly incorporated non-profit WP Community Collective. While it’s unclear why Mullenweg targeted Reed in his blog post, there’s been longstanding tension between them.
In September 2023, Reed filed a WordPress code of conduct violation report against Mullenweg, alleging that he bullied and harassed her during confrontations with WordPress leadership over concerns that WordPress.com plugin listings were outranking those on WordPress.org in Google Search results. The WordPress Community Team investigated and upheld Reed’s claims and, in January 2024, asked Mullenweg to publicly apologize to Reed. In October, after waiting for Mullenweg’s apology, Reed publicly shared the community team’s findings on X, prompting him to apologize, albeit without context.
Yesterday, Reed posted a thread on X about why she believes the majority of people in the WordPress community don’t want it to fork.
“WordPress, and its community, stands out because it is truly more than the sum of its parts. We (collectively) give much more than we take. THAT is why the majority of the people in the WordPress community don’t want to fork,” she said. “Because it is ours. We all made it. Together.”
de Valk, Marruchi, Rand-Hendriksen, Burns, and Reed join an unknown number of other WordPress contributors, including WordPress REST API creator Ryan McCue, who have been banned from WordPress.org in recent months for speaking out about WordPress governance. Account deactivation means users can no longer contribute to conversations on WordPress.org, manage any plugins or themes they own, or participate in Making WordPress Slack.
Mullenweg has publicly supported the idea of a WordPress fork, including during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt last October. The most successful WordPress fork to date is ClassicPress, a project originally developed to exclude Gutenberg. It’s run under a non-profit organization called the ClassicPress Initiative and has a board of directors. Director Viktor Nagornyy has previously said the project was established to counter WordPress’s lack of community-driven governance.
Feature image credit: Chris Clarke, WordCamp Europe 2019, CC BY-SA 2.0, no changes made.
Updated, 15 January 2024: Clarified that Heather Burns wasn’t a member of the WordPress Governance Project and that harassment directed at her didn’t just happen at WordCamp Europe 2018. Also clarified that Mullenweg announced plans to deactive five WordPress.org accounts but has only deactivated Reed and Burns’s accounts.