WordPress Drama Explained (and How it May Affect Your Website)

It’s weird to receive texts like “is this WordPress drama crazy or is it being blown out of proportion”.

In the 15 years of running WPBeginner, I never thought I would have to write a blog post covering any WordPress industry drama. My focus with the blog has always been to provide high quality free WordPress tutorials for non-techy beginner users and small business owners.

But unfortunately, we are at a point where a lot of misinformation and fear is being spread about WordPress by media outlets and influencers who’re hungry for clicks.

This is causing panic among some website owners, agencies, as well as people in enterprise companies. Some folks are asking questions like whether WordPress is still safe and should they search for an alternative CMS option for their websites.

In this post, I want to explain what this latest WordPress drama is about, who it impacts, and what you can do to protect your websites. 

TLDR: No, this is NOT the end of WordPress, and your websites are safe.

With that out of the way, let’s jump right into what’s happening around this WordPress drama involving WP Engine vs. Automattic.

What is This WordPress Drama All About? (Short Summary)

Quick Summary: There is a lawsuit between two WordPress companies (WP Engine and Automattic) around a trademark dispute. Due to their influence, there have been escalations that have led to a lot of negative PR for the WordPress ecosystem. The vast majority of WordPress sites are NOT impacted by this at all.

This whole thing started because two big companies in the WordPress industry are in a legal battle over a trademark dispute.

Automattic is a company started by WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. They are the creators of WooCommerce, WordPress.com hosting service, Jetpack plugin, and more.

WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting company owned by a large private equity firm Silver Lake.

Automattic has the exclusive commercial rights to use the “WordPress” trademark. They asked WP Engine to negotiate a licensing agreement which involved either payments to Automattic OR increased contributions to the free open source WordPress project.

Because the parties failed to come to an agreement, Matt publicized the dispute at the annual WordCamp US conference, where he claimed that WP Engine, despite being a $400M+ revenue company, does not give back enough to the free open source WordPress project.

As things escalated, both companies sent each other a formal legal Cease and Desist (C&D) letter. Due to the legal threats, Matt, as co-founder of WordPress, banned WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org servers.

This meant that any customer with websites on WP Engine hosting were no longer able to receive updates from WordPress.org servers.

The ban was later reverted temporarily to protect users and allow WP Engine to build their own update servers. Since WordPress is open source, the WP Engine team was able to build their own updater to ensure users on their hosting platform can get software updates.

The server block officially went back into effect on October 1st. Shortly after, WP Engine filed a federal lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg.

Due to the escalation, WP Engine’s team were banned from accessing their WordPress.org accounts. This means the WP Engine team is no longer able to release updates to their WordPress plugins from the official WordPress.org servers.

One of the plugins owned by WP Engine is Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) which is popular among developers and used by over 2 million websites. To ensure security updates are available to all users, the WordPress.org team forked the ACF plugin, renamed it to Secure Custom Fields (SCF), and took over the original ACF plugin directory page without the consent of WP Engine. The reasons given for this were to maintain and provide updates to users who were unaware of the drama. 

This decision was not well received and garnered a lot of negative comments from developers, influencers, and press outlets.

At the time of writing this post, all other WP Engine plugins are still available for download on the WordPress.org plugin directory, however, the WP Engine team is still banned, so they are not able to use WordPress.org servers to issue updates.

In summary, at the root of this WordPress drama is a heated legal trademark dispute between WP Engine hosting company, Automattic, and Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress). 

Since there is a federal lawsuit filed by WP Engine against Automattic, I believe only the courts can decide the outcome unless the parties come to an amicable resolution outside of the courts. The official WordPress Twitter account tweeted that the situation could be resolved under the following conditions:

Is this the End of WordPress?

The answer is NO. Absolutely not.

WordPress powers over 43% of websites on the internet, and it’s bigger than any one person or company. The vast majority of small business owners and users of WordPress don’t even know about this ongoing drama because it simply doesn’t impact them.

I talked with a local small business owner who’s my personal trainer, and he wasn’t aware of the negative press around WordPress at all. When I briefly told him about it, here is what he said:

“I am not going to switch from WordPress because some big companies are having a trademark dispute. What matters to me is that my website is working and my business is growing.” – Sean Nelson, Founder of Hustle Training 360.

The reality is that the WordPress software you built your website with hasn’t changed.

If you’re using popular plugins like Elementor, WPForms, WooCommerce, AIOSEO, Duplicator and literally 60,000+ others, they are still the same.

Something as big as WordPress simply doesn’t end because two companies have a trademark dispute. 

In the grand scheme of things, there are a small portion of users who are impacted, and I will share how you can find out if your website is impacted, and what you can do about it.  

Is My Website Affected by All of This?

The vast majority of users and websites using WordPress are NOT impacted by this legal dispute between Automattic and WP Engine.

If you are using a free plugin that was developed by WP Engine, and you are NOT on their hosting platform, then your websites are impacted because you will not be able to receive updates for those free plugins from WordPress.org.

Here are the popular free plugins built by WP Engine that are blocked from sending updates from WordPress.org servers:

• Advanced Custom Fields
• Nitropack
• Better Search Replace
• WP Migrate Lite
• WP Offload SES Lite
• Frost
• Genesis Blocks
• Genesis Custom Blocks
• For the full list, see plugins built by WP Engine.

What Can You Do to Protect Your WordPress Site?

As I said earlier, if you’re not using the plugins made by WP Engine, then you don’t need to do anything.

Your WordPress site is safe and good to go. 

Although, I always recommend having regular WordPress backups and using a firewall like Cloudflare (see more WordPress security tips).

Now, if you’re using the plugins built by WP Engine, then you will need to either install the WP Engine updater plugin to continue receiving updates or find an alternative, depending on your personal preference.

What Should I Do as a WordPress Agency with Concerned clients?

You can send them a link to this blog post and re-assure them that WordPress is still safe and by far the best open source CMS option in the market.

A legal trademark dispute between two companies does NOT change the fact that WordPress powers 43% of all websites (and growing). There are 60,000+ free WordPress plugins and thousands of free WordPress themes available in the market that make it easy to build any type of website they want.

WordPress core development progress continues, and WordPress 6.7 is coming soon.

Here are some more insights on WordPress market share and trends.

My Final Thoughts

Despite everything that’s going on right now, I still love WordPress, and I believe in our amazing WordPress community.

I have spent more than half of my life in the WordPress community, and I will continue to do everything in my power to support the community and our users. See my recent post on contributing to the WordPress ecosystem.

Lastly, I truly hope that the two respected companies involved in the lawsuit can come to an agreement soon, so we can all focus on growing WordPress and helping democratize publishing & commerce across the world.

As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner, and I look forward to continuing serving you for years to come.

Yours Truly,

Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

References: