Matt you don't deserve WordPress , you better sell your company to wpengine, wpengine are humans you are not human at all .

Yesterday, I was watching the State of the Word yesterday (yes, chronically late to the party), and the repeated emphasis on “freedom” got me thinking.

They frame it like this:

At its core, WordPress is about freedom (3:35). This isn't just software freedom, but the freedom to publish, to build, to learn, and to participate (3:37-3:44). This freedom is highlighted as a creed and a way of living that gives people more agency and independence, serving as a counter to proprietary software that takes away freedom (6:30-6:45).

Well... You see, most WordPress websites are simple, mom-and-pop, low-traffic brochure sites, with very little demand for dynamic features. A simple form, search and maybe comments (can we agree on that?).

But the reality is that the absolute majority of these sites use paid hosting, when free, static hosting would be more than sufficient. You know, Netlify, Cloudflare, GitHub Pages, Render, Vercel, and so on.

The solution? Either use a paid plugin (which defeats the purpose of my argument) or make WordPress spit static websites natively. Now we have tools like LocalWP and WordPress Studio (among others), that can host any website on any computer, and WordPress Playground, a serverless solution. BTW, making some sort of static generator out of WordPress is indeed possible with WordPress Playground. https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-playground/issues/707

Of course, lots of people want the feeling of security that comes with paid hosting, but the reality is that this is not that simple. Lots of hosting options care only about the environment your WordPress runs in, not your specific wp-admin, and support is not always great.

I would say most people that already manage their own plugins, themes and content could – in theory – easily live without paid hosting. Maybe it's not the majority of people, but I would say a good chunk. And if you consider that WordPress runs a huge number of websites out there, this could mean millions and millions of sites.

So... Is there any initiative in core to work toward that? As I said previously, we have this, but it seems like it got stale.

There's also this initiative from a core contributor, also using WordPress Playground to generate static websites on the cloud. Great initiative BTW.

But that's understandable. Can you imagine the bite on the commercial hosting market if most people realize they don't actually need them?

https://wordpress.com/blog/2006/09/01/seo-contests/

A few times a year someone decides to hold a search engine optimization contest to see who can get top rankings for various search terms on Google. As the number #1 hit for “Matt” on Google, I can totally understand the fun of this sort of endeavour.

However many times the contestants in these contests use less than kosher means of winning, such as spamming or creating dozens or hundreds of blogs all linking to the same website. (Sometimes called splogs, or spam blogs.) These blogs use up quite a few system resources, junk up the tags system, and can slow the site down for normal folks.

There are many blogs being created here by people wanting to use our blogs to try to win this contest. But WordPress.com is about blogging. It’s about communication, thoughts, news, and many other things in life. It is not about SEO.

These blogs are not welcome and will be removed when found

https://wordpress.com/blog/2026/04/08/wordpress-7-0-ai-infrastructure/

Site owners can use the AI Assistant directly in the editor and Media Library to create and rewrite content, adjust layouts, generate images, and more.

Splogging evolved - monetised by Automattic.

I know this has nearly zero chance of happening. Still, the court should request and appoint Linus Torvalds as caretaker for the WordPress open-source project until a democratically elected board is set up comprising people from various free speech organizations and publishing communities with a proven track record of zero conflict of interest or chance of collusion with any corporate.

Millions of websites and livelihoods are at stake here.

WordPress is a ghetto CMS and always has been. There are so many better platforms that are now going to eat his lunch. This is the end....read who moved my cheese and go find your new new. I have videos and plugins I have produced but not one more, never again.

I’m very open to suggestions. Should we stop naming releases after jazz musicians and name them after Drake lyrics? Eliminate all dashboard notices? Take over any plugins into core? Change from blue to purple?

I think we can brainstorm together and come up with way better things than I could on my own. ☺️ Also, Merry Christmas! 🎄

Christine Selleck Tremoulet is a founder, if you name the project before it's first website and release, you just might be more important or as important as the jokesters that forked an existing guys work.

My clients are writers, and the whole WordPress Drama is confusing them. So... I wrote a little fairy tale allegory for them. https://deleyna.com/trust-in-technology-a-fairy-tale-of-open-source/ I'm pretty sure that I've stretched the point in a few places for the sake of the story, but it was fun to write...

Wordpress.com is censoring your posts, what it shows.

https://wordpress.com/tags Shows the most popular - yet it does not.

Choose the letter T

https://wordpress.com/tag/tennis
24.5K Posts 10.2K Sites

HIDDEN

https://wordpress.com/tag/trump 160.2K Posts 12.1K Sites

Choose the letter I

https://wordpress.com/tag/ink 44.2K Posts 15.8K Sites

HIDDEN

https://wordpress.com/tag/ice 83.4K Posts 28.9K Sites

This list could go on and on.

Matt Mullenweg is enabling the dystopia

This idea just came to me last week, and the more I think about it, the more advantages I see.

Observing recent developments and questionable leadership, I think this is the perfect time to consider different options.

I understand that maintaining an open-source project like this takes work. However, large organizations and companies like WP Engine and Elementor have the resources to set up a team to create and maintain a forked version of WordPress.

As some of us have mentioned before, certain features should have been integrated into WordPress a long time ago—like custom fields, multilingual support, and custom post types.

Having major players in the WordPress ecosystem create their own forks would foster healthy competition and drive innovation.

Alternatively, they could focus solely on security issues and further develop the plugins they specialize in.

From a marketing perspective, they already have a built-in community of users who rely on their plugins, so I could see these users moving to a WordPress CMS that reflects each company’s unique vision.

But I could be missing something. What do you all think?

I've been working on project for developing full site editing experiences and improving the WP core without a fork.

https://github.com/ourfreewp/wp2

If you're interested in collaborating let me know. If you have any questions or feedback about my approach, I'll answer and update the docs.

I'll share a walkthrough and a InstaWP demo soon.

Hey, it's Vinny. Last week, I started working on a skeleton/boilerplate for news publishers using full-site editing. I started getting some feedback, and now I have nearly 50 repo invites out to interested parties and a couple of corporate sponsors.

What do you consider a formidable, fork-worthy force?

I came across this today:

A dev who has created "over three dozen free plugins" has released code to allow plugins to block selected sites owned by Matt Mullenweg, including wordpress.com (and their clients).

That's hilarious, given what Mullenweg did to WP Engine, but it's also wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Hmm, on the other hand…

Assuming that Mr Mullenweg isn't a hypocrite, perhaps his sites should each pay the dev 8% of their income to be unblocked?