WordCamp Drama: Is WP Engine A “Cancer”?

Well, as last week drew to a close, the WordPress community got all hot and bothered over some comments by Matt Mullenweg (the titular founder of WordPress) that took place at Wordcamp.

So, I gotta talk about that. It isn’t the first time he sparked something…. and it probably won’t be the last.

So, let’s just dive in, shall we?

Featured This Week

Should You Offer A Lifetime Membership To Your Membership Site? Don’t Make These Mistakes…

Offering a lifetime subscription to a membership is seen as a way to increase sales, but is it a good idea? When can you use a lifetime membership, and when it is a REALLY bad idea?

Matt Mullenweg Attacks WP Engine

Last week, the big WordPress US event took place in Portland, Oregon. I was originally going to go. Changed my mind and decided not to go about two weeks beforehand. And frankly, I’m kinda glad I didn’t bother.

The last evening, I happened to be sitting on my couch at home. I picked up my phone to check out X. And I noticed a lot of chatter on the event hashtag talking about Matt Mullenweg’s keynote. Some said it was “dark”. That it ruined the mood of WordCamp.

If you don’t know, Matt Mullenweg is known as the original founder and developer of WordPress. He started the WordPress project and founded Automattic. So, in a lot of ways, Matt is kind of the figurehead of the WordPress community.

But, he has opinions. And he came right out and bashed WP Engine over the head. In fact, bashing WP Engine was practically the entire point of his talk at the end. You can watch the video on Youtube here. He even followed up with a blog post on the official WordPress.org blog where he was calling out WP Engine.

What’s his beef?

He says WP Engine doesn’t spend enough time coding (for free) and contributing back to the WordPress core project. Basically, he says WP Engine uses WordPress and doesn’t give back. That it started doing this after a private equity firm called Silver Lake (with $102 billion under management) bought WP Engine and has been working on maximizing profits solely.

In fact, Matt even says they’ve tracked the slowdown in growth of WordPress to an increase in this kind of activity. Big private equity firms come in and profit off the WordPress community and don’t (he says) prioritize contributing back to the community.

For it’s part, WP Engine responded with a blog post which highlights how they do feel they are contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem.

So, is Matt right?

A couple years ago, he basically said the same thing about Godaddy. He called Godaddy a parasitic company on the WordPress space. Now, he’s basically calling WP Engine a cancer on the WordPress space.

Ironically, Godaddy and WP Engine were both top sponsors of Wordcamp. So… yeah. ‍♂️

Now, a few thoughts from me…

I do think Matt’s overall point has some validity, but I don’t think the way he does it is very good and I think it hurts the community overall.

In fact, I think there’s an argument to be made that he does this stuff out of a way to attack a competitor. After all, WordPress.com and Automattic host WordPress, too. WP Engine is technically a competitor.

Not only that, sometimes his points of attacks are just stupid. For instance, on WP Engine…

• He says WP Engine is actively trying to make people think they ARE WordPress. Has anybody (except his mom, apparently) ever thought that? I don’t see how anybody could think WP Engine is part of official WordPress.
• He is attacking WP Engine for limiting post revisions. Again, this just feels like he is attacking a competitor to me. He doesn’t have to like it. Plus, every WordPress performance plugin on the market does the same thing. For a reason.
• He specifically pointed out Bluehost as an example of a “good” host and it is recommended on the official WordPress site. But, Bluehost is one of the worst hosts out there, if you ask me. So, they’re going to openly attack WP Engine and steer people into a really bad host?
• WP Engine was a MAJOR sponsor of Wordcamp. They also acquired Advanced Custom Fields and improved it substantially and this is a plugin I use constantly. Some even think it should be part of WordPress core. They’ve been involved in numerous other efforts as well, including Local which is used by a ton of WP developers. Point is, contributing back to WordPress core is not the only way to help the WordPress community.

So, I think Matt was short-sighted to go after WP Engine specifically in this way.

I am not a massive fan of WP Engine. There are certainly better hosts. It is overpriced. It is money-hungry. But, I’d say the same thing about Kinsta, too, and I don’t see Matt attacking them. So, why WP Engine?

In the end, this is not the first time that Matt has injected his personal opinions into things and, I believe, hurt the overall WordPress community. His role in the community is important for helping drive the overall direction. But, in my opinion, attacking specific companies – especially with points that don’t take into account a full picture – is not the way to do it.

And frankly, Matt shouldn’t be using WordPress.org for his personal rants.

And let’s just ignore that WordPress.com is literally a web host. Not even a very good one, either. And they charge money to install plugins… and quite literally cause market confusion because people end up thinking that IS WordPress. So, his point about WP Engine is stupid on many levels.

More below…

This Week In Concierge

One big thing that came up last week for a client serves as a big reminder for everybody.

This client tried to take care of a small matter with regard to his WooCommerce store, so he went out and found himself a code snippet. You know, there are libraries of various pre-written code snippets out there to do various things with WordPress. You can just copy/paste this code into your favorite snippets manager and tweak how your site works.

Thing is…

Sometimes these code snippets are gloriously flawed.

In this instance, he was using this snippet to try to ban one specific email address. And if it was that email, it would clear the cart. The funny thing is, this snippet was labeled as “AI Verified”. Yet, the code was 100% wrong and ended up breaking the client’s store by clearing everybody’s cart. So, nobody could buy anything at all.

Here’s the exact code snippet if you wanna see for yourself. Verified by AI and everything. But, any coder can see the problem. The bot probably only checked for syntax errors, but not that the code actually functioned.

So, this client contacts me with an urgent problem, of course. And not knowing what was going on, I went into research mode and ended up spending 2-3 hours on this issue…. all to find out it was all due to a buggy code snippet that was “AI Verified”.

The lesson…

• People assume that AI is automatically smart. But, it isn’t. There’s nothing “intelligent” about it. And these days, people toss it around like a buzzword. You still need to know what you’re doing! You cannot blindly trust AI.
• You gotta be careful with code snippets. They’re awesome, but they do have the power to break your site pretty spectacularly if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

For my Concierge clients, I keep a library of code snippets handy here that I can bust out when needed. Also, I actually do know how to code PHP. I don’t wanna admit it sometimes, but I do. Which means, I can create code and spot bugs with it. And help keep my clients’ sites purring.

Nobody wants a busy membership site or their WooCommerce store having problems. Especially ones that affect sales. Concierge helps keep those kinds of sites crankin’. These videos are on the new Client Information section of the account dashboard.

WordPress Quick Bits

Free WooCommerce Course. Looks like Craylor Academy has launched a new, free course on building a Woo store from scratch with Kadence Theme. Looks like it is sponsored by WP Engine, so I expect that to be the hosting recommended. Also, don’t tell Matt.

New WooCommerce UI Option. A new tool called StoreUI has launched. It is a SaaS tool (which means third-party, hosted) that gives a new management experience to your WooCommerce store. Looks interesting, although really likely only suitable for people running pretty large stores with a ton of products.

Hostinger brags about their AI bot. Hostinger has launched Kodee, their new “AI Assistant”. I mean, it may speed up support. However, bragging about outsourcing your client support to a bot seems pretty… interesting.

30 Niche Themes Tested. Martin Dubovic took it upon himself to test out 30 different niche themes. These are pre-designed themes marketed for specific purposes (i.e. travel blogs) and sold in big marketplaces, typically. And he concluded “the entire category was riddled with junk.”. No surprise there. Personally, I think buying themes like this is a relic of the past now. I just pick a solid platform such as Kadence and turn it into anything I please.

Elementor Gets Floating Bars. If you’re using Elementor page builder, the new 3.24 release includes the ability to easily design floating bars for calls to action across your site. 30 different designs and use of the rules engine to determine where it goes. Read more about the 3.24 update here.

WP Social Ninja 3.14. This plugin got an update which includes GDPR-ready feeds for Facebook and TikTok. This includes locally saving images from those feeds. For embedding social media feeds onto your site, this plugin continues to be my “go to” option. Read more about this update.

Wordcamp Video Recordings. If you want to see recordings of the sessions from Wordcamp US in Portland, they’ve posted all of it into a Youtube Playlist.

WordPress And The Open Source Religion

This is a newsletter for people who use WordPress to make money. We use WordPress as a platform on which to build our businesses, our membership sites… and to power our online goals.

It is AWESOME for that.

The largest reason that WordPress is as big as it is is because of that freedom to do with it what you want. That freedom has sparked a very large economy of theme developers, plugin developers, web hosts, service providers and much more.

If it wasn’t for all of those people and companies, WordPress would be nothing. It would be like Drupal. Some free content management system only used by a few nerds and die-hards.

It is the WordPress economy that makes it big. It is the only reason anybody cares.

So, when the titular founder of WordPress comes out and specifically attacks it as he did last week, I think it does a lot of harm.

It is almost as if he has a religion of open source…. and he was attacking WP Engine for not giving the proper level of sacrifice to the core “gods”.

The irony of the whole thing is that the entire ethos of the GPL software license that WordPress uses is specifically to… do whatever you want. It says you can run it for any reason, change how it works, redistribute it freely.

Nowhere does it state that, if you are making good money off it, you need to dedicate an “appropriate” amount of time donating developer hours back to the WordPress core project. That is a BELIEF of Matt Mullenweg, apparently. But, that’s all it is…. a belief.

This open source religion, like other religions, has it’s different interpretations. People who follow it at different levels, and in different ways. And sometimes they argue with one another. Sometimes they do things differently and don’t see eye to eye. It says right on the WordPress website that it is supposed to be “welcoming and inclusive”.

But, is it always? Perhaps not. Not even by it’s founder.

WordPress is what it is because of all of the people and companies working in this ecosystem. Frankly, whether they directly contribute to the core codebase or not, they all serve their role in this ecosystem. And there are SO many contributions to this ecosystem that don’t involve direct contributions to WordPress core. And, again, core would be nothing if not for those other contributions.

Sometimes, I do feel as if that superpower of the WordPress ecosystem gets adversely affected by political beliefs. As if there’s an anti-capitalist bent to some of them. And that’s unfortunate. Because, it is because of all of that capitalism and competition and people seeking to make money with WordPress…. that we’re even here talking about it.

The good thing, though, is that WordPress is way bigger than it’s original founder. He’ll probably continue to spark some drama from time to time. And people like me and numerous others will be here to talk about it. That’s also part of what makes WordPress awesome.

But, MAYBE… just maybe… Matt shouldn’t get up on stage and call the biggest contributor to their main US event a “cancer”. You know… just a little advice there.

Did you like this issue? Consider sharing the opt-in page on social media to help it grow.
And feel free to forward it on to somebody you think will benefit from it.

The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.