Pressed

The preliminary injunction against WordPress wasn’t exactly much of a surprise when it was announced. You know how people say, “Don’t hold your breath?” I was able to hold my breath when following this one. (That said, whew,)

Months after WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg decided to spark a public squabble with WP Engine over its business practices, a federal judge ruled that Mullenweg’s high-profile attempts to sabotage a competitor needed to be rolled back.

(The messy details, including ample tweet and Slack screenshots, are over on CourtListener.)

The moves that blocked WP Engine from WordPress’ servers? They have to be reverted. The decision by WordPress to take over the popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin from WP Engine? They gotta roll that back. The infamous loyalty checkbox? That must be no more. All the people kicked out of the community Slacks? Let ’em back in.

At least on paper, the norms before that fateful WordCamp speech that created this ongoing drama-bomb have to be put back together. There’s still going to be a trial, of course, but federal judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin seems very much swayed by WP Engine’s case. And based on this comment, the biggest issue in her eyes (and honestly, anyone with eyes who isn’t tied to Mullenweg) was the collateral damage Mullenweg’s moves created:

Those who have relied on the WordPress’s stability, and the continuity of support from for-fee service providers who have built businesses around WordPress, should not have to suffer the uncertainty, losses, and increased costs of doing business attendant to the parties’ current dispute.

But the frayed relationships are unlikely to be easily fixed. After all, Mullenweg burned a lot of bridges on his way to resetting the WordPress project’s norms. And signs are strong that he isn’t taking the preliminary injunction well—he apparently left a prominent third-party WordPress community in a huff.

Last night, Mullenweg wrote this on X, a platform I no longer use:

I’m disgusted and sickened by being legally forced to provide free labor and services to @wpengine, a dangerous precedent that should chill every open source maintainer. While I disagree with the court’s decision, I've fully complied with its order. You can see most changes on the site. They have access to ACF slug but haven’t changed it … must not have been the emergency they claimed.

Mullenweg’s anger about this situation, well-documented at this point, is rooted in the private equity ownership of WP Engine and how he felt it would threaten to damage the open-source community his company had built. And to be clear, the people who own the platforms we rely on? That is a real issue. The idea that a large company can undermine an open-source project? Point to Mullenweg. He has reasons to be nervous.

But I don’t think that’s really what’s been happening here. I think the concern, if we’re really being honest, reflects frustration that Mullenweg has struggled to make Automattic into the firm that WP Engine has become—the first choice for businesses and agencies looking to get a site online. His actions since September—which, mind you, included building a website promoting the number of WP Engine users that had left that platform—have only come to underline that. And despite his claims otherwise, his actions have clearly spoken in the other direction.

So, now we’re in this awkward position where Automattic has to serve this company that its boss clearly does not want to serve, because he has forgotten that his open-source platform ultimately serves users. Mullenweg has publicly used his corporate goodwill and personal capital to demean and downgrade this firm in nearly every way possible. It doesn’t feel like a sustainable situation, does it?

With all that in mind, I don’t think this ruling really changes the dynamic at play here, other than to reset specific things in the ecosystem. Mullenweg hasn’t apologized to the community for the disruption he caused, and customers are still caught in the middle of an extremely tense situation not of their own making.

If anything, things are now worse. But on the plus side, competing platforms have taken steps to make the transition easier for those who want to move elsewhere. In the nearly two months since I posted my piece about CMS alternatives, platforms like Directus and Craft CMS have improved their migration offerings, making the move to another platform a little easier to manage. I honestly think that competing CMS platforms saw this moment as an opportunity to promote the stability and flexibility of their respective tools.

And the fact that it’s essentially the result of one guy pushing things too far is honestly the worst part.

If nothing else, I think this situation will at least push companies out of leaning quite so hard on a single approach to putting content on the internet. The CMS space is extremely diverse. Users of CMS platforms should better reflect that.