“My sense is that many enterprise WordPress administrators will think twice about continuing to use the software under these circumstances,” said IDC Research Manager Michele Rosen. “It’s such a shame to watch a leader in the open source community repeatedly sabotage his own project.”

“At this point, I have real concerns about the impact of Matt Mullenweg’s words and actions on the overall image of open source software,” she added. “Even if he feels that WP Engine’s actions are unethical and the court is wrong, his actions are clearly having an impact on the WordPress ecosystem, including his own business. It seems self-destructive.”

  • @[email protected]
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    9 hours ago

    It’s like I heard the voices of thousands of cheap businesses owners who refuse to pay for a website domain cry out … …and then were silenced

  • @[email protected]
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    821 day ago

    I always find it funny how WordPress somehow believes they aren’t just lucky that their EXTREMELY shitty software was useful at the time. It shows how power makes people think they have value.

    • @[email protected]
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      1812 hours ago

      I have tried it out like once every decade and it’s always the same hot mess and I end up making my own homegrown html mess.

      Is there no other FOSS alternative?

      • @[email protected]
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        11 hour ago

        I’ve been looking into Payload CMS. It’s FOSS for the non Enterprise features I believe.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 hours ago

        I build Craft CMS sites at work. It’s a paid product, but has a free version with some minor limitations and is open source. It’s fantastic.

      • @[email protected]
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        2112 hours ago

        WordPress started out as a terrible hack PHP app and somehow while PHP the language has been improving to allow people to build sane apps, WordPress has somehow gone the other direction to make themselves EVEN MORE INSANE.

        It used to be you could make a custom styled theme by taking the default theme and editing the HTML/CSS to customize the pages.

        The current default themes use the most insane methods known to webdev. They replaced CSS with JSON files. And then use CSS embedded in JSON embedded in HTML comments inside of PHP files. It’s completely incomprehensible.

      • @loopedcandle
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        310 hours ago

        Every once in a while I go looking for FOSS alternates to WordPress . . .can’t find one. Ghost is the closest I got and it’s nowhere near the same.

    • Amon
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      712 hours ago

      Wordpress is overpowered for most blogs, it is underpowered for most web apps.

      • @[email protected]
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        410 hours ago

        Which is why I’m a Drupal fan. It’s wayyyy too overpowered for every purpose equally. …If I need a personal blog, there’s always Jekyll.

  • @[email protected]
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    22 hours ago

    Just a friendly reminder to anyone looking for free website hosting that dozens of Public Access Unix Systems exist and would love to have you as new members.

    Almost all of them offer free membership that comes with web hosting, email, and other useful services. Some like SDF and midnight pub come with web browser interfaces allowing easy access to non-geeky users. Some pubnixes do have a small barrier to entry in which you may need to learn how to navigate a conputer through command line terminal.

    https://sdf.org/?signup

    https://tildeverse.org/members/

    https://midnight.pub/

    https://envs.net

    https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/cdg.thegonz.net/infrastructure/hosting/ (this last one is a really large repository for all known pubnixes that also allow for gemini capsule hosting, most of them also have regular https/webpage hosting options as well.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 hours ago

      I’ve looked at SDF before, and one thing has never changed: I have no idea what I’m looking at or how it works, and the more I look the more esoteric it seems.

    • azl
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      1213 hours ago

      We also have a Lemmy instance!

    • @[email protected]
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      101 day ago

      Ooo I’m gonna use that to make a bio page. I was really considering spending $40+ a yr on a website host

      • @[email protected]
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        18 hours ago

        Yeah you don’t need to spend $40 a year just for a bio page anyway, that’s nearly as much as the lowest end shared tier of a Hetzner VPS, which should be enough to host your website and instances of some of your favourite self-hostable services.

        For a simple static website, there are several free options, most of them being free tiers of paid services. Some even let you set up automation pipelines to rebuild the site when the source gets changed (if you set up something like a git repo with markdown files, to be ingested by a static site generator that turns your markdown into a website, for an example).

        On the topic of this post in general, not your issue in particular: The average blog never needed to be dynamic anyway. Static site is always going to load faster than a bunch of PHP being run in the server and there’s soooo much less attack surface!

        • @[email protected]
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          624 hours ago

          “$40 yr” was short for ‘$40 a year’
          which is still too much considering how I literally just want a bio because the charicter limit is annoying

  • Snot Flickerman
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    1 day ago

    The internet is fragmenting and healing. It was never supposed to be so centralized.

    • The Quuuuuill
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      461 day ago

      it’s still frustrating how much is being lost though from our collective knowledge, especially with the dismantling of the internet archive. web 2.0 was definitively a mistake, and it’s one that almost everyone fell for

      • bobalot
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        231 day ago

        The old internet was the peak.

        Mostly static Web pages and thousands of BBS forums was the greatest.

      • Rimu
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        13 hours ago

        They eventually say that, yeah. But only after first saying a bunch of other misleading stuff.

  • @[email protected]
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    511 day ago

    This could also spark the creation of an alternative hub to wordpress.org, one that would be truly operated in the interest of the [open source] community.

    I really hope so.

    The current one bans most plugin forks, it’s a bit of farce to prop up freemium plugins.

    • m-p{3}
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      61 day ago

      It would be nice to have the ability to host a third-party repository. We do it for Linux, F-Droid, etc why not Wordpress?

    • mesamune
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      71 day ago

      Composer + other hosting is a much better spot in my opinion.

  • mesamune
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    421 day ago

    Wow this might be an end of an era. Crazy. The wp community has been around for a large part of my stay on the Internet. Wild.

  • @[email protected]
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    271 day ago

    Matt never ceases to amaze with his smoothbrain decisions.

    The amount of effort this moron puts into his weird personal vendetta against WP engine, even after the court told him that he has nothing, which was actually his last chance to end this kinda gracefully, could’ve been used for so much better things.

    And he’s not only successfully kicking himself in the balls, he’s willing to throw so many years of community and project time and effort under the bus for it.

    Go on Matt, keep telling how much you’re only doing this for WordPress.

  • @[email protected]
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    271 day ago

    How long until some organization forks the project and everybody switches to it?

    With all the plugins etc. it might take a while, but once a critical mass is reached it would put an end to this idiocy.

  • @[email protected]
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    121 day ago

    Well, I fully expect him to step on his dick, but I did not expect him to also kick himself in the balls while doing so.

    Congrats Matt, rarely are my expectations of dumb behavior exceeded so spectacularly!

  • dinckel
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    61 day ago

    Things like WP prove yet another time, that investing into a proper product is better, than cutting corners. If you need a website, hire an engineer. It will be yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. There are plenty of CMS options too.

    • @loopedcandle
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      210 hours ago

      I run WP on a dreamhost account. I do it costing zero dollars and am an amateur (haven’t really coded in 20+ years). I do it for my kid’s parent teacher org. There is some value in DIY/cheap.

    • @[email protected]
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      518 hours ago

      I was there when “The Web” became available to the drooling masses. Nothing brought me more work in digital media than “easy tools” that blow up if one screw isn’t turned just right.

  • @[email protected]
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    41 day ago

    Summary: he can’t take his ball but he’s going home.

    Prediction: WP Engine will open hosting of plugin source projects.

    And discuss.