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Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg recently made headlines by announcing the deactivation of several WordPress.org community members’ accounts, citing their involvement in planning a new fork of the open-source WordPress project. This move comes amidst ongoing criticism of WordPress’s governance, with key figures like Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi proposing ideas for a new era of WordPress.
In response to the controversy, Automattic revealed a reduction in its core WordPress contributions, prompting de Valk to express interest in leading the next WordPress release. However, Mullenweg decided to deactivate their accounts to give their independent efforts a push, encouraging others to align with WP Engine’s new initiative instead. This decision also affected three other individuals, including Sé Reed and Heather Burns, raising questions about accountability and governance within the WordPress community.
Despite the account deactivations, the possibility of forking the WordPress project remains open, allowing users to access the code on GitHub and explore alternative leadership models. Mullenweg even jokingly suggested the name “JKPress” for any potential fork, hinting at a possible collaboration in the future.
“Joost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I’m genuinely curious to see how they work out,” Mullenweg added. “The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation.”
This post was updated to provide clarification that de Valk and Marucchi didn’t say they planned a fork, instead it’s about creating “mirrors” for the plugins and themes repositories, while also offering to lead on the next release of WordPress. This post was further updated to clarify that, at the time of writing, de Valk’s WordPress.org account is still active.
