Support Inclusion in Tech (SiNC) has announced the expansion of its grant program to now include applicants from North and South America. SiNC was proposed by Winstina Hughes in 2022 to mitigate the financial stress of underrepresented groups seeking to participate in WordPress events and was first tried in WordCamp US 2022. 

Originally launched in June 2024 to honor Pride Month, the Grant program offers four grants of $240 USD each, to individuals across Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and South America.

“We believe that a truly inclusive WordPress community requires a global perspective,” said Winstina Hughes, founder of Support Inclusion in Tech. “By expanding our grant program, we are taking a significant step towards ensuring that everyone, regardless of their geographic location, has the opportunity to contribute and thrive within the WordPress ecosystem.”

Eligible applicants include those who have contributed to the WordPress community through local meetups, WordCamps, or code contributions. Starting January 2025, applicants can choose to be included in a public directory, with grant selections to follow in March 2025 via a random name picker.

The WP Community Collective has announced that it has incorporated as a California membership nonprofit for mutual benefit. Sé Reed, President & CEO of WPCC, shared, “A lot is said about (and to) the #WordPress community. But for the most part, the community has been spoken for and not had a voice of its own. That’s why we founded @thewpcc.” 

The organization is also finalizing its designation as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization, a federal classification that defines it as an association with a common business interest. This will provide WPCC with greater flexibility in projects and funding. 

WPCC is also planning to create a charitable nonprofit subsidiary. This subsidiary will focus on supporting important projects like the Accessibility Fellowship and efforts to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in the WordPress community. 

Membership in WPCC is now open to individuals with a minimum contribution of $5. Members should adhere to the organization’s Code of Conduct and Conflict of Interest policy. In addition, WPCC plans to introduce membership tiers for businesses and organizations, along with scholarship memberships, in early 2025. They also launched a dedicated Slack instance for its members. 

Earlier this year, the WPCC faced a challenge when its fiscal host, the Open Collective Foundation (OCF), dissolved unexpectedly. As a result, the WPCC had to move its funds to a temporary host. Unfortunately, those funds cannot be used for the new nonprofit structure, but the organization remains focused on moving forward. They are working on new initiatives and building partnerships to expand opportunities for contributors around the world.

The WPCC is committed to being transparent with its finances. You can support the organization by making a contribution here.

When Inc Magazine reached out to have David H. Freedman (website powered by WordPress) write a feature piece I was excited because though Inc wasn’t a magazine I have read much since I was a teenager, David seemed like a legit journalist who usually writes for better publications like The Atlantic. I opened up to David with a number of vulnerable stories, and allowed the photo shoot in my home in Houston.

Whether it was him or his editors, unfortunately the piece has turned out pretty biased and negative, even to the point of cherry-picking negative photos from the photo shoot they did in my home. It also has a number of basic errors which make me question the fact-checking and editorial integrity of Inc in the first place. Let’s go through it.

Although they have dozens of photos of me smiling, it starts with one where I look pretty morose. At least I got some Sonny Rollins and Audrey Hepburn in the background.

The article starts with a conversation David had with me while we were both in the bathroom, away from his recorder, where he remarked that the bathroom was really nice. I talked about visiting Google in 2004 when I first came to San Francisco and thinking they had cheap toilet paper, and how given that Automattic’s offices are barely used there’s no reason not to spend a few extra bucks on nice soap and toilet paper to give a better experience to employees and visitors. (For those curious, we use Aesop soap and Who Gives A Crap toilet paper, a brand that donates 50% of profits to charity.) I chose these brands because it’s what I use in my home, and I want people in our offices to have the same quality. David spins it thusly:

I ask him who at Automattic, the estimated $710-million company of which Mullenweg is CEO, is responsible for toilet paper and soap quality control?

“Me,” he says, beaming. 

Of course, Mullenweg’s control of Automattic extends well beyond the bathroom walls.

Now you know how the rest of the piece is going to go! Factual errors mixed with bias. First, no credible business publication would put Automattic’s valuation at $710 million, our last Series E primary round was at $7.5 billion. That was 2021 and we’d probably trade closer to $5B now with current multiples, but still the article is an order-of-magnitude off.

David asked if there was a person responsible for choosing toiletries: of course not! We have better things to work on. The entire thing took probably 30 seconds of my time, from going to the bathroom in our New York office to sending a Slack message, and I haven’t thought about it since until David commented about our bathrooms being nice, while we were both in the bathroom and I was washing my hands. Okay, back to the article.

And it all began when Mullenweg got very annoyed, very publicly, at a $400 million company called WP Engine. 

Once again, Inc is unable to distinguish between revenue and valuation.

On September 25, more than 1.5 million websites around the world suddenly lost the ability to make some routine software updates.

First, WP Engine doesn’t host 1.5 million WordPress sites. This was easily checked on our website WordPressEngineTracker.com, which as best we can tell from crawling the web, looking at domain registrations and public data from BuiltWith and W3Techs, they probably had ~745k sites on September 25th, so the second number in the piece is off by 2x. Second, those sites could still do software updates using WP Engine’s tools or by uploading new versions, it was just the connectivity between WP Engine’s datacenters and WordPress.org’s that was impacted for a few days.

WP Engine had royally pissed off Matt Mullenweg for not contributing enough to the open-source community, in his opinion. Mullenweg claims he had been in negotiations with WP Engine for months to get them to cough up their fair share one way or another, but finally decided the company had dragged its feet for too long, leading him to break off talks and go public with his ire.

No, the negotiations, and what they were doing wrong, was abuse of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. I also think it’s lame how little they’re involved in the software their entire business is built on and their ability to serve customers was dependent on free server resources and bandwidth from WordPress.org, but our negotiations were about trademark use.

Mullenweg controls the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit that oversees WordPress’s open-source software, the website that serves as the gateway to WordPress resources, and the WordPress trademark.

False, false, false. First, I do not control the WordPress Foundation. I am one of three board members, so by definition am not in control. The other two board members could remove me at any time. Second, the Foundation does not oversee the core software, or the WordPress.org website! This is super clear in WPE’s legal filings, in the about pages of the respective websites, by talking to anyone who understands this. Really shoddy journalism.

The nearly 1,700 employees—a number that reflects the more than 150 who have left in the past few months—are scattered officeless across 90 countries.

As you can see on our about page, Automattic has 1,750 employees, not “nearly 1,700.”

In person, Mullenweg comes off as surprisingly chill when we meet on October 22, given all the angry online noise and employee turmoil surrounding the WP Engine beef for the past three weeks. He is a young-looking, animated 40 with a near-constant grin, and his neat beard and shawl-collar cardigan sweater contribute to his laid-back air.

I’m quoting this just to show they would occasionally say something nice before twisting the knife or going back into inaccuracies. A “near-constant grin” they couldn’t capture in photos.

Two days later, a comment popped up under the post from a U.K. coder named Mike Little: Would he like some help? 

Three obsessive days later, Mullenweg released the results and followed a friend’s advice to name it WordPress— only after checking to make sure the domain names WordPress.com and WordPress.org were available. This domain ownership would prove critical.

It’s true that Mike Little commented a few days after my blog post in January 2003, but WordPress’ first release wasn’t until May 27^th, 2003. Not “three obsessive days later.” This fact could have been easily verified by digging deep into obscure sources like the Wikipedia entry for WordPress.

Though there are different versions of open-source licenses, the general idea is that anyone can freely download and use the software, and anyone can modify it as they see fit, and then release it as their own version. But the original developer of the fork retains the trademark rights. And when it comes to WordPress, the rights belong to Mullenweg. 

I’m not sure where to start… The WordPress trademark doesn’t belong to Mullenweg, it belongs to the WordPress Foundation. David has clearly not been able to figure things out at this point. But again, this is easily checked by looking at the WordPress trademark on the USPTO site.

A 2020 study commissioned by WP Engine calculated the value of all business driven by WordPress to be $600 billion, and growing rapidly. No one gets a bigger piece of that pie than Automattic.

Okay, now after saying Automattic is worth $710M and WP Engine is worth $400M, you’re now breathlessly quoting WPE’s PR slop claiming the WP ecosystem is $600B (it’s not, probably closer to $10-15B/yr) and then immediately pivot into saying that Automattic gets the biggest piece of that pie, something clearly not true based on our revenue versus everyone else in the ecosystem.

Mullenweg had another complaint: WP Engine was violating Automattic’s trademark rights over the WordPress name, based on the fact that WP Engine freely used the abbreviation “WP,” and that “WordPress” appeared throughout their website.

I’m quoting this just to point out how bad the quality control is at Inc Magazine: the link for “another complaint” doesn’t work, it has the code <a href="http://@photomatt">another complaint</a>. They can’t even make sure all the links work in their published articles! I presume this was trying to refer to a tweet of mine, but no one reading the article will be able to know what it was. I would like to know, because our trademark complaint had nothing to do with “WP”, it was about the use of “WordPress” and “WooCommerce.”

Inc Magazine already runs on WordPress, though they use a needlessly complex and expensive custom front-end instead of just serving the site natively. Maybe in their next re-architecture they can take the money they save by getting rid of their lame headless implementation and put it towards fact-checkers and better editors.

Whenever Mullenweg is accused of being too controlling, he often points out he turned over control of WordPress software to a non-profit called the WordPress Foundation. He created the Foundation in 2010, and did indeed assign it all WordPress rights.

I have never said that, and it’s not even factually accurate or possible for me to assign all WordPress rights.

But few people who have looked at the Foundation take its independence seriously. Mullenweg is chairman of its three-person board. Little is known about the other two members, and their names don’t appear anywhere on the Foundation’s website.

The names of the other directors do appear on the Foundation website, for example in this October 17 blog post that says “WordPress Foundation Directors: Mark Ghosh, Matt Mullenweg, and Chele Chiavacci Farley.”

Now the article includes a picture of me at the computer, and out of the hundreds they have with my eyes open, they for some reason chose this one where my eyes were closed.

Like most theme vendors in the early years of that small sub-industry, it sold its themes under a proprietary—that is, non-open-source—license. But in 2008, Mullenweg cleaned house of all theme vendors who refused to switch to an open-source license. Only Thesis held out.

In response, Mullenweg offered to pay Thesis users to switch. He also reportedly paid $100,000 to acquire the domain name “Thesis.com” from a third party and had the name direct to an Automattic blog about theme design.

Themes in WordPress are linked and integrated in a way that the GPL license applies to the PHP code, so if you publish and distribute a WordPress theme the PHP needs to be GPL. There has only been one person to dispute this, Chris Pearson from Thesis, no lawyer or the thousands of successful themes since then have tried to violate the GPL license. Chris is a clown, and the only source for saying that 100k was paid for the Thesis.com domain, I will say now that the domain was bought for a small fraction of that. Again, no fact checking or citing sources.

Thesis eventually gave in. But many in the WordPress community were put off by what they saw as Mullenweg’s vindictive, bullying behavior, and some eventually even left WordPress for other publishing platforms because of it. 

It’s funny to talk about the last big controversy in WordPress world being in 2010, I think it actually speaks to our stability. Since 2010, when “some eventually even left WordPress”, the platform has grown market share from under 10% to 43%. I think in a few years we’ll look back at WP Engine as inconsequential as Thesis, and Heather Brunner as credible as Chris Pearson.

Some are leaving WordPress entirely. Cernak of Northstar Digital Design has already decided to abandon WordPress (and WP Engine) for a much smaller, rival website-development platform called WebFlow. “I can’t depend on WordPress if Matt is going to make changes based on whatever he happens to want at the time,” he says.

Wow, they found one person leaving WordPress for Webflow. Is that cherry-picked, or a trend? Again, you can go to third parties like W3Techs to see the relative market share, and see that we’ve gained share since September and Webflow has been flat. Northstar Digital Design “is a creative agency specializing in digital marketing, blockchain technology, web development & design” with 5 followers on X/Twitter. Their website lists no clients or portfolio. It’s unclear how many sites they are responsible for. But this Cernak character is quoted like he’s some authority or representative of a trend. Maybe he’s more credible on blockchain technology.

When I ask Mullenweg if he is feeling traumatized by the pervasive criticism, he tells me about the time he was playing in a Little League game when his teammates saw, through his thin white pants, that his underwear had cartoon characters on them. “They started laughing. That was traumatic for me. But now it’s a funny story,” he recalls. “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.” 

Whether or not anything about the current crisis ever seems funny to him, he insists it will all end up as a beneficial experience. “The best things come out of adversity and clashes,” he says. “We’re going to come out of it way stronger.”

This is a true story, I was very open and vulnerable with the journalist.

In a prepared statement emailed to Inc., a WP Engine spokesperson said that “we are encouraged by and supportive of the ideas we see being shared by leaders within WordPress and adjacent open-source platforms to reimagine how key elements of the WordPress ecosystem are governed and funded….” It is a clear plug for pushing Mullenweg out of his BDFLship.

Oh finally, WP Engine talks to the press after months of avoiding interviews and conferences. This is a great statement given WP Engine can barely fund and govern itself, much less the broader WordPress ecosystem, and I doubt the broader WordPress hosting ecosystem would prefer Silver Lake and WP Engine holding the reigns of WordPress.

There’s more slop in the article but I’m not going to go through everything. I know a lot of entrepreneurs follow me and I don’t want your takeaway to be “don’t talk to journalists” or “don’t engage with mainstream media.” When Inc reached out I thought back to when I was a teenager reading Inc and Fast Company, and how those magazines were inspiring to me, I didn’t think as much about their decline in editorial quality and relevance. I read David’s other pieces and thought he had some great insight, but this is a good example of where a decent journalist can’t overcome a crappy editor and quality control. I probably wouldn’t be excited to work with Inc Magazine again while Mike Hofman is in charge as editor-in-chief, he’s clearly overseeing a declining brand. But I will continue to engage with other media, and blog, and tweet, and tell my story directly.

If you’d like to see how much editorial bias can shape a story, I will say that Inc just published a great profile, with flattering photos, of my good friend Stacy Brown-Philpot. When an editor wants to make you look good, they can! If they decide they want to drag you, they can too. Everything in my interactions with David and Inc made it seem this would be a positive piece, so be careful.

We’ll see if Inc Magazine has any journalistic integrity by their updates to the article.

The controversial mandatory pineapple pizza checkbox on WordPress.org’s login form has been made optional. This decision follows a Twitter poll conducted by WordPress.org, in which 81.2% of respondents voted against making the checkbox mandatory. Additionally, 58.3% of respondents declared that pineapple on pizza is not delicious.

The checkbox initially replaced one from October, which required users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise,” before accessing their accounts. This earlier requirement was removed following a court ruling.

Former WordPress Plugin Review Team representative Mika Epstein advocated for the change by opening a Trac ticket to make the “Pineapple is Delicious” checkbox optional. The proposal quickly gained traction, with Matt Mullenweg expressing his support, stating, “I’m supportive of this change.”

Earlier, Matt had expressed his willingness to meet with people to discuss specific proposals and changes, responding to calls for reforms in the governance of the open-source project. The Repository had published an open letter written by a group of WordPress professionals urging Matt to work with the community instead of continuing to act unilaterally.

In response to the change, Jeff Chandler tweeted, “The stupid Pineapple checkbox when logging into WordPress.org is now optional.” CEO of ClikIT Blake Whittle remarked, “Not of any community doing. Only because Matt is supportive of the change on his personal website.” Accessibility Expert Alex Stine added, “Matt said yes, change goes live.”

One Reddit user humorously quipped, “The Pineapple is dead! Long live the Pineapple!”

Earlier, Patricia BT had suggested an alternative in the Make WordPress #community-team Slack channel. She said, “Could the .org login box be changed to something a bit more serious? Maybe something like “I adhere to the Community Code of Conduct” so everyone is following the code. I understand the pizza joke and I am relieved that the legal implications of the previous one are gone (see my concerns about legal implications on my blog), but the WordPress community must look a bit more serious and not have newcomers scratching their heads… We are the community and people (meetup attendees, end-users, customers, etc) ask us (who are more involved here) about what is happening and they need trust.”

Dion Hulse of Automattic also chimed in. He said, “Rather than having a checkbox that must be checked every time without thought, it’s probably better to figure out if the policies are in a format that can be linked to / agreed to, and enable that functionality.”

The talented Felix Arntz has given an incredible Christmas gift to the WordPress community with his fast, light, and accessible Snow Fall plugin, which is live on this site and you can install on yours. I hope everyone is having a happy holidays! Search for “snow fall” in your plugin dashboard and install his version, make your site cozy for the holidays.

The latest release of Gutenberg, version 19.9, brings a suite of powerful features, tools, and improvements for WordPress users. From enhancing classic themes with the Style Book to introducing the new Query Total block, here’s everything you need to know about this update.

Style Book Comes to Classic Themes

One of the standout features in Gutenberg 19.9 is the introduction of the Style Book for classic themes. Classic themes that support editor styles (via add_theme_support( 'editor-styles' )) or include a theme.json file now have access to the Style Book under the Appearance > Design > Styles section in the WordPress admin panel.

For classic themes supporting the Style Book, site patterns have been relocated to Appearance > Design > Patterns, consolidating design-related features previously found under Appearance > Patterns.

New Query Total Block

The new Query Total block is designed to enhance the user experience. When used within a Query Loop block, it displays either the total number of results returned by a query or the current range in a set of paginated results.

This feature is particularly useful for improving navigation and providing context to site visitors, making it easier for them to understand the scope of content on your site.

More Highlights and Enhancements

Gutenberg 19.9 also comes with several developer-centric improvements, updates and bug fixes.

• phpMyAdmin in wp-env: Developers can now launch phpMyAdmin in wp-env. This connects automatically to the running MySQL database service, allowing you to inspect and manage your WordPress database during development.
• Resolution Controls for Featured Images: The Cover block now offers resolution controls for featured image backgrounds.
• Inline Reset Button for Colors: An inline reset button has been added to all color controls, enabling users to reset colors for blocks and global styles with a single click.
• Query Block Design Options: Query block patterns have moved from a modal interface to a dropdown menu under the block toolbar’s “Change design” option.
• Set Homepage in Site Editor: Users can now set their homepage directly within the Site Editor. Under the Pages section, select the desired page, open the action menu, and choose “Set as homepage.”

Bug Fixes

Several bug fixes have been addressed in this release:

• Fixed site editor crashes when adding a front-page template and clicking more options.
• Resolved visual alignment regressions in the navigation menu items within the Site Editor.
• Addressed a critical error in the Style Book when blocks were not registered.
• Corrected the List View not updating when switching editor modes.

Gutenberg 19.9 is the last release of 2024.

WP Gives A Hand, a charitable initiative within the WordPress community, uniting businesses to donate a portion of their revenue to support various nonprofit organizations, has turned five. The businesses choose whichever charity they would like to donate to.

Over the past five years, 29 companies have collectively raised more than $52,000, benefiting 19 different charitable organizations.

In 2023, 16 participants contributed $11,200 to nine diverse charities, supporting causes ranging from climate change mitigation to poverty alleviation.

For the 2024 campaign, participating companies will donate a percentage of their sales between December 23 and 29 to charity. So far, nine companies have joined the movement.

This year’s donations will support World Bicycle Relief, SOS Children’s Villages Latvia, ENPA Mira, Associazione Rinascendo, Sonrisas Canarias, and Fundación Favaloro among other charities.

To get involved, visit wpgivesahand.com.

On the podcast today we have Andrew Palmer.

Andrew’s journey with WordPress started almost two decades ago after transitioning from Joomla. He went on to make significant strides in the community, co-founding Elegant Marketplace and investing in ventures like Atarim and Bertha AI.

In this episode, we talk about the intricacies of working within the WordPress ecosystem, comparing the free and commercial sides. Andrew shares his thoughts on the challenges of financially compensating event contributors and the importance of non-financial contributions, such as time. He discusses the absence of a structured regulatory body in the web development industry, and how he thinks this can impact trust and credibility.

We discuss the lack of industry-wide accreditation in web development and the controversial nature of establishing such systems within the ever-evolving WordPress environment.

We hear about his personal and business achievements, such as guiding clients to grow their recurring income, sharing successes in SEO, and the positive experiences of community events like Meetups and WordCamps.

As we explore his thoughts on contribution expectations and financial struggles of freelancers, Andrew also touches on the changing nature of the industry with the rise of AI solutions and the long-term utility of WordPress.

Andrew’s reflections on his long career, his plans to pivot towards personal interests, and his intention to remain partially involved in the community, lead to a fun conversation which all seems to boil down to perseverance in a rapidly changing industry.

If you’ve ever thought about the complexities and commercial dynamics of the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Elegant Marketplace

Bertha AI

Milestones – The story of WordPress

Contact Form 7

Gravity Forms

WS Form

Ninja Forms

Divi

Bricks

ZipWP

Kadence WP

GoDaddy Airo

Termageddon

WPLDN

Watchful

PublishPress

InMotion hosting

GoHighLevel

WP Certify

Beaver Builder

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word (SOTW) address today from Tokyo Node Hall in Tokyo, Japan. This marks the second time the event was held outside North America, following last year’s address in Madrid, Spain.

This year’s event spanned three hours, with a special emphasis on Japanese culture. Matt explained, “We’ve gotten so much inspiration over the years from Japanese culture, we wanted to make this event really “of the space,” so we’re doing a few extra things this year. My presentation will include Mary Hubbard and Matías Ventura, but also part of it will be in Japanese and presented by Junko Fukui Nukaga. We’ll have a piano performance by Aiko Takei. After the presentation and Q&A we’ll do a panel in Japanese with Mieko Kawakami, Craig Mod, Hajime Ogushi, and Genki Taniguchi.”

Matt enumerated the WordPress contributions of the Japanese community, mainly Translation, and Wapuu. Japan was the country that made him realize that WordPress was more than a blogging tool, and Kansei engineering fascinates him. 

A Japanese WordPress site was set up in December 2003, just six months after WordPress was launched.  The version originally called “WordPress ME” (WordPress Multilingual Edition) was maintained by a user called Otsukare. Wapuu, the official mascot character of WordPress, was designed by Kazuko Kaneuchi in 2011 and is GPL licensed.

Matt then shared some statistics:

• WordPress now powers 43.6% of the internet and, according to W3Techs, has a 62.3% CMS market share.
• WordPress powers 58.5% of all the websites in Japan and has an 83% market share, which is 31x Shopify, which is only at 2.7%.
• WordPress has surpassed 500M core downloads. 
• English is the most used language (50.8%), followed by Spanish (6.87), German (5.99) and Japanese (5.82%)
• 1,700 new themes were uploaded in the last 12 months, an increase over the 1,400 new themes last year. Of those new themes, over 1,000 of them are block themes.
• WordPress is expected to hit 2.35 billion downloads of plugins this year, which is a 20% year-over-year growth.
• Plugin ecosystem is thriving, with the review queue reduced to zero. After launching the Plugin Check tool, 41% fewer issues were reported per approved plugin and enabled the team to approve 138% more plugins each week.

Gutenberg 

The event also highlighted the progression of Gutenberg, which is entering its third phase focused on collaboration.  Matias Ventura, Gutenberg’s lead architect, discussed upcoming features that will enable users to collaborate directly within the editor, including leaving comments and receiving notifications, similar to Google Docs. 

WordPress is for everyone. So we need to really put our minds together into working out how can it be the best writing tool, the best design tool, the best developer experience. It takes time, it takes effort from the whole community but I think it’s very rewarding.

– Matias Ventura

The team is also working on a ‘Zoom out’ feature. He then talked about Styles, the theme JSON structure, block bindings, query block, the ongoing efforts to address the lack of responsive tools in the editor, and the new Registered Blog Template API, which has simplified the process of registering and managing custom templates.

“We have a lot to go through,” Ventura said, “and we want to approach this one through sort of four lenses, and that is Write, Design, Build, and Develop.”

WordPress Playground

WordPress Playground was another exciting feature discussed. This tool allows WordPress to run instantly on any device without hosting, enabling users to experiment without installations. New updates include support for multiple instances within a single window, the integration of Blueprints (JSON files for setting up your WordPress Playground instance), and a Playground block that embeds WordPress instances within WordPress itself. Mullenweg emphasized that these innovations aim to make WordPress more accessible and powerful while preserving its open-source ethos.

We don’t want to just make things that work. We want to make them beautiful.

– Matt Mullenweg

WordPress & WP Engine

WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard said she hopes to resolve the WP Engine issue equitably. She said, “So like Matt, I believe that when you choose WordPress, you should get WordPress. And that should never be anything that somebody is confused about. And that’s something that I personally believe is worth fighting for and driving my driving force and motivation of taking on this role because we’ve come too far as an open source platform and we should not stand by as it’s being exploited or watered down for the short-term gains of a few at the expense of the long-term needs of the many because WordPress belongs to all of us, us and to our community and that’s what I’m most passionate about.”

She also talked about Learn WordPress which now features structured learning pathways, and Openverse which has expanded to include 884 million images and 4.2 million audio files, nearly 4 million page views this month alone and over 21 million API requests.

WordPress does belong to us all and what we’re doing is taking care of it for the next generation and the next generation is critical to WordPress’s ongoing growth as a platform and making it accessible and frictionless as possible has never been more important.

– Mary Hubbard

Grassroots programs are flourishing and she mentioned two programmes – WP Campus Connect from India and National ICT Innovation Hub from Uganda.

Local Japanese Community

WordPress Community Program Supporter and Team Rep Junko Fukui Nukaga shared the updates on Japan and WordPress. Japanese is now the fourth most used language in the world by WordPress. In October 2024, the Japanese WordPress community celebrated DigitalCube’s IPO on the Tokyo PRO Market. Other notable Japanese businesses include Contact Form 7, HAMWORKS, SAKURA Internter, KOMOJU and Xserver.

Japan is also home to 26 active meetup groups and 11265 community members who hosted 189 local meetups this year. Japan’s contribution to the Core are growing. 

Matt then mentioned the contributions of Aki Hamano, a Core Committer (made 774 contributions to WordPress core with 338 props for 6.7),and Akira Tachibana, an active Docs Team member. 13 Japanese contributors supported 5.4% of WordPress 6.6 development.

Data Liberation

Matt had announced Data Liberation at last year’s State of the Word to be the gold standard of liberation and interoperability. The idea is not just to make WordPress more powerful but to ensure that it’s truly free. It’s the freedom to move content anywhere, to collaborate without barriers or constraints. WordPress Playground plays a critical role in this vision.

“Some people might see 2024 as a year of distractions or attacks from bad actors in the community. But it was really a year of growth and focus where we were able to accelerate so many things that we’re doing. It was also an amazing year of growth in a lot of areas.”, he said.

Q&A Session

The event also had a short Q&A session where Mullenweg fielded questions about the future of blogging, whether the performance plugin of WordPress will be integrated into core, AI-generated content, digital identity, and democratising publishing. 

Matt also congratulated developer Aki Hamano. He then talked about Automattic’s missions – to democratize publishing, democratize commerce (with WooCommerce), and democratize messaging (through Beeper). These three things will keep him busy for life, and he revealed that he’ll work on WordPress for the rest of his life, which he considers to be an honour and privilege. 

Panel Discussions

The event had two panel discussions moderated by Mary Hubbard. The first panel featuring Mieko Kawakami, Craig Mod and Matt explored ‘Publishing in the Open’ while the second panel of Hajime Ogushi, Genki Taniguchi, and Matt discussed ‘The Future of WordPress in Japan and Beyond’. 

The event was live-streamed and is available on WordPress YouTube channel.

On a memorable evening in Tokyo, State of the Word 2024 brought together WordPress enthusiasts from around the world—hundreds in person and millions more online. This event marked the first time State of the Word was hosted in Asia, reflecting the platform’s growing global reach. The setting couldn’t have been more fitting: a city where tradition and technology coexist in seamless harmony. Tokyo, much like WordPress itself, reflects a powerful blend of legacy and innovation, craftsmanship and technology, and moments of vast scale balanced by serene stillness.

During the event, the concept of kansei engineering emerged as a central theme. This Japanese design philosophy seeks to create experiences that go beyond function and aesthetics, focusing on how something feels. As highlighted during the keynote, this principle has quietly influenced WordPress’s development, shaping its design and user experience in ways that resonate on an instinctive level.

The evening also celebrated Japan’s deep-rooted connection to WordPress. Nearly 21 years ago, Japan became the first country to localize WordPress, long before a formal translation framework existed. It all started with a single forum post from a user named Otsukare, launching a translation project that helped WordPress become a truly global platform. Seeing how far the Japanese WordPress community has come—both in market share and cultural influence—was a powerful reminder of what shared purpose can achieve.

Wapuu, WordPress’s beloved mascot, was also born in Japan. What began as a simple idea for a fun and friendly representation of WordPress evolved into a global phenomenon. Thanks to Kazuko Kaneuchi’s generous open-source contribution, Wapuu has been reimagined by WordPress communities worldwide, each version infused with local character. This uniquely Japanese creation has helped make WordPress more welcoming, approachable, and fun wherever it appears.

WordPress Growth in 2024

WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg highlighted significant achievements that underscored WordPress’s growth, resilience, and expanding global presence in 2024. He shared that WordPress now powers 43.6% of all websites globally, with a CMS market share of 62.3%. In Japan, WordPress’s influence is even more pronounced, powering 58.5% of websites and commanding an 83% CMS market share. This remarkable statistic reinforces the platform’s enduring role as a cornerstone of the open web and accentuates Japan’s deep-rooted commitment to the WordPress ecosystem and its developers’ significant contributions.

WordPress sites using languages other than English are expected to surpass English-language sites by 2025. German recently overtook Japanese as the third-most-used language, though Japanese remained close behind. Meanwhile, emerging languages like Farsi experienced rapid adoption, reflecting the platform’s expanding multilingual ecosystem. In Southeast Asia, languages such as Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai saw substantial year-over-year growth, signaling broader adoption across diverse regions.

Core downloads surged to nearly half a billion annually, with the notable releases of WordPress 6.5, 6.6, and 6.7.

WordPress’s design and development ecosystem flourished as well. Over 1,700 new themes were uploaded in 2024, bringing more than 1,000 block themes to the official repository and reflecting increased interest in modern, flexible site design.

The plugin ecosystem also saw record-breaking activity this year. Plugin downloads surged toward 2.35 billion, representing a 20% year-over-year increase. Plugin updates exceeded 3 billion and are on track to surpass 3.5 billion by year’s end. Notably, the Plugin Review Team made transformative improvements, drastically reducing the average review wait time. Their efficiency gains were complemented by the launch of the Plugin Check tool, which reduced submission issues by 41% while enabling the team to approve 138% more plugins each week.

These accomplishments showcase WordPress’s resilience, adaptability, and ever-expanding influence. As the platform continues to evolve, its global community remains at the heart of its success, driving innovation and ensuring that WordPress thrives as the leading tool for building the open web.

Advancing the Platform

WordPress lead architect,  Matías Ventura, highlighted WordPress’s evolution through the lenses of writing, design, building, and development, demoing various pieces of new and forthcoming enhancements.

Writing

The writing experience in WordPress saw notable advancements this year, with an improved distraction-free mode that helps users to focus on content creation without interface distractions. Now you can directly select the image itself to drag and drop it where you want, even enabling on-the-fly gallery creation when you drop images next to each other.

Additionally, the introduction of block-level comments in the editor, currently an experimental feature, promises to reshape collaborative workflows by enabling teams to leave notes directly on blocks.

These enhancements all work together to make writing, composing, and editing in WordPress feel more fluid, personal, and pleasant than ever.

Design

Along with new default theme Twenty Twenty-Five, more than 1,000 block themes offer tailored starting points for different site types, including portfolios, blogs, and business sites. Designers can also utilize the improved Style Book for a comprehensive view of their site’s appearance, ensuring a smooth design process.

Design work isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s also about creating the right environment and guardrails. It’s important that users can interact with their site, add content, replace media, and choose sections without needing to know the layout details. We’re implementing better default experiences to help you focus exclusively on the content or on the design, depending on your needs at the moment. 

This all works seamlessly with the zoom-out view, where users can compose content using patterns without having to set up every individual block. Having a bird’s-eye view of your site can really help you gain a different perspective.

These design capabilities scale with you as your WordPress projects grow. WordPress’s approach to design is systematic: blocks combine to form patterns, patterns form templates, and templates help separate content from presentation.

Building

WordPress’s content management capabilities allow working at scale and across teams. Central to this is the introduction of Block Bindings, which merge the flexibility of blocks with the structured power of meta fields. This feature allows block attributes to be directly linked to data sources like post meta, reducing the need for custom blocks while creating deeper, more dynamic content relationships. The familiar block interface remains intact, making complex data management feel seamless. This connects naturally with our broader work on Data Views for post types and meta fields. 

These updates reinforce WordPress’s role as a powerful content management system by connecting its core primitives—blocks, post types, taxonomies, and meta fields—more intuitively. 

Development

Lastly, Matías showcased a range of groundbreaking tools that empower WordPress developers and streamline their workflows. One of the highlights was the new Templates API, which has simplified the process of registering and managing custom templates. Future updates to the API will allow users to register and activate templates seamlessly, enabling dynamic site customizations such as scheduling different homepage templates for special events or swapping category archives during campaigns. This flexible approach offers developers greater creative control in a standardized way. 

The session also explored the Interactivity API, designed to deliver fast, seamless website experiences by enabling server-rendered interactivity within WordPress. Unlike JavaScript-heavy frameworks, this technology keeps everything within WordPress’s existing ecosystem, bridging the gap between developers and content creators. Attendees saw live demos showcasing instant search, pagination, and commenting—all without page reloads—while maintaining a perfect performance score of 100 on Lighthouse. In addition, it was announced that responsive controls will receive significant attention, with new features being explored, like block visibility by breakpoint and adding min/max controls to the columns block.

The WordPress Playground also emerged as a game-changer, allowing users to spin up WordPress sites directly in their browsers, experiment with Blueprints, and manage projects offline. With improved GitHub integration and expanded documentation, WordPress developers now have a more accessible and powerful toolkit than ever before.

An AI Future

Returning to the stage, Matt noted that Gutenberg’s evolution is paving the way for AI-powered site building while keeping creative control in users’ hands. A recent speed building challenge on WordPress’s YouTube channel showcased this potential, with Nick Diego using AI-assisted tools and Ryan Welcher building manually. While the AI-assisted approach won, the key takeaway was that AI isn’t here to replace developers but to enhance creativity and efficiency.

Community Impact and Global Reach

When WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard took the stage, she emphasized WordPress’s commitment to its open-source mission and the power of its global community. Mary shared her passion for defending WordPress’s principles, reaffirming that when users choose WordPress, they should receive the authentic, community-driven experience that the platform stands for. This commitment to clarity, trust, and open-source integrity is central to ensuring WordPress’s long-term sustainability and success.

In 2024, WordPress’s global influence surged through expanded educational programs, developer contributions, and grassroots initiatives. The platform’s social media following grew to 2.3 million, while major events like WordCamps and live-streamed gatherings attracted millions of attendees and viewers, connecting people worldwide.

Learn WordPress introduced Structured Learning Pathways, offering tailored tracks for beginners and developers, fostering a growing network of creators eager to learn and contribute. Grassroots programs flourished, with WP Campus Connect bringing WordPress education to Indian colleges and innovation competitions in Uganda empowering young creators. In Latin America, the Community Reactivation Project reignited meetups across nine cities, fostering a network of over 150 active members and setting the stage for three new WordCamps in 2025.

WordPress’s efforts also advanced through Openverse, which expanded its free content library to 884 million images and 4.2 million audio files, serving millions of creators worldwide and supporting WordPress’s broader mission of democratizing publishing.

Whether through educational platforms, developer-driven innovation, or community-led projects, WordPress’s ecosystem continues to nurture shared learning, creativity, and collaboration, ensuring its growth and relevance for future generations.

Japanese Community Highlights

Junko Fukui Nukaga—Community Team rep, program manager, and WordCamp organizer—noted that WordPress’s prominence in Japan contributes to an economy now estimated to exceed 100 billion yen.

In October of 2024, the Japanese WordPress community celebrated DigitalCube’s IPO on the Tokyo PRO Market, marking a milestone for the local WordPress ecosystem. Major contributors like Takayuki Miyoshi’s Contact Form 7 plugin surpassed 10 million active users, while companies like Sakura Internet and XServer built specialized WordPress infrastructure.

Community events in Japan have also flourished, with 189 local meetups held throughout the year, fueled by dedicated volunteers and organizers. Translation Night gatherings have ensured WordPress remains accessible to Japanese users, reflecting a thriving collaborative spirit.

Matt gave special recognition to Japan’s standout contributor, Aki Hamano, a Core Committer whose exceptional efforts elevated WordPress development over the past year. Hamano-san made an impressive 774 contributions to WordPress core, earning 162 props for WordPress 6.5, rising to 274 props for 6.6 as the second-highest contributor, and securing the top spot with 338 props for 6.7.Other notable Japanese contributors included Akira Tachibana, an active Docs Team member, and Nukaga, recognized for her exceptional community organizing efforts. Additionally, 13 Japanese contributors supported 5.4% of WordPress 6.6 development, showcasing the country’s growing influence in the WordPress ecosystem.

Data Liberation

Reflecting on the progress since the initiative’s launch last year, the focus remained on ensuring that WordPress not only becomes more powerful but also embodies freedom in its deepest sense—the freedom to move content anywhere, collaborate without limits, and create without constraints. This vision extends beyond individual sites to a broader web where content flows seamlessly across platforms, enabling unrestricted creativity and innovation.

One compelling example demonstrated how easily ePub files could be imported into a WordPress site, integrating seamlessly with existing designs. This represents the initiative’s broader goal: making content migration and integration effortless. WordPress Playground plays a critical role in this vision by enabling easy site migration through a simple browser extension. With Playground as a staging area, migrating and adapting sites becomes intuitive and accessible.

Q&A

The floor was opened to questions in both Japanese and English.

Questions from the audience, including Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein, covered the future of blogging, WordPress performance, the impact of AI search, and what democratizing publishing means today. Matt shared his excitement for more open platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as his recommendations for optimizing your site for both humans and AI. A common thread throughout was that a personal website is an important part of your digital identity, and WordPress allows you to express yourself in fun and unique ways.

Panels

After attendees enjoyed a special performance by the pianist, Takai-san, industry leaders, creators, and innovators took the stage for panel discussions about the present and future of WordPress, moderated by Mary Hubbard.

Publishing in the Open

Featuring:

• Mieko Kawakami, Japanese Author and Poet 
• Craig Mod, Author of Things Become Other Things 
• Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Cofounder and Automattic CEO

This first panel explored the transformative power of open-source publishing. Panelists shared insights into how open publishing has influenced their creative journeys, expanded audience engagement, and shaped storytelling across cultural boundaries.

Publishing in the open has defined what I’ve done. All the best connections I’ve made in live have been the result of publishing in the open. – Craig Mod

Publishing in the open, like WordPress, is about building community, mutual connections, and putting power back into the hands of creators.

The Future of WordPress in Japan and Beyond

Featuring:

• Hajime Ogushi, mgn CEO
• Genki Taniguchi, SAKURA internet Inc. Senior Director
• Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Cofounder and Automattic CEO

The second discussion highlighted WordPress’s remarkable growth in Japan and its broader global impact. The discussion covered the drivers behind Japan’s adoption of WordPress, its thriving ecosystem of WordPress-based businesses, and emerging trends in web development.

Compared to other CMSs the WordPress Japanese is much easier to use. – Hajime Ogushi

The group discussed plugins such as Contact Form 7, the affordability of hosting WordPress, and local meetups and events

Closing

Thank you to all the guests who joined us on stage, those who ventured to Tokyo, and everyone who tuned in from around the world. Today’s event showcased how a free and infinitely flexible platform, an active global community, open innovation, and a commitment to a fully democratized web make us better at being who we are.

From Tokyo, Arigatou Gozaimashita!

For those interested in exploring past State of the Word keynotes, WordPress has curated a comprehensive YouTube playlist featuring keynotes from previous years. Watch them all here: State of the Word YouTube Playlist. Be sure to mark your calendars for major WordPress events in 2025: WordCamp Asia (Manila, Philippines), WordCamp Europe (Basel, Switzerland), and WordCamp US (Portland, Oregon, USA).

Does pineapple belong on pizza?

The answer may vary from person to person. But WordPress users were in for a surprise when they tried to login to the WordPress.org website.

A new mandatory checkbox require users to confirm that “Pineapple is delicious on pizza” before accessing their accounts. 

Following the dispute with WP Engine, WordPress.org had introduced a mandatory check box in October that allowed users to access their accounts only after confirming “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” It was later removed following the court instructions. 

Reactions From the Community

Francesca Marano of Patchstack tweeted, “Seeing the level of immaturity and unprofessional behaviour in the WP industry is disheartening. Pizza checkbox? Not fun. A website calling Matt the worst person in tech, also not fun.”

Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer has opened a poll on X and more than 1500 people have voted. 

He also tweeted, “This checkbox is a good example how the public feud of two billion-dollar companies (Automattic that raised $985M in VC funding and WP Engine that raised $250M in private equity funding) keep impacting WordPress developers – even if its in cryptic forms like this.”

Web and eCommerce specialist Nick Weisser joked. “Pineapple is delicious on #pizza? So now you have to break Italian law to access @WordPress.org.”

Maarten Belmans, founder of Studio Wombat, shared his concerns, “My only worry is WP has already caused trust issues with enterprise (hijacking a plugin is no small issue, so  I heard). Adding another checkbox, even as a light joke, might show enterprise WP just isn’t the serious platform they need it to be? Idk!”

Bozz Media was critical, and tweeted, “Gross. It’s sad that the unprofessional and unbecoming behavior from WP leadership continues, tarnishing the entire reputation of the platform.”

Brett Atkin, Founder and Digital Strategist at Pixel Jocks, tweeted, “Thought it was a joke until I started seeing multiple posts about it. Sad, embarrassing and unprofessional, especially given the circumstances and recent court rulings. Feels like he is mocking the court, the judge and the entire community.” He is not alone as several users initially thought it to be a joke or a meme.

WPTavern founder Jeff Chandler also shared his thoughts, “That checkbox didn’t exist during WCUS so technically, it’s not restored back to the status quo. It’s stupid.”

Simon Harper of SRH Design tweeted, “This should not have been added and I’m not sure what’s worse, the checkbox and text alignment or the attempt at humour.” The alignment issue was later fixed. 

The pineapple debate has sparked conversations on Reddit too.

If you need a little push to start writing this winter, in the comfort of your familiar editor, here it is! You can now use the Block Editor to create electronic books and other documents—all completely offline. What a full circle moment for Gutenberg!

The Block Editor contains so many features I miss when writing in other editors. It produces clean, semantic markup. You can paste in content from anywhere and the editor will clean it up for you, or paste a link onto selected text to auto-link. The List View and Outline panels allow you to easily navigate and inspect the content. And we’re constantly iterating on the Block Editor: more features and improvements are on the way, such as refined drag and drop interactions coming in early 2025.

All this inspired me to wrap our editor in an app that can read and write local files—just as other document editors do. It turns out that EPUB is the best file format to store the content, because EPUB is an open standard for e-books that is essentially a ZIP file containing HTML and media—HTML like your WordPress posts!

And just like that, the WordPress Block Editor can also be used to write books! The cool thing about EPUB files is that any e-book app, such as Kindle and Apple Books, can open it. So even if someone doesn’t have this editor, they can still easily read the content, which makes the files it produces portable.

The editor allows you to create a cover, so you can easily distinguish between the books or documents you write. It will also treat each heading as a chapter so you can easily navigate content when opened in an e-book reader.

The term “book” should be taken broadly. While the file that the Block Editor produces is primarily used for e-books, you can create any document with it. It’s possible to export your document to a DOCX file in case you need it, though the more complex blocks are not supported yet.

It is still very much a nascent project. There’s many features left to be added, such as revisions and the ability to open any externally created EPUB files, or even DOCX files, so keep an eye out for these in the coming weeks and months! If you’re interested in this editor, it’s all open source, and I welcome any kind of help.

For now, the demo editor is installable as a Progressive Web App (PWA) in Chrome. While it’s totally usable without installation, it does give you some nice benefits such as allowing you to open the EPUB files directly from your OS. In the future we might wrap it in proper native apps. Your feedback is welcome on GitHub!

It’s a dream come true being here in Tokyo for State of the Word 2024. We’re going to be in an amazing venue that looks over the city. Most of WordPress and Automattic’s senior leadership is here, and we’ll also have several hundred folks from the local community and press.

We’ve gotten so much inspiration over the years from Japanese culture, we wanted to make this event really “of the space” so we’re doing a few extra things this year. My presentation will include Mary Hubbard and Matías Ventura, but also part of it will be in Japanese and presented by Junko Fukui Nukaga. We’ll have piano performances by Aiko Takei. After the presentation and Q&A we’ll do a panel in Japanese with Mieko Kawakami (one of the top novelists in Japan, on par with Haruki Murakami), Craig Mod, Hajime Ogushi, and Genki Taniguchi.

For those who can attend in person, we’ll have a reception afterward with some unique gifts including posters from a local Kanji artist and nice sweater to keep everyone warm this winter.

If you’d like to livestream at home, you can do so on Youtube here:

My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political science, I started WordPress when there, and then dropped out after two years to move to San Franisco. It was fun seeing UH Magazine feature an article about my journey from a University of Houston student to co-founding WordPress and leading Automattic. I was surprised they put me on the cover of the physical edition! I wish my Dad were still around to see it.

The piece explores my commitment to open-source, my vision for democratizing online publishing, and the values of creativity and adaptability that have shaped my path. It’s an honor to reflect on these experiences with my alma mater.

WordPress.com is now offering new annual plans at 25% off as part of their year-end promotion. The offer includes a free domain for the first year.

This exclusive deal ends on December 31st, 2024.

To claim the offer, use the coupon code DREAM25 at checkout.

Please note this offer is only for new annual plan purchases and does not apply to renewals or upgrades for existing paid plans.

After removing the mandatory WordPress.org login checkbox and the WP Engine Tracker CSV file, Automattic has reinstated WP Engine’s WordPress.org repository access and control over the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin repository. This follows a court ruling that required Automattic to restore these rights within 72 hours.

In October, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg announced the forking of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin into the new plugin Secure Custom Fields. He took over the plugin citing security issues and invoked point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines. 

In a tweet, Advanced Custom Fields confirmed: “53 minutes ago, we initiated publishing the genuine ACF on .org and are now awaiting .org to complete the review process to make it available.”

They later added: “We’re pleased to share that our team has had account access restored on WordPress dot org along with control of the ACF plugin repo. This means all ACF users can rest assured that the ACF team you trust is once again maintaining the plugin. There’s no action required if you have installed ACF directly from the ACF website or you are an ACF PRO user.”

The Repository now lists WP Engine as the author of the plugin instead of WordPress.org. 

While many in the community are relieved to see ACF restored, some have expressed concerns about the negative reviews ACF received following the controversial takeover and the future of the SCF Pro version. Secure Custom Fields plugin still has WordPress.org as the author in the Repository.

WP Engine’s Brian Gardner tweeted, “Welcome home, ACF.” while entrepreneur Duane Storey commented: “This should never have been done in the first place. Let’s not forget, this was returned due to a court order, not a change of heart. I still consider the dot org repositories to no longer be trustworthy. I seriously think people with plugins there should be migrating away.”

Matt Mullenweg responded on this with, “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.”

As usual, the community remains divided with some supporting his stance while others opposed it. 

Hi, 🎄🎁🎆

I wish you a contemplative, peaceful and restful Holiday Season and a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year! 2025!

This newsletter and I will take a break, and we will be back on January 11, 2025. Be well,

Yours, 💕
Birgit

PS: Voting in The WP Awards has been extended to December 20. If you haven’t yet, please consider voting for Gutenberg Times in the Blog category. Also, vote for the Gutenberg Changelog in the Podcast category. And for your favorite WordPress products at the same time.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Catch up on what’s coming next for Core, Gutenberg, and WordPress Playground in the last edition of What’s New for Developers? for 2024. Ryan Welcher summarized developer-related changes in WordPress for December 2024. Key updates include style book improvements in the Site Editor, new filters for block editor rendering mode, and enhancements to WordPress Playground. The post highlights updates to core blocks, bug fixes, and new features like setting featured images directly from Image blocks. It also mentions the release of WordPress 6.7, planning for version 6.8, and resources like Developer Hours sessions, YouTube content, and new tutorials on the Developer Blog.

The WordPress Meta and Design teams have been incredibly busy. They updated the Make WordPress Sites with all the team’s sites, the Rosetta sites, and the Photo Directory. This visual refresh is part of the continued effort to build a consistent design language across WordPress.org.

Read more about the effort and the before and after views in Make WordPress gets a refresh by Nick Diego. “The Make section of WordPress.org is vast, covering 32 contributor teams and 114 local teams, each with its own blog, handbooks, and component pages.” he wrote. After many years, the sites are now converted to a block first layout. It’s a newfound pleasure to publish on the Make Blogs again! The handbooks follow the developer documentation sites and it’s reading pleasure.

In The Photos Directory gets a refresh and is now powered by blocks, Nick Diego also shares details on the revamp for the popular picture site. Besides the reorganized homepage that now shows many more photos at first glance, I am quite intrigued by the new search filter by format: landscape, portrait or square.

📣 Don’t miss it! The annual State of the Word is Matt Mullenweg’s keynote presentation of the year. It will take place on December 16, 2024, in Tokyo, Japan. The livestream will start at 9 am UTC on WordPress YouTube channel.

WordPress developer Riad Benguella recently sparked a lively community discussion on improving the Gutenberg block editor, on Bluesky. Developers provided several suggestions, many linked to existing GitHub issues. They focused on practical enhancements like border radius presets, link CSS classes, and table block improvements. The conversation highlighted the community’s wish for more granular design controls and better pattern organization. Some suggestions led to immediate action with pull requests in progress. Others need further exploration due to technical complexities or the need to balance functionality with user-friendliness. Martin Dubovic posted a recap of the conversation with links and opinions. What’s Next for Gutenberg? A Community Chat With WordPress Developer Riad Benguella.

Gutenberg 19.9 RC1 is ready for testing. It includes a style book for classic themes. There are improvements to the experimental feature of inline commenting. Additionally, there is a new block for post counts and other updates to existing blocks. The changelog should be your guide until the final release on December 18, 2024. It will be the last release of 2024. The next Gutenberg Changelog episode will be recorded on January 10th, and we will cover not only 19.9 but also Gutenberg 20.0 – the 200th release of the project.

🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #112 Gutenberg 19.8, Create Block Theme Plugin with Sarah Norris

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Explore the insights of WooCommerce in 2025. It’s about building a platform for the future. This is presented by Beau Lebens, the Head of Engineering at WooCommerce. In 2025, the organization will concentrate on three significant objectives. They will enhance performance. They will improve the online shopping experience. They will deploy essential tools that meet the actual needs of merchants. The strategy streamlines operations for merchants. It integrates an increased number of features directly into the core platform. This integration reduces complications linked with extensions. The overarching goal is to develop a robust, flexible platform that effectively addresses the requirements of contemporary online merchants.

In Remkus de Vries newsletter, Within WordPress, I learned about ​Dynamic Template Parts​  by Matt Watson. It allows you to replace headers, footers, and other template parts dynamically based on the content you’re editing.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Brian Coords new Webmaster podcast latest episode is: Building a Block Theme for 1 Million Users. In this conversation, Jessica Lyschik shares her journey as a WordPress developer and core contributor. She discusses her experiences in the WordPress community. She also talks about the evolution of WordPress themes and the unique features of the Greyd Suite. She emphasizes the importance of full site editing, the challenges of the block editor, and the future of Gutenberg. The discussion also touches on the impact of social media on blogging and concludes with where to find Jessica online.

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2024” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

In his latest video, Elliot Richmond walks you through how he created a sticky nav bar with Block Variations, CSS, and JavaScript. “This WordPress block theme technique will enhance your visitors’ browsing experience by adding a creative sliding navigation bar that appears as they scroll down the page.” Richmond wrote.

In his latest newsletter, Remkus de Vries alert me to a little script by Luc Princen that turns Block patterns into loadable template files, so they can then easily be added to Git. This could save you from having to go through a lot of database hassle. The script is available in a Gist.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

In his blog post, Snippet: How to lock WordPress blocks and prevent unlocking, Nick Diego explains the Block Locking API. He also discusses how to use it. It also details how to prevent unlocking blocks as well as disabling the Code Editor.

Did you miss the Man vs Machine Speed Build Challenge? The recording is available on YouTube: AI Takes On HUMAN in WordPress Speed Build Showdown. “In this thrilling face-off, two WordPress powerhouses go head-to-head in an epic coding battle with a twist. Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher, both seasoned WordPress developers, are pitted against each other in a race against time. But there’s a catch – one developer has the advantage of AI assistance, while the other relies solely on traditional coding methods.” Jamie Marsland wrote. After watching the show, I wasn’t the only one wh checked out the Cursor AI and played around with it.

This week in Playground

If you missed last week’s Hallway Hangout, Adam Zieliński has the recording. He also has a summary and the transcript for you: Recap of Hallway Hangout: Playground for Agencies and Product Demos. As an agency, you can use WordPress Playground to streamline your workflows. You can test your products and share interactive demos. You can show and do so much more. In this recent Hallway Hangout sparked by Tammie Lister, attendees from various agencies and product teams shared their experiences. They also expressed curiosity about applying WordPress Playground in their work.

Uros Tasic, co-lead organizer of WordCamp Europe, talked about Code, Test, Repeat: Accelerating Development with WordPress Playground at WordCamp Larissa last month. The recording is now available on WordPress TV. Tasic discussed how Playground can enhance your development cycle, enabling quicker iterations without the need for complex setups.

📣 Upcoming Developer Hours: Everything you need to know about WordPress Playground will take place on December 17th at 16:00 UTC.  “Beyond spinning up WordPress sites, Playground offers powerful capabilities, from testing plugins and themes to running demos and even supporting app development. No matter how you engage with WordPress, Playground has something valuable to offer.” reads the description.

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to [email protected]

Featured Image: Abstract architecture by Chris Clarke found on the WordPress Photo directory wordPress.org/photos

Don’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?

After the court issued a preliminary injunction in favor of WP Engine, Automattic has begun complying with the orders. The mandatory login checkbox in WordPress.org website has been removed, and the WP Engine Tracker website has been updated, including removing the controversial domains.csv files.

The mandatory login check box in WordPress.org, introduced in October this year after WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, required users to confirm: “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise,” before accessing their accounts.

This checkbox has now been removed. 

Last month, Automattic launched the “WP Engine Tracker” to monitor websites leaving WP Engine. The site provided a downloadable CSV file listing sites hosted on WP Engine, labeled as “sites ready for a new home.” Following the court’s decision, the link to the CSV file returned a 404 error and was later removed entirely.

The links promoting migration offers from other hosting providers have also been taken down from the site.

Secure Custom Fields plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/), which is the fork of the ACF plugin, however, is still available in the Repository. 

Meanwhile, Nick Gernert, WordPress VIP CEO, shared this: “As ever, Automattic continues to do what’s best for WordPress, the open source community, and everyone who depends on it… We stand committed to preserving open source and the collaborative spirit that it embodies—it’s what drives innovation and helps businesses like yours thrive. What’s most important to know is that Automattic’s focus is on keeping WordPress strong and forward-thinking.”

The CEOs of Barn2Plugins, Patchstack, and LayerWP have announced plans to expand their businesses beyond WordPress. While none of them are leaving the WordPress ecosystem, they are branching out into new territories to diversify their offerings and drive growth.

Barn2Plugins: Entering the Shopify Ecosystem

Katie Keith, CEO of Barn2Plugins, revealed on Twitter that the company will begin selling Shopify apps in 2025. “In 2025, @Barn2Plugins will diversify into selling Shopify apps as well as continuing to focus on our WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. Shopify is an excellent fit for Barn2, and feels like the right move to secure our future.”, Katie tweeted.

Katie believes expanding into Shopify will accelerate growth beyond what relying solely on WordPress could achieve. However, she admitted that understanding the Shopify ecosystem and identifying the factors behind a successful app presents a significant challenge.

The company plans to develop its Shopify apps from scratch. Katie noted that her experience with WooCommerce has been invaluable in identifying gaps in the Shopify market that might otherwise be overlooked.

She regularly shares her Shopify journey in Twitter.

Patchstack: Expanding to Laravel

Oliver Sild, CEO of Patchstack, shared on Twitter that his company has extended its vulnerability intelligence services to Drupal and Joomla and is next exploring the Laravel framework.

Oliver shared with WP Tavern, “Even though we are expanding to other CMSs and even to frameworks such as Laravel, WordPress continues to get most of our attention. It’s simply so because WordPress is so much bigger than all the others combined.”

Patchstack, already the largest vulnerability intelligence provider in the WordPress ecosystem, always had plans to expand into the broader open-source community.

Oliver added, “Even though we’ve just expanded to Drupal and Joomla – we still have a lot to do and many exciting things to publish next year. Those who have followed what we do at Patchstack know that we’ve been also working with Google for the past year – so stay tuned because there’s something cool we can show you very soon.”

LayerWP: WP Deals Evolves

Ben Townsend of LayerWP is also venturing out with his WP Deals project. He announced, “WP Deals is evolving.”

“WP Deals is now about more than just WordPress. I’m opening the doors to SaaS tools, hosting, digital resources, and other must-have web products. The mission stays the same: curate the best deals, deliver them straight to your inbox, and save you money.” Ben shared.

Subscribers will continue to get curated deals while businesses can feature their deals on WP Deals. 

WPExperts has acquired the Advanced File Manager plugin from Modal Web. WPExperts (formerly WooExperts) is a leading WordPress development company with an extensive portfolio of WordPress and WooCommerce plugins.

The Advanced File Manager plugin has over 100,000 active installations on the WordPress Plugin Repository with a 4.8-star rating.

CEO of WPExperts, Saad Iqbal, emphasized the strategic nature of the acquisition, stating: “Unlike other acquisitions, this one is different. Advanced File Manager is more of a developer-oriented tool that we have used extensively in multiple scenarios, and we absolutely love it. I saw an opportunity to enhance the user interface and user experience, as well as improve its documentation.” 

He also shared his vision for the future of Advanced File Manager: “We plan to implement several enhancements in both the free and pro versions. These include features such as an activity log, a secure code editor to prevent critical errors, user role-based access, and group-based access. All these improvements will make the plugin more powerful and user-friendly. I am genuinely excited about the future of Advanced File Manager now that it is part of our WPExperts family.”

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Building your own forum gives you something the usual social media channels can’t match: A dedicated space where your community can gather, share knowledge, and help each other grow. Forums build lasting connections between members who share similar interests, challenges, and goals.

Running your own forum offers distinct advantages over relying on social networks or existing community platforms:

• Members generate valuable content that helps with market research and product development.
• Premium spaces can be monetized through exclusive access.
• Direct feedback loops between your team and power users improve products faster.
• Searchable discussion archives reduce support costs.
• Community-driven innovation creates competitive advantages.
• Experienced members naturally help newcomers, building stronger bonds.
• You maintain complete control over your platform.

And here’s a fascinating detail many people miss: Forums drive significant search traffic. Research from Detailed.com shows that discussion threads frequently appear in top search results, as people actively seek authentic opinions and recommendations from real users.

This guide provides practical steps for building a forum that encourages meaningful discussions and keeps members coming back. A huge part of success lies in choosing the right platform. While there are many options available, WordPress offers particularly strong benefits for creating an integrated forum website. Let’s explore why WordPress makes sense as a foundation, and how to build an engaging community space that serves your specific goals.

Choosing the right platform for your forum

Forums work best when they’re integrated with your broader business strategy rather than existing in isolation. This integration matters more than many realize – forums can complement and enhance core business functions in powerful ways:

• Supporting online course students with collaborative learning spaces.
• Creating fan communities that drive product innovation.
• Providing enhanced customer support through peer assistance.
• Building brand advocacy programs that amplify marketing.
• Hosting member discussions that generate valuable insights.

While launching “just a forum” might work for passion projects or interest-based communities, most organizations need deeper integration with their existing services and goals. Building a forum should connect directly with your broader business objectives, whether that’s reducing support costs, gathering product feedback, or strengthening customer relationships.

For example, many people are tempted by free platforms like Flarum or Reddit because they let you set up standalone forums quickly. However, the issue here is that they create disconnects between your community and your main business presence. This separation causes real problems:

• Members must switch between different websites to access your products, contact information, or support resources.
• User experiences become inconsistent as third-party platforms control the interface.
• Adding custom features or integrations gets complicated or impossible.
• Your valuable community discussions live on someone else’s domain.

A better approach? Think beyond just “building a forum” and focus on creating an integrated website with forum functionality. This makes it easier to:

• Keep members engaged with your core business offerings.
• Maintain consistent branding across all touchpoints.
• Add new features as your community grows.
• Retain full control over the member experience.
• Scale smoothly as opportunities emerge.

WordPress excels at this integrated approach. As a flexible content management system, WordPress lets you build any type of website while adding powerful forum capabilities through plugins. This prevents “platform sprawl” – the headache of managing multiple disconnected systems for different purposes.

Open Studio is a great example of that. They previously ran their communities, course hosting, and payments on separate platforms. Working with WooCommerce agency Saucal, they consolidated everything into a single WordPress-based system. While that’s a large-scale example, the same principles apply to smaller communities – start with an integrated foundation that can grow with your needs.

How to create an online forum with WordPress

Building a WordPress-based forum involves several key components. Let’s break down each essential piece of the setup process.

Set up reliable WordPress hosting

Forums need hosting that can handle multiple users interacting simultaneously without slowdowns. Look for WordPress-specific hosts like Pressable that optimize their systems for fast loading times even with many concurrent visitors, including handling sudden traffic spikes, without upgrading your plan. You can also benefit from built-in caching to reduce server load, the option to automate regular backups of forum content, and strong security protections. 

We recommend evaluating your choices based on the following criteria: 

• Server response times in your target regions. 
• Maximum concurrent user limits. 
• Database performance specifications. 
• Backup frequency and retention. 
• Support response times for technical issues. 
• Bandwidth allowances for file attachments. 
• SSL certificate inclusion for secure connections. 
• Server-side caching capabilities. 

Select a forum-friendly WordPress theme

Your theme forms the visual foundation of your forum and is one of the more important aspects of great user experience. Thankfully, there are a lot of themes to choose from, such as Disputo or Pocco. 

While your choice will depend on your specific needs, there are some universal qualities that every good forum theme must have. These include: 

• Clean typography for easy reading of long discussions.
• Responsive designs that work well on phones and tablets.
• Fast loading speeds to keep members engaged.
• Simple navigation between forum sections.
• Compatibility with forum plugins.

If you’re adding a forum to an existing site, ensure the theme matches your current branding while supporting forum functionality.

Installing bbPress as your forum engine

bbPress provides the core forum features for WordPress. This free plugin adds discussion capabilities with minimal overhead:

1. Install bbPress from the WordPress plugin directory.

2. Create your initial forum categories.

3. And create your first forum! 

4. Set up the forum user settings, which come with some anti-spam features, as well. 

5. Customize the main forum features like auto-embedding links, reply thread levels, subscriptions, and more. 

6. Configure user roles. You can do this when you create a new user or from the dashboard. 

7. Add any extension plugins for extra features.

Managing user profiles and identity

Strong user profiles build trust and encourage participation, but they can be tricky to manage. In order for your forum to be successful, the users participating in it need to have trustworthy profiles that can be showcased in important places, especially if it’s going to be a discussion area for a specialized topic. 

Thankfully, the easy integration with Gravatar makes the process a lot easier. Our REST API gives you more control and the option for custom profile data retrieval and display, advanced privacy setting management, personalized user experiences based on profile data, and flexible presentation options for member information. 

This lets you:

• Speed up registration processes and customer onboarding. 
• Enable consistent identities across platforms. 
• Provide verified email-based profiles. 

More about that a bit later! 

Secure your forum community

Forums naturally attract spam and unwanted content, which can both get in the way of building a strong and reliable community. To prevent these, you need a good WordPress security plugin, and Jetpack is one of the more solid options. 

It will help you set up a reliable login system with two-factor authentication for the users and forum owners, making sure only the verified registered users are logging in and keeping the conversations free of spam. 

Besides that, its useful features help you block suspicious login attempts, prevent spam account creation, monitor for malicious activity, and protect member privacy – all essential security measures. 

Setting up content access controls

Different forums need different levels of privacy, and you need to figure out what type of forum you and your audience will benefit from the most. Common options include public forums, private member-only sections, support forums, and hidden areas for moderators and admins. 

Of course, you don’t have to choose one or the other. You might have a public forum that helps every user or lets them discuss relevant topics and maintain a premium area for paying subscribers. 

Membership plugins like Paid Membership Subscriptions can help monetize exclusive content while maintaining easy access to public discussions. It integrates well with WooCommerce and bbPress, which allows you to create special members-only products and sales. 

Your forum checklist: Core elements of a forum

Every successful forum needs essential components properly configured and optimized. Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of what your forum needs to function effectively.

Beyond these basic elements, we recommend adding some extra features such as: 

• Community pages: Show automated welcome messages for new members, dynamic FAQ sections pulled from common questions, member directories highlighting active contributors, and an achievement system recognizing participation. You can then use that system to award members with a moderation function if you want to. 
• Forum threads: Threads are the bread and butter of forums, so they have to be fully functional and engaging. To help people stay in the loop, give them the option to receive email notifications when someone replies and add solved/featured status options. However, ideally, users should be able to subscribe to every thread even if they haven’t participated. Finally, include different formatting tools for improved readability and test your forum with screen readers for better accessibility.
• Activity widgets: These aren’t necessary, but they really help maintain engagement by showing trending discussions, recent member achievements, upcoming community events, and popular topic statistics.

Focus on customizing these elements to match your specific community needs while keeping functionality intuitive. Members should find the interface familiar enough to participate comfortably while discovering features that make their experience better than on other platforms.

Streamlining user profiles with Gravatar integration

Adding Gravatar to your forum removes common friction points in the registration process. Members can start participating right away using their existing Gravatar profiles, which sync automatically between different platforms they use. This universal profile system is particularly powerful – with over 200 million users already on Gravatar, many of your potential members might already have profiles ready to use.

Profile management becomes straightforward since Gravatar handles the following:

• Avatar images that update everywhere at once.
• Basic profile information like names and bios.
• Privacy settings that follow user preferences.
• Cross-platform profile synchronization.
• Verified email-based identities.
• Professional profile photos and metadata.

For developers, implementation is straightforward through the Gravatar API. This lets you:

• Pull user profile data securely.
• Respect privacy settings automatically.
• Update information in real-time.
• Customize the display of profile details.
• Create personalized user experiences.
• Add custom profile fields.
• Generate user analytics.
• Enable social features.

These features create a smoother experience for both forum administrators and members, encouraging more active participation. New members appreciate skipping lengthy profile setup processes, while administrators benefit from pre-verified user identities and reduced fake account creation. 

The system also scales automatically – as your community grows, Gravatar’s infrastructure handles the increased profile management load without requiring additional setup or maintenance from your team.

And if you want to present this data in an attractive way, we recommend complementing the API with the Gravatar Enhanced plugin, which allows you to create and display profile blocks. This gives you a simple way to create a list of all your users on one page (though you’d need to do this manually) or use profile blocks to sign off on community posts. 

Keep in mind that it doesn’t replace the Gravatar REST API in scope but can be used to complement it and give additional UX functionality to your forum. 

How Gravatar simplifies user verification and community growth

Gravatar’s email-based system provides built-in verification that helps maintain forum quality. New members can jump into discussions faster since their profiles are already set up, removing barriers to participation.

The platform enhances engagement through several mechanisms:

• Members maintain consistent identities across all forum sections.
• One-click profile setup reduces registration abandonment.
• Verified email addresses build trust between members.
• Simple profile management encourages long-term participation.

These tools help create richer member profiles that spark more meaningful interactions. Members can focus on participating in discussions rather than managing multiple profiles or dealing with complicated setup processes.

Best practices for managing and moderating your forum

Automate routine tasks to save time

Running a forum means dealing with spam, trolls, and occasional disruptions. Setting up automated tools early saves countless hours of manual work. Start with spam filters that catch unwanted promotional content through keyword detection and behavior patterns. Then, you can add trust-level systems that automatically grant privileges to members who consistently participate positively.

For new members, implement a post-approval queue until they demonstrate genuine engagement. This extra step prevents drive-by spam while allowing moderators to welcome newcomers properly. Rate-limiting features prevent rapid-fire posting and help maintain discussion quality.

Build a structure for your moderation team

Effective moderation needs clear systems and processes. Here’s what we recommend: 

• Give moderators specific roles with carefully defined permissions, and keep detailed logs of all moderation actions. 
• Set up private channels where moderators can discuss issues and get help with difficult situations. 
• Document common scenarios and expected responses to help moderators stay consistent.

Create positive engagement incentives

Members who feel recognized contribute more often. Design systems that reward helpful participation through reputation scores and achievement badges. Quality scoring helps highlight valuable content, while member levels show experience and trust. Simple “thank you” mechanisms encourage members to help others.

Plan for challenging situations

Even well-run forums face occasional problems. Prepare by setting up content filtering for sensitive topics and IP restrictions for repeat rule breakers. Create clear procedures for emergency situations and establish fair appeal processes for moderation decisions. Document major incidents to help prevent similar issues.

Remember that automated systems work best alongside human judgment. Good moderators explain rules patiently, provide context for decisions, and help new members understand community norms. This balanced approach creates a welcoming environment where members feel safe contributing while keeping the moderation workload manageable.

Start building your professional forum community today

Building your own forum puts you in control of your community’s future. Third-party platforms might offer quick setup, but they limit your ability to grow and adapt as your community evolves. With WordPress, you can create a fully integrated platform that connects your forum with your existing website and services.

The process is straightforward: Start with reliable WordPress hosting, add bbPress for core forum functionality, and integrate Gravatar to streamline user profiles. This combination gives you everything needed to launch a professional forum:

• Complete control over your platform.
• Flexibility to add custom features.
• Simple user registration and profiles.
• Strong security and spam protection.
• Options for premium content areas.

Gravatar integration proves particularly valuable for accelerating community growth. Members can join discussions immediately using existing profiles while you benefit from verified user identities and simplified onboarding.

Ready to get started? Check out the Gravatar documentation for detailed integration guides. Your future community members are waiting – give them a great place to connect.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the Northern California District Court has granted WP Engine’s motion for a preliminary injunction against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg. The ruling follows a November 26, 2024, hearing where the judge expressed an inclination to approve WP Engine’s request for injunction. Both parties were directed to collaborate on a stipulated order, but having failed to reach an agreement, they submitted competing proposals on December 2, 2024.

The Court directed Automattic and Matt Mullenweg to immediately stop:

1. Blocking or interfering with WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org.
2. Disrupting WP Engine’s control over its plugins hosted on WordPress.org.
3. Interfering with WP Engine-related WordPress installations via unauthorized auto-migration or updates.

Also within 72 hours, Automattic and Matt must:

• Remove WP Engine customer data from the “domains.csv” file on the WP Engine Tracker website.
• Restore WP Engine’s WordPress.org access, including employee login credentials, to the state of September 20, 2024.
• Remove the mandatory checkbox on the WordPress.org login page.
• Reinstate WP Engine’s access to the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin.

In granting the injunction, the Court evaluated the four Winter elements.

Success on the Merits: The Court found that WPEngine is likely to succeed on the merits of its intentional interference with contractual relations claim and Automattic’s arguments do not compel a different conclusion.

Irreparable Harm: The court determined that WP Engine’s evidence of harm, including the loss of a $40,000 client contract, was persuasive. Defendants countered with four arguments but “None is persuasive.” The court accepted that WPEngine will suffer irreparable harm without preliminary injunctive relief.

Balance of Equities: Banning WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org, taking over ACF plugin, and the additional burdens imposed on WPEngine’s customers demonstrates that WPEngine has a significant interest in obtaining preliminary injunctive relief and Automattic’s arguments in opposition do not establish that they will suffer any damage that overrides WPEngine’s interest in obtaining relief. Thus the balance of hardships tips in favor of WP Engine.

Public Interest: The court said the public consequences of withholding injunctive relief are significant as Mullenweg himself acknowledges that more than 40% of all websites run on WordPress. Those who depend on WordPress’s stability should not be forced to endure the uncertainty, financial losses, and increased operational costs arising from the ongoing dispute between the parties. Thus, “the final Winter element – the public interest – weighs in favor of granting preliminary injunctive relief.”

The Court accepted WP Engine’s claims of irreparable harm, citing losses of existing and potential customers, damage to customer relationships, market share erosion, harm to goodwill and reputation, and broader negative impacts on the WordPress community. 

WP Engine told the court that the company experienced a 14% increase in the average number of daily cancellation requests between September 26 and 30, and an increase of 17% in cancellation requests between October 1 and October 14, as compared to September 1 through September 25. The Court concluded that WP Engine would suffer irreparable harm without injunctive relief. 

The Court also declined to require WPEngine to post a bond as “the Court finds that any harm to Defendants resulting from the issuance of preliminary injunctive relief is unlikely, as it merely requires them to revert to business as usual as of September 20, 2024.”

Automattic responded to the ruling on Twitter, “Today’s ruling is a preliminary order designed to maintain the status quo. It was made without the benefit of discovery, our motion to dismiss, or the counterclaims we will be filing against WP Engine shortly. We look forward to prevailing at trial as we continue to protect the open source ecosystem during full-fact discovery and a full review of the merits.”

WP Engine also tweeted, “We are grateful that the court has granted our motion for a preliminary injunction that restores access to and functionality of wordpressdotorg for WP Engine, its customers and its users. This ruling provides much-needed stability for the WordPress ecosystem. We deeply appreciate our customers for their continued trust and support. We remain committed to serving them and their sites with the performance, availability and integrity they deserve while collaborating to ensure a vigorous, thriving and stable WordPress community.”

The ruling does not mention anything about the “Secure Custom Fields” (https://wordpress.org/plugins/secure-custom-fields/) plugin that WordPress.org released with ACF Pro features. 

The preliminary injunction is effective immediately and will remain in place until a final judgment is issued after the trial.