The Rumble around WordPress

The software that powers almost half of all the websites on the internet is back again with so many issues to debate over. Despite the fact that it's an open source software and many people and even developers like myself spent countless hours working on this piece of software to make the web a little better place than yesterday. In fact, my job as a web developer also revolves around WordPress on daily basis.

The founding developer of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg recently accused WP Engine of violating WordPress' trademarks. WP Engine is a web hosting company that primarily provide their services based on WordPress. Now, please note that Matt's company Automattic is also heavily invested in web hosting business.

I use WP Engine almost every work day and I noticed that the WordPress on their server is slightly different than your average self hosted WordPress based site. For security and other reasons, WP Engine keeps their ecosystem under strict control and thus all the theme, plugin updates are a bit delayed. Why that happens on WP Engine? I am not quite certain about that but the sole fact that they built a billion dollar business around a free software is something that didn't go un-noticed. Not at least to Matt and he want's a slice of that pie.

Personally I stopped using WordPress on my personal Blog site for quite sometime now for wide range of reasons. I said it in the past and I am saying it again for those who doesn't know, WordPress was meant to be a CMS for Blog. Converting it into a Wix like page builder is not something that everybody wants. However, I understand that there are lots of businesses out there who are using WordPress for commercial purpose. I recognize their requirement is different from average users. But pushing the entire WordPress development focusing commercial user's requirements is not something that I really hoped for.

The question that remains is what we or the community can do to mitigate this issue? Simple answer could have been building specialized Plugin based on business requirements. For an example, WooCoomerce was introduced way back to to allow users to sell their products from WordPress based site. We can come up with similar plugins as based on business requirements rather than shoving a certain group of people's decision on to millions of users out there. This is one of many reason why I don't use WordPress on my personal site any longer.