Lately, the WordPress community and even the broader web community has spent a lot of time thinking about WordPress and what might happen with respect to a fork. All largely kicked off by the huge spat Matt Mullenweg has had with WP Engine that has already resulted in legal action against him, which he is now framing as legal action against the WordPress project.
It’s not necessary here to cover the history of this battle, where it originates from, and where it’s likely to lead because it’s beautifully documented literally everywhere. You could get a solid roundup by scanning WordPress forums around the place, or the WPDrama subreddit.
I have no desire, even, to get into an argument with Mullenweg or Automattic, or anyone really. I’ve got stuff to do and it’s not like I’m ungrateful for the good stuff they’ve done. All good things come to an end, and there are always replacements waiting in the wings. Ask Caesar.
What I can say is that WordPress has been good to me. It’s kept me in gainful employment and I’ve been using it for nearly two decades! It’s not made me rich, and I do suspect a part of that was a decision I made way back in 2009 to treat it as a tool and step away from being too core to the community I’d thrown myself into. In fact, by the time my kids came along I pretty much stopped entirely. Life was relatively hard in the UK and money wasn’t free flowing. I focussed on customers. But I did try and pay back.
We coded up the Search Replace DB script that is a power tool to break many a site, but which was so useful its code made it into wp-cli. I’m proud of that, and the algorithm I created for it.
So the question…
Will there be a successful fork of WordPress?
There already is one. It’s called ClassicPress. It’s a solid effort and it’s fixing some things, albeit with a small team and community. We don’t use it over at Standfirst, but we’re eyeing it up. So why haven’t we jumped enthusiastically over?
Good question.
Taking on new tech stacks to support across a customer base is hard even when the software is almost the same as what you had. In fact, in some ways, it’s worse because there can be subtle differences that catch you out. You feel like you understand the fork until blam! You don’t!
And WordPress is the land of the small studio and the freelancer or the DIYer. Some of the biggest and most successful development firms in the WordPress space are a few hundred strong. Which is still actually pretty small – so even at the extreme ends of the WordPress business size of things, nothing looks big. Even Automattic aren’t that big in global terms.
So whilst I might think “oh wow, we’re doing so well!” The reality is that in business terms and scale we are absolute minnows and that means decisions on tech have to be taken carefully.
For us, a forked WordPress doesn’t bring anything new that grows our business or makes it more profitable. When we want to build dynamic, fast websites that we can grow and scale up we use Laravel or Yii. It’s cheaper, faster, and much more efficient on server resources.
When we decided to build a small fast API in front of a database we used Lumen.
In fact, for any website that requires custom workflows, performance, scale and complex security patterns we don’t use WordPress. And even for a simple blog but with dynamic content for each registered user we’d also use Laravel.
So you see how it works? It’s a bit like having cars. One big estate car might be great for everything, but if you need a racing car, just get one designed for the track rather than trying to force a family car to be any good. And if you need something to carry 40 tonnes of coal, use a truck.
And sure, if the boss of a car company was going a little bit peculiar and saying they didn’t want to create new models or support old ones… well, if you’re an engineer that’s not a problem. You just fix things up.
If you’re a consumer… that might be different. A hobbyist starting out has a cornucopia of options, including many of the email/site combo platforms like Substack or the open source Ghost with its hosted options at low cost.
Where does a fork fit? If Automattic just froze WordPress that wouldn’t be bad for us. If all that ever happened to WordPress from now on was security updates…we’d be fine. And if they didn’t, we’d do it ourselves after stripping out everything we don’t need.
And that’s kind of fine because I haven’t been excited about a new WordPress release since the REST API hit.
OK, so what’s your conclusion, Dave?
I think a viable fork will be hard, in part because it’s too late. It’ll inherit everything that’s bad like the legacy code and noughties architectural decisions, not have access to the hidden multi-tenanted SaaS knowledge of WordPress.com, will have to compete against a relative giant in the space, and won’t have the resources to make it stick.
If the fork had some really really strong selling points, like a good ORM and the ability to scale better straight out of the box, plus various security and functionality improvements thrown in then it could gain traction. But that’s a big project for volunteers to take on. And ultimately – WordPress started as open source blogging software by nerds, for nerds with some really wise ideas for the time. Between them, Mike Little (often forgotten but not by me – he rocks) and Matt Mullenweg created something of incredible value. I’ll always be grateful for that. Automattic though… it’s a business, and businesses in the USA, ever since Dodge v Ford, have always been run for the benefit of the shareholders and only the shareholders with little else in mind. Don’t forget that. The investors won’t. It’s how they get rich. Them. Not you. Them.
WordPress is still useful today. But the easy growth era is over. And that’s why Automattic and Matt Mullenweg may feel increasingly disconnected from the open source community. They need to make revenues to keep their business going, and most of us aren’t giving them very much and mainly because most of us don’t have that much. From our perspective it’s a solid bit of software with years of service in it left. A tool. But something to invest substantial time and money into for the future? Nah. I don’t see it. And that’s the real problem.
