Category: Blog

Over the past few months, the dominant story surrounding website themes for many businesses involves the underlying platform at the heart of the overwhelming majority of many websites.

Because of its simplicity, versatility and vast support thanks to its open-source structure, WordPress is an extremely widely used foundation for millions of websites for both business and personal use.

However, in recent months this underlying fabric has been in some turmoil due to a highly publicised conflict between Automattic, the commercial arm of WordPress which handles web hosting, and the unrelated but highly popular hosting service WP Engine.

This conflict, which has led to an antitrust lawsuit and a bitter split amongst the development team and wider community, has led to concerns that the entire WordPress project could be forked entirely, something co-founder Matt Mullenweg has addressed directly in a post which sparked further controversy.

A fork in the context of software development is when a new project begins using the code from an existing one, creating something that is entirely separate as a result.

It happens relatively often with open-source software such as WordPress’ underlying codebase because the nature of open-source code is that it is free as in speech; you can distribute it and edit it as you please, as long as you grant the same permissions in anything based on it, a process known as copyleft.

Some in the community have considered a fork of WordPress, which would allow the code to develop without relying on the WordPress Foundation and the increasingly concerning conduct of Mr Mullenweg, but doing so would be an extremely drastic and messy approach.

As software engineer Gavin Anderegg noted in a blog on the affair, WordPress as it currently exists relies on services and sites controlled by Mr Mullenweg, and as people who proposed a fork have had their accounts deactivated, opines that whether someone is welcome to contribute to one of the most important projects on the internet is based on loyalty to him.

A fork would be extremely disruptive and affect a lot of plugins and themes in the early stages of the process, but it is also something that could not necessarily be ruled out.

The versatility and customisation options for WordPress are unparalleled when it comes to website creation tools, which is part of the reason why custom themes designed around certain industries are both very popular and radically unique.

However, one addition to the central hub of WordPress that has sparked some intense debate involves one of the oldest culinary debates engaged with online.

Some users of WordPress.Org when attempting to login found that the relatively familiar login box had an extra checkbox that extolled the virtues of pineapple on pizza.

This question is controversial by itself for reasons relating to culinary history well outside the scope of WordPress, but the reason why it was controversial with so many developers and website users was not necessarily the food opinion but its placement on their login prompt.

The reason for this is that it was an unprofessional response to an unprofessional move which was itself an unprofessional response on the part of Automattic, a commercial company which runs WordPress.Org and is closely associated with the non-profit WordPress Foundation.

The checkbox originally required users to state that they were not in any way affiliated with WP Engine, a WordPress hosting service. After WP Engine won a court injunction to remove the checkbox, this was interpreted as an in-joke by Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg, a co-founder of WordPress.

Whilst some software engineers and web developers saw the funny side, others were extremely critical of the unprofessional behaviour displayed by some of the most important figures in 

WordPress, particularly as this has a knock-on effect on the rest of the ecosystem.

Enterprise software needs to be trusted completely inside and out, and for two decades WordPress was an effective solution in this regard when in the hands of professionals.

However, impulsive decisions such as this have shaken some of this trust, leaving plugin and theme developers to maintain the stability lacking from some in the industry.