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.

In today's digital age, a website is your brand's storefront window to the world. But for many, crafting a website can feel intimidating. Fear not! Website templates offer a fantastic way to get a beautiful, functional site up and running quickly and easily.

Alfredo Press

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