this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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I currently have WP running on a VPS. It utilizes neither wordpress.org (nor wordpress.com) nor wpengine infrastructure. I'm not getting how this means they can do anything about that.
Edited to add - I did dig up this article which has helped me to understand the situation a bit better FWIW: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-wordpress-org-wp-engine
He can't. Mullenweg is just having a really bad, prolonged meltdown over a hosting company making (morally questionable, but legally clear) money and threatening to burn it all down.
It's kinda funny because although I enjoy selfhosting, I wasn't going to self-host wordpress until I saw how ridiculous the prices are through Wordpress.com for any actual functionality. I've got a decent VPS and have paid for a couple of key (to me) "premium" 3rd-party plugins and it's still costing far less than it would have hosting it all through Wordpress.com. Their pricing seems frankly astronomical to me (or did when I was making my decision.)
I did dig up this article which has helped me to understand the situation a bit better FWIW: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-wordpress-org-wp-engine
What's your use case for WordPress? Anything you couldn't just make in a short amount of time?
Although I am a geeky techy, I'm not a web developer, so I'm sure there are other ways to do what I do that would be easier for someone who was. I just have a basic blog and newsletter with signups, and an audience far, far smaller than the number of characters in this comment. :D (That's OK though, I'm on an intentional slow growth curve.)
I don't even go out of my way to drive people to it because in some ways I'm still deciding what I want to do with the space. The "premium" plugins I pay for are to help handle spambots and signups/newsletter stuff. (and there are free plugins to help with those if I really needed to stay free) Wordpress.com sends me "30% off ACT NOW" emails every so often for their hosted packages and it doesn't even come close to competing. They want you to pony up $$ to get access to any worthwhile plugins at all from what I can tell, and I'm too much of a dyed in the wool Linuxy "you aren't going to tell me what I can and can't do" kind of guy to have any tolerance for that.
Edit: Just looked again now - $300/year to reach a tier that allows use of plugins. Nah.
Idk, with ai I made a static html site in about an hour today that looks somewhat decent. Just to play around a bit with Cursor / claude.ai. Hosted on cloudflare pages (free). pipeline from GitHub.
I'm not a developer either, but was fun. I can add more to it later.
Figured I don't really want or need comments anyway So no need for a database or spambot detection :p
Totally fair, we all have our different usecases...
As far as I have been able to tell, it doesn't. If you have your own infra it doesn't affect you at all.
Even self hosting, thenplug ins directory and updates etc seem to be where they have stopped wp engine access. It is still open for other websites but could be cut off if they chose.
From what ive read, manual upload of a plugin still works, so its just removing convenience and auto update. I doubt its long before a fork or plug in offers identicsl functionality.
This is also about WP Engine access to upload their plugins and support their users on the centralized forums,...
Yes, I expect there eventually will be more than one forum and/or plugin repository, depending on where you use WordPress. Its not really WordPress providing the support, more the community, but they host it.
I think this whole spat is about wordpress.com not .org
Mullenweg has been blocking WP Engine hosting’s access to .org resources, and even stripping them of access to plugins they distribute there. Not the biggest fan of WP Engine from what I saw in their Advanced Custom Fields plugin buyout (they messed with the existing licensing and focused on monetizing the crap out of it), but things aren’t alright in the WP universe.
I specified org because that's what's in OP, but honestly my comment is the same either way. :D
Don't wp updates and plugins only come from one of the 2? Anyway I'm pretty sure they're just mad that wpengine uses bandwidth from the wp update infrastructure without paying instead of hosting their own update infrastructure, which basically means that selfhosters / individuals are not the target. That said it still sounds like the dude is being hella petty about it.
I agree, and after posting that I did dig up this article which helped me a little to understand FWIW: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-wordpress-org-wp-engine
Where do you get your updates from? Theoretically they could change the license for newer versions or switched to a paid model or any number of things. Your only choice would be a fork or nothing, the latter which would suck if there’s a security hole. As others have mentioned look what happen with OpenOffice
What happened with OpenOffice? iirc Oracle bought them then made it open source and abandoned it, so it became LibreOffice, still free and awesome.
I've been down this road before, that doesn't really scare me. Something this big, there will be a good fork if that happens.
Happily using LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice for like a decade now, and there's also a reason I've got Jellyfin instead of Emby running on the server in the basement.
Still, good point, I was trying to figure out how his current, immediate meltdown was related to self-hosting generically, and it sounds like it's not.