For the past month, I've been following the recent WordPress vs WP Engine drama, and the situation seems to be getting worse each week. Read Edition 192 (story #1), Edition 193 (story #8), and Edition 194 (story #7) to get caught up to speed.
The reason I'm so obsessed with this ongoing story right now is that most of my websites (including Shopifreaks.com) and client websites are powered by a mix of WordPress / WooCommerce — other than the ones on Shopify.
Aside from my personal vested interest in the future of WordPress, the recent actions of Matt Mullenweg on behalf of Automattic and The WordPress Foundation are hugely impactful not only to WordPress (which is the most popular CMS on the Internet by a landslide), but also the open source community as a whole.
The sad part is that WooCommerce reached out to me a few months ago about becoming a sponsor of Shopifreaks — and I was enamored with the idea at the time. As a two-decade user of WordPress and Automattic products, I would've been thrilled to accept them as a sponsor — but they decided not to move forward with the sponsorship at the time. Now I'm thankful that they didn't because I would've been in a very uncomfortable position right now, as I disagree wholeheartedly with the recent actions of Matt Mullenweg.
Here's what happened now:
In retaliation of WP Engine's lawsuit against Automattic, Mullenweg performed a hostile takeover of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin, which was acquired by WP Engine in June 2021 and subsequently maintained by their company.
If you're not familiar with ACF, the plugin enables users to add custom fields to their WordPress websites and manage the data easily through the WP backend — a feature that many have advocated for decades be a core function of the WordPress CMS. The free and paid versions of ACF are collectively used by over 4.5M WordPress users, according to WP Engine.
Mullenweg said that the action was “to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem” — neither issue which has resulted in such a response from WordPress in the past. The ACF team posted on X, “A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.”
WordPress is calling the “new” plugin “Secure Custom Fields” (SCF) to avoid trademark infringement, and claiming that they are “forking” the Advanced Custom Fields plugin.
However a “fork” (which is a legal way to copy a plugin's code) has always resulted in a new / fresh plugin listed in the WordPress Plugin repo that starts from scratch with 0 installs and 0 reviews. Never in the history of WordPress has a “fork” resulted in the complete takeover of an existing plugin listing, along with all their installs, reviews, and support documentation.
Any WordPress users who enable auto-updates, or who don't pay attention to what's happening when manually updating ACF, are now being switched to SCF, which Mullenweg says “is now a non-commercial plugin.”
Existing ACF users who want to continue using the real plugin have to perform a one-time download provided by the Advanced Custom Fields team, which will then update moving forward from their servers.
Keep in mind one other thing… Mullenweg is claiming that this plugin takeover is happening in the name of security because the ACF plugin had a vulnerability. However a week ago, he blocked WP Engine from the WordPress Plugin repo, making it impossible for them to ship updates. In other words, Mulllenweg caused this “vulnerability” (which has proven to not even be a vulnerability), and then booted ACF from the plugin repo as a result of the issue he caused them!
Matt, I urge you to reconsider your recent actions that are effectively destroying the WordPress community right now.
What you're doing is likely to be deemed illegal in court and to be followed by huge damages that'll have to be paid out by yourself and Automattic. However more importantly than that, you're destroying the empire you built over a feud with a competitor.
The losers in all this are the WordPress users, developers, and contributors around the world who are watching their livelihoods become held hostage by a CEO on a power trip.
The winners will be Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, Ghost, Webflow, and other content management systems that will inevitably take your market share — as website owners and developers lose trust in WordPress.
For the love of God man, stop.