The company behind WordPress, Automattic Inc., and its founder, Matt Mullenweg, continue to face backlash over a "nuclear war" started with WP Engine (WPE) that allegedly messed with maintenance and security of hundreds of thousands of websites.

In a proposed class action lawsuit filed this weekend, a WPE customer, Ryan Keller, accused Automattic and Mullenweg of "deliberately abusing their power and control over the WordPress ecosystem to purposefully, deliberately, and repeatedly disrupt contracts"—all due to a supposed trademark infringement claim. If granted, the class would include "all persons in the United States who had ongoing active WPE WordPress Web Hosting Plans on or before September 24, 2024 through December 10, 2024."

WPE had previously sued Automattic and Mullenweg, alleging that the attack on WPE was actually an attempt to extort what Keller alleged was "tens of millions of dollars" in payments from WPE for using the WordPress trademark. Mullenweg made it clear that the value of the payments was "based on what he thought WPE could afford, rather than what the value of the trademark actually was," Keller's complaint alleged.

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It’s a new year, but drama in the WordPress community keeps going. Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, said that it would reduce its contribution to WordPress core, the open source project that acts as the backbone of most of Automattic’s products and ensures the longevity of WordPress as a technology and community. Automattic CEO […]

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Days after web hosting provider WP Engine won a preliminary injunction against WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg and rival hosting provider Automattic, Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org is taking a holiday break. WordPress.org — a site that provides access to WordPress plug-ins, themes, and other artifacts to the community — will take a break from providing free […]

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WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic Matt Mullenweg is trolling contributors and users of the WordPress open-source project by requiring them to check a box that says “Pineapple is delicious on pizza.”

The change was spotted by WordPress contributors late Sunday, and is still up as of Monday morning. Trying to log in or create a new account without checking the box returns a “please try again” error. 

Last week, as part of the ongoing legal battle between WP Engine and Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, a judge ordered Mullenweg to remove a controversial login checkbox from WordPress.org that required users to pledge that they were not affiliated with WP Engine before logging in.

Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is required to remove a controversial login checkbox from WordPress.org and let WP Engine back into its ecosystem after a judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in its ongoing lawsuit. 

In addition to removing the checkbox—which requires users to denounce WP Engine before proceeding—the preliminary injunction orders that Automattic is enjoined from “blocking, disabling, or interfering with WP Engine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ access to wordpress.org” or “interfering with WP Engine’s control over, or access to, plugins or extensions (and their respective directory listings) hosted on wordpress.org that were developed, published, or maintained by WP Engine,” the order states.

In the immediate aftermath of the decision, Automattic founder and CEO Matt  Mullenweg asked for his account to be deleted from the Post Status Slack, which is a popular community for businesses and people who work on WordPress’s open-source tools. 

This story has been updated throughout with more details as the story has developed. We will continue to do so as the case and dispute are ongoing. The community around WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites, is going through a very heated controversy. At the core is a fight […]

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A California district court judge on Tuesday ruled that Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg must restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, a theme and plug-in repository owned by Mullenweg. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin noted that WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, themes, plugins, and subdomains should be restored as they were on September 20, when Mullenweg […]

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BlackRock has cut the worth of its stake in web hosting provider Automattic by 10%, the asset manager said in its latest quarterly disclosure report. The company, which invested in Automattic during its Series E round in 2021, valued its investment in the WordPress-hosting company at $37.5 per share, down from $41.7 per share earlier […]

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