Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Mullenweg’s WordPress Pause Triggers Unexpected Complications


Matt Mullenweg recently paused multiple WordPress.org services for the holidays, but the side effects began almost immediately, affecting attendance at future WordPress conferences held around the world. Joost de Valk requested a fix on GitHub.

Updated on 12/21/2024

The break in WordPress services was a turning point for Joost de Valk, co-founder of the Yoast SEO plugin. He openly called for a change in leadership. Mullenweg signals that he is resisting any change in WordPress management as the momentum for change gathers pace. Yoast co-founder calls for WordPress leadership change – Mullenweg resists

Mullenweg’s break in services

Mullenweg’s unexpected break in WordPress services affected new WordPress.org account registrations, new plugins, theme and photo directory submissions, and new plugin reviews. Mullenweg didn’t specify a time for those services to return, only saying that they will return when they have the “time, energy and money” sometime in 2025. So, the break in WordPress.org services is ongoing indefinitely.

Unintended consequences of pausing WordPress

Joost de Valk submitted a Ticket to GitHub drawing attention to a serious issue affecting the registration of new community members to WordCamp. The GitHub ticket foregrounds the problem inherent in Mullenweg’s unilateral decision to pause certain WordPress.org services.

Mullenweg’s dramatic service hiatus had the unintended consequence of reducing the growth, energy and momentum of the WordPress community itself.

Joost’s GitHub ticket explains why Mullenweg’s holiday break is devastating:

“A change was recently made that requires people to have a WordPress.org account in order to purchase a WordCamp ticket. Because of this change, the new holiday vacation imposed by Matt causes problems. Due to this enforced holiday break, people can no longer sign up for a WordPress.org account and therefore can no longer do so before purchasing a WordCamp ticket.

There are several WordCamps, large and small, that could be affected, as can be seen from the list on Central, possibly including WordCamp Asia 2025.”

Members of the WordPress community agreed. These are examples of comments that represent concerns from members of the WordPress community:

MakarandMane shares:

“Next 2 weeks there are two Wordcamps Kolhapur & Kolkata.. After 2 weeks another WordCamp in Pune.
Kolhapur is a new community that focuses entirely on new entrants who do not have an account. This will affect our ticket sales and associate day.”

Concerns were also expressed about WordCamp EU:

“And the WCEU just opened ticket sales…
In the WordCamp rules, we must be inclusive…. refusing to sell a WordCamp ticket isn’t really… welcoming new community members”

Solution found

A solution has been proposed to resolve the issue caused by Mullenweg’s service outage.

WordPress community member dd32 posted:

“It has been agreed to re-open registration for WordCamp purposes, this has been done at https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/14325”

Community members were grateful for the fix although some reported that they were still blocked from registering a new WordPress account, but it was a bug in their browser, fixed by switching to a new browser or a new IP address.

Expressed concern about the solution

Not everyone agreed that the solution was ideal. One member of the WordPress community posted their concern and received four likes from other members, showing that others agree with them.

decodekult wrote:

“I would suggest reconsidering this solution. Here he addresses an urgent matter (people couldn’t buy a ticket!) but ignores the primary petition: remove the wordpress.org login requirement to buy WordCamp tickets.

The change that closed this ticket doesn’t: it guesses where you came from, and if it contains the magic words, then you’re lucky enough to open a wordpress.org account.

Given that the primary reason for requesting a wordpress.org account where the owner can log in to purchase WordCamp tickets was precisely to prevent certain people from buying WordCamp tickets, because they could not log into their accounts due to their relationship with a certain company, and considering that this ban has been legally lifted by court order, I am raising my hand here and asking, as this ticket has done in its own title, that the wordpress.org login requirement to purchase a WordCamp ticket be removed.”

What happens when decisions are imposed

The importance of what happened is not just the inability of new community members to register for local WordCamps. It is a question of decisions and control. It appears that one person, Matt Mullenweg, has made a unilateral decision to pause WordPress.org services. Joost de Valk himself uses the word “imposed” to characterize the pause, writing:

“…the new holiday break imposed by Matt is causing problems. Due to this enforced holiday break, people are no longer able to sign up for a WordPress.org account…”

The word “imposed” in this context means a unilateral decision made by one person without consultation or choice of community members. A strong (and appropriate) word has been imposed because it says that the holiday was not optional or voluntary, but that it was ordered by Matt Mullenweg.

Although this issue was resolved by the WordPress community, this would never have happened if the decision was made with input from stakeholders from the entire WordPress community, from developers, key contributors, to WordCamp organizers. This happens when there is a lack of community input and accountability in decision-making.

Mullenweg’s action prompted one of WordPress’ biggest supporters to call for change. Catch up Joost de Valk calls for a change in WordPress leadership

Featured Image Shutterstock/Studio Romantic



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *