Ok, I think Matt’s goofy for various reasons. From just what this article says, I think he’s right on this one. This is my understanding of it:
* The dev team has a disagreement about putting one of the company’s own projects on the available plugins carousel or whatever inside their main product.
* They eventually decide not to.
* The CEO says “this has been an important part of our product for 20 years. It’s silly that we’re even debating this”, and put it there anyway.
And that’s about it? Based only on what I read here, there wasn’t any compelling engineering reason not to do a thing, and the CEO made a product decision to do it. That sounds like something I’ve heard 1,000 times at different shops and I’m not sure what the problem is.
Perhaps I’m misreading this, and the main point isn’t “CEO overrides valiant dev team”, but “CEO makes recalcitrant dev team stop bikeshedding”.
I say this out of no love for Matt’s… “interesting”… decision making the last couple of years. This sounds reasonable to me though.
Agree. And the meta point, after reading through to the core committer channel on the WP slack is that it's clear he's now more involved in the project again and making decisions. I haven't been involved for years, but while I was it seems he had other priorities (understandable).
But the rapid changes from AI are an existential threat to the long-term viability of WP. Rather than bike shedding about something relatively trivial, they need to focus on the bigger issues, which it's apparent he's trying to do.
Interestingly, the culture that sustained WP over the last 2 decades may now be working against it. Culture is really hard to change, but he now seems to have his 'wartime CEO' hat on trying to do it, which is the right move.
Leaving out the optics and personalities and internal politics, the biggest issue I see is that they added this during the RC phase, which is against their policy. It should have been pushed to 7.1.
They just wound back half the RC for Wordpress 7 at the last second to tweak some features for Matt. I don't know if he's right about it, but they did it.
> Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict
This is an excellent way to get stuck with only the engineers sucky enough to have to put up with that, which is not the norm.
However, in this specific case, it looks like engineers were making a product decision, not an engineering one, and management decided to make a different product decision. That feels categorically different than "mauve has more RAM".
This is something people seem to miss. His position as CEO of Automattic creates a huge conflict of interest with his position at the non-profit foundation.
This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.
> most software development is not "real engineering".
Most software development doesn't have anywhere near the real world impact of the Boeing/NASA engineering you reference.
Good engineering practice recognizes the risks and scales the effort to match it.
A CRUD app for internal users has a different set of requirements than a revenue generating SaaS app, just like a backyard fence has different building criteria than a highway bridge.
Sure, I understand the stakes are lower for blog plugins than for aircraft.
But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. You don't decide to cut corners because you feel like it, or because it's more profitable. Mullenweg is not professional.
What does cutting corners have anything to do with the topic at hand? The situation isn't about devs getting the time to do something right, it's about programmers making a non-engineering decision that was overruled by the business in the businesses best interest. That's perfectly reasonable.
goofy is a pretty nice way of say he has a history of dressing up his shenanigans by literally... lying lol. the fact that wpengine debacle was framed as a defense of OSS should tell you a lot, probably don't even need to look at the details to know that it's usually him trying to profit while framing it as something moral.
It says a lot about what's been going on in the Wordpress ecosystem lately that I had never heard of Mullenweg before maybe a year or two ago, and now I immediately see his name and think "What's he done this time?" Probably very frustrating for many people who actually use the platform, but as someone who doesn't, it's almost morbidly fascinating watching the continued drama and wondering if and when any of it ends up hurting the bottom line enough that something changes. I've joked to my wife before that if they end to running into issues and sell Tumblr, and it follows the trend of how much cheaper it was the second time, it might mean we could just buy it ourselves and run it.
Same here. I had no idea who he was before the WP Engine debacle. He’s been fascinating to watch for someone who enjoys the occasional low stakes, high drama public spat.
But what did he do this time, though? I don't understand it very well, but it sounds like they made an anti-spam solution the default? That is good, right? WP gets a lot of spam.
This one certainly does seem to require a bit more direct knowledge of WP to interpret than I have compared to some of the others. It sounds like the strongest argument against it that is that he previously has been against plugins being listed in the default page and that he doesn't seem particularly open to having published guidelines for what merits being there by default, which means that what belongs there essentially is left up to whatever he decides with no one else having a clear picture of it.
In a vacuum, probably not a huge deal, and maybe for people who actually use WP the idea that this is basically something up to a judgment call makes sense. At least from my outside perspective, it sounds a bit like what's on the default page is basically being left up to the whim of the CEO without any real concrete explanation, which would be mildly concerning even if the CEO wasn't someone who's been making the news a lot the past couple years from getting into pissing matches with competitors, causing 8.4% of his employees to take a blanket offer to leave: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/automattic-workers-quit-...
I think the less charitable and more honest reading is: he wouldn't have allowed such a commit if it wasn't an Automattic product that benefits. He's been making very clear business decisions and forcing them into the foundation (which he controls) for a while (gutenberg was about wordpress.com's goal of competing with wix.com etc, not about wordpress.org), this is just one of the more aggressive ones, which is why it stands out.
His usual response is "but we're also sponsoring .org with developers" ... yeah, that's true, with developers who do Automattic's bidding and ensure that .org is pursuing .com's needs. He'd have to pay those developers either way, but this way he can call it a charitable donation.
Bro really needs an assistant to write his e-mails/comments for him. Every time he talks, people like his company less.
This is also more proof that open source owned by a company will never do what a community wants. Sure you can patch a bug if you fork the code, but nobody wants to do that, so it's not much different than using a proprietary product. Better to use open source not owned by a company, as the incentives are aligned with functionality rather than corporate profit.
Maybe the right to time to Ask HN: are you ready for a high performance bullshit-free Wordpress replacement yet? One that has everything batteries included so you don't need plugins for the most part? I would love to hear your thoughts on what your non-negotiables are from a CMS in 2026 and what features are important to you.
There are endless examples of very good CMS software out there already. WordPress is the plugins, WordPress is a website builder that is ubiquitous because of the plugins.
If you don’t need WordPress, you can choose from thousands of other options.
Cloudflare already did that and it’s available now[1], although it’s billed as a “spiritual successor” and not a literal one (so probably not backwards compatible).
It introduces a new prominent page in your wordpress settings that recommends popular services to you. All other services are behind a link that says "Find more connectors in the plugin directory" and are less visible.
At a dinner party, sure, but if anything we should be this transparent in business and political contexts more often. Who's paying your bills is often very important when outsiders are weighing our choices.
People on the Internet are just so dramatic. "Terrifying". Yes, indeed, this induces "terror", abject fear. Give me a break. At worst it's slightly cringe-worthy. This treadmill of dysphemisms is honestly annoying. At this point, all actions are described in extreme terms as if they're life changing when they're only mildly quirky.
I guess I'm confused about Matt wanting to "right the ship" so to speak, while also shoving this through. (Idgaf, it's a product call ultimately)
But it seems the clean, sustainable, long-term way to do this was to have the akismet plugin simply self-register. Why was this hack easier than just doing that?
God I love this place, a simple fking question gets downvoted.
Ok, I think Matt’s goofy for various reasons. From just what this article says, I think he’s right on this one. This is my understanding of it:
* The dev team has a disagreement about putting one of the company’s own projects on the available plugins carousel or whatever inside their main product.
* They eventually decide not to.
* The CEO says “this has been an important part of our product for 20 years. It’s silly that we’re even debating this”, and put it there anyway.
And that’s about it? Based only on what I read here, there wasn’t any compelling engineering reason not to do a thing, and the CEO made a product decision to do it. That sounds like something I’ve heard 1,000 times at different shops and I’m not sure what the problem is.
Perhaps I’m misreading this, and the main point isn’t “CEO overrides valiant dev team”, but “CEO makes recalcitrant dev team stop bikeshedding”.
I say this out of no love for Matt’s… “interesting”… decision making the last couple of years. This sounds reasonable to me though.
Agree. And the meta point, after reading through to the core committer channel on the WP slack is that it's clear he's now more involved in the project again and making decisions. I haven't been involved for years, but while I was it seems he had other priorities (understandable).
But the rapid changes from AI are an existential threat to the long-term viability of WP. Rather than bike shedding about something relatively trivial, they need to focus on the bigger issues, which it's apparent he's trying to do.
Interestingly, the culture that sustained WP over the last 2 decades may now be working against it. Culture is really hard to change, but he now seems to have his 'wartime CEO' hat on trying to do it, which is the right move.
Leaving out the optics and personalities and internal politics, the biggest issue I see is that they added this during the RC phase, which is against their policy. It should have been pushed to 7.1.
They just wound back half the RC for Wordpress 7 at the last second to tweak some features for Matt. I don't know if he's right about it, but they did it.
Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.
> Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict
This is an excellent way to get stuck with only the engineers sucky enough to have to put up with that, which is not the norm.
However, in this specific case, it looks like engineers were making a product decision, not an engineering one, and management decided to make a different product decision. That feels categorically different than "mauve has more RAM".
Business is wordpress.com, this is wordpress.org -- explicitly not part of Automattic but an "independent" open source project.
Obviously it isn't, but that's what Matt likes to pretend.
This is something people seem to miss. His position as CEO of Automattic creates a huge conflict of interest with his position at the non-profit foundation.
This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.
>Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.
This bush league kind of attitude is why people insinuate that most software development is not "real engineering".
When Boeing or NASA lets making money get in the way of good engineering practice, people die.
> most software development is not "real engineering".
Most software development doesn't have anywhere near the real world impact of the Boeing/NASA engineering you reference.
Good engineering practice recognizes the risks and scales the effort to match it.
A CRUD app for internal users has a different set of requirements than a revenue generating SaaS app, just like a backyard fence has different building criteria than a highway bridge.
Sure, I understand the stakes are lower for blog plugins than for aircraft.
But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. You don't decide to cut corners because you feel like it, or because it's more profitable. Mullenweg is not professional.
What does cutting corners have anything to do with the topic at hand? The situation isn't about devs getting the time to do something right, it's about programmers making a non-engineering decision that was overruled by the business in the businesses best interest. That's perfectly reasonable.
> But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low.
Being a professional means that you adjust what things you do according to the stakes.
For example, in software dev, you usually have tests for the code. Do you have tests for the tests? No? Why not? Why aren't you doing "the thing?"
In chip development, I usually had tests for the tests, because the stakes were higher. But I didn't usually have tests for the tests for the tests.
"died in a blogging accident"
RIP American democracy, we hardly knew ye.
goofy is a pretty nice way of say he has a history of dressing up his shenanigans by literally... lying lol. the fact that wpengine debacle was framed as a defense of OSS should tell you a lot, probably don't even need to look at the details to know that it's usually him trying to profit while framing it as something moral.
It says a lot about what's been going on in the Wordpress ecosystem lately that I had never heard of Mullenweg before maybe a year or two ago, and now I immediately see his name and think "What's he done this time?" Probably very frustrating for many people who actually use the platform, but as someone who doesn't, it's almost morbidly fascinating watching the continued drama and wondering if and when any of it ends up hurting the bottom line enough that something changes. I've joked to my wife before that if they end to running into issues and sell Tumblr, and it follows the trend of how much cheaper it was the second time, it might mean we could just buy it ourselves and run it.
Same here. I had no idea who he was before the WP Engine debacle. He’s been fascinating to watch for someone who enjoys the occasional low stakes, high drama public spat.
But what did he do this time, though? I don't understand it very well, but it sounds like they made an anti-spam solution the default? That is good, right? WP gets a lot of spam.
This one certainly does seem to require a bit more direct knowledge of WP to interpret than I have compared to some of the others. It sounds like the strongest argument against it that is that he previously has been against plugins being listed in the default page and that he doesn't seem particularly open to having published guidelines for what merits being there by default, which means that what belongs there essentially is left up to whatever he decides with no one else having a clear picture of it.
In a vacuum, probably not a huge deal, and maybe for people who actually use WP the idea that this is basically something up to a judgment call makes sense. At least from my outside perspective, it sounds a bit like what's on the default page is basically being left up to the whim of the CEO without any real concrete explanation, which would be mildly concerning even if the CEO wasn't someone who's been making the news a lot the past couple years from getting into pissing matches with competitors, causing 8.4% of his employees to take a blanket offer to leave: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/automattic-workers-quit-...
I think the less charitable and more honest reading is: he wouldn't have allowed such a commit if it wasn't an Automattic product that benefits. He's been making very clear business decisions and forcing them into the foundation (which he controls) for a while (gutenberg was about wordpress.com's goal of competing with wix.com etc, not about wordpress.org), this is just one of the more aggressive ones, which is why it stands out.
His usual response is "but we're also sponsoring .org with developers" ... yeah, that's true, with developers who do Automattic's bidding and ensure that .org is pursuing .com's needs. He'd have to pay those developers either way, but this way he can call it a charitable donation.
Akismet makes money for Automattic / Matt.
Comment spam is terrible and will continue to get worse.
Decent alternatives exist.
Increasing the visibility of Akismet should help increase revenue.
This is 100% a financial move.
What are those decent alternatives to Akismet?
I went looking earlier this year and found nothing even close to Akismet on a price-to-effectiveness basis.
Look at WP Armour – Honeypot Anti Spam.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/honeypot/
/r/wordpress will probably have others.
Requiring moderation of all comments remains effective.
Bro really needs an assistant to write his e-mails/comments for him. Every time he talks, people like his company less.
This is also more proof that open source owned by a company will never do what a community wants. Sure you can patch a bug if you fork the code, but nobody wants to do that, so it's not much different than using a proprietary product. Better to use open source not owned by a company, as the incentives are aligned with functionality rather than corporate profit.
Maybe the right to time to Ask HN: are you ready for a high performance bullshit-free Wordpress replacement yet? One that has everything batteries included so you don't need plugins for the most part? I would love to hear your thoughts on what your non-negotiables are from a CMS in 2026 and what features are important to you.
There are endless examples of very good CMS software out there already. WordPress is the plugins, WordPress is a website builder that is ubiquitous because of the plugins.
If you don’t need WordPress, you can choose from thousands of other options.
Maybe someone will put LLMs on Wordpress and make a new backwards compatible one.
Cloudflare already did that and it’s available now[1], although it’s billed as a “spiritual successor” and not a literal one (so probably not backwards compatible).
1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/
What is a "connector" in this context?
The Connectors API is a framework for managing connections to services like AI, anti-spam, etc. It was introduced on March 18, 2026 with WordPress 7.0 at https://make.wordpress.org/core/2026/03/18/introducing-the-c... and the PR at https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/75833.
It introduces a new prominent page in your wordpress settings that recommends popular services to you. All other services are behind a link that says "Find more connectors in the plugin directory" and are less visible.
See image https://developer.wordpress.org/news/files/2026/03/image-1.j..., which is the second image on "What’s new for developers?" at https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2026/03/whats-new-for-d...
>Automattic-sponsored core committer Jorge Costa
>Fueled-sponsored core committer Peter Wilson
>Bluehost-sponsored core committer Jonathan Desrosiers
>Human Made-sponsored core committer John Blackbourn
This is a terrifying way to describe people.
It does make the implicit explicit though, right? Each of these folks have a personal viewpoint but also represent a corporate viewpoint.
Why? People are referred to as committers everywhere. I like the transparency and credit this gives to the ecosystem users helping fund development.
When I did OSS work paid for by my employer, I was careful to note and credit who paid for the PR.
At a dinner party, sure, but if anything we should be this transparent in business and political contexts more often. Who's paying your bills is often very important when outsiders are weighing our choices.
People on the Internet are just so dramatic. "Terrifying". Yes, indeed, this induces "terror", abject fear. Give me a break. At worst it's slightly cringe-worthy. This treadmill of dysphemisms is honestly annoying. At this point, all actions are described in extreme terms as if they're life changing when they're only mildly quirky.
I guess I'm confused about Matt wanting to "right the ship" so to speak, while also shoving this through. (Idgaf, it's a product call ultimately)
But it seems the clean, sustainable, long-term way to do this was to have the akismet plugin simply self-register. Why was this hack easier than just doing that?
God I love this place, a simple fking question gets downvoted.