WP Engine is not WordPress

It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then?

There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless, again, I'm completely missing something.

The WordPress revision system is a real pain to deal with. I've been hosting and running a multi-site WordPress site for about 15 years, and the biggest drain on server resources was the revision system. Thankfully, there's a setting to limit to disable the revision history: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/

For Matt to call WP Engine a "cancer" because they use WordPress-supported functionality to turn off a WordPress feature is bizarre. All WordPress hosts modify the software to make it work for them. Especially Automattic!

A more accurate and even more confusing statement would be “Wordpress is not Wordpress” which is a reality that I’ve had to explain to clients (in a former life) countless times.

“But when I go to Wordpress.com…”

SORRY, forget everything you saw there, that’s not Wordpress. Same logo? Yes. Branding? Yes. Company? Yes. But it’s not Wordpress.

This one setting that WP Engine disables is a shame, but it’s nothing compared to the confusion that Automattic has brought upon themselves

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops".

Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators.

It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.

The gist I get reading all the commentary is:

a: There's no angle to analyze this attack from where he isn't a massive hypocrite

b: It's not clear why he singles out WP Engine when so many major players in the WP ecosystem have equal and worse ethical issues. Why does this seem like a grudge match when a higher-minded ecosystem-level call for review and change seems like the right path?

Maybe this is a bit radical but I'm not sure the guy who runs one of the biggest commercial WP operations should be able to make posts attacking rival commercial operations on the .org blog.

> WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system

I'm not sure I see how the absence of a revision tracking system rises to a violation of sacred principles.

In my experience, the revision system in WordPress is not performant. The more revisions there are for a given page, the longer it takes to publish that page, eventually leading page publish requests to time out. I usually have to limit the number of per-page revisions to keep, to prevent that from happening.

We settled on Wordpress and WP Engine for the marketing side of my employer's website. Strictly speaking, I'm in charge of all of our technology choices, but my time and attention is better spent on our product, and WP Engine and its deployable artifacts is good enough for leadership. (We are a very small company)

My boss (ie the owner) has never asked me about per post versioning. When we need to roll back, WP Engine's custom snapshotting fits the need.

> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

And that's their right according to the GPL license, is it not?

This entire tirade reads like corporate mudslinging.

The way you win over customers with an open source product is by offering a better service. Period.

As someone outside of the WP world and without a dog in this fight, I'm now more inclined to look into the WP Engine offering rather than whatever Matt Mullenweg is selling.

It's pretty bizarre to claim that WP Engine is causing confusion here when the real confusion is between WordPress.org and WordPress.com

WP Engine does backups differently… and rather than force you to copy and deploy complex histories to prod, which wastes time, they just snapshot the server nightly. You can roll back as needed.

The way they let you copy the DB between staging and prod, honestly it’s faster and better for their users the way they do it vs. default WordPress. My 2 cents.

I personally dislike WP Engine after years of having used them. Earlier this year there was a story about how Cloudflare had bizdev representatives reach out about a technical issue under the guise of customer support. I saw the very same thing with a client on WP Engine a few years back, and it was over something that they likely could have done something about given their position in the ecosystem: Too many spiders hitting old URLs.

Instead of recommending strategies to help fix it, they jacked up our prices. It was a huge pain for everyone involved.

But I think the challenge is, at an agency level, it’s hard to move to another CMS host because it’s seen as difficult to move up the food chain. Providers like WP Engine exploit this misunderstanding by targeting non-technical customers with promises that they’ll help you out. That was clearly an opportunity for them to step in, and they used it to put on the squeeze.

You can’t license software as open source, with a liberal license, and then get angry when someone profits off of it. That is one of the many valid uses. If you don’t want commercial use, license your property with a limited license that meets your expectations.

It’s probably worth mentioning that WP Engine author the _Local_ app https://localwp.com/ which is far and away the best tool to build WP sites errr on your local machine. Then just upload to WP Engine and your are live. This valuable innovation is fueling the growth of WP Engine and makes this a bit of a honey trap.

Personally I’m not convinced that keeping a 100% audit trail for reconstruction of old states is useful in production. It may well be a better trade off to run WordPress code in a leaner way for speed and storage requirements. Since that architecture results in many ways to get the current state from the db there is also a purity argument that the default schema is too denormalised. Discuss…

I hosted on WP Engine for many, many years and everything got slower, including their control panel.

I moved to a service that cost me less for two years than what I paid WPE for one month, and they’re faster and have had zero issues. I also had to rely on backups and they worked too.

WPE was great in theory a few years ago, but then they acquired a few other companies and added too many distancing layers for tech support. They have professional features and a cool API, but their hosting speeds are now abysmal.

It might not be WordPress, but then WordPress is often an inefficient, error-prone piece of dung anyway. WP Engine is the only painless WordPress hosting solution I've seen. It's fast and has a great backend panel for debugging. Hard to do all that yourself for that price, unless you're hosting WP in bulk.

I can only speak as someone who has done enough web dev to feel like every CMS is designed to get in the way and extract money.

Using any variant of wordpress on a project seems equally negligent.

What's maybe more disturbing is the CEO of one privately backed company (Automattic) can use a privileged community position to malign another community member (WPEngine). As a passive observer of Wordpress it feels like a very icky conflict of interest. Especially when you throw in the oooh "spooky boogieman private equity" fearmongering language.

This feels like a private which has reached the public shorn of the context that would be necessary to understand it.

I use Wpengine and have enjoyed it. They have some aggressive upsells and you learn you can ignore them. Actually had no idea about revisions, hadn't used them before I hosted with Wpengine.

I very much like using Wordpress and Wpengine has helped make it easy to do so. I'm sure they have some things to work put between them but I feel this needs more info. At a certain level it's open source software and if it isn't a trademark violation and is allowed by the license terms then Wordpress has only moral suasion to work with.

Very happy with the work Wordpress has done to make an amazing ecosystem. If they need something from WPEngine to keep things going I think it's fair to ask and perhaps they did but we're a bit in the dark here.

I've been out of the WP community/scene for a number of years now, but this post is kinda weird. Revisions definitely aren't the hill I'd die on when choosing a hosting provider at all. Especially considering WPEngine does a lot of things very well:

1. Dead-simple staging environments

2. Support for Local, which makes WP development an absolute breeze because I don't need to maintain docker, vagrant, or a LAMP stack, etc. And it makes deployments quick/easy.

3. Dead-simple backup/restore features

4. Simplified cache-management

And yeah, I've got the technical know-how to handle all of that myself directly on a proper server and all that devops-y goodness. And yes, $5/mo shared hosting cPanel provider would be comparable (and let's be real, it's good enough for most people using WP)....But man is it nice to just charge/pay a little more for a host that just does that crap for me with a nice interface.

I like revisions as a feature. Hell, I made reference to them a lot in the training material and sessions I put together for clients way-back-when as a way to give clients the confidence to tweak copy without fear of completely ruining their site. But this blog post seems to pretend it's the heart of WP and without it, it's an entirely different piece of software all together, which is absurd.

One of the most disturbing posts I read ever from some tech executive; instead of encouraging competition and driving quality forward for the users, instead he spreads his venom and calls his competitor a cancer?!

It's now a legal battle: https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fn3mjr/matt_mul...

>> "WP Engine has now filed formal legal action against WordPress.org, myself, Automattic, and we are doing the same against them, so I may not be able to comment on this too much in the future."

Amazed that this got to the point where an official post was deemed necessary.

WP Engine is fantastic. I’ve hosted Wordpress directly on Linux (with me as sysadmin) and tried out or evaluated probably all the most popular WP hosting platforms… including both WordPress.com and WP VIP, owned by Automattic. I settled on WP Engine.

It seems a little disingenuous for Matt to pull on the self-righteous mantle of open source in order to run down a company that directly competes with his commercial platform.

What happened to the idea of WordPress as an inclusive, flexible project that lifts all boats? What happened to open source means you can do what you want?

The more I think about it, the more troubling this seems for other commercial entities working with WordPress. Is Matt going to start putting targets on the backs of companies who get too successful with “his” software WordPress?

Says the company with a competing product

I feel like I read something like this nearly two decades ago and the community consensus became: WordPress is not WordPress

The history or vague sentiment that comes to mind for you is probably not from WordPress itself, but plugins or integrations that used it.

A victim of success, WordPress alone isn't much. All of that said... I know absolutely nothing about WP Engine. This isn't an endorsement

I mean, yeah. Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Because an option exists to store every revision doesn't mean you necessarily have to do it for free. It is a costly feature. They're free to chop up WordPress as much as they like and monetize features that elsewhere are default. They're not hiding it and users can choose to go elsewhere. Otherwise every WordPress host would be the same, just hosting vanilla WordPresses... and while the WordPress people may not like it, ain't nothing wrong with it.

This has the same energy as a spat between two Mastodon instances. Did he make any effort to work this out with them in private? I'd think he would mention that if he did.

Actually, since WordPress supports ActivityPub now, it's a spat between two massive AP platforms with apocalyptic potential. Someone needs to get follower migration from WordPress to anything else on the AP fediverse done quick.

Related:

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

Why is the .org mouth speaking with the .com's words?

This is nothing more than commercially focused.

Matt has chosen to keep Wordpress Opensource, and thanks to him for that.

This allowed companies like WPEngine to exist... and focus their resources like marketing and maintaining their internal "fork" rather than contributing to core Open Source Project... and this might be one of the reasons they are getting some good success.

Generally trademark is what should offer some protection here and I think this is where Open Source landscape was not tested well.

WP Engine claims on their front page they are "Most Trusted Wordpress Hosting" which arguably makes folks to assume they host full featured Open Source Wordpress, which per Matt's article does not seem to be the case.

I would agree if revisions were enabled by default just for posts and pages.

Here’s a common example: you have a blog with 20 pages and 20 custom plugins (quite a standard these days). In a year of hosting that one, you’ll end up with millions of revisions in the database, which is really resource and speed issue for MySQL servers as the developers of WordPress never considered sharding; everything is stuffed into one table, with no indexes by default.

So, usually, the size of the DB and resources to run it go over what you would expect, so naturally, you limit it to a more sane value.

TLDR; In pristine WP env with no plugins unlimited revisions make sense. In a WP with many plugins they don't as other plugins declare them but not use them and thus we end with a system that uses huge amount of resources for nothing.

Oh and revision in WP is not like GIT revision as is full copy of the content.

tbf I dislike revisions in the forever space as a default and would prefer if they are off. If revisions can expire by default that is fine tough. I have no idea how Wordpress handles it. But most of the time you should backup your hosting data anyway , especially Wordpress, because updates will break stuff and these revisions are useless for that.

Sorry, but for all intents and purposes, WPEngine IS WordPress.

Running WordPress is such a pile of security and customer support suck that nobody wants to deal with it. Consequently, if you are being made to run WordPress, you also want to pay somebody to make the pain go away. If I pay WPEngine, I can tell my marketing and design teams "Customer support is over there. Talk to WPEngine and leave me alone."

If WordPress made their software such that hosting administration wasn't such a fiasco, WPEngine would have viable competitors and wouldn't be able to extract the ecosystem.

They really thing WordPress is something special. It really isn't; there are better systems. I think Matt is just mad because he is not getting any revenue from wpengine.

That being said, some commercial users of open-source software need to be better contributors to the eco-system and not just vampires.

WP Engine is so incredibly overpriced.

Using .org blog to attack an Automattic rival is unacceptable. Matt must resign from WP leadership and focus on his business — and post this nonsense over there.

In a sense, the aggressively FOSS approach of Wordpress opened the doors for this.