WP Engine has filed an injunction at a U.S. court to regain access to the open-source repository WordPress.org. It is the next chapter in the ongoing feud between WP Engine and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and his company Automattic, in which Mullenweg recently revoked WP Engine’s access to the repository.
The main result of Mullenberg barring the door was that WP Engine no longer has access to its own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin. WordPress forked it and converted it to Secure Custom Fields to ‘remove commercial upsells and solve a security problem’. In doing so, WP Engine effectively lost a vital tool it offers its customers.
Because Mullenweg denied and removed access to the plugin, WP Engine can no longer manage and update it. As a result, WP Engine is asking the court to restore access to the repository and restore the situation to before September 2024.
Mullenweg on the warpath
Mullenweg, meanwhile, remains on the warpath and has instituted a new verification step for WordPress.org contributors, requiring them to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine. Some Automattic employees disagree with Mullenweg’s rigorous steps. In at least one case, that lead to the staff member being denied access to an internal communication channel.
WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner said she thought WordPress.org was owned by the nonprofit WordPress Foundation (as opposed to the profit-driven company Automattic). There is a lot of ambiguity surrounding the ownership of these entities. Mullenweg is the co-creator of WordPress and manages the (nonprofit) WordPress Foundation, which is about WordPress as an open-source project.
Uncertainty about WordPress.org’s status
At the same time, he is CEO of Automattic, which markets managed-hosting provider WordPress.com and e-commerce platform Woocommerce, among other things. Mullenweg also personally owns WordPress.org for self-hosted sites. This part does not technically fall under Automattic, although in practice, it seems to be the case.
In any case, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg escalated by forking ACF and taking over the plugin on WordPress.org. According to him, this is a unique situation “caused by WP Engine’s legal attacks. We don’t expect this to happen with other plug-ins,” the WordPress founder said.
Although both parties interpret the situation in their own way, WordPress refers to its guidelines. These explicitly state that the platform has the right “to remove or disable a plug-in from the directory, even for reasons not explicitly stated in the guidelines.”
Also read: WordPress halts ACF plugin in WP Engine conflict