throwawaymatt

This drama started in April 2025 and there were replies to my comments here on HN telling me WordPress is "dead" and that the community would soon jump ship. Neither happened (not even remotely), and instead of switching to a different CMS we're just using (on new projects) WordPress as a pure CMS with custom/detached front ends because WordPress is still the best/most mature CMS. 99% of my clients that had WordPress, still have WordPress because small businesses move slow, and most of the "AI WordPress killers" are just glorified chatbots which well, if you've ever tried to manage a large site with a nondeterministic "AI chatbot"... it's obvious why.

Just when we (the WP community) thought things were settling down and cooler heads might be prevailing... this happens. Uhg, not great for someone who has invested over 15 years into building with WP and does (paid) business with an Automattic company.

A very important distinction indeed. Wordpress.COM is not the same as the self-hosted version at WordPress.ORG

While they've made recent changes to .COM to bring it closer to .ORG mostly as a knee-jerk response to the Matt v WPE scrap, they are still very different experiences.

I rarely advise clients looking to DIY solution to go to WordPress.com

Splitting the community in half? Nah. If Matt needs to go, the community who is more interested in just making money (we're not "post economic" like Matt) will move aggressively to cut him out like cancer.

Sure he controls a scary amount of the ecosystem NOW, but we've seen big vendors express interest in hosting repositories, and major plugin vendors move quickly to secure their distribution and update models.

My tiny agency has already mitigated many risks and shifted our support towards developers who see a future PostMatt™

We'll be fine because WordPress belongs to us, not Matt.

yawn Pretty much every major WP builder has an AI component. I'm sure this one is as half-baked as all the others.

They're still battling out in court, with a timeline that extends into 2027. Meanwhile: (very quick summary) Matt's pulled his developers off the project, and the release schedule has slowed. Some commercial vendors have increased their support, while others have pulled back. Meanwhile the ecosystem of devs and agencies basically shrugged it off. If we need to get rid of Matt we will (with big vendor support), no big deal.

Today I'm sending a link to a client to purchase a license for Paid Memberships Pro. Not because of this, but because it's the best tool for the job. I'll continue to go directly to the developer/source for good plugins.

It's not ironic, although I love irony. I created this throwaway because there's too many clues on my primary account that could lead back to IRL me and Matt is petty like that.

Word of mouth mostly. We have a local presence, and through good old fashion IRL networking we've built a decent little business.

I've built over 700 WordPress websites and launch 4-5 each month. I expect to launch at least 30 in 2025. AMA and give me your example of something "better" and I'll gladly tell you why it's not. I've spent my career using these tools and deploying them for real people (not marketing departments creating throwaway sites).

> I joined WP Engine in 2018 because it was the one company that really did seem to be honest about who they were. Like every other company they were in it to make money, but unlike every other company they didn’t hide that fact behind abusive language. They didn’t claim I was “family.” They didn’t claim their work was virtuous and therefore somehow “better” than non-WordPress orgs. No, they said they wanted to be the biggest host and went after that with the best pay I saw in the WordPress ecosystem and interesting work on top of it.

Well said. Our agency chose WP Engine over 8 years ago because they were hands-down the best managed WordPress hosting provider. It revolutionized our WordPress hosting offerings and allowed stable, mostly headache free growth. Without the WP Engine's platform, and their investments in making WordPress hosting modular and safe we'd still be in the stone ages of dedicated/vps hosting.

What kept us as a customer for these 8 years though, has been the quality of support. It can't really be measured, but I've found their support to be unmatched and highly competent over hundreds of interactions.

We've grown over 400% with WP Engine and this entire fiasco with Matt blindsided us. Begrudgingly, we're diversifying our hosting allocations to protect against this new threat but we'd be much happier continuing with just WP Engine.