Joost de Valk Calls for Breaking the WordPress Status Quo, Community Reacts

Joost de Valk, co-founder of the Yoast SEO plugin has called for Breaking the Status Quo of the WordPress world. This comes in the wake of Matt Mullenweg’s announcement of a holiday break for WordPress.org and the ongoing Automattic-WP Engine legal dispute.

de Valk said, “We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we’re ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is “Democratizing publishing”, we’ve been very low on exactly that: democracy.”

Referring to Mullenweg as a BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), de Valk argued that Matt is “no longer Benevolent, and because of that, speaking up in public is a risk.”

de Valk acknowledged that due to Yoast’s contributions to WordPresss, he “did get some say in where WordPress went, though never officially, and never when it went in directions that Matt disagreed with. Over time, that influence became less as Matt tightened his grip on the project. I think that tightening was in part a cramp. Wanting to control more what people were working on, because the project wasn’t progressing fast enough in the direction he wanted it to go in.”

I think it’s time to let go of the cult and change project leadership. I’ve said it before: we need a “board”. We can’t wait with doing that for the years it will take for Automattic and WP Engine to fight out this lawsuit.

– Joost de Valk

He said, “I’m still, to this day, very thankful for what Matt has created. I would love to work with him to fix all this. But it’s clear now, that we can no longer have him be our sole leader, although I’d love it if we could get him to be among the leaders.”

He put forward 5 steps that must be taken fast:

A WordPress foundation-like entity consisting of a board with people from diverse backgrounds leads the project.

WordPress.org and key community assets are transferred to the foundation.

The WordPress trademark is made public domain or managed for free use.

Companies and individuals can sponsor the foundation, receiving perks like listings on a hosting page.

Small teams are formed for Architecture, Product, Events, etc., with proper governance.

He also suggested “Federated and Independent Repositories” to decentralize the official WordPress repository. He said, “Matt might not agree to my first five points above. However, we can still work on the Federated and Independent Repositories without his permission because, frankly, we don’t need it.”

He revealed that he’s already in talks with other community figures like Karim Marucchi, CEO of Crowd Favorite. He is also willing to take up the mantle of the movement if needed.

He said, “I’m here, and willing to lead through this transition. I do have the time, the energy and the money needed to fund myself doing it. I’ve worked in this industry and this community for close to 20 years and it’s very dear to me. Thanks in large part to the WordPress project, I have the privileged position to be able to drop and/or delegate some of the stuff I’m working on and start working on this.”

Karim Marucchi’s Vision For a New WordPress Business Roadmap

Karim Marucchi of Crowd Favorite backed Joost de Valk. He said, “the current situation has jeopardized the very fabric of this ecosystem.”

We need to prevent a single entity from doing to WordPress what befell other open-source projects that shrank or died while protecting one party’s market position.

– Karim Marucchi

He proposed five essential critical paths to concentrate on:

Securing the supply chain & start modernization

Convening, defining & creating the Commons

Defining the roadmap as “the” Open-Web’s Operating System.

Open Source as a hub for innovation

Focusing on leading data ownership, privacy, and accessibility

de Valk and Marucchi will get together with other community leaders in January 2025 to decide the way forward.

Response From Matt

Matt commented under de Valk’s blog post: “I think this is a great idea for you to lead and do under a name other than WordPress. There’s really no way to accomplish everything you want without starting with a fresh slate from a trademark, branding, and people point of view.”

Response From the Community

Joost de Valk found support from other community leaders too.

Brian Gardner of WP Engine supported de Valk, tweeting, “Cosign. (My personal op and b/c I WordPress.)”

WP Engine also came out in support.

Michele Butcher-Jones of Can’t Speak Geek also shared her thoughts:

Katie Keith of Barn2Plugins shared, “Wow, I never expected someone as high profile as @jdevalk to speak out so openly against the current leadership of WordPress. However, I completely agree with his analysis of the situation and his proposed solutions.”

WordPress Core Committer Tonya Mork said, “I’ve been mostly quiet, other than publicly pausing my WordPress Core contributions. That ends today. I stand with @jdevalk and @karimmarucchi for the “hold this community together” effort. Publicly sharing my support.”

Taco Verdo of Emilia Capital had this to say:

Daniel Schutzsmith, Jon Brown, Karissa Skirmont, Blake Whittle, Duane Storey, Vova Feldman and Takis Bouyouris also came out in support of de Valk.

Andrei Lupu was, however, against the development. He said, “Let me nuke my WP career with an honest question: why would we follow a board of people who sold their products when they peaked? No one is perfect and I’m not sure if switching from one person’s vision to multiple people fighting for influence of a “board” is a good thing.”

@ViaEth also supports Matt. “All of this started after WPE couldn’t continue to leech off the #WordPress branding. All of these blog posts and whining just proves @photomatt right. Companies want to suck WP dry if this was purely about altruistic reason they would just fork the codebase and fuck off.”

Jesse Nickles, an SEO enthusiast, also does not believe in de Valk. He said, “Despite my desire to want to give you another chance as a “thought leader” or whatever else, 2 things are seared into my memory… first, the fact that Yoast SEO was always, and still is, one of the most dishonest and tricky plugins in WordPress history.”

Morten Rand-Hendriksen published After WordPress. According to him, there are two paths forward for the WordPress community:

Mullenweg releases his iron grip on the project, brings in proper governance, creates a more equitable ecosystem economy, and steps into a role of visionary leader instead of micromanager.

The community organizes, takes every lesson learned over the past 20+ years, combines with a vision for what the world will need going into the next 10 years, and builds a new platform to stand on.