First of all, just to clear the air immediately, I am not affiliated with either company in this stupid fight and I am not being paid or persuaded in any way to post this. I just see that the discussion seems to be very one sided in this subreddit so I wanted to post an alternative view. I don’t agree with how Matt has been handling things, but I’ve also got a 20 year career built on WordPress and I’ve looked at many other CMS over the years and there’s just nothing out there that comes close and I really hope we’re not just seeing the complete downfall of the platform because it truly is the best website building ecosystem out there.

So here’s the hard truth that people keep avoiding because Matt keeps giving them so much other crap to complain about with all his crazy shit he’s doing. His initial comments, while maybe not presented at the best time, are true. A large private equity firm currently controls WP Engine and as someone who was on their platform for over 5 years now I can 100% confirm that I was already seeing negative impacts of this. Support has gotten sooo much worse. If having to tell an AI bot TWICE that you just want to talk to support wasn’t annoying enough, they also added a whole layer of junior level support agents who basically just have the same scripts as the bot and can’t really help with anything technical without escalating you to the next tier, which is where you’ll find the real experts you used to have direct access to.

We’ve also been getting weird server issues the last couple weeks too. All of our sites over multiple servers have been getting random 502 bad gateway errors that WPE knows about but can’t seem to fix.

It honestly just hasn’t felt like the same WP Engine for at least the past 6 months and that is coming from someone who was a die hard advocate for the company. I am even a part of their agency affiliate program. They’re honestly starting to feel a lot like GoDaddy these days.

The reality was that when this all blew up we had to make a hard choice. I think Matt is asking like an idiot but I’m also not going to sit here and pretend that a huge private equity firm who’s only goal is ever going to be to maximize profits no matter how it effects customers or their employees. The hard truth is that I need WordPress to keep my business running. I don’t need WP Engine. They were a great partner of convenience but they were the replaceable piece of the puzzle.

I will say, when it came to researching new hosting platforms we did have a hard time finding anyone with all of the convenience features that WP Engine offers. I’m not a server admin and don’t want to be so I’m not going to dive into some complex AWS or cloud system where I’m configuring servers and I also wanted the most managed service I could. WP Engines automated plugin updates add-on was huge for helping me maintain my clients sites without spending hours and hours on plugin updates. Very few hosts have that option. I demoed and setup sales calls with around 10 different hosting solutions looking for something to match WPE.

In the end we found what I think is the most direct equivalent to WPE on the market, but it comes from a source that a lot people here are going to hate. Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with picking sides and everything to do with finding a WPE alternative that matched up with their offering and interface. We only found one host that had all of that, Pressable, which is owned by Automattic. I had honestly never even heard of it before all of this and who knows that might be the real reason they’re so mad at WPE because they have their own hosting platform that no one is talking about. All I know is it has all the features I need from WPE at half the cost and since using them there is a very noticeable decrease in load times on my sites. I’ve also found that a lot of the other features like domain connect, sftp setup, etc also are a little easier and just seem to work better. My domain DNS have been populating in under 5 minutes across the board regardless of provider. It’s been really nice so far.

I don’t know why the future holds and I don’t know if we are seeing the start of the downfall and decentralization of WordPress but I’ve had to pivot a million times in my career over the past 20 years and I’ll continue to do so when situations require it. For this situation I chose to pivot my hosting and I’m pretty happy with the choice so far. Maybe this will help anyone else too who doesn’t really like what WPE is doing either and wants to find a good alternative for themselves as well.

Howdy mods, I have confirmation from u/spez that if the mods here send a request to him, they can capitalize the P. Can we fix this together? It's been years!

Is wordpress being destroyed from the inside?

Did someone from Wix or SS join the team to sabotage it?

I've worked for companies and this either came from the top down, or no one stopped it.

I don't typically use default themes, but these signs of rot.

Lately the discussion in r/WordPress seems to have dried up a lot. And any posts where people are coming in and asking questions are getting voted down which just seems really unfriendly to me.

I don't see this in any other subreddit.

Mods - can you not check who is constantly downvoting every single WordPress post and kick them?

Some of these posts are just moronic, much like the people that demanded that the mods stop 'controlling' things & that they were basically dictators lol.

I hope you're all happy.

I see a lot of these. "I want to do this, what plugins do I need hur hur?" We need to get rid of them or send them to another subreddit, because the quality of these posts is low and doesn't contribute to useful content on this sub.

1. The questions are almost always super vague or ask to implement the functionality of an entire platform.

2. The way the questions are asked is lazy and there are too many possible answers.

3. Per the above, the person probably has just heard about WP and hasn't done any research (how do I build [popular app functionality] into my blog?)

4. Plugins are great, but you should probably have an idea of what functionality you're trying to replicate and or what other pieces are necessary to accomplish your goal.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I'm not sure if this sub is supposed to be the Noob's first stop or the WP Welcome Wagon. If you're asking vague and general questions this way then you're being lazy and want someone to do the leg work for you. I have no issues with someone who's done their homework asking for something more specific which will solve other people's problems, but asking open ended questions that are going to result in opinionated responses is a waste of space IMHO.

We should ban these questions, or subject them to the same basic good question etiquette as Stackoverflow

• Show you Googled/researched before posting.

• Have a specific, answerable question.

• For god's sake if your question is "how do I make a social media site?" FFS specify a feature.

end rant.

Gonna make this short. I spent months learning Wordpress and Woocommerce for my side hustle. Learned elementor and all. Built a site all by myself. But at this point it’s become too much to learn and handle.

Everyone told me that Wordpress you have to do a lot of the backend stuff by your self and at first I thought I was up for it. But as my business grows I don’t want to have to focus on all that BS. I think I will move to square space or Shopify

I just want stuff to be easy and focus on selling my product the easiest way possible. If I had help maybe I’d stay but nah.

Just posting to let people know my thoughts and sort of asking for advice

The way some of these post ask for stuff you can easily find out. Or worse, unabashedly ask for information that people on here who know their stuff could easily get paid to consult and implement is WILD.

I get it. It's Reddit. Much more reliable to get an answer from someone with experience, than piece together documentation or several google searches. And quite honestly people still generously answer some of these questions to help out beginners but overall it's still kind of crazy how much free consulting happens on here.

EDIT: Before you comment your own version of 'That's how the internet/reddit/subs work"

1 - I kind of don't care.

2 - Obviously I am not talking about everyone who asks questions.

3 - It's the ones that want a roadmap and then to be handheld through the terrain.

4 - Yes it's hard to know what was done prior to posting a question, but it's pretty clear when someone has CLEARLY taken absolutely 0 initiative.

A proper and polite petition perhaps? Perhaps pointless?

This is going to be a bit of a controversial post, since a lot of people here are in support of WP Engine and Silver Lake Capital. But I'll just bite the bullet and clarify my position.

There's no reason to use ACF Free anymore

When SCF only had the free features you could make the argument that it didn't matter. In fact you could argue that ACF Free was better because SCF was hastily put together (as made clear my the old ACF logo and whatnot).

But now SCF has all the features of ACF Pro (which includes Options Pages, and 5 extra fields: notably the repeater field and the flexible field). And while it's still a bit crude, it's still in the beta. Give it a few months and it will be just as good as ACF Pro.

In fact it might even become better because plugins and themes will be able to integrate the features without having worrying about licensing issues (e.g. BricksBuilder had this issue with ACF Pro half a year ago).

Unless you have a lifetime license, there's no reason to use ACF Pro anymore

For those of you who are not in the know, 4 years ago when Elliot Condon (the original creator of ACF) owned ACF he offered two lifetime licenses ($25 for 1 site, $100 for unlimited sites) but when Delicious Brains took over they removed these offers and bumped the price to $50/year and $250/year respectively. Delicious Brains was then bought out by WP Engine.

Why do I bring this up? Because the main argument for why you should get ACF Pro is "you need to support the developers," but this is mainly pushed by people who have lifetime licenses and don't themselves support the developers.

In fact, when WP Engine acquired Delicious Brains they sent out emails to lifetime license holders requesting them to support the developers and the overwhelming answer was: "No!" In fact, WPTuts made a video justifying why he shouldn't have to support the developers because he bought a lifetime license for $100. This is interesting because WPTuts is one of those people who will tell you to buy ACF Pro and support the developers. In other words, "Rules for thee, not for me."

But not only that, ACF Pro is more expensive than any other premium plugin for CPT and CF, and subscription prices are not grandfathered or guaranteed. If they raise the price from $250/year to $300/year that's what you'll have to pay.

Oh, and if you don't have an active license not only won't you receive updates or support, you even won't be able to use the plugin at all (this is a recent feature implemented by Delicious Brains to get people back on the subscription despite not adding anything of value for the last year).

But SCF is stolen!

• It's legal.

• It's easily accessible through the .org repository.

• There's no subscription.

• It's free.

I couldn't care less about the moral pandering. If you want to support a private equity firm with a $250/year subscription, go ahead. But I'm pocketing the money and going with SCF.

Feels awfully familiar to the idle threads and casual nature that Matt is doing as if he's taking a cue directly from Steve Huffman's insane drama threatening an implosion of all the goodwill their platforms had built if they didn't kowtow to the increasingly volatile threads coming from their CEOs. And of course, spez was directly mimicking Musk in throwing tantrums and imploding everything they had built out of their hubris and megalomaniacal belief that the entire ecosystem owed its very existence to their visionary genius.

Is this what we can expect all the time now that a generation of techbros are aping the actions of those who did it and got away with it? I know Musk is himself aping Peter Thiel, so this is a long legacy of the insanely wealthy believing they are bigger than all their customers.

Yesterday I wrote "Merry Christmas" to Matt and received sexually suggestive insults in response. I understand how upsetting Q4 has been and discussion has become polarized. I wish you all happy holidays, good health to you and your loved ones, and for a great new year. We can put positivity into community objectives like a distributed plugin repository. Hope we can work towards common goals together and make 2025 a good year for WordPress.

I'm attempting to get support at https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/elex-australia-post-shipping/, and therefore need to login to wordpress.org. I have a WP Engine account, so this means I have an affiliation. Is this is ridiculous?

I am having a few websites built by an agency. They are ridiculously expensive. They do good work but before we launch the sites we will have a meeting with their maintenance team to discuss what those fees would look like for ongoing changes when we need to make updates. I have been in this world for quite some time and have had good and bad experiences with monthly retainers for maintenance work, turnaround times when changes need to be made, etc. Does Claude or ChatGPT or any of the bigger AI models do any of this work easily - work like updating photos on a website, adjusting copy, moving things around design wise on a page if the sites are WordPress? Forgive the ignorance, but I have seen so much on Twitter about AI companies being able to code, famously with Claude Code, so assumed I may be able to bypass paying this agency when I need to make changes barring that paying for the AI perform the task isn't more expensive than the agency would charge for changes.

I have no website building experience whatsoever. I'm trying to create a website to sell things I make. Everyone said to use wordpress. So i bought a domain name, chose a template, and got started. I quickly realized that I have no fucking clue how to do anything on this stupid thing. I feel like an idiot because i keep deleting things on accident, adding shit I don't want, etc. I feel so fucking stupid for spending money on something I have no clue how to use. So now i'm sitting here having a meltdown. I actually don't know what to do. Do i pay someone to do it for me? I don't know anyone who can do this kind of stuff. Or should i just let the money I spent go down the drain and use a different software. If anyone has any advice at all let me know.

Another WP friend and I were discussing MM. She mentioned how he’s becoming like Elon, that success has gone to his head and made him crazy. I came up with a name for the phenomenon - Muskification.

Hi guys, I've been a WP devs for years. However, I have never been around to any drama of the WP ecosystem, except for the recent one, which I consider to be quite big. I know a few things (like Matt is a terrible person), but I couldn't follow all the story. Can anyone sum up what is the current situation between Matt and WP Engine? Is it getting better or it's still where it was 6 months ago?

For the second question, what are the alternative solutions for CMS? And maybe I'm being crazy but why don't we, as the developers with the open source spirit, build something that is close to what WP has? I mean, I know there are good CMS but I don't think they have the similarity of WP, so if WP users want to switch side, it takes a learning curve to transit from WP to others. Wouldn't it be great to have something close to WP functionalities so people can easily transit?

We built a WordPress dev pipeline that plugs into Claude Code - basically it's a bunch of skills, agents, automations, that will build things for you in a WordPress context.

You tell it what you want, it researches, writes specs, codes, does security checks, WPVIP compliance checks, etc in a loop until it's done.

Can't Claude just do this anyway? Sort of? It can but it often improvises, ignores existing patterns, doesn't always review its work, etc. The pipeline basically forces it through a process that a senior WP dev team would follow.

Our plan is to open source it... but first we need ideas to test it with!

So, give me your craziest, complicated, weird, edge-case, silly, WordPress things you need done, and I can run them on our pipeline and share the results in this thread.

We really need feedback at this stage and I've run out of how many kinds of "Weather Blocks" I can create.

There should be an add in to do this. I don't want people in Florida to access my astrophysics site because I was a prostitute there.

Ideally it would display 50 check boxes one for each state.