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.
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!
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.
Here's an alternative hill to die on and that to be taken at least as seriously as this post: regardless of what WP Engine is doing wrong, WordPress is wrong to tell you that you're "editing" or "changing" a published post. You're not. You're preparing a distinct, updated edition of the work previously published. To publish one thing and call it /foo and then to publish a later edition and call that /foo is to break "the core promise" behind scholarship and citation, and, by extension, the Web. (The fact that everybody else does it is weak. They shouldn't do it either. Is it going to stop? Probably not.)
If this is their worst complaint about one of WPs biggest hosts then he isn’t doing too badly.
I’m not sure if he’s still involved, but the founder Jason Cohen seems very nice and down to earth. I’m sure he would turn the setting back on in 5 minutes if Matt came knocking and this is all there was to it.
WP Engines whole reason for being is that open source Wordpress is a car crash to manage. The hacks, the spam, the broken addons on upgrades are in a league of their own. They’ve probably done more to help the platform than hinder it.
The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument.
The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can.
The “default setting” is an example of this behavior.
Also, calling turning off all historical revision data as just “changing a default setting” in a content management system is disingenuous to say the least.
> The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can.
Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks twice about the private equity hosted version?
Because the market is stupid. Worse is better, planned obsolescence, clickbait, fast fashion; the free market is full of failures. It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete.
Your argument is perhaps unintentionally implying that WP Engine's offering is 10x better. WP Engine is the competitor. It's ridiculous to suggest WordPress.com wouldn't be the default, obvious choice for hosted/managed WordPress.
Put in B2B terms, this is as if AWS only sold managed ElasticSearch and they did it well enough that it forced Elastic to change their licensing (as happened in real life). But of course, WordPress can't change their license because it's too ubiquitous and doing so would be an obvious, massive backfire.
If WordPress.com was truly competitive, this whole issue wouldn't even be a discussion. It's middling and expensive. And Mullenweg is upset that people are willing to pay for essentially Lightsail-but-it's-just-WordPress over his own offering.
In this case the market is not stupid. WordPress.com's managed offering is limited enough that most web developers make valid recommendations to avoid it. Wpengine works a lot more the way a WordPress user wants it.
> private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can
Still a bizarre hill to die on. Were contributors misled about the license that allows a private or public company or a nonprofit org to use the software for profit?
Did Matt Mullenweg delude himself into thinking that only people who share his ethos about content would use the software?
Did noone learn anything from the lamentations that started with Berkley and ATT, continued with Redhat and most recently with Elastic-Amazon and Hashicorp-itself?
My impression is that Mullenweg is a thoughtful person, so maybe I'm missing something.
I used to use WP Engine for client sites and I've run into this revisions issue.
Is the WP revisions implementation amazing? No. Should it be off by default? Also no.
This isn't the only quirk: they (used to, at least, may still) forcibly upgrade WP major versions on quite an aggressive timescale, which I think is unacceptable when minor versions are getting security patches and when there can be reasons you might want to stick with an older version.
I had a couple of far less than optimal experiences with them which stopped me using them, but this was in their "growth explosion" phase in 2016 and 2017.
I no longer use hosting providers like this, don't use Cloudflare etc.; my main feeling is that once you think you need WP Engine for your website you actually need more WP expertise. Given how the costs on WP Engine rack up, you should probably be paying for dedicated hosting and a consultant to optimise your site first. It's not difficult to make WordPress radically more efficient with relatively simple hosting and configuration changes, even while preserving Apache on the backend if you chose to.
This is not to say that the staging=>live push tools aren't useful; they are. But they are less useful than you might think, once you have a production site with user-generated content (guest bloggers/editors) that diverges from the content on your staging site.
WordPress is a two-sided thing: out of the box it is pretty solidly secure and easy to deploy, but using a custom configuration at scale requires expertise.
As an offering WP Engine has improved a lot over the years, and I believe they pay the WP-GraphQL guy which is a good thing. But I still think that even in the medium term it is easier to own your own hosting problems than surrender control like this.
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.
> I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable.
How can it be wage theft when people voluntarily contribute to it? If you don't want others to use your open source software, don't write open source software.
try releasing something under an open-but-not-open-source license as a solo developer or small team. there's a lot of established developers (presumably earning high salaries) that will very vocally badmouth the license choice. i'd seen this happen over and over again eg here, and when i've asked other developers why they open sourced their products they've said the same, and it was one of my concerns when i approached launch
sadly, my market fit was so bad that nobody ever looked at the license ::karma::
note: i have no problem with someone choosing not to use a product with a license they don't like (i do the same). it's the dissing of others that would use it that potentially crosses the line. i'm not even saying it *is* theft, only that there's a valid argument to that effect
> It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.
It's not just rare, it's important to know that in many arrangements it's simply impossible. Once any company takes outside equity financing, every quarter is only looked at in terms of growth, and anything a company says should always be viewed in terms of "will this allow us to grow revenue." I'm not saying it makes all companies "evil", and there are a good deal of "do good" things that happen to coincide with growing revenue. But you can bet that if any principal requires going against growing revenue, it will be jettisoned in short order.
The only way to avoid this is to not take outside funding, and even then there is no guarantee what happens when the business is sold (and when a business is sold, the acquires are nearly always going to look at ROI solely from monetary returns).
> This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does
Yes it is. If you're hollowing out your value prop you better be returning at least some, if not a majority, of that value back to your users in the form of price drops or increased service levels. We have all been Stockholm Syndrome'd into believing otherwise as our favorite products and services institutionalize themselves into nothingness.
Ownership and management are mere stakeholders in the business, equal with (and no more) than customers and employees.
> rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable
Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.
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 to page publish requests to time out. I usually have to limit the number of per-page revisions to keep, to prevent that from happening.
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.
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.
> 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.
According to whom? I’ve developed and run Wordpress sites for nearly 15 years and never enabled revisions on a single one.
This whole line of thinking—of why is a “core tenet” or whatever—is directly contrary to the ethos of open source. If Matt doesn’t think people should be able to turn off revisions, he should put that in the license. Otherwise, users can do what they want and open source leaders should celebrate that.
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'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.
Personally, most the features Wpengine offered wasn't very useful for my team and we just went to rent servers on Hetzner for the sake of simplicity. Same goes for Cpanel too. We just used google drive + mysqldump to synchronize the database and rsync to synchronize the files. However, we manage the site ourselves with a team of 4 dedicated software engineers so I don't know if this approach would work for customers who just want a site that they will edit themselves.
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.
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.
He mentioned during the talk that he made multiple attempts to resolve this in private but the other side wasn’t interested in hearing him, he also said he did not want to do this presentation
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not everything that is immoral will necessarily be illegal. We can't legislate morality. The WordPress.org folks seem to be taking a position that WP Engine's behavior is immoral. That doesn't mean that WordPress.org has some duty to attempt to use every governmental remedy at their disposal to prevent WP Engine from taking these (allegedly) immoral actions. Instead, the folks at WordPress.org are attempting to use public shaming and boycott to bring WP Engine in line.
Do you believe that governmental mandates are the only acceptable solution to (this class of) immoral acts with software?
If what you're saying is indeed the case, that's some awful hypocrisy. WordPress.com (run by Mullenweg!) is not "real WordPress". It disables the installation of most plugins unless you pay them a boatload of money. Arguably, that's just as "hacked up" as what WP Engine is offering.
Imagine going after a direct competitor for doing to your open source project the exact sort of thing that you commercially do to that same project. The idea that they're immune to the morality argument because they contribute to the OSS project more is ridiculous.
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.
always great to see devs sh1t on other devs under the premise of "this isn't right!!!" when in reality it's just affecting their bottom line. money makes the world go round!
Did you read the post? They have no problem with other Wordpress hosts and are calling out WP Engine specifically. They even suggest switching to literally any other WP host that isn't WP Engine.
You can chop up WordPress, because it's open source. But you cant chop it up and keep calling it the same thing. Only the vanilla WordPress gets to be called WordPress... because the project called WordPress has decided that the release they put out is what they want to attach their name to. Someone cant come along later, make a bunch of changes, and then attach someone elses name to it.. and then go around insisting that their version is the same thing.
Most large open source projects have a trademark policy that makes this explicit. Don't know if WP has one though.
> 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.
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.
If it was just about turning off a WP feature (revisions), I would agree with you... but the author also writes:
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.
Which is a more serious allegation, and trademark law would prevent them from calling it WordPress if they modified the software. It's pretty common in the open source community to insist forks use another name to prevent confusion.
You called out the most absurd passage in the post. My web-focused company uses WP Engine and I administrate it and let me tell you, it's WordPress. Completely WordPress. So some defaults are changed? Every other provider I've used does something similar. Matt hasn't mentioned the other excellent default WP Engine choices, if he wants more to complain about. Random PHP calls disabled by default. Must-use security drop-in plug-ins. High-risk and processor-intensive plug-ins disallowed. Regular plug-in vulnerability reports. It's an administrative layer of choices I appreciate as a web admin because I am just one guy. Also, I don't use revisions and neither should you if you have a large site. They balloon a database AND YOU SHOULD BE COMPOSING OFFLINE FIRST, anyway. Maybe I'm dating myself as a 35-year+ internet user but composing in a browser's text field is considered harmful. If you compose locally, you always have a backup and don't need revisions.
reply