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WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

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Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#41

Post by bravetraveler »

sureIy wrote: post #33
CharlesW wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever happens, WordPress isn't going anywhere. At worst, someone will fork and rebrand it, just like Mike and Matt forked and rebranded b2/cafelog to create WordPress. (There are already successful forks like ClassicPress.)

> ClassicPress Never heard of it before, but it constantly surprises me how much effort people are willing to put in just to keep “the old version” of something.

I think it says a bit about how dubious 'new and improved' can be

Security updates, features? Perhaps yay. Redesign, boo. I already use the thing.

Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#42

Post by porker »

kevmarsden wrote: post #16
AlienRobot wrote: post #12

While I agree with Matt's thoughts on Wordpress I don't like this sort of public shaming. If you post this kind of thing, it burns bridges that you can't mend later. How can the two organizations reconciliate after this? Wordpress wants WP Engine to contribute to the source code because it makes money off Wordpress and uses its servers. I think this is very reasonable. I'm pretty sure WP Engine could patch Wordpress…

> I'm pretty sure WP Engine could patch Wordpress to use its own infrastructure, so this isn't a really as much of a security risk as people claim. Patching core WordPress is straightforward, but there's also tens of the thousands of plugins and themes on WordPress.org. Until WP Engine can create a mirror of the plugin and theme repos, there will be security risks.

Mirroring is not difficult, I've done it in order to perform code analysis on plugins at scale.

Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#43

Post by oliwarner »

type0 wrote: post #23
cyral wrote: post #9

The exaggerations in the post are crazy, that WP engine "broke" websites by disabling the news in the admin dashboard? If I recall that is like a one line code change. They disabled it because Matt published a disparaging post about WP Engine, knowing that it would show up in the admin dashboards of every wordpress install. That post was about them not being "real" wordpress because they disable post revisions (which…

> His own competing managed WordPress service (confusingly named Wordpress.com) disables features as well They are allowed to do this because Automattic owns the trademark along with WordPress Foundation

Has anyone actually been confused about the hosted service and the software?

I struggle with this argument because so much SaaS follows this model with self-hosted community editions. It's not like .com is trying to sell you a proprietary self-hosted version.

Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#44

Post by martpie »

porker wrote: post #42
kevmarsden wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty sure WP Engine could patch Wordpress to use its own infrastructure, so this isn't a really as much of a security risk as people claim. Patching core WordPress is straightforward, but there's also tens of the thousands of plugins and themes on WordPress.org. Until WP Engine can create a mirror of the plugin and theme repos, there will be security risks.

Mirroring is not difficult, I've done it in order to perform code analysis on plugins at scale.

Well, it definitely becomes harder when you cannot (officially) access any of the WP infra, including themes and plugins.

Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#45

Post by sureIy »

bravetraveler wrote: post #41
sureIy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ClassicPress Never heard of it before, but it constantly surprises me how much effort people are willing to put in just to keep “the old version” of something.

I think it says a bit about how dubious 'new and improved' can be Security updates, features? Perhaps yay. Redesign, boo. I already use the thing.

Yeah, exactly. Do you really want to put that much effort because “redesign boo”? Makes no sense. Put the effort learning the new UI and move on.

Every single “bring the old X back” project ends badly, you’re just extending your own pain by using those projects because they’ll slowly fall out of date.

The only way to successfully “bring the old X back” is to convince the original vendor, like it happened for the Metro UI in Windows 8.

Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#46

Post by bubblesnort »

nailer wrote: post #40
bubblesnort wrote: post #39

Someone please fork WordPress to e.g. WebPublish and sed -i 's/WordPress/WebPublish/' the whole thing and let both of these companies duke it out while we can continue in peace. Much good could come from this.

Won’t solve problems. Web Publish still needs to run all the infrastructure that Wordpress dot org does.

Not really.

WordPress continues to function in airplane mode with the airplane mode plugin.

And besides, you have to start somewhere. There could be a bunch of independant plugin and theme registries just like there are with Minecraft mods and resource packs. GitHub already serves this purpose for me with WordPress.

Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#47

Post by gulbanana »

MattPearce wrote: post #25
computerliker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier this year, Matt chased a popular Tumblr user he banned under Tumblr's weirdly transphobic TOS to Twitter to harass her publicly. He immediately took a "sabbatical" from Tumblr after this. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...

Please point out where Tumblr’s TOS is “weirdly transphobic”. Users who post pornography are banned regardless of gender identity. Matt’s sabbatical from Automattic was already underway when this incident occurred. Disclaimer: I work for Automattic but I am speaking personally.

are all of you called Matt over there?

Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#48

Post by Kye »

oliwarner wrote: post #43
type0 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His own competing managed WordPress service (confusingly named Wordpress.com) disables features as well They are allowed to do this because Automattic owns the trademark along with WordPress Foundation

Has anyone actually been confused about the hosted service and the software? I struggle with this argument because so much SaaS follows this model with self-hosted community editions. It's not like .com is trying to sell you a proprietary self-hosted version.

The .com and .org user forums get a steady stream of posts from people who mixed them up.

Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#49

Post by bravetraveler »

sureIy wrote: post #45
bravetraveler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it says a bit about how dubious 'new and improved' can be Security updates, features? Perhaps yay. Redesign, boo. I already use the thing.

Yeah, exactly. Do you really want to put that much effort because “redesign boo”? Makes no sense. Put the effort learning the new UI and move on. Every single “bring the old X back” project ends badly, you’re just extending your own pain by using those projects because they’ll slowly fall out of date. The only way to successfully “bring the old X back” is to convince the original vendor, like it happened for the Metr…

You've changed my mind on this a bit! I was generally more in the mindset of: "sure, maintain the old copy". Granted, Wordpress isn't the best choice for this. Vulnerabilities abound.

It's funny we still agree, coming from different approaches :) To your point, it doesn't make much sense to fork and actually maintain the code. I more meant the installation/deployment. I'm not that afraid with things like SELinux policies and network boundaries in place.

One could learn the new thing, find something more suitable, or run the old thing until the wheels fall off. We're spoiled for choice!

Creating more fragmentation/choice extends the challenge. We see this with Linux distributions. Outside of like four root distributions, we have N derivatives re-packaging for slightly different themes and configs.

Given enough time and caffeine I could replace the entire ISO ecosystem with YML and Linux from Scratch... but I use something more traditional because I value my time/effort.

Re: WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

#50

Post by KomoD »

healsdata wrote: post #31
amanzi wrote: post #26

He's lost his mind! Customising the admin dashboard has been something WordPress multisite hosts have been doing for 15+ years! There are tons of plugins on WordPress.org that provide this specific feature. And if you don't want a plugin, you can develop it yourself using supported WordPress-provided dashboard hooks: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/wp_dashboard... Same with post revisions - you can do…

> Where is the contract that WP Engine signed, that says they must display posts from their competitors calling them a cancer in their customer's websites? There isn't one. Just like there isn't one that says they can download plugins et al from their competitors' website. This is open source. They're free to fork WordPress, set up a competing app store, etc.

Competitor? How is wordpress.org a competitor?
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