WordPress: Resilience and the Path Ahead

Published: October 21, 2024

In my last post, I focused on the short-term effects of the Matt vs. WP Engine drama. Today, I want to look at the bigger picture.

In Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella Meadows describes how resilient systems can absorb shocks, adapt, and keep functioning… up to a point! Think of an ecosystem, like a forest. It can handle occasional fires, regrowing and maintaining its balance. But if fires become too frequent or too intense, the soil degrades, species die off, and the forest reaches a tipping point where it can no longer recover.

Push a system too hard, and it reaches a threshold where it can no longer bounce back. That’s where things break. We haven’t hit that tipping point yet, but if we keep going down this path, we might find ourselves beyond it.

WordPress thrived because of its openness and simplicity. It attracted talent from all sides: core contributors, plugin creators, theme builders, and hosting providers. Not everyone needed to have a stake in decision-making, but the platform’s appeal was that developers could build, innovate, and contribute in their own way.

What puzzles me is that many of Matt’s decisions could have had community support in different circumstances:

  • Taking on a private equity firm: In open-source, few things rally people more than standing up to private equity. Yet the way this was handled felt more like a power struggle than community-driven action.
  • Integrating custom fields into core: The community has asked for this for years. But instead of a collaborative effort or a fork, it came through a forced takeover of a plugin, which left a bad taste.
  • Encouraging companies to contribute more: Most of us agree that companies profiting from WordPress should be encouraged & incentivized to give back. But twisting arms and dragging the community into a legal fight was never the way to do it.

Then there’s the issue of tone and approach. Using the official WordPress account to engage in off-brand tweets (no matter how harsh the criticism) isn’t the way to handle community discourse. The fallout is visible. Talent who might’ve contributed are now questioning whether WordPress is the right platform to invest in. And that’s the real loss.

If WordPress keeps going down this path, we’ll cross a point of no return. WordPress is already facing growth problems, with younger people choosing other platforms. If the goal is to make WordPress less attractive to the next generation, it’s working.

But here’s the thing about systems: before they break, they can still heal. They can absorb shocks and bounce back if we act quickly. I haven’t lost hope. If WordPress returns to its roots, it can still recover and thrive for decades to come. The clock is ticking.

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