Recent drama about relationship between WordPress.org and WpEngine, creator of the popular ACF module, have frightened me. My trust in WordPress has for twenty years been based on a reasonable mix of opensource background and business involvement, but above all the reliability of upgrades : my original blog ecolopop has been running on wordpress for more than twenty years !!
It seems that on the side of Opensource, WordPress has long gone away from the original philosophy. On the website development activity, in order to achieve quality, I had to subscribe to a few very efficient plugins, but still business based. I can name them, because they are good for a small business creator : Gravity Forms, Elementor, Word fence, Yoast SEO...
On the side Small business, we are really in a place where wordpress flourishes, and I am thankful for that. I have to say, that 12 years ago I also switched to wordpress for small business websites and it saved me hours of hazardous development and alternative solution trying (Silverstripe was one of the candidates, but really never got to be a satisfying solution, the fact that it's still around makes it a reasonable alternative to study). I was really satisfied by editors like visual composer, elementor, and likes, that really marked an innovative step for small business owners independence for content management. Unfortunaltely, I find that the emergence of Gutenberg is also bloating wordpress with more complex infrastructure that makes all these editors still powerful for quick prototyping, but really for long term efficient development, I started think of going back to code based solutions, or pure data base management based on laravel, for example.
Then suddenly comes the october 2024 event : Everybody has a word to say about this, and the most reassuring word I have found about this is also the most frightening : while maintaining trust in wordpress, Kyle, creator of themeco, calls to Jesus. Did you read that? interesting is it not ? what does religion has to do with web site developement business ? Where does the Old Testament come to help me with multi block page editing ? I don't know actually, I am surprised, a bit confused, and I admit I would, in this position also migrate words to esoteric phrases, in my own words I would ask the surrounding trees, what do you think about this ? But let's go back to technical considerations.
I am not moving away from WordPress for blog based publications, because I have more than twenty important websites that run on wordpress. But I have to say I rely a lot on ACF module for specific development like event management. The fact that the whole update procedure is altered by ego based actions like the unilateral fork of the plugin that took place last saturday really questions the main argument I have to stick to wordpress : maintainability over years. Both Kyle from themeco and Ian from ACF now rely on their own server for upgrades. In other words, the october hack from Matt Mullenweg's stupid initiative breaks trust I have in wordpress automatic updates, what guarantees that future updates of wordpress are safe? nothing.
Trust is the most important criteria of choice for choosing platforms. WordPress, precisely, being the open platform so widely spread, is one of the most vulnerable code based. I have my own security module that blocks most attacks and rely on it for peace of mind. But when the mot notable person that embodies and --partially owns-- the system starts to spend time on fight, it means to me, run away. Slowly...