The developers claim that their trust has been damaged following public confrontations with WordPress leadership. They believe that these confrontations have tarnished their professional relationship and credibility within the community.
John Blackbourn's tweet, which expressed concerns about WordPress.com plugin listings outranking WordPress.org on Google Search, sparked two days of intense debates among the WordPress community that quickly spiraled into a maze of uncontrolled emotional confrontations across various social media platforms. As a result, the WordPress community is ending the discussions.
Concerns over the SEO impact of copying plugins from WordPress.org's directory and using them on WordPress.com without creating backlinks to the original plugins were raised by developers. The fact that it maintains the long-standing misunderstanding between WordPress.org and WordPress.com is another issue.
When asked whether WordPress.com is thinking of not indexing these pages that duplicate content from WordPress.org, Matt Mullenweg told the Tavern, "I don't think the SEO concern is real," which is to say that aside from John's screenshot, which I believe is related to the.org en-gb subdomain decision/bug.
He mentioned that he saw.com five pages down for general searches. It appears from the traffic to those pages that search engines aren't sending them much, if any! Therefore, I'm not too concerned about those pages' SEO.
Those who are logged in receive the great majority of traffic to those pages. It is truly compatible with both Jetpack and.com websites; users can simply install it across numerous sites or view where it is already installed by clicking Manage.
Concerns were also raised by plugin developers regarding new users finding a duplicate plugin page on WordPress.com and discovering that the plugin is only available for free on the (paid) Business plan. The lack of an explanation link pointing back to WordPress.org gives the visitor the idea that the plugin isn't available for free anywhere else.
It wasn't until recently that many WordPress.org plugin authors discovered that WordPress.com was using their plugin pages that were being scraped. Patchstack changed its readme file yesterday to include the following wording, which informs users and visitors to WordPress.com that the plugin is free to download from the official WordPress plugin repository:
Oliver Sild, CEO of Patchstack, said, "I was at a Python conference last week and a guy came to our booth and said he has a WordPress site but he hasn't been able to purchase any plugins yet." After informing him that they are all free, I discovered that he had a WordPress.com website where installing any plugins requires payment. Some individuals believe that THIS is the WordPress.
Mullenweg verified that he assured Sild that WordPress.com would work on providing links to the.org similar page this week when asked whether WordPress.com could at least link back to the.org plugin for logged-out views to clear up some of the misunderstanding.
Mullenweg said that open source software and WordPress.com form a false dichotomy, in response to WordPress developer Daniel Schutzsmith's claim that WordPress.com is confusing OSS. As much a part of the OSS community as any other host, every website hosted on.com is.
It presumes that misunderstanding is a major problem for WordPress. Nothing about WordPress's development, even in comparison to other projects, suggests that the availability of both a.com and a.org domain name has impeded our progress.
Regarding revenue, Mullenweg stated that GoDaddy, Newfold/Bluehost, Siteground, Hostinger, and WP Engine make more money from WordPress hosting than.com does if you extrapolate out public domain numbers with plan pricing and look at public filings like the amount GoDaddy makes from hosting and what percentage of that hosting is powered by WordPress. These businesses are included on the five for the future page for you to look into.
Although it's cynically popular to criticize some of the larger ones, the WordPress community is free to choose any other host if they're not satisfied with the value and price they're paying. By that standard, you might really claim that they've all connected with customers far more effectively than.com. Perhaps I put too much of my.coms engineering and money in mobile apps, Gutenberg, Calypso, reader/notifications, 2FA/passkeys, and metrics, and not enough in marketing or paying affiliate host review sites.
Even though he claimed that Reed is the only person he has ever blocked on Twitter, some saw him barring Reed as a way to silence criticism. Her remarks were unrelated to the initial problem (the effects of the WordPress.com plugin listings), but they gained attention after Mullenweg retaliated against product owner and developer Dan Cameron, accusing him of intentionally causing more harm than good.
Dan, you created the Search Everything plugin, which gained popularity early on before being abandoned and eventually purchased by Zemanta. was last updated six years ago. You worked on "Smart eCart" for five years, but Woo and WP-eCommerce prevailed. You completed the 2k Sprout Apps / Invoices task.
The immediate and intensely (though clumsily researched) personal character of Matt's attacks causes many to become paranoid and fear that he has a list of ordinary people, not large corporations or other entities, on his enemies' list. It's a terrifying form of psychological abuse in which the community adopts the perspective of the children of an abusive parent. We all respond differently to stress because we have various personalities and, depending on our experiences, different points of view. But now that the paranoia has been verified, it's really unpleasant because Matt essentially made fun of the idea that he relies on information from second- or third-hand sources about what others say about him behind closed doors.
Mullenweg made so many of the plugin owners who propel WordPress adoption feel insignificant by using the entire situation as an excuse. The faith that product owners placed in the WP project leadership was severely damaged. Because they no longer believe Mullenweg has their best interests at heart, I predict that more product owners will choose to develop SaaS integrations with WordPress rather than create specialized products. I also don't see how he can ever put the genie back in the bottle following his actions on Twitter and in Post Status Slack.
WordPress, in my opinion, isn't software, Standiford stated on his site. It's not a community. No matter how important a person may believe they are, it's not about just one individual. I think WordPress is an expression of the idea that an open web is optimal for the internet. I would gladly contribute to WordPress over the current platform if I honestly thought that forking WordPress would be beneficial for WordPress and the internet.
WordPress 5.0 and the drive to make Gutenberg essential have completely transformed the community and contributions. A volunteer who is not a committer is not taken into consideration while making decisions.
First of all, I don't need his approval to validate my successes; I'm proud of them. His egregious misrepresentations were intended to serve his own interests and support his beliefs. I know many people in the community do not follow such values, and neither do I.
My goal has always been to create lifestyle enterprises that provide for my family, and for more than 20 years, I was successful in doing so. It was an amazing accomplishment for me that those companies helped other families as well. How fortunate am I? On the backs of the community, I truly won the WP lottery.
I made an effort to give back because I feel obligated to the community. It was honestly quite poor. I stopped participating because I felt that my ideas and work weren't good enough, as seen by the core team's actions. I consequently choose to support the community in my own way. I hope it's clear that this isn't the first time I've been let down by leadership. Despite the fact that I've already succeeded and been fortunate, I've come to terms with it and grown up.
S has more strength. She is more dedicated than I have ever been. She ought to apologize. She is deserving of respect. Not me.
Dan, your work with Sprout Invoices was an inspiration to me when I first started LearnDash. I would keep up with your success and read your personal blog. We ended up hanging together at a WordCamp and became friends years later. You're a smart, funny, and laid-back man. among the greatest.
Here, I'm on Matt's side. Each time there is an outcry like this, the guy is dragged, branded a tyrant, and other absurd things are said. WordPress is still entirely free and being developed more aggressively than ever in the interim. A tweet concerning plugins being featured on WordPress.com at two in the morning sparked the most recent episode. The WordPress backchannels (Slack and other places that ordinary users don't see) would have been a far better place to solve issue.
Since Matt has stated that he has no control over Google's decision about the ranking of.com or.org plugin pages in searches, he strongly implies that the fact that.com plugin pages outrank.org in search engine results is an unintentional one. However, the WordPress.com plugin browser has been around for eight years, but it wasn't until recently made available to search engines and unlogged users. Additionally, Automattic has been actively attempting to enhance SEO for the.com plugin pages ever since they made them public:
Sincerely, I'm not sure how he could explain all that SEO work if Automattic wasn't actively trying to sway organic visitors away from the.org repository and toward the WordPress.com pages for premium plugins.
You can tell that this is a continuous work just by looking at the repository. If you aren't attempting to funnel search traffic from the.org directory or the plugin's own page into the.com business plan sales funnel, what good is all that SEO work? (Remember that purchasing a.com business plan is the only way to use that plugin if you land on those sites right now.)
Cloning the plugins repository for financial gain is improper since it has an impact on SEO results, among other things. However, the impact is negligible. I conducted my own search here. Additionally, users, clients, and newcomers become confused by the existence of a service called WordPress(.com). However, the effect is negligible. My personal numbers are here.
Rebranding the private company that owns the dot com to something other than wordpress.com is the only viable option. Afterward, the dot com should be forwarded to the dot org.
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