Drama in the WordPress Community – What Does it Mean for You?

Up until now, you might have been blissfully unaware of the drama brewing in the WordPress Community. At a very high level, there have been disagreements between Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the company behind products like wordpress.com and Jetpack, among many others, and WP Engine, a hosting provider that also owns popular plugins like ACF, which is used on millions of WordPress sites.

We don’t want to get involved and take sides, but thought you should know of a few events that might impact you:

• On September 25th WP Engine was blocked from being able to access the WordPress.org repository, as outlined in Matt’s post here. This means WP Engine customers won’t be able to update plugins and themes through WP admin.
• On October 3rd the ACF team, owned by WP Engine, announced that future updates will come directly from their site.
• On October 12th  Matt appropriated the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin and .org listing, creating “Secure Custom Fields.”
• October 13th WP Engine, the owner of Advanced Custom fields, sent out an email to WordPress customers informing them of this action. WP Engine is making consumers aware of how to get “real” ACF, directly through them. 

If you’re on one of our maintenance plans, there’s no need to worry. For the foreseeable future our team will have to manually download plugin updates, and then upload them to your site directly. This will take longer, but we hesitate to make any hasty moves, like switching hosting providers or plugin solutions, until we see how the dust settles in the coming weeks. Anyone who is hosted on WP Engine isn’t impacted by the ACF change mentioned above, and website maintenance customers who aren’t will continue to have ACF updated manually by our team. Rest assured we are monitoring the situation closely and will keep in touch on the best steps moving forward.

Nick Bonnet
Director of Operations