The WordPress and WP Engine Drama: Is a Fork on the Horizon?

Tom Smykowski
8 min readOct 14, 2024
Photo: Markus Winkler, public domain

Tensions are rising between WordPress and WP Engine, two giants of CMS world. With WordPress powering around 40% of the web, recent events have sparked a debate over contributions and responsibilities.

I’ve used Wordpress for many years, and also I’m a software engineer that writes often about open source. So I have to share my opinion on the latest drama in the open source world that you probably heard of. Between Wordpress and WP Engine.

The article is brought to you thanks to my readers on Medium. Thank you for your continued support!

What is Wordpress?

But before we get into it, just a quick introduction. Wordpress is the major CMS system (~40% of the web), content management system. It’s a software to build blogs and websites. It has a nice user interface, is easy to install and use, has a lot of themes, plugins etc.

It was co-created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003. The first one created the Automattic company that is behind a website WordPress.com, a SaaS version of Wordpress (means that you can just create a Wordpress blog or page there, you don’t have to download and install…

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Tom Smykowski
Tom Smykowski

Written by Tom Smykowski

Software Engineer & Tech Editor. Top 2% on StackOverflow, 3mil views on Quora. Won Shattered Pixel Dungeon.