Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve seen the drama that’s been unfolding in the wonderful world of WordPress the last couple of weeks. Today, its megalomanic founder, Matt Mullenwegg — who seems to be devoted to make sure everyone feels the extent of his wrath — made a change that impacts all users of free plugins hosted on the wp.org repository. So, I felt the need to reach out.
My “Professional” Opinion
I know, I should remain neutral in this. But, today, in an attempt to answer a support ticket for OMGF, I woke up to a login screen that required me to pledge my allegiance to Matt and his band of misfits:
I haven’t yet.
As a plugin developer, you can imagine this frustrates me. I’m not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, yet I have to deal with this.
What frustrates me, is that I have 300K+ users on my free plugins — all of them hosted on wp.org. A fair share of them are probably hosting their website on WP Engine, and a handful of them might be looking for support right now, only to be greeted by this embarrassing attempt at gatekeeping.
I’m Still Here to Help
So, this is me, reaching out to you. If you’re affiliated with WP Engine in one way or another, and you’re a user of my plugins, free of premium, I’m right here!
The contact form isn’t just for paid users. Free users are more than welcome to use it. In fact, I would love it if our benevolent dictator would allow me to change the link of the Support tab on WP.org to my contact form. But he doesn’t — yet?
Anything Else?
That’s it for now. I haven’t updated the blog in a while, but today felt like an emergency.
I’m back from my Summer break for a month now — it was great, thank you. I have a lot of great stuff in the works: a completely new redesign of my website is coming early next year, the license manager of my premium plugins is getting an overhaul, OMGF Pro is getting some pretty cool new features and, last but not least, GDPRess is getting a huge update.
Last but not least, I want to end on a happy/funny note and share this tweet (X?) by my WP buddy, Xaver, because it’s hilarious IMO:
