A leaked WordPress Slack chat shows that Matt Mullenweg is considering limiting future WordPress releases to just one per year from now through 2027 and insists that the only way to get Automattic to contribute more is to pressure WP Engine to drop their lawsuit. One WordPress developer who read that message characterized it as blackmail.
WordPress Core Development
Mullenweg’s Automattic already reduced their contributions to core, prompting a WordPress developer attending WordCamp Asia 2025 to plead with Matt Mullenweg to increase Automattic’s contributions to WordPress because his and so many other businesses depend on WordPress. Mullenweg smiled and said no without actually saying the word no.
Automattic’s January 2025 statement about reducing contributions:
“…Automattic will reduce its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project. This is not a step we take lightly. It is a moment to regroup, rethink, and strategically plan how Automatticians can continue contributing in ways that secure the future of WordPress for generations to come. Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.
As part of this reset, Automattic will match its volunteering pledge with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem, or about 45 hours a week that qualify under the Five For the Future program as benefitting the entire community and not just a single company. These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates.
We’ve made the decision to reallocate resources due to the lawsuits from WP Engine. This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem.
WP Engine’s historically slim contributions underscore the imbalance that must be addressed for the health of WordPress. We believe in fairness and shared responsibility, and we hope this move encourages greater participation across all organizations that benefit from WordPress.”
Leaked Slack Post
The post on Slack blamed WP Engine for the slowdown and encourages others to put pressure on WP Engine to drop the suit.
The following is a leaked quote of Mullenweg’s post on the WordPress Slack channel, as posted in the Dynamic WordPress Facebook Group (must join the Facebook group to read the post) by a reliable source:
“Would like to put together a Zoom for core committers to discuss future release schedule, hopefully bringing together some of the conversations happening the past 6 weeks:
6.8 includes a lot of “overhang” contributions from Automatticians, including 890+ enhancements and bug fixes in Gutenberg.I’d like to make sure we get extra testing on 6.8 from web hosts, especially if they can upgrade perhaps their company blogs or something, employee sites, etc to make sure upgrades and everything work well in all environments and with the most popular plugins without regressions.
The Chromecast update issues today (https://x.com/james_dunthorne/status/1898871402049999126 )remind us how easily this can happen.I’m willing to commit people to early roll-out to WP .com to provide widespread testing with hundreds of thousands of users. This is very resource-intensive, but has contributed a lot to making sure releases are stable before they deploy to the wider array of non-engaged web hosts in the past.
We should consider modifying the release schedule:Other corporate sponsors are protesting WPE’s actions by pulling back contributions, which I think will effect some of the other largest contributors after Automattic.
The court schedule in the WP Engine lawsuit against Automattic, me, and WordPress .org ( https://cloudup.com/c33IWQHdNMj ) goes to jury trial in 2027. WPE appears to be unresponsive to public pressure to resolve things earlier. (As I said at WC Asia, I’m ready to end it yesterday.)
We are approaching 7.0 in two releases, which has an emotional valence and I’d rather not be purely maintenance. (Nor do I want to break our naming structure and do 6.10.)
One approach would be delaying 6.8 and making it the only release this year, 6.9 in 2026, and then aim for a 7.0 in late 2027 assuming a positive outcome of the jury trial.FWIW I would estimate WPE is spending the equivalent of 60 engineers full-time salary at 250k/yr as plaintiffs / attackers, and Automattic a similar amount on defense. Imagine the project could do for democratizing publishing and competing against proprietary alternatives if that were going into core and community development.
Drop any other thoughts or agenda items you may have in this thread.”
Response to Mullenweg’s leaked post:
One Facebook user accused Mullenweg of trying to “blackmail” the WordPress community to pressure WP Engine (WPE). They wrote that the community is largely sympathetic to WPE than to Mullenweg. But in general Mullenweg’s statement was met with a shrug because they feel that this will give core contributors the chance to catch up on maintaining the core which to them is a greater priority than adding more features to Gutenberg which many of the developers in this group apparently don’t use.
One lone commenter in the Facebook discussion asked if anyone in the discussion had made a positive contribution to WordPress. At the time of writing, nobody had cared to respond.
