Matt Mullenweg Overrules Core Committers; Puts Akismet on WP 7's Connector List

mmooreds about 5 hours ago 44 commentsRead Article on therepository.email

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Discussion (44 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

kstrauser•about 4 hours ago

Ok, I think Matt’s goofy for various reasons. From just what this article says, I think he’s right on this one. This is my understanding of it:

* The dev team has a disagreement about putting one of the company’s own projects on the available plugins carousel or whatever inside their main product.

* They eventually decide not to.

* The CEO says “this has been an important part of our product for 20 years. It’s silly that we’re even debating this”, and put it there anyway.

And that’s about it? Based only on what I read here, there wasn’t any compelling engineering reason not to do a thing, and the CEO made a product decision to do it. That sounds like something I’ve heard 1,000 times at different shops and I’m not sure what the problem is.

Perhaps I’m misreading this, and the main point isn’t “CEO overrides valiant dev team”, but “CEO makes recalcitrant dev team stop bikeshedding”.

I say this out of no love for Matt’s… “interesting”… decision making the last couple of years. This sounds reasonable to me though.

AnonEM00se•about 4 hours ago

Leaving out the optics and personalities and internal politics, the biggest issue I see is that they added this during the RC phase, which is against their policy. It should have been pushed to 7.1.

qingcharles•about 2 hours ago

They just wound back half the RC for Wordpress 7 at the last second to tweak some features for Matt. I don't know if he's right about it, but they did it.

asdfasgasdgasdg•about 3 hours ago

Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.

kstrauser•about 3 hours ago

> Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict

This is an excellent way to get stuck with only the engineers sucky enough to have to put up with that, which is not the norm.

However, in this specific case, it looks like engineers were making a product decision, not an engineering one, and management decided to make a different product decision. That feels categorically different than "mauve has more RAM".

luckylion•about 3 hours ago

Business is wordpress.com, this is wordpress.org -- explicitly not part of Automattic but an "independent" open source project.

Obviously it isn't, but that's what Matt likes to pretend.

stackghost•about 3 hours ago

>Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.

This bush league kind of attitude is why people insinuate that most software development is not "real engineering".

When Boeing or NASA lets making money get in the way of good engineering practice, people die.

gmays•about 1 hour ago

Agree. And the meta point, after reading through to the core committer channel on the WP slack is that it's clear he's now more involved in the project again and making decisions. I haven't been involved for years, but while I was it seems he had other priorities (understandable).

But the rapid changes from AI are an existential threat to the long-term viability of WP. Rather than bike shedding about something relatively trivial, they need to focus on the bigger issues, which it's apparent he's trying to do.

Interestingly, the culture that sustained WP over the last 2 decades may now be working against it. Culture is really hard to change, but he now seems to have his 'wartime CEO' hat on trying to do it, which is the right move.

ookblah•about 1 hour ago

goofy is a pretty nice way of say he has a history of dressing up his shenanigans by literally... lying lol. the fact that wpengine debacle was framed as a defense of OSS should tell you a lot, probably don't even need to look at the details to know that it's usually him trying to profit while framing it as something moral.

kstrauser•34 minutes ago

Notice the distinct lack of me sticking up for him outside this very specific case.

saghm•about 4 hours ago

It says a lot about what's been going on in the Wordpress ecosystem lately that I had never heard of Mullenweg before maybe a year or two ago, and now I immediately see his name and think "What's he done this time?" Probably very frustrating for many people who actually use the platform, but as someone who doesn't, it's almost morbidly fascinating watching the continued drama and wondering if and when any of it ends up hurting the bottom line enough that something changes. I've joked to my wife before that if they end to running into issues and sell Tumblr, and it follows the trend of how much cheaper it was the second time, it might mean we could just buy it ourselves and run it.

kstrauser•about 4 hours ago

Same here. I had no idea who he was before the WP Engine debacle. He’s been fascinating to watch for someone who enjoys the occasional low stakes, high drama public spat.

AlienRobot•about 4 hours ago

But what did he do this time, though? I don't understand it very well, but it sounds like they made an anti-spam solution the default? That is good, right? WP gets a lot of spam.

saghm•about 2 hours ago

This one certainly does seem to require a bit more direct knowledge of WP to interpret than I have compared to some of the others. It sounds like the strongest argument against it that is that he previously has been against plugins being listed in the default page and that he doesn't seem particularly open to having published guidelines for what merits being there by default, which means that what belongs there essentially is left up to whatever he decides with no one else having a clear picture of it.

In a vacuum, probably not a huge deal, and maybe for people who actually use WP the idea that this is basically something up to a judgment call makes sense. At least from my outside perspective, it sounds a bit like what's on the default page is basically being left up to the whim of the CEO without any real concrete explanation, which would be mildly concerning even if the CEO wasn't someone who's been making the news a lot the past couple years from getting into pissing matches with competitors, causing 8.4% of his employees to take a blanket offer to leave: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/automattic-workers-quit-...

luckylion•about 1 hour ago

I think the less charitable and more honest reading is: he wouldn't have allowed such a commit if it wasn't an Automattic product that benefits. He's been making very clear business decisions and forcing them into the foundation (which he controls) for a while (gutenberg was about wordpress.com's goal of competing with wix.com etc, not about wordpress.org), this is just one of the more aggressive ones, which is why it stands out.

His usual response is "but we're also sponsoring .org with developers" ... yeah, that's true, with developers who do Automattic's bidding and ensure that .org is pursuing .com's needs. He'd have to pay those developers either way, but this way he can call it a charitable donation.

markx2•about 4 hours ago

Akismet makes money for Automattic / Matt.

Comment spam is terrible and will continue to get worse.

Decent alternatives exist.

Increasing the visibility of Akismet should help increase revenue.

This is 100% a financial move.

stevoski•about 3 hours ago

What are those decent alternatives to Akismet?

I went looking earlier this year and found nothing even close to Akismet on a price-to-effectiveness basis.

markx2•about 2 hours ago

Look at WP Armour – Honeypot Anti Spam.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/honeypot/

/r/wordpress will probably have others.

altairprime•about 2 hours ago

Requiring moderation of all comments remains effective.

0xbadcafebee•about 1 hour ago

Bro really needs an assistant to write his e-mails/comments for him. Every time he talks, people like his company less.

This is also more proof that open source owned by a company will never do what a community wants. Sure you can patch a bug if you fork the code, but nobody wants to do that, so it's not much different than using a proprietary product. Better to use open source not owned by a company, as the incentives are aligned with functionality rather than corporate profit.

neya•about 1 hour ago

Maybe the right to time to Ask HN: are you ready for a high performance bullshit-free Wordpress replacement yet? One that has everything batteries included so you don't need plugins for the most part? I would love to hear your thoughts on what your non-negotiables are from a CMS in 2026 and what features are important to you.

fontain•42 minutes ago

There are endless examples of very good CMS software out there already. WordPress is the plugins, WordPress is a website builder that is ubiquitous because of the plugins.

If you don’t need WordPress, you can choose from thousands of other options.

j45•about 3 hours ago

Maybe someone will put LLMs on Wordpress and make a new backwards compatible one.

lukevp•about 2 hours ago

Cloudflare already did that and it’s available now[1], although it’s billed as a “spiritual successor” and not a literal one (so probably not backwards compatible).

1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/

drcongo•about 4 hours ago

What is a "connector" in this context?

textrunmax•about 3 hours ago

The Connectors API is a framework for managing connections to services like AI, anti-spam, etc. It was introduced on March 18, 2026 with WordPress 7.0 at https://make.wordpress.org/core/2026/03/18/introducing-the-c... and the PR at https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/75833.

It introduces a new prominent page in your wordpress settings that recommends popular services to you. All other services are behind a link that says "Find more connectors in the plugin directory" and are less visible.

See image https://developer.wordpress.org/news/files/2026/03/image-1.j..., which is the second image on "What’s new for developers?" at https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2026/03/whats-new-for-d...

AlienRobot•about 4 hours ago

>Automattic-sponsored core committer Jorge Costa

>Fueled-sponsored core committer Peter Wilson

>Bluehost-sponsored core committer Jonathan Desrosiers

>Human Made-sponsored core committer John Blackbourn

This is a terrifying way to describe people.

kelnos•19 minutes ago

In a vacuum, yes, that seems weird. But in this context I think it's important to disclose who writes their paychecks so it's easier to understand what their biases might be.

mooreds•about 4 hours ago

It does make the implicit explicit though, right? Each of these folks have a personal viewpoint but also represent a corporate viewpoint.

nixosbestos•about 4 hours ago

Why? People are referred to as committers everywhere. I like the transparency and credit this gives to the ecosystem users helping fund development.

When I did OSS work paid for by my employer, I was careful to note and credit who paid for the PR.

micromacrofoot•about 3 hours ago

At a dinner party, sure, but if anything we should be this transparent in business and political contexts more often. Who's paying your bills is often very important when outsiders are weighing our choices.

renewiltord•about 4 hours ago

People on the Internet are just so dramatic. "Terrifying". Yes, indeed, this induces "terror", abject fear. Give me a break. At worst it's slightly cringe-worthy. This treadmill of dysphemisms is honestly annoying. At this point, all actions are described in extreme terms as if they're life changing when they're only mildly quirky.

themafia•40 minutes ago

> It is pathological that we keep attacking me and Automattic who have by any measure given the most.

"I'm so self important I've decided I get to order you to do illogical things."

Some people see leadership as a responsibility. Some people see it as a chit.

I really detest the latter group.

nixosbestos•about 4 hours ago

I guess I'm confused about Matt wanting to "right the ship" so to speak, while also shoving this through. (Idgaf, it's a product call ultimately)

But it seems the clean, sustainable, long-term way to do this was to have the akismet plugin simply self-register. Why was this hack easier than just doing that?

God I love this place, a simple fking question gets downvoted.