After reducing Automattic’s WordPress Contribution Hours, Matt Mullenweg has now challenged Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi to fork the WordPress project. He also deactivated the WordPress.org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, escalating tensions within the WordPress community.
Joost de Valk’s Call for Breaking the Status Quo
After Matt Mullenweg’s surprise announcement of a holiday break for WordPress.org, de Valk described Mullenweg as a BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) and called for Breaking the Status Quo of the WordPress world.
de Valk said, “We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we’re ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is “Democratizing publishing”, we’ve been very low on exactly that: democracy.”
“I think it’s time to let go of the cult and change project leadership. I’ve said it before: we need a “board”. We can’t wait with doing that for the years it will take for Automattic and WP Engine to fight out this lawsuit.”, he continued.
He also expressed willingness to head WordPress and was supported by Karim Marucchi, CEO of Crowd Favorite. de Valk has experience being the Marketing & Communications Lead of WordPress for around six months in 2019.
Matt’s Response – Joost/Karim Fork
Under de Valk’s blog post, Matt commented, “I think this is a great idea for you to lead and do under a name other than WordPress. There’s really no way to accomplish everything you want without starting with a fresh slate from a trademark, branding, and people point of view.”
Now he has challenged Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi to create a fork of WordPress – Joost/Karim Fork. “They don’t need to follow our process or put in the hours to prove their worth within the WordPress.org ecosystem; they can just lead by example by shipping code and product to people that they can use, evaluate, and test out for themselves. If they need financial or hosting support, it sounds like WP Engine wants to support their fork.”, he said, referring to WP Engine’s support of de Valk’s proposal.
Matt also suggested incorporating Post Status and PatchStack into Joost/Karim Fork as de Valk has invested in both of these projects. Incidentally, Patchstack was rejected recently as WordCamp Europe 2025 Sponsor due to a lack of ‘significant’ WordPress contributions
Matt also shared his ideas about the future – “If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation. I propose that in a year, we do a WordPress + JKPress summit, look at what we’ve shipped and learned in the process, which I’d be happy to host and sponsor in NYC next January 2026.”
“We welcome @jdevalk and @karimmarucchi to try their ideas around architecture, governance, and more to give folks a chance to try out alternative leadership.”, tweeted WordPress.
Meanwhile, Karim Marucchi and Joost de Valk tweeted that they only proposed changes inside WordPress and not about forking it.
Matt shared on his personal blog, “I wrote over on WordPress.org about breaking the status quo with a Joost/Karim fork. It’s a perfect time as Automattic is re-focusing its work while the legal stuff is going on.”
More WordPress.org Accounts Deactivated
Matt also announced that he has deactivated the WordPress.org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. “I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.”, he said.
sé reed shared on X that she has requested reinstatement of the account. Last year, she filed the WP Code of Conduct Violation Report against Matt, and he had to apologize to her.
Heather Burns revealed that she hasn’t logged into her WP.org account since February 2020 and hasn’t been involved with WordPress.
Morten Rand-Hendriksen had walked away from the WordPress Open Source Project in 2019 “due to irreconcilable disagreements around governance, ethics, and community equity” with Matt. However, he recently published After WordPress, where he discusses two paths forward for the WordPress community: Matt releases his iron grip on the project, and the community builds a new platform.
Community Response
Eric Karkovack of The WP Minute coined the term “techpocalypse” to describe the recent events. Core contributor Ryan Duff tweeted, “Perhaps this will wake some out of their slumber that @photomatt will never ever let others lead *his* project.”
Calls for Matt’s resignation have intensified, with some users and developers gradually shifting to other technologies. WordPress developer Igor Benić shared that he “Heard some companies that were taking on only WordPress projects, started recently taking projects with other tech stack.”
Matt had last spoken about forking in October last year in Forking is Beautiful.