#209- WP Engine Files New Court Documents, 50K+ Sites Migrate To Other Hosts From WP Engine

Issue #209 | March 4, 2025 | Reading time: 18 mins

Hello!

March is Women’s History Month, a time to honor the achievements and contributions of women across the world. As we approach International Women’s Day (March 8th), WordPress communities worldwide are organizing special events to highlight women’s contributions and encourage more inclusivity in tech. If you’re attending or hosting an event, we’d love to hear about it!

Today we cover the two new court documents filed by WP Engine, the migration of over 50K websites from WP Engine to other hosts due to the ongoing legal drama, and new projects.

Don’t forget to subscribe and listen to the podcast version of this newsletter, where you can hear more details and discussions about these topics and more.

See you next week!

Team WP-CONTENT.CO

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🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN

WP Engine files two new court documents in the ongoing legal drama

The first document objects to new evidence defendants Automattic Inc. and Matt Mullenweg filed, and the second document is a motion asking for the court to compel Automattic and Matt Mullenweg to respond to discovery requests. Also, Vinny Green on X posted, “I heard a rumor that Automattic revenue has taken a hit and is causing some internal drama.”

More than 50k websites have left WP Engine and migrated to other hosting providers: Matt Mullenweg notified the community of this through the #announcements channel on Slack, “ Though some people seem to want .org to be sued into oblivion or fail, we’re incredibly appreciative of the support shown by the vast majority of the community, including those voting with their wallet in the free and open market of hosts in response to WP Engine’s actions.”
Automattic on WP Engine’s contribution hours: Automattic posted on X about how WP Engine’s contribution to the WordPress project has gone down to 20 hours after the preliminary injunction was granted.
The WordPress community worldwide is coming together to celebrate Women’s Day: Special events and WordCamps will honor women’s contributions, share insights, and encourage more women to join the tech and open-source space. From online to offline, various events are happening, and the full list of events and WordCamps is available on WordCamp Central.

📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND

All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies

WordPress 6.7 “Rollins” retrospective

The WordPress 6.7 retrospective gathered feedback on the release process, focusing on what worked well, areas for improvement, and collaboration experiences. The Tech Release leads were pleased with the scheduling of the Dev Chats, the response also voiced that future release leads should be announced earlier. Issues were raised about respect for lead roles, affecting willingness to volunteer again, and concerns about lower-than-usual release testing.

WordPress 6.8 release party schedule: According to the release schedule, Beta 1 of WordPress 6.8 is set to be released on March 4, 2025, with the general release scheduled for April 15, 2025.
What’s new in Gutenberg 20.3: The latest release brings a new option to the query loop to ignore sticky posts, a new discord icon in the social icon block, and various other enhancements and bug fixes.
Announcing the WordPress Training Team Deputy Representative Program and our first deputy: Sumit Singh is the first Deputy Team Representative who will begin his term in Q2 2025 (April-June). The Deputy Team Representative role has been established as a quarterly position designed to support the existing Team Representatives and ensure continuous team operations.
Now easily track your completed Learn WordPress Courses: The recent update allows users to view and track all the courses completed on Learn.WordPress.org directly from the WP.org profile.
WordPress 6.8 to improve pattern organization: With the upcoming first major release of 2025, users will be able to organize patterns into folders.
Announcing the first group of 2025 Global Sponsors: A2 Hosting and Woo have been announced as the 2025 Global Sponsors and more Sponsors will be announced in the coming weeks.
Does WordPress need another site building tool? Builderius thinks so: A newly released page builder plugin called Builderius elicited enthusiastic feedback in a private WordPress Facebook group. A conversation with one of its principals, the UX UI designer Elvis Krstulović, underscored how WordPress’s open source flexibility allows developers to rethink site building itself, creating tools that prioritize flexibility, maintainability, and professional development practices.
WooCommerce 9.7 released: This release brings forth a new shipping method display, an improved block editor performance which brought down 4,550 subscription callbacks and execution time to only 24 subscription callbacks and an execution time of 0.63s. Other changes involve improvements to Product Variations API, modernized payment settings, and so on. At the same time, James Kemp stated that the work on the Product Editor project is currently paused, “ Work is currently paused on V3 as well because we’re unable to push dataviews and dataforms work upstream to WP.”
Reflected XSS patched in Essential Addons for Elementor affecting 2+ million sites: The reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability due to insufficient validation and sanitizing of the popup-selector query argument was recently patched and users are to update to the latest version immediately.
VSCode extensions with 9 million installs pulled over security risks: Microsoft has removed two popular VSCode extensions, ‘Material Theme – Free’ and ‘Material Theme Icons – Free,’ from the Visual Studio Marketplace for allegedly containing malicious code.
Survey: 42% of people say Google Search is becoming less useful: Google continues to lose ground among younger generations, with 61% of Gen Z and 53% of Millennials using AI tools instead of Google or other traditional search engines according to a new Vox Media survey.
Google AIO is sending more traffic to YouTube: New data confirms that AIO is becoming an increasingly significant source of traffic to YouTube channels. A closer look reveals that complex search queries, which traditional organic search may not adequately answer, create opportunities for optimized YouTube videos but only for certain topics.

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

Lua Salazar named WordCamp Europe 2025 Diversity Scholarship Recipient

Lua Salazar, currently working as a Community Manager and Project Manager and also a consistent contributor to the WordPress Community team, has been awarded the WordCamp Europe 2025 Diversity Scholarship.

Support Inclusion in Tech (SiNC) announces inaugural contributor cohort recipients: SiNC received 21 applications for this inaugural cohort and the recipients are Eleonora Anzini from Europe (Italy), Suji K Chandran from Asia (India), Sumner Davenport from North America (USA) and Idris Nfongang Tabi from Africa (Cameroon). No applications were received for the South America region.
Michelle Frechette is open to new opportunities: Michelle Frechette is now exploring new opportunities, particularly in marketing and community roles after being let go by StellarWP due to budget constraints.
Aaron Jorbin’s 15 years of contributing to WordPress: Aaron Jorbin is celebrating his propsevarsary, with his first props being earned back in Feb 26, 2010.
Brainstorm Force turns 16: Brainstorm Force the team behind AstraWP, CartFlows, ZipWP, and more is celebrating 16 years of innovation in the WordPress ecosystem.
New milestone achieved by Block Visibility and Icon Block plugins: The Block Visibility and Icon Block plugins created by Nick Diego has now over 30k active installs respectively.
SureCart inching close to the next milestone along with a brand refresh on the horizon: Adam Preiser on X posted about SureCart reaching nearly 100k active installs and also provided a glimpse of the new website being worked upon as a part of the brand refresh.
Backuply crossed 400K active WordPress installations: Backuply, a WordPress backup plugin, has recently reached this milestone and marked the occasion by sharing an overview of upcoming features, including multiple auto backups, incremental backups, support for pCloud, and zstd compression.
A list of 4000+ disposable email domains used by scammers: Tomzur, co-founder of Kinsta shared this list so that service owners who use Stripe can block these email domains and reduce fraud signups.
Enhancing the Wordfence Bug Bounty Program: New incentives & a stronger focus on high-impact research: The updates include the introduction of a new Monthly Bug Detector Streak Bonus, which rewards researchers for consistent and high-quality vulnerability submissions and the Superhero Challenge bounties will continue in 2025. The team has also expanded the scope and lowered the threshold for in-scope software to include smaller plugins with at least 25 active installations (previously 1,000).
Introducing regional and city-level insights in Jetpack Stats: The update will allow admins to see the specific regions and cities of website visitors, which were previously limited to country-level data. This enhancement will help website owners refine their content and marketing strategies more effectively.
Laravel Cloud is using Cloudflare: Laravel Cloud, a managed infrastructure and deployment platform optimized for Laravel apps and PHP, leverages several Cloudflare features to enhance security and performance. It also integrates Cloudflare’s R2 storage for seamless object storage with zero egress fees. Future plans include adding Argo Smart Routing, WAF, and advanced caching controls

🚀 NEW PROJECTS

Announcing Jotform AI Agents: Jotform AI Agents are powerful automated customer service tools that provide real-time assistance, answer user queries, and guide customers through processes like form-filling and troubleshooting.
Introducing Autodelve: Sam Hogan has introduced Autodelve, a simple AI-powered Discord to answer questions based on a set of documents.
All new Gravity Forms Brevo add-on: The Brevo Add-On allows you to send form submissions directly to your Brevo account, making it easier to manage your email list and enhance engagement with your leads and customers.
Introducing Divi AI for Divi 5: This includes their full suite of AI tools, including website, layout, section, module, text, image, and code generation, being added to Divi 5.
New white-label Beaver Builder services: The two white-label services that have been introduced are Web Design and Web Development. After receiving feedback, they clarified that these services are exclusively for existing customers and not publicly advertised or indexed by search engines.
Patchstack launches all-new contributor program: As a Patchstack contributor, you will write technical articles, discover and report vulnerabilities, and also engage with the community through webinars.
New Fontis Block plugin: WP Messiah has released the Fontis Block plugin, a custom Gutenberg blocks plugin.
All new helpy-ui: Dmytro has launched helpy-ui, a directory where users can find dev tools, custom UI elements, libraries, and more.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

More posts and podcasts from the WordPress Community you don’t want to miss

Matt Mullenweg on the future of open source and why he’s taking a stand: The podcast discussed Matt’s response to criticism, mortgaging his home to fund San Francisco’s iconic Bay Lights project, Tumblr, and so on.
Unity in WordPress: Navigating fractures and embracing positivity with Simon Harper: In this episode, Nathan Wrigley and Simon Harper talked about the WordPress landscape and the ongoing changes and tensions. From WP Builds.
In conversation with Adam Weeks: Bud Kraus is joined by Adam Weeks, where they explored his career journey, involvement with WordPress, and also touch upon a few aspects of his personal life experiences such as his love for travel. From, Seriously Bud?
Finding your niche as a WordPress freelancer: Eric Karkovack shared some valuable tips and insights on discovering your niche and doing what you like best with WordPress. He stresses the importance of keeping an open mind and exploring different projects to gain experience before settling on a niche. From The WP Minute.
Scaling your WordPress agency in 2025: Matt Medeiros and Nat Miletic, founder of Clio Websites, discuss the challenges and strategies for scaling a WordPress agency in 2025. Nat shares insights into the evolution of WordPress development, the role of AI in agency workflows, and how agencies can adapt to a rapidly changing digital landscape. From The WP Minute.
Exploring CMS options beyond WordPress ft. Maciek Palmowski: In this conversation, Brian and Maciek Palmowski discuss the evolution of content management systems, focusing on WordPress and its community. From Webmasters.fm.
WordPress communities mark International Women’s Day 2025 with women-led events: At least 12 WordPress events and WordCamps will be held over the next two weeks celebrating International Women’s Day. From The Repository.
Freemius’ WordCamp Asia 2025 experience: The recap talks about the preparations from the start, the travel experience, the conference days, the Freemius Makers’ Meetup, and much more. Freemius also recently underwent a rebranding recently which includes a new logo, colors, UX changes, and so on.
A recap of WordCamp Kolhapur 2025: WordCamp Kolhapur 2025, held on January 11-12, marked the city’s first-ever WordCamp, bringing together 269 attendees, including 215 first-timers. The event featured workshops, Contributor Day, speaker sessions, and networking.
Sustainable web design: A guide to low-carbon websites: This guide provides information to help reduce the amount of carbon your website produces. The article touches upon how websites produce carbon, green web hosting, efficient caching, and so on. From Clearcut Derby.
AI is a tool, but you don’t have to be: Brian Coords reflects upon using Cursor AI recently for a WordPress project, prioritizing efficiency over manual coding. Ultimately, he encourages exploring AI tools while maintaining a focus on intentionality and quality in the process.
From design to deployment: Why Figma and design systems are essential for WordPress projects: Ash Shaw explores why design systems are game-changers for WordPress professionals, with insights into how they simplify workflows and enhance collaboration. From Doo the Woo.
11 Words & phrases you never want to see on your privacy policy page: Trevor Willingham explores how to optimize and avoid blunders when it comes to your website’s privacy page. From The Admin Bar.

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

Customize WordPress embeds to match your theme: From WordPress Developer Blog
How core Git developers configure Git: From GitButler
WordPress geolocation made simple: a developer’s guide: From Kinsta
The ultimate guide to WordPress website security: From InMotion Hosting

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

Women in Tech on March 8, 2025: The registrations are now open.
WordCamp Mukono on March 8, 2025: The tickets are now available.
The Dutch PHP Conference 2025 on March 18-21, 2025: The tickets are now available.
EmpowerWP Bhopal on March 9, 2025: The call for speakers is out.
DE{CODE} 2025 on April 15, 2025: The registrations are now open.
PressConf 2025 on April 23-26: A conference for WordPress Professionals and the tickets are now available.
WordCamp Lisboa 2025 on May 16-17, 2025: Tickets are now available.
WordCamp Europe on 5-7 June 2025: Tickets are expected to be available soon.
WordCamp Asia 2026: It is tentatively planned for early February 2026 and the call for organizers is now open.

🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK

Again, these are the best deals of the week, handpicked by yours!

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4 Months free offer on hosting plans of WP Engine (Coupon Code- FREEDOMTOCREATE)
10% off on monthly & annual plans at SureTriggers (Coupon Code- WPCONTENT10)
15% off yearly plans at Videvo (Coupon Code – WPV15)