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#274 – Matt Mullenweg Issues Emotional Plea, SiteGround Faces Backlash, WP Market Share Dips

Issue #274   |   June 2, 2026   |   Reading time: 26 mins

Hello!

This week on The WP Week Newsletter, we cover the emotional plea published by Matt Mullenweg, the backlash faced by SiteGround for automatically installing an AI plugin on customers’ websites, a new community survey by The WP Community Collective, a dip in the market share of WordPress, new projects, and more.

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.

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See you next week!

Team WP-CONTENT.CO

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🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN

On the occasion of WordPress’ 23rd anniversary, Matt Mullenweg published an emotional blog post on WordPress.org reflecting on the ongoing legal conflict with WP Engine and private equity firm Silver Lake. 

Mullenweg sharply criticized WP Engine’s legal counsel, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart, describing him as a “shoggoth” — referencing the fictional creature in the Cthulhu Mythos — and accusing him of engaging in “paperclip-maximizing legal torture.”

He further claimed the legal effort was attempting to dissolve the WordPress Foundation, which he described as a nonprofit entity with no employees or payroll that exists to support WordCamps and open-source education.

📰  WORDPRESS & AROUND

All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies

SiteGround users are criticizing the hosting provider after discovering that its AI Agent plugin had been automatically installed on their websites after the automatic update to WordPress 7.0. The plugin arrived already activated and pre-configured as the site’s default AI connector, along with 20,000 free monthly AI tokens.

  • WordPress market share declines for six months in a row: The six-month decline saw WordPress market share fall from 43.2% in December 2025 to 41.9% in May 2026. Prashant Baldha also highlighted it on X, on which Matt Mullenweg commented, “ It’s almost like… it needs more investment. I wonder who could have predicted that.”
  • WordPress 6.9 server compatibility: The recommendations suggest hosting providers use newer stacks for new installs, including PHP 8.3–8.4, MySQL 8.0–8.4, and MariaDB 10.11–11.4.
  • Help test new career functionality on WordPress.org: Anne McCarthy is inviting community members to help test new career features being added to WordPress.org, including an updated jobs board and enhanced user profiles with job history, accomplishments, and an “open to work” option.
  • React 19 upgrade in WordPress: WordPress is upgrading from React 18 to React 19. This change will first ship in the Gutenberg plugin version 23.3 and is expected to land in WordPress 7.1.
  • Hotfix available for WordPress 7.0 classic editor issue: A hotfix has been released to address the issue affecting users of the Classic Editor who have extended the post publishing panel with additional action buttons. Those affected can install either Classic Editor 1.7.0 or Hotfix 1.4, with a permanent fix planned for WordPress.
  • Open Horizons Scholarship recipients continue contributing after WCUS 2025: An update on the first Open Horizons Scholarship cohort highlights how the six recipients have remained active in the WordPress project since attending WordCamp US 2025. Their contributions span organizing events, mentoring new contributors, translating WordPress, contributing to Core and Gutenberg, and so on.
  • WP Ibarra: How a community was born and its first in-person meetup: The WordPress community in Ibarra, Ecuador, celebrated its first in-person meetup on May 29, 2026, marking a major milestone after officially forming in late 2025. The group had previously hosted its first virtual event and conducted outreach through local universities and entrepreneurship fairs, helping build momentum for the launch of a local WordPress community in the region.
  • WooCommerce 10.8.0 released: Key updates include better storefront performance enhancements, an offline-aware admin feature that warns users if the browser loses connection, a new customer review request email feature, several database and API updates, and a lot more. Also, WooCommerce 10.8.1 has been released to address two issues introduced in 10.8.0: a critical regression in the WooPayments onboarding flow, and a fatal PHP error during in-place upgrades from 10.7. They have also released the first public beta of WooCommerce AI Product Advisor, which is a plugin that analyzes your product catalog, spots items with the highest growth potential, and recommends focused improvements you can apply with a single click. Also, WooCommerce is cleaning up its GitHub issue backlog by closing stale, inactive, and misplaced reports to make the queue more actionable and easier to maintain.
  • WordPress malware campaign hides payloads in Steam profiles: Nearly 2,000 WordPress websites were infected with malware that relies on Steam Community profile comments to hide command-and-control (C2) data. The threat actor used invisible Unicode characters to encode a payload that builds a URL to a malicious script. By leveraging Valve’s platform, the attacker avoids maintaining a separate C2 infrastructure and evades traditional detection methods. Since the campaign was first uncovered in July 2025, GoDaddy security engineers have found malware on approximately 1,980 WordPress websites.
  • 15,000 WordPress sites affected by administrator account creation vulnerability in WP Maps Pro WordPress plugin: The vulnerability that makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to create new administrator accounts on the affected sites, leading to complete site takeover, has been patched. Users are to update to the latest version immediately.
  • Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (May 18, 2026 to May 24, 2026): There were 99 vulnerabilities disclosed in 87plugins and 1 theme.
  • Automattic joins the Tech Coalition: It’s a global alliance of technology companies working to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse. Through the partnership, Automattic will collaborate with other industry members on child safety initiatives, research, detection technologies, and efforts to make online platforms safer for young users.
  • WordPress.ocm introduced four new features: First is Write, a minimal, distraction-free writing editor designed for bloggers and writers who want a simpler posting experience. Secondly, Posts to Podcast, a new feature that lets bloggers turn their recent posts into AI-generated podcast episodes, and a new Social Feeds section in Reader, letting users connect Bluesky, Mastodon, and the Fediverse to read, react, and post directly from within the Reader. They also introduced Achievements, a new feature that lets users track and celebrate milestones such as publishing posts, commenting, and maintaining activity streaks.

🔧 TIP OF THE WEEK

Avoid CSS Background Images for Hero Banners

❌ Avoid:

.hero {
  background-image: url(hero.jpg);
}

✅ Prefer:

<img src=”hero.jpg” alt=””>

Browsers prioritize <img> elements better, improving LCP.

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

The WP Community Collective has launched the State of the Community survey, a first-of-its-kind initiative inviting members of the WordPress ecosystem to share their perspectives on the open source project, its future, and related factors, including AI, open source sustainability, and community participation.The launch of the survey coincided with WordPress’s 23rd anniversary, with responses remaining open through June 28, 2026.

  • WordCamp Europe opens applications for 2028 host city: The team is now accepting applications, and submissions are open until 31 July 2026. The selected host city will be announced by the end of September 2026.
  • WordCamp Europe attendance sees a sharp decline: Jean Galea reports WordCamp Europe attendance as 2,734 in 2019 (Berlin), 2,304 in 2022 (Porto), 2,545 in 2023 (Athens), 2,584 in 2024 (Torino), 1,723 in 2025 (Basel), and about 1,650–1,800 expected in 2026 (Kraków), showing a sharp drop in 2025 after several stable years. He also highlights a strong shift in talks toward AI and security, a decline in business-focused content, and an overall contraction in program size.  Relating to WordCamp Europe, Nick Hamze argues that WC Europe 2026 feels increasingly detached from everyday WordPress users, with the schedule focused on developer and ecosystem-oriented sessions that don’t reflect the needs of typical site owners. In contrast, Jamie Marsland has been thinking about how WordCamps can be reinvented to bring in newer audiences, noting that at WordCamp Asia, they ran beginner-focused workshops, which he found valuable and enjoyable. Separately, Carl Hancock points to a different factor behind the decline in WordCamp events, arguing that it began before the pandemic and was driven in part by experienced organizers stepping away due to increasingly strict WordCamp Central rules.
  • ACPT is partnering with Soflyy: Soflyy will take over the business and marketing side so that Mauro (Founder of ACPT) can focus entirely on product development. The partnership is not an acquisition, and full control of ACPT, including roadmap and direction, remains with Mauro. Existing licenses and pricing, including lifetime deals, will stay unchanged, and support and documentation will continue as before.
  • Rapyd Cloud has been rebranded to Levamo: While the company’s name, branding, and website are changing, its team, services, infrastructure, and customer support remain unchanged.
  • Pressable, WordPress VIP, and WP Cloud partners earn Secure Hosting Alliance certification: The certification from the Secure Hosting Alliance (SHA) recognizes hosting providers that meet standards for security, reliability, transparency, and responsible operations.
  • Anita on the new WordPress 7.0 feature that lets plugins add custom filter tabs: After noticing an unexpected tab in the Plugins screen, Anita investigated and found that WordPress 7.0 introduced a new plugin list filter that allows plugin developers to add custom tabs when multiple plugins from the same author are installed. It sparked a broader community discussion, with some users arguing that the feature could clutter the Plugins screen and offer limited value, while others saw potential benefits for managing larger plugin ecosystems such as WooCommerce. Anita also announced the release of two new resources. Succession Planning Toolkit for Freelancers, Small Businesses, and Agencies, and Succession Planning Toolkit for Designers Who Sell Themes and Plugins.
  • Rodolfo Melogli asks what holds developers back from starting plugin businesses: Many responded to it, citing concerns about marketing, sales, distribution, and customer support.
  • Plugin Check 2.0.0 is out: It brings several enhancements, like WordPress functions compatibility check to flag usage of functions unavailable,  Write File check to detect plugins saving data in the plugin folder instead of upload or DB, AI false positive detection and more.
  • ACF 6.8.2 security release: This is a security update for both ACF and ACF Pro that addresses two vulnerabilities in frontend forms. The release tightens how form submissions are processed and restricts which field values can be saved, and users are encouraged to update as soon as possible.
  • WP Simple Pay 4.17.2 is now available: The new version introduces conditional logic for payment forms, allowing fields to be shown or hidden based on user input without requiring code. The update also adds new billing-location smart tags, smoother overlay forms for Klarna, Afterpay, and Automatic Tax, and includes additional stability enhancements.
  • SureForms 2.10 is here: The release brings a live character counter on Textarea, one-click HTML form importer, three new presets in the Form Style and more.
  • WP-Rankings v2 is trying to bring back WordPress plugin growth charts: Paolo M. Tajani is working on WP-Rankings v2, trying to bring back the WordPress.org plugin growth chart that was lost, with four years of ranking data. Install numbers are estimates like WP.org active installs, and he is also open to feedback.
  • Super Admin Mode is now available in Angie: An opt-in feature that gives Angie elevated access to a WordPress installation, allowing it to read and write files, query the database, execute PHP, access logs, interact with plugins, and perform tasks that normally require WP-CLI or direct server access. The plugin also reached a new milestone of having over 50,000+ active installations.
  • WPFolks has launched the Folks Academy: This is a learning initiative that offers live workshops to help people make their first contributions to WordPress. Led by community members, sessions cover areas such as Core, documentation, translation, design, and so on, with participants able to earn badges as they get involved.
  • Fatih Kadir Akın is seeking WordPress plugin authors for Pressship: It is a modern command-line tool for the entire WordPress.org plugin publishing workflow. Interested folks can get in touch with him.
  • The Who-Said-That Game by Bud Kraus: The contest features voice clips from seven past podcast guests who appeared on Seriously, Bud? and are also speaking at WordCamp Europe 2026. Participants can listen to the clips, identify the speakers, and earn points based on the difficulty of each challenge.
  • WordPress Playground now supports WordPress 1.0: Jamie Marsland shares that WordPress Playground now includes support for running WordPress 1.0 “Miles,” extending the range of versions available to explore.
  • Claude agent submits a support ticket: Carl Hancock shared that he recently received a support ticket submitted by a Claude AI agent, noting that its debugging efforts and troubleshooting notes were more thorough than those typically provided by human users.
  • Arundhati Kane receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community: Arundhati Kane, a valued member of the WordPress community, is the latest recipient of the Yoast Care fund.
  • The Website Specification: Developed by Joost de Valk, this is a platform-agnostic specification that defines the essential technical standards every good website should follow, covering areas like SEO, accessibility, security, performance, privacy, and AI/agent readiness.
  • All new pagr: The project by Vikas Singhal is a real-time dashboard that tracks all Claude Code agents across your machines, showing what each one is doing and sending Telegram alerts when an agent needs input or is waiting for a response.
  • Futrfund is now available: A new project by Adam W. Warner, this is a business management platform providing tools to manage customers, track jobs and revenue, accept payments, and more.
🚀 NEW PROJECTS
“Copying a live WooCommerce site to staging shouldn’t mean dumping 250k+ orders and real customer data into a dev environment.“

Emre Erkan about creating WP Stage Sync.
  • WP Stage Sync: A new tool by Emre Erkan for syncing WordPress sites between live and staging environments. It supports standard WordPress sites as well as WooCommerce stores, adding features like order filtering, customer anonymization, and selective theme/plugin promotion with built-in backup and restore safeguards.
  • SproutOS: This is an MCP plugin by POSIMYTH Innovations that turns your entire WordPress site into an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. It lets AI agents like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and others read files, write code, edit themes, create pages, execute PHP, and manage your site – all through a standardized protocol with granular admin controls.
  • Milo Subscriptions: Built by Remi Corson and his team, this is a subscription plugin for WooCommerce and standalone WordPress sites, offering recurring billing, free trials, plan switching, customer self-service tools, and WooCommerce Blocks support. There is also a companion plugin called Milo Payments, which provides a unified payment gateway interface for Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, and Square, allowing merchants to manage multiple payment providers from a single dashboard.
  • RankReady: A new plugin by POSIMYTH Innovations that helps sites appear in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. It works alongside existing SEO plugins without replacing them and adds AI-focused signals like llms.txt, FAQ schema, Markdown endpoints and crawler controls to improve how often content is read and cited by AI systems.
  • WP Astro MCP: A new tool by Varun Dubey, this is a headless WordPress MCP server that adds an Astro frontend to any WordPress site, with support for multisite installations, content synchronization, and GitHub publishing.
  • Pixellize Image Optimizer: The plugin automatically converts uploaded images into modern WebP format.
  • WP Replai: A new plugin by Hamza Mairaj, this is a skills-based AI support agent for WordPress that adds a conversational chat widget to websites. Available around the clock and in any language, it can answer questions, collect leads, send emails, automate support workflows, and escalate conversations to the team when needed.
  • WPLIA: Created by Maciej Bis, the plugin analyzes internal and external links directly from a site’s database, without relying on web crawlers or external services. It helps users identify orphan pages, review link structures, and generate detailed link reports, with options to export the data in CSV or JSON formats.
  • Alpaca Issue Tracker: Developed by Simon Dickson, this is an issue tracker built entirely inside WordPress, designed for developers and agencies managing client projects.
  • AIPCF: The plugin by Abhishek Deshpande allows users to connect their sites to Cloudflare Workers AI.
  • Underway: A plugin by Anne McCarthy and Kelly as a part of the Radical Speed Month, that provides users with four dashboard widgets that, together, support the full pre-publish lifecycle of writing.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

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

  • In this episode of Seriously, Bud?, Bud Kraus talks with Jagadish “Jaggy” Tulagapu about his life, career in the WordPress ecosystem as a global recruiter at WPMU DEV, and more.
  • Kasia Janoska, on this episode of WordCamp Europe Insights podcast, talks with Attendee Services Team Lead Lorenzo Fracassi about the hidden side of the attendee experience, from registration desks and food queues to Contributor Day, networking anxiety, and surviving your first WordCamp Europe as an introvert.
  • On Open Makers, host Adam Weeks talks with Joe Simpson, organizer of WordCamp Santa Clarita, about the value of reviving local WordCamps.
  • This episode of the Melapress Show features Jonathan Bossenger from Automattic discussing how AI is being built into WordPress Core. He explains tools like the Abilities API, AI Client, MCP Adapter, and Connectors, and how they prepare WordPress for future AI integration.
  • On this WP Tavern Jukebox episode with Luke Carbis, he discusses how AI-generated plugins are impacting the WordPress plugin directory, making discovery and quality harder despite improvements in review times. He also explores ideas for improving plugin standards and discoverability, connecting WordPress.org accounts with sites, and the possibility of a commercial plugin marketplace.
  • In this Checkout Summit 2026 session, Katie Keith shares lessons from spending a year working with Shopify. The talk compares WooCommerce and Shopify across areas such as flexibility, costs, checkout experience, analytics, and onboarding, while exploring how cross-platform experience challenged assumptions and informed future product development.
  • Andrew Nesbitt explores the many ways open-source projects can become effectively dead, from maintainers leaving and funding drying up to governance disputes, security compromises, broken release pipelines, and ecosystem shifts.
  • Brin Wilson examines the challenges facing new WordPress bloggers in 2026, arguing that AI search, shrinking attention spans, and declining discoverability have made it increasingly difficult for text-first sites to attract readers and build an audience from scratch.
  • Rich Tabor has outlined several proposals aimed at simplifying the WordPress editing experience, focusing on areas such as block locking, editing synced patterns and template parts, and the zoom out workflow.
  • Dries Buytaert argues that open-source companies should compete on the merits of their products and contributions to the ecosystem, criticizing Pantheon’s attacks on Acquia and urging companies to focus on building, contributing, and helping more organizations adopt Drupal.
  • Joost de Valk says that while the EU’s proposed “Open Source First” approach is essential for digital sovereignty, it does not go far enough. Drawing on his experience with the FAIR project, he contends that open source software alone cannot guarantee independence unless governments also invest in the neutral, shared infrastructure and governance that underpin open source ecosystems.
  • Karim Marucchi highlights that funding the open-source commons is only half the solution. Sustainable open-source ecosystems also need patient private capital to support the companies that build, maintain, and bring open technologies to enterprise users.
  • Daniela Chan of Hostinger explores the state of the global domain industry in 2026, highlighting that more than 392.5 million domain names are now registered worldwide.
  • Katie Keith on the AI generation gap and why young people are skeptical.

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK

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

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MORE DEALS

This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by awesome WordPress Companies 🦸‍♂️🙌

ProfilePress – Create membership sites & sell subscriptions on WordPress Check it out  →

Always-on, always-fast WordPress Hosting you’ll fall in love with. Check it out  →

Create a career page and start recruiting talents in a few minutes Check it out  →

Last but not least, updates from WP-CONTENT.CO 👇

SiteGround Faces Backlash After Automatically Installing AI Plugin on Customer Sites

SiteGround users are criticizing the hosting provider after discovering that its AI Agent plugin had been automatically installed…

Read more

The WP Community Collective Launches The State of the Community Survey

The WP Community Collective has launched the State of the Community survey, a first-of-its-kind initiative inviting members of…

Read more

Matt Mullenweg Issues Emotional Plea as WP Engine Legal Battle Escalates on WordPress’ 23rd Anniversary

On the occasion of WordPress’ 23rd anniversary, Matt Mullenweg published an emotional blog post on WordPress.org reflecting on…

Read more

WordPress 7.0 Released: New Features and Changes

WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”, the first major release of this year, has been released. Named in honor of Louis…

Read more

Team WP-CONTENT.CO

Issue #274   |   June 2, 2026   |   Reading time: 26 mins

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