Joost/Karim Fork

Making great software, great product that stands the test of time and not just survives but thrives through monumental technological shifts is incredibly hard. That challenge is part of the reason I love doing it. There is never a dull day, and the reward of seeing the code you wrote used by the most amazing creators in the world is an indescribable pleasure. When I see what people create with WordPress, some days I feel like I’m grinding pigment for Leonardo da Vinci or a slitting a quill for Beethoven.

In open source, one thing that makes it even harder to ship great software is bringing together disparate groups of contributors who may have entirely different incentives or missions or philosophies about how to make great work. Working together on a team is such a delicate balance, and even one person rowing in the wrong direction can throw everyone else off.

That’s why periodically I think it is very healthy for open source projects to fork, it allows for people to try out and experiment with different forms of governance, leadership, decision-making, and technical approaches. As I’ve said, forking is beautiful, and forks have my full support and we’ll even link and promote them.

Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better. He asked for and I gave him WordPress marketing leadership responsibility in January 2019 and he stepped down in June of 2019, I think we would both agree in those 5 months he was not effective at leading the marketing team or doing the work himself.

Karim leads a small WordPress agency called Crowd Favorite which counts clients such as Lexus and ABC and employs ~50 people.

Both are men I have shared meals with and consider of the highest integrity. I would trust them to watch any of my 15 godchildren for a day. These are good humans. Now go do the work. It probably won’t happen on day one, but Joost and Karim’s fork, which I’ll call JKPress until they come up with a better name, has a number of ideas they want to try out around governance and architecture. While Joost and Karim will be unilaterally in charge in the beginning, it sounds like they want to set up:

1. A non-profit foundation, with a broad board to control their new project.
2. A website owned by that foundation which hosts community resources like a plugin directory, forums, etc.
3. No more centralized and moderated plugin and theme directories with security guidelines or restrictions are what plugins are allowed to do like putting banners in your admin or gathering data, everything done in a federated/distributed manner.
4. The trademarks for their new project will either be public domain or held by their foundation.
5. “Modernization” of the technology stack, perhaps going a Laravel-like approach or changing how WordPress’ architecture works.
6. Teams and committees to make decisions for everything, so no single person has too much power or authority.

Karim has a similar post. Joost says he has the time and energy to lead:

Now, as core committer Jb Audras (not employed by me or Automattic) points out, within WordPress we have a process in which people earn the right to lead a release:

However in Joost and Karim’s new project, 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 is sounds like WP Engine wants to support their fork:

Awesome! (Maybe it’s so successful they rebrand as JK Engine in the future.) WP Engine, with its half a billion in revenue and 1,000+ employees, has more than enough resources to support and maintain a legitimate fork of WordPress. And they are welcome to use all the GPL code myself and others have created to do so, including many parts of WordPress.org that are open source released under the GPL, and Gutenberg which is GPL + MPL.

Joost also is a major investor (owner?) in Post Status (which he tried to sell to me a few months ago, and I declined to buy, perhaps kicking off his consternation with me), so they have a news media site and Slack instance already ready to go. He also is an investor in PatchStack and appears to be trying to create a new business around something called Progress Planner, both of which could be incorporated into the new non-profit project to give them some competitive distinctions from WordPress.

To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .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.

In the meantime, on top of my day job running a 1,700+ person company with 25+ products, which I typically work 60-80 hours a week on, I’ll find time on nights and weekends to work on WordPress 6.8 and beyond. Myself and other “non-sponsored” contributors have been doing this a long time and while we may need to reduce scope a bit I think we can put out a solid release in March.

Joost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I’m genuinely curious to see how they work out. The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. 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. The broader community will benefit greatly from this effort, as it’s giving us a true chance to try something different and see how it goes.