Welcome to WordPress! What is your opinion of pineapple on pizza? Answer wisely or you will be unable to login.
Over the weekend, WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic Matt Mullenweg inserted a little joke on his platform: a checkbox that users must check to indicate they agree to the statement “Pineapple is delicious on pizza.” Failure to check the box results in an error message urging users to “please try again.”
Interestingly, this is a required field.
I don’t happen to like pineapple on my pizza, so does this mean I can’t log in to wordpressdotorg?
Enough with the games. @WordPress please provide transparency around the purpose of this field. https://t.co/nFyqBdZeaM pic.twitter.com/xzBWLJxU5r
— Carrie Dils 🇺🇦 (@cdils) December 16, 2024
The move raises a number of questions, primarily: “…Why?”
The answer is that the checkbox is a cheeky response to a legal dispute between WordPress parent company Automattic and web hosting and plugin company WPEngine which has grown increasingly petty.
The first shot was fired in September by Mullenweg, who wrote a blog post aiming at distancing WordPress from WP Engine, which hosts about 1.5 million WordPress sites. The WordPress co-founder wrote “WP Engine is not WordPress,” insisted that WP Engine is profiting off the WordPress name and “needs a trademark license to continue their business.” Mullenweg also WP Engine is “a cancer to WordPress” because it strips out core features like saving revision history and doesn’t contribute to the open source project.
So obviously that ruffled some feathers in WP Engine land, and the company responded by sending Automattic a cease and desist letter. Mullenweg opted to neither cease nor desist, and instead to do the secret third thing: escalate.
Automattic sent its own cease and desist back to WP Engine and updated the WordPress trademark policy to send a shot at the web host. The new policy notes that ‘WP’ is not trademarked, but requests organizations not use it in a way that confuses people. “For example, many people think WP Engine is ‘WordPress Engine’ and is officially associated with WordPress, which it is not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress,” the page reads.
Mullenweg also banned WP Engine from accessing elements, plug-ins, and themes from WordPress.org, which effectively broke a bunch of websites that had their functionality caught in the crossfire of the feud. WP Engine accused Mullenweg of misusing his power over WordPress. As the back and forth continued, Mullenweg added a checkbox to the WordPress.org login page asking people to confirm “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.”
That move, which was widely derided by the WordPress community, and was in part the impetus for WP Engine seeking a preliminary injunction against Mullenweg and Automattic demanding an end to the interference with WP Engine’s access to the WordPress.org platform. A federal district judge in California granted that request last week.
This brings us back to the pineapple checkbox. The move appears to be a sort of tongue-in-cheek response from Mullenweg, but few in the WordPress community seem to be in the mood for jokes. WordPress powers an estimated 44% of all websites. The ongoing battle might be a joke to at least one of the major players, but the reality is that it has an impact on a massive amount of information and peoples’ livelihoods. Ideally, accessing that would not be reliant upon a person’s opinion of pineapple on pizza.
