Navigating the Future of Wordpress

This month, our community chat offers an open forum to discuss events unfolding in the world of WordPress.

Join the conversation - November 20 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

For this month’s community chat, we thought it made sense to talk about the Automattic and WP Engine drama, what that means for WordPress and the community of folks who use WordPress, and generally provide a place to ask questions, discuss, and share advice. Join us for the chat.

Recent developments

If you'd like to catch up on what's been happening, here are some useful links to resources to keep informed:

WordPress Drama Explained (and How it May Affect Your Website)

There’s a lot of misinformation and fear being spread about WordPress. Here’s an objective overview of the latest WordPress drama, and how it may affect your website.

WPBeginnerSyed Balkhi

The WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained | TechCrunch

This story has been updated throughout with more details as the story has developed. We will continue to do so as the case and dispute are ongoing. The

TechCrunchIvan Mehta

What it means for institutions using WordPress

If you are someone in charge of a site that runs WordPress, or perhaps you are a Domain of One's Own or WordPress Multisite admin leading a community of folks using WordPress, this won't have much of an impact on you. WordPress still powers 43% of websites and this trademark dispute between large companies has much more to do with their businesses than your ability to use this tremendously popular, free and open-source tool.

The main thing to note is that WP Engine as a company no longer has access to WordPress.org, which means that their plugins will not be available there. WP Engine has a guide on how to install their plugins here, but the process is no different from other plugins that require manual installation, like those you might find on GitHub.

Navigating risk and uncertainty

Providing the best support we can is important to us at Reclaim Hosting, and we follow events like this so that you can rely on us as you navigate risk and uncertainty. For many in the Higher Ed community this dispute between Automattic and WP Engine is worrying to watch, but based on what's happening at the moment our team doesn't anticipate it having a large impact on most people using WordPress for their sites. That being said, we do regularly use this site and our monthly newsletter to let folks know about security updates, new tools, and anything we think may be relevant to our customers. We recommend checking in to stay up to date, and asking questions when you have them!

How do I keep up with what’s happening at Reclaim?

We’ve been working hard on making it easy to keep up to date with announcements, events, and everything happening related to Reclaim Hosting! Your go-to tool in your utility belt should be community.reclaimhosting.com! This page has links to all the things we are up to, including Announcements, upcoming

Reclaim the BlogTaylor Jadin

Beyond WordPress: Resilient infrastructure

We have the expertise to help institutions assess their current infrastructure and use of WordPress, advising on ways to make the infrastructure more resilient and explore open-source tools and platforms beyond WordPress. If you want to start a larger strategic conversation about how we may be able to help, reach out to us!