I think sometimes Matt thinks I don’t like him or his company, but the truth is that by and large I have a positive vibe towards both. I just think there’s a few things that need a tweak here and there in order to make things really really brilliant and truly achieve greatness.

Telling people to vote with their feet isn’t constructive. Trying to see why they feel like they do *is*, and is something that’s needed in the WP community if it’s to prosper in the long term.

I love WP. I helped sell it into The Telegraph, and later got them into the idea of using BuddyPress. I’ve sold WP into parts of the NHS. I’ve sold it into the US Government. There are major UK corporates in the UK using WP in all sorts of ways and some of them are paying for VIP support services. I’m not a core contributor because I’m an awful PHP developer, but that didn’t stop me writing one of the most popular search/replace tools to assist devs in migrating WP sites.

You may feel that complaints or issues raised by folk like me are unimportant. And in the overall scale, just one person or business *is* unimportant. But there are a lot of people starting to complain that they feel ignored, and that’s bad for WP. We absolutely must acknowledge this and listen, or as a community we’re going to fragment. The cracks are showing, let’s do something about it before they turn into wide open fractures.

1. It’s not a meritocracy – otherwise we’d select the best leader. Is Matt Mullenweg the best leader? Well, maybe. Maybe not. But if nobody else can be leader we can never know. So that’s the first key point and if I hear anybody say that the WP community in my presence then I might just express my frustration.
2. Because of the strong Automattic links with the core group, developments will be selected where they favour Automattic’s business. This, frankly, is natural. I mean, they contribute by far the most of any company in the community.
3. When a patch gets submitted you can spend ages getting it raised, a core member will mark for a release, then somebody else will kill it saying that it’s a duplicate of another, better patch but which nobody will test or mark out for release because it’s too complex. Frus.Tra.Ting.
4. WordPress is brilliant. I love it! I’ve built a successful business around it, and I’m not going to complain about the product itself. Yep, it has limitations, bucketloads of it, but so does every other piece of software known to man. So long as you’re aware of that and don’t try and push WP too far in a direction in which it was never intended to go then you’re fine. There’s other software.

So, those are my key points about what we experience with WP. In summary though it’s an awesome system.

Where I do think the WP elite go wrong is to do the following:

1. Fail to accept that they can be wrong about many things, and that all complaints, however whiny, are actually valid. In the real world of software you have to do that – you can’t say your customers are wrong.
2. Fail to understand that people who use and contribute to the WP community (whether core patches, plugins, themes, helping on forums etc) are as much customers as anybody else. They may not have contributed money, but they’ve certainly contributed a lot of time. In fact, if we cost our time (and we do, we’re organised) we can see that supporting the WP community costs us far far more than our company’s total spend on non open source software like MS Office, CS or even hardware.

Our business depends on WordPress. But in reality it also depends on PHP, Apache and MySQL. It would be interesting to see how much time or money the WordPress Foundation or Automattic have put into any of those platforms. Proportionally very little, I suspect, and I’m almost certain that it’s less than we have put into the WP community. Of course, that’s just my opinion and supposition, so I may well be wrong (and I often am!)

So every time I hear a complaint like “just put a patch in” or “get stuck in to get your voice heard” I get just a little bit angry. It’s a position that looks down a little on those who aren’t in the elite group, and it makes people feel mad. I totally understand why they say it, and I can even see the benefits in the way WP is organised. I just think… it could be better. Moving the WordPress Foundation into a more democratic model (even if based on monetary contributions buying voting rights for board selection) would be a huge step forward. I’d love to hear that this is the case, but there’s little sign of this happening.

The result is that the community is fracturing slightly. The fractures could lead to forks of the core project, and the original WP project will continue to do well, but the forks will be targeted at slightly different needs. One or two may succeed. I’d prefer it if WP doesn’t fracture (explaining new platforms to clients is *hard*!) but I won’t be entirely surprised if it does.