On January 11, 2025, WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg announced that he was deactivating the WordPress.org accounts of five contributors, framing the move as a push for a separate project he called “JKPress.” But the people he associated with a possible fork, Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi, said they were discussing federated repositories and governance changes—not announcing a conventional WordPress fork. The distinction matters: this concerned access to WordPress.org services, not the ability to run WordPress on a website.
What Mullenweg announced
In a January 11, 2025 post on WordPress.org, Mullenweg said he was deactivating the WordPress.org accounts of Joost de Valk, Karim Marucchi, Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. He said de Valk and Marucchi had been discussing alternative leadership and governance arrangements and argued that they could develop those ideas outside the existing WordPress.org structure. He used “JKPress” as a joking or temporary name for a possible independent project.
Mullenweg also argued that WordPress’s GPL-licensed code could be used to build a separate version without his permission. His post sketched a possible project with a nonprofit foundation, a separate website and community resources, federated plugin and theme directories, different trademark ownership, a modernized technical stack, and teams or committees designed to distribute authority. Those were Mullenweg’s proposals for what such a project might become; they do not establish that the named contributors had formed a project with that plan.
Was a WordPress fork actually planned?
“Fork” can mean different things. A conventional software fork is a separate project based on existing code, with its own releases and community. De Valk’s proposal, as described by TechCrunch, focused chiefly on federation, mirrors, independent repositories, and governance. De Valk and Marucchi denied that they had announced plans for a conventional fork.
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Federation would mean that multiple repositories or services could share plugin and theme data without relying on a single central source for everything. Alternative governance is a related but separate question: who makes decisions about releases, repositories, trademarks, and community rules. Neither proposal by itself amounts to a finished replacement for WordPress.
De Valk, creator of Yoast and a former WordPress Foundation marketing and communications lead, said he was willing to lead future WordPress releases. Marucchi, CEO of enterprise WordPress consultancy Crowd Favorite, supported broader governance and repository reform. TechCrunch reported that de Valk’s WordPress.org account was still active when its January 11 article was published. That is a contemporaneous account-status update, not evidence of what happened to his account later.
Who was named, and what is established about them?
- Joost de Valk: proposed a federated approach to WordPress.org resources and said he was ready to lead future releases; he denied that he and Marucchi were planning a conventional fork.
- Karim Marucchi: supported alternative governance and repository arrangements; he also denied that the group had announced a fork.
- Sé Reed: president and CEO of the WP Community Collective, a nonprofit intended to support collaboration and resources around WordPress and open source. Mullenweg named her account, but his post gave less specific explanation for her inclusion than for de Valk and Marucchi.
- Heather Burns and Morten Rand-Hendriksen: former WordPress contributors who had raised concerns about governance, accountability, and conflict-of-interest policies. Their inclusion broadened the episode beyond the disputed fork characterization.
Mullenweg is WordPress’s co-creator and Automattic’s CEO. Automattic’s court filing characterized WordPress.org as owned and operated by Mullenweg individually. That is a party’s position in litigation, not a judicial finding resolving the broader governance question. The filing is available here.
What a WordPress.org account deactivation affects
A WordPress.org account is used for services and contribution channels associated with the WordPress.org project, including core, plugin, and theme work, support, and community resources. Deactivation can block participation through those channels. It is not the same as deleting a person’s website, disabling WordPress software, or cancelling a WordPress.com subscription. WordPress.org’s own explanation of its services helps distinguish the project’s web infrastructure from an individual WordPress installation.
The software itself remains publicly available, and WordPress core is also hosted on GitHub. A contributor can continue working with code outside WordPress.org and can create a separate project. But access to code is not the same as access to WordPress.org’s hosted repositories, reviews, user accounts, plugin metadata, or distribution services. The announcement therefore concerned access to a centralized participation channel—not whether the contributors could legally or technically write code.
Mullenweg announced the deactivations, but the available contemporaneous reporting does not establish that all five accounts were successfully disabled at the same moment. TechCrunch specifically reported that de Valk’s account remained active at the time it published. Later status for every named account is not established by these sources.
How the WP Engine dispute set the stage
The announcement came amid a wider conflict between Automattic and WP Engine that had intensified since September 2024. The immediate backdrop was Automattic’s decision to reduce its participation in WordPress’s “Five for the Future” contribution program to approximately 45 hours per week, a level it said matched WP Engine’s contribution. TechCrunch reported on that decision. De Valk then offered to lead future releases, and Marucchi said his team was ready to help. Mullenweg treated those statements as evidence of an independent effort aligned with WP Engine.
That does not establish that WP Engine commissioned, funded, or controlled a fork. WP Engine expressed willingness to support broader reform, but the reporting cited here does not show that it formally sponsored a replacement project. The dispute also involved restrictions on WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org resources and litigation; those issues should not be collapsed into the question of whether contributors had announced a fork.
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WordPress code is open source, but key services around it are centralized. WordPress.org provides infrastructure for finding and distributing plugins and themes, receiving updates, reviewing submissions, getting support, and coordinating contributions. That makes the difference between a right to fork code and the practical ability to operate a sustainable alternative important to developers, agencies, hosts, and site owners.
Best Value
- For contributors: working on code may remain possible elsewhere, while losing WordPress.org access can mean losing visibility and participation in established review, release, support, and distribution workflows.
- For plugin and theme developers: a central repository offers familiar discovery, review, update, and moderation processes. Federation could reduce reliance on one operator and improve resilience, but it would need shared metadata standards, trusted update mechanisms, security screening, synchronization, and clear responsibility for disputes or malicious packages.
- For site owners: this incident did not remove the ability to run WordPress. The potential longer-term concern is ecosystem fragmentation—different repositories or update sources, compatibility differences, and uncertainty about which project or security process to rely on.
- For agencies and businesses: the episode highlights reliance on WordPress.org for distribution and collaboration. A fork would have to sustain release management, security response, documentation, moderation, funding, and community participation; hosting a site with another provider would not by itself replace those services.
Mullenweg had previously described forking as a normal feature of open source and noted that WordPress began as a fork of b2/cafelog in his October 2024 post. That principle does not settle who should control WordPress.org’s infrastructure. The tension is between the freedom to reuse and fork code, and the operational influence held by whoever administers services on which the ecosystem depends.
What remains unverified
- Whether all five accounts were deactivated, and whether they were deactivated at the same time.
- The later status of each person’s WordPress.org account.
- Whether a functioning project called JKPress emerged.
- Whether WP Engine formally backed or controlled a fork.
- Whether the account actions were unlawful; the sources cited here do not establish a legal ruling on that question.
The January 2025 episode is best understood as an account-access decision made amid a governance dispute, accompanied by a disputed characterization of repository and leadership proposals as a fork. It raises a wider question for open-source communities: how much practical control can reside in centralized services even when the underlying code remains available to fork.
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