WordPress 6.7.2 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.
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 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.
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:
A non-profit foundation, with a broad board to control their new project.
A website owned by that foundation which hosts community resources like a plugin directory, forums, etc.
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.
The trademarks for their new project will either be public domain or held by their foundation.
“Modernization” of the technology stack, perhaps going a Laravel-like approach or changing how WordPress’ architecture works.
Teams and committees to make decisions for everything, so no single person has too much power or authority.
I'm ready to lead the next releases. I am sure plenty of people and companies are willing to help me and we've got plenty of ideas on what we should be doing.#WordPress
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:
Before leading any major release of WordPress, please start with leading a minor one @jdevalk. Then, apply to be Triage Lead or Coordination Lead Deputy for a major release. These are the steps everyone in our community should follow before claiming to run « the next releases ».
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:
We appreciate @jdevalk and @karimmarucchi thoughtful call for constructive conversation, change and evolved leadership within the WordPress community. Moments of disruption challenge all of us to reflect and to act.
WordPress’s success as the most widely used CMS is not the…
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.
The modern web has gradually shifted from a vibrant tapestry of personal expression to a landscape of identical designs, where millions of websites share not just similar structures, but identical visual language, spacing, and interaction patterns. As we collectively gravitate toward the same “proven” layouts and “conversion-optimized” designs, we’re not just losing visual diversity – we’re ceding control over how we present ourselves to the world. This matters because genuine self-expression online isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s about maintaining spaces where authentic voices can flourish.
When every blog has the same hero section, when every portfolio follows the same grid, when every restaurant site looks interchangeable, we create an echo chamber of sameness. The cost isn’t just visual monotony – it’s the slow erosion of the web’s ability to surprise, delight, and showcase truly individual perspectives. WordPress, with its emphasis on complete ownership and control, offers an opportunity to break free from this convergence of design, allowing creators to build digital spaces that truly reflect their unique voice and vision.
Think of WordPress themes like album covers. They should have personality and create an immediate visual impact. The web has become too sanitized, with everyone chasing the same minimal, “professional” look.
Great themes should:
Have a strong point of view – like how Kubrick (the classic WordPress theme) defined an era with its distinctive header gradient. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.
Embrace specific aesthetics boldly – whether that’s brutalist design, pixel art, hand-drawn elements, or distinctive typography. Create themes that excite people rather than just working for everyone.
Design for specific use cases – like a theme for photographers that’s all about full-bleed images or a theme for writers that treats typography as art or a theme for musicians that feels like an album cover.
Break some rules thoughtfully – because not every theme needs a hamburger menu. Not every theme needs to be mobile-first. Sometimes constraints create character.
We need more themes that make people say “Wow!” or “That’s different!” rather than “That’s clean and professional.” The web needs more personality, more risk-taking, more fun.
After spending countless hours digging through the WordPress theme repository, searching for designs that break the mold and spark excitement, I came up nearly empty-handed. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of well-built themes out there. But where’s the daring? The personality? The unexpected?
If you’ve got a wild theme idea burning in your mind – that portfolio theme that looks like a vintage trading card collection, that blog theme inspired by zine culture, that restaurant theme that feels like a hand-drawn menu – now’s the time to build it. WordPress desperately needs your creativity, your weird ideas, your willingness to break the visual rules. The future of the web shouldn’t be a monochrome landscape of identical layouts. Let’s make WordPress themes exciting again. Let’s make the web weird again.
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