ACF has been hijacked | anderegg.ca
It’s super late at night on Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. I shouldn’t be thinking about weird internet drama, but here we are.
The first point is pretty minor, but highlights the depths of strangeness at play. Vinny Green created a project called FreeWP that… actually, I don’t actually know what it’s about. You need to read the site for yourself. It seems to be an announcement of organization that includes a news site, a class action lawsuit, and some other things. It’s not really clear to me, and it seems like it might be an elaborate troll.
This normally wouldn’t be news, except Matt Mullenweg made it so. It’s really unclear if Mullenweg even understood what Green was building, but Green was quick to point out that it wasn’t a fork of WordPress. Mullenweg then amended his post to include AspirePress, and noted a spelling error. The whole thing seems strange, but I’m assuming that Mullenweg wrote the blog post to make fun of potential WordPress forks.
The bigger issue happened on Saturday when Automattic hijacked the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin. As I’ve written in the past, ACF is a major plugin in the WordPress development world, and a requirement for many custom websites. It’s also owned by WP Engine, the company Mullenweg is beefing with. In the previous link, I had guessed that Mullenweg intended to kick them out of the WordPress plugin directory. Turns out, they went one further.
