Issue #323 - Mullenweg tells Andrea Fercia to contribute elsewhere, and remembering Eric Binnion

THIS WEEK'S HEADLINES

1. Matt Mullenweg Tells Longtime Accessibility Contributor Andrea Fercia to "Contribute Your Talents to Another Project"

2. Longtime Automattic Engineer Eric Binnion Remembered as "the Kindest Soul"

MORE STORIES

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Automattic's New Lawyers Lose Bid for More Time in Legal Fight With WP Engine

IN OTHER NEWS

• Gutenberg 24.2 has shipped with notes that sit in a margin beside the content, a single search for adding pages, posts, categories, and tags to navigation menus, and sorting and duotone support for the Gallery block. The release also turns on React 19 by default, and plugin and theme developers who use React are asked to test their code and report any issues (Make WordPress Core)
• Yjs creator Kevin Jahns has told contributors working on real-time collaboration that they're overcomplicating it, warning that pushing every keystroke through PHP could leave Gutenberg with a resource-hungry feature that still isn't truly real-time. Jahns, who responded to a Make WordPress Core post comparing three experimental sync engines, also said he'd already solved syncing edits from plugins and agents during a short funded stint on Gutenberg in 2024, but that work was never ported to the current Yjs engine (Make WordPress Core)
• Clicking the WordPress logo in the admin toolbar could take users to the dashboard instead of the About page under a new proposal for WordPress 7.2 (Make WordPress Core)
• WordPress Campus Connect recently tried a hackathon at Stamford University Bangladesh, but about half of the students who registered didn't show up. Campus Connect organizer Muhibul Haque also said beginners stalled without live support, and he's seeking feedback on how to make the format work before taking it to other universities in Bangladesh (Make WordPress Community)
• WordPress's HTML sanitizer wp_kses() is being rebuilt on the HTML API for WordPress 7.2 or 7.3, and developers whose plugins or themes sanitize HTML are being urged to test against trunk now (WordPress Developer Blog)
• Client-side media processing, which has only worked in Chromium-based browsers since WordPress 7.1, could soon reach Firefox and Safari after Mozilla backed the web standard it relies on and WebKit withdrew its objections. Independent core committer Adam Silverstein has been pushing the standard, called Document Isolation Policy, forward and has formally asked WebKit to add support (Matt Mullenweg)
• Bluehost-sponsored core committer Jonathan Desrosiers has used AI to create roughly 500 pull requests to repair broken automated testing on Gutenberg's older release branches, and he's calling for help reviewing them (Make WordPress Core)

• WordPress Day for AI has published its full program for October 24 in Faro, Portugal, with 16 speakers across separate business and developer tracks (WordPress Day for AI)
• CMS Conf's full program is out and features more than 50 sessions, including an EmDash workshop and talk from Cloudflare's Matt Kane. Other speakers at the November 12–14 event in Gdynia, Poland, include Astro maintainer Elian Van Cutsem on Astro as a universal CMS front end and the Drupal Association's Alejandro Moreno Lopez on why code alone won't save the open web (CMS Conf / Backstory: The Repository)
• Students made up nearly half of the more than 300 attendees at WordCamp Jinja in Uganda last month, ranging from primary schoolers to university students. One student was so taken with the event that he hand-drew every sponsor logo so he'd remember them (WordCamp Central)
• Enqueue has announced the first six speakers for its December 9 event in Sydney: WP Engine-sponsored core committer Weston Ruter, Metorik founder Bryce Adams, Pantheon's Chris Reynolds, WebDevStudios' JC Palmes, Human Made's Jerico Aragon, and Evolution 7's Dee Teal (Enqueue / Backstory: The Repository)

• GoDaddy, Google, Cloudflare, and Infoblox have teamed up with Singapore's tech regulator on an open blueprint for verifying AI agents that shop on people's behalf, and are inviting the wider industry to adopt it (GoDaddy)
• Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says other companies will soon scramble to add writers to their boards, and has offered to negotiate board seats and pay for sci-fi authors for a 1% fee donated to the WordPress Foundation or Locus Magazine. Mullenweg, who appointed Silo author Hugh Howey to Automattic's board, wrote that he has "become a bit of an expert in board protections, dynamics, compensation, and such" (Matt Mullenweg / Backstory: The Repository)
• Jeremy Klaperman has resigned as Automattic's interim CFO less than a month into the job, making him the second CFO to leave since last month's failed attempt to oust CEO Matt Mullenweg. According to TechCrunch, Mullenweg had demoted Klaperman back to his old role at WordPress VIP. The company didn't name Klaperman, but wrote on X that it considers outside candidates for key roles, adding, "Sometimes people are offended or surprised by this and they resign" (TechCrunch / Automattic on X)
• Awesome Motive has acquired WP Crontrol, a cron management plugin with more than 300,000 active installs, three months after owner John Blackbourn revealed in Post Status Slack that he wanted to sell it. Awesome Motive has made the plugin's Pro features free and added email alerts for failed cron events and Abilities API support for AI assistants (Syed Balkhi on X / WordPress.org)
• Pantheon has launched a public REST API, letting customers and AI agents deploy code, spin up Multidev environments, restore backups, and manage domains from their own tools, without relying on its PHP-based Terminus CLI (Pantheon) / GoDaddy has also expanded its Developer Platform with hosting, email, and commerce APIs, so developers and AI agents can deploy Node.js apps and set up business email from the command line (GoDaddy)
• WebDevStudios says AI is great at the visible 20% of a website but leaves the other 80% unbuilt, and has launched a microsite called It Looks Done to prove it. The site runs a vibe-coded app and a WordPress build through the same launch day, from Googlebot's first visit to a security advisory at 4:58 on a Friday afternoon. "You think your site is finished, but in reality, you have just traded invisible platform automation for manual technical debt," CEO Brad Williams wrote in a September post that inspired the site (It Looks Done / WebDevStudios)
• Barn2's six-week test of ChatGPT ads produced 370 clicks and zero sales, prompting CEO Katie Keith to pause the campaigns. Over the same period, visitors who followed links inside ChatGPT answers stayed almost 12 times longer and made five purchases, which Keith said suggested OpenAI was showing ads to people with no interest in what they're advertising (Barn2)
• WP Engine founder Jason Cohen says WordPress plugin makers shouldn't cut prices to compete with AI, because people who vibe code their own tools were never their customers to begin with (WP Product Talk)
• WP Mayor founder Jean Galea says the loudest "WordPress is fine" posts come from people on enterprise payrolls, who can't see the long tail of small plugin makers and agencies breaking underneath them (Jean Galea on LinkedIn)
• WP Builds host Nathan Wrigley and Big Orange Heart founder Dan Maby have launched show.fm, an all-in-one podcast platform for guest booking, episode prep, hosting, and analytics (WP Builds / show.fm)

THIS WEEK'S POLL

• 👍🏼 A.P: "This is a heavily nuanced scenario. The funders would want to see transparency, have a say in who does what and have unfettered access to the data. Would this be a possibility, probably not, but, let's see."
• 👎🏼 G.H: "Automattic just wants more money (to fund things like its lawsuit against WP Engine and to appease Matt's ego), and can't give 100% certainty that the money will actually go into security. All the companies should instead give money or people to an independent organization.