Issue #324 - PHP2Shell's global panic, MCP coming to WordPress core, and TeamUpdraft's breach

The RepositoryOct 23, 2026

G'day WordPresser. If you patched PHP quickly this week, there's a good chance you have Ondřej Surý to thank. Surý, who lives in Czechia, maintains the PHP packages that a huge number of Debian and Ubuntu servers rely on. He does it as a volunteer, on top of his day job.

The Atlantic caught up with him mid-crisis, and he was pretty relaxed about it. As he put it, if he gets hit by a bus, "it will be someone else's problem." Fair enough.

As WordPressCS maintainer Juliette Reinders Folmer pointed out this week, the vast majority of open source software, like PHP, "is largely maintained by unpaid volunteers."

So here's my ask: Find a maintainer who works on an open source project you rely on and make a donation, however small. They support your work, so let's support theirs.

Let's dig in.

Rae Morey, Editor and Publisher

First time reader? Sign up. Got a tip? Get in touch. Support us? Become a member.

THIS WEEK'S HEADLINES

1. PHP2Shell Had the World Panicking, but Wordfence Says the Messaging Got Ahead of the Evidence

It's not every week the Japanese prime minister tells people to update PHP, but that's what happened on Wednesday after the PHP project gave advance warning that it was about to ship patches for two critical vulnerabilities.

GridPane CEO Patrick Gallagher summed up the early mood, posting, "This is fairly horrifying. Y'all have any idea how many millions of WordPress sites are still pre PHP8?"

Spare a thought for the folks at hosting and security companies who've spent the past couple of days working around the clock to block attacks and scrambled to roll out patched versions of PHP. The NSA, FBI and CISA told organizations to patch or take their sites offline, and governments from the Netherlands and Finland to Australia pulled websites as a precaution.

And yet the internet is still standing, and the tsunami of hacked sites everyone was bracing for hasn't happened.

So was it all a bit of a beat-up? Wordfence CEO Mark Maunder reckons "the messaging here is off the charts." In a long post on X tagging Patchstack's Oliver Sild, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, he pointed out that no one was seeing real-world compromises, and warned that as AI tools surface more scary-sounding bugs, inflated messaging could cost the industry credibility when it matters most. "This has gone mainstream, but no one is talking about the fact that no one is seeing hacks," he wrote.

Meanwhile, WordPressCS maintainer Juliette Reinders Folmer posted a public service announcement: "Now, please realize that the vast majority of Open Source Software, like PHP, and including PHP, is largely maintained by unpaid volunteers."

2. WordPress AI Team Gets the Green Light to Build MCP Into Core

Two weeks after the WordPress MCP Adapter was released in the WordPress.org plugin directory, the AI Team has been given the green light to build MCP into core, with WordPress 7.3 floated as a possibility. Automattic-sponsored AI Team rep Jason Adams shared the news in WordPress Slack on Tuesday, adding that Matt Mullenweg had one request: "throw everything we've got at this to avoid new vulnerabilities."

Cue the whiplash. When the adapter launched, the AI Team's announcement said MCP's volatility made it "a poor fit for inclusion in the core WordPress package at this time." In WordPress Slack, Automattic's Ovidiu Galatan, who maintains the adapter, wanted to know what had changed in just two weeks, while also adding that he would be "very proud" if the plugin were merged into core.

As Adams wrote in WordPress Slack, "MCP is becoming the de facto agentic solution (love it or hate it)." He cited WPVibe's popularity as evidence of the growing demand for MCP. The free plugin has passed 90k active installs since launching in April.

But the official adapter can't do much yet. Andy Peatling's new WordPress Agent Benchmarks found AI agents can't complete any tasks for site owners with the MCP Adapter, but are able to finish 79% of tasks without it. In WordPress Slack, Peatling posted, "With the risk of sounding alarmist, I would stop all other AI work (outside of the core abilities stuff) and focus on this."

After we shared our story about the benchmarks on X, GoDaddy's Nik McLaughlin, an AI Team contributor, responded that the scores were "not a surprise to the Core AI team," since neither the adapter nor core yet registers abilities that let agents edit a site. He said those abilities are on their way. "Delivering core Abilities is the top priority for the Core AI Team at the moment," he posted.

3. TeamUpdraft Still Isn't Saying How It Was Breached

Remember the TeamUpdraft breach? It feels like a lifetime ago, but it was only last weekend that an attacker stole UpdraftCentral keys from TeamUpdraft and used them to backdoor WordPress sites. Some site owners had no idea they were even connected to UpdraftCentral, thanks to a checkbox that's ticked by default.

"It's pretty shocking that UpdraftPlus just kept all of these active all these years… and that they make it opt-out, not opt-in," NerdPress founder Andrew Wilder wrote in Post Status Slack, after finding about 340 client sites with old keys "just lying around." WPConcierge founder Sarah Savage said the incident "feels like an extinction-level event." And BigScoots wasted no time, removing UpdraftPlus from customer sites and declaring the plugin no longer welcome on its servers.

We still don't really know how the attacker got in. TeamUpdraft has since said the attacker used a compromised key to access its site, and that the speed of the attack and the initially broken backdoors suggest AI was used. But it hasn't said whose key it was or how it was compromised. When we asked for more, a TeamUpdraft support rep pointed us to the company's blog post.

Despite the severity of the compromise, plenty of people are cutting the team some slack. "Honestly can't imagine what it's like inside Updraft. That's just the worst case scenario really," Patchstack CEO Oliver Sild wrote in Post Status Slack. Wilder agreed: "I hope we can all have some empathy and grace for them right now."

WordPress 7.2 Beta 1 Out Now With Secrets API and Notes Upgrades, Punts Suggestion Mode to 7.3

Beyond Notes and the Secrets API, Beta 1 brings text shadows, form styling, and an On This Day widget.

Pressable sponsored post with headline and terminal mockup.

Rank Math Confirms System Breach Delivered Malware to Several Hundred PRO Customers

Rank Math says several hundred customers downloaded a tampered copy of its PRO plugin during an 11-hour window.

WordPress dashboard with a notifications panel open on the right.

Feature Notifications Project Returns After Three-Year Pause

The Feature Notifications is finally on track for a working release in December.

OUR SPONSORS

WP Engine: Fragmented tools strain resources and slow media teams using WordPress. Learn how WP Engine Newsroom simplifies publishing with one foundation and connected workflows to accelerate editorial time-to-market.

WANotifier for WooCommerce: Help your clients drive more revenue by sending order notifications, abandoned cart recovery alerts and promotional marketing campaigns on WhatsApp, powered by the official WhatsApp Business API. Free 7-day trial.

WPForms: Track form views, interactions, and conversions right inside your WordPress dashboard, with field-level insights, conversion goals, and built-in AI chat. Trusted by 5 million sites. Get started today.

20i: Leave single-server hosting in 2015. Choose autoscaling Managed WordPress Hosting built for traffic surges, complex sites & demanding PHP workloads, all without missing a beat.

Patchstack: The #1 WordPress vulnerability processor, protecting websites against vulnerable plugins. Patchstack partners with hundreds of plugins and hosting providers to make the ecosystem safer. Get started today.

Altis Enterprise Cloud: Next-gen hosting from Human Made. Autoscaling hack-proof servers, integrated CDN+WAF, best-in-class DX with X-Ray APM, plus Afterburner, a PHP extension for performance. Let's go!

Metorik: Metorik gives stores the analytics and reports they're missing – advertising spend, operational costs, profit, attribution, segmenting, exports, and essential email marketing tools. Rated 4.9/5 stars. Free 30-day trial.

Novamira: An open source plugin that gives your AI full access to your WordPress site, so it can run PHP, query the database, and perform file operations. Connect via MCP or CLI. Available free at novamira.ai.

WPConsent: WordPress privacy compliance made easy. Create compliant cookie banners, automatic script blocking, consent log, and more privacy features. Trusted by 100k+ websites. Get started today.

Pressable: We sponsor The Repository because we like good newsletters and even better websites. If you're reading this, we hope your coffee is hot and your site is fast. (If not, we know a host.)

Weglot: Your WordPress translation workflow just got an upgrade. Weglot 2.0 brings context-aware AI, brand control, and multilingual SEO and GEO, all built in. Get started today.

Our sponsors keep The Repository free and independent. The best way to support us? Support them.

LEARN MORE →

IN OTHER NEWS

🏗️ WordPress Project

WordPress Credits will pilot paid sponsorship tiers in 2027, from $5,000 a year up to $30,000-plus for companies that want to fund an entire named program. Credits Program Lead Isotta Peira wrote that the program, which reached more than 900 students across 17 countries in its first year, needed steady support to fund curriculum, translation, tooling, and the work of bringing new institutions on board (Make WordPress Community)
Matt Mullenweg has floated a new WordPress history book after the project's two existing books, Milestones and Building Blocks, moved to GitHub so merged fixes go live on WordPress.org within the hour. "We can iterate and make these books so much better, and also maybe time to think about one covering our latest chapters," Mullenweg wrote (Make WordPress Meta)
WordPress Community Support is now routing Campus Connect funds in Indonesia through Automattic Indonesia Partnerships Manager Devin Maeztri, who pays vendors locally so first-time university organizers don't have to cover costs themselves (Make WordPress Community)
Just four people responded to the WordPress 7.1 retrospective survey, for a release that had more than 800 contributors (Make WordPress Core)

📣 Community & Events

Blind Access Journal publisher Darrell Hilliker has written an open letter asking Matt Mullenweg whether accessibility is still a core requirement of WordPress, after Mullenweg ordered an accessibility fix reverted and stripped core committer Andrea Fercia of his WordPress.org roles. "When [accessibility] lives outside core, or depends on the standing of individual advocates, people with disabilities are the ones left behind," wrote Hilliker, a blind screen reader user (Blind Access Journal / Backstory: The Repository)
PressConf EU kicks off in Barcelona on October 27, running four days at the H10 Marina Barcelona for the business conference's first European edition. Among the speakers are WP Engine's Thierry Muller, Patchstack's Oliver Sild, Scanfully's Remkus de Vries, and Human Made's Petya Raykovska, who will co-present a talk on company culture in the age of AI (PressConf)
WordCamp Canada returns to Vancouver on November 5–6 at UBC Robson Square, with Contributor Day on November 4. The program includes a keynote from Miles founder Andy Peatling and a fireside chat between WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard and longtime core contributor Mary Baum (WordCamp Canada)
Dan Knauss has launched Maintenance Art, a site encouraging people to thank, fund, and help the maintainers behind WordPress, PHP, and other open source projects. Knauss, a technical accounts and solutions lead at Pixel, wrote that the mostly AI-generated site was still rough, and asked for feedback and volunteer admins ahead of the holiday season (Maintenance Art)

💼 Business & Product

Automattic has begun layoffs across its communications, social, WordPress.com, and VIP teams, with insiders telling TechCrunch that more cuts are likely ahead of a debt renegotiation in June. "We're staggering our organizational changes to be more generous with severance and allow more time with each Automattician," Automattic spokesperson Chenda Ngak told TechCrunch (TechCrunch)
Blackwall, which sells bot and AI agent traffic protection that hosts can rebrand as their own, has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, four times its valuation last year. "We are really thrilled about our $100 million Series C funding round," Blackwall CXO Robert Jacobi told The Repository. "This will accelerate our ability to expand globally in securing the digital landscape and provide traffic management for an increasingly automated internet." (TechCrunch)
Wordfence has disclosed a high-severity vulnerability in the Duplicator plugin, that lets attackers hide malicious code in an anonymous comment that runs when an administrator later migrates the site. It's patched in version 5.0.0, though older backup packages still contain the vulnerable installer (Wordfence)
WooCommerce 11.3 is dropping its own MCP endpoint, so stores will need the WordPress MCP Adapter plugin to connect AI assistants. Merchants using the old endpoint will need to switch to the adapter and a WordPress application password before upgrading (WooCommerce Developer Blog)
WooCommerce has published accessibility conformance reports for 41 of its official extensions after a 14-month audit by Equalize Digital found 519 accessibility issues. "We applaud WooCommerce for providing this level of transparency for merchants and encourage other WordPress plugin developers to do the same," wrote Equalize Digital CEO Amber Hinds (Equalize Digital)
Former BigCommerce SVP of Platform Strategy Nate Stewart says the company's WP Engine partnership is a good investment in WordPress, but questions why it didn't engage more broadly with the community. "Now, why they wouldn't go deep into the community in general, and not just with WP Engine, I don't know the ins and outs of that decision," Stewart told Crossword (Crossword)
Jetpack has launched a public feature request board where users can suggest and vote on new features, with every request tracked from review to shipped, or marked not planned with an explanation (Jetpack)

THIS WEEK'S POLL

Do you use an MCP tool to manage your sites with AI tools?

✅ Yes, it's part of my regular workflow 🤔 I've tried it, but I'm not sold yet 🚫 No, I don't let AI near my sites

Last week's poll: What's your read on Matt Mullenweg stripping Andrea Fercia of his WordPress.org roles?

👑 One person still calls the shots (36%)
♿ Accessibility has become an inconvenient priority (29%)
🕵️ There's more to this story (36%)

Your two cents:

👑 C.B: "Even if there's more to the story, Matt has a history of rash and problematic actions, and he should not have so much power. Anyone with a toxic family member or ex can recognize the vibes here."
👑 ?.?: "Every week there's some unexpected turbulence that doesn't showcase stable leadership."

The Repository is an independent media outlet dedicated to reporting the latest news in the WordPress ecosystem. Our publisher is Rae Morey and our proofreader is Mike Johnston. A big thanks to Kinsta, our hosting sponsor, and MailPoet, our email sponsor.

You're receiving this email because you subscribed on our website.

© 2026 The Repository WP, Northcote VIC Australia 3070