As part of Matt Mullenweg’s extortion campaign against WP Engine, he blocked off WP Engine’s customer from software updates coming from wordpress.org. In an interview he did during the weekend, he wanted to highlight another aspect of this campaign. He had blocked WP Engine from providing updates to their 2+ million install plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is free, in the WordPress Plugin Directory. That also applied to their other plugins. His comments were, like everything else from him, highly problematic.
He said that “They need to figure out how to get all those people using their own update servers.” It is actually easy technically to provide updates for plugins outside of the Plugin Directory. You only need a little bit of code in the plugin and have hosting for a file that lists information on the latest version of the plugin and .zip file of the plugin. WP Engine is a major web host, so they could handle serving up the .zip files. Presumably, Matt Mullenweg should be aware of that, as his competing company is in the hosting business as well. The problem is that WordPress Plugin Directory doesn’t allow you to add the code needed to do that to the plugin. That is spelled out in guideline 8 of the Detailed Plugin Guidelines: [Read more]