Matt Mullenweg recently paused multiple WordPress.org services for a holiday break but unintended effects started almost immediately, affecting the attendance of future WordPress conferences taking place around the world. Joost de Valk requested a fix on GitHub.
Mullenweg’s Pause In Services
Mullenweg’s unexpected pause in WordPress services affected new account registrations on WordPress.org, new plugin, theme and photo directory submissions and reviews of new plugins. Mullenweg did not set a time for the return of those services, only saying that they’ll return once he has the “time, energy, and money” sometime in 2025. So the pause in WordPress.org services is for an indeterminate amount of time.
Unintended Consequences Of WordPress Pause
Joost de Valk filed a GitHub ticket calling attention to a serious issue affecting WordCamp registration for new community members. The GitHub ticket foregrounds the problem inherent in Mullenweg’s unilateral decision to pause certain WordPress.org services.
Mullenweg’s dramatic pause in services had the unintended consequence of diminishing the growth, energy and momentum of the WordPress community itself.
Joost’s GitHub ticket explains why Mullenweg’s holiday break is disruptive:
“Recently, a change was made to require people to have a WordPress.org account to buy a ticket for a WordCamp. Because of that change, the new Holiday Break imposed by Matt causes issues. Because of that imposed holiday break, people can no longer sign up for a WordPress.org account and thus can no longer do that before buying a WordCamp ticket.
There are several, large and small, WordCamps that might be affected by this, as can be seen from the list on Central, and probably including WordCamp Asia 2025.”
Members of the WordPress community agreed. These are a sample of the comments representative of WordPress community members’ concerns:
MakarandMane shared:
“Following 2 weeks there are two Wordcamp Kolhapur & Kolkata.. After 2 weeks another WordCamp in pune.
Kolhapur is new community which focus totally on new attendee who don’t have an account. This will affect our tickets sales and contributor day.”
A concern about WordCamp EU was also raised:
“And WCEU has just opened their ticket sales…
In the WordCamp rules, we have to be inclusive…. refusing to sell a WordCamp ticket is not really…. welcoming to new community members”
Solution Found
A solution was proposed to fix the issue caused by Mullenweg’s pause in services.
WordPress community member dd32 posted:
“It’s been agreed to re-open the registration for WordCamp purposes, that’s been done in https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/14325”