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A new week, a new chapter of the Matt Mullenweg vs WP Engine saga unfolds. This time, the plot twist involved the tropical fruit, pineapple.
For the past three days, if you wanted to log in to your WordPress.org account, you’d have to agree to a controversial statement, “Pineapple is delicious on pizza.”
If you’re not familiar with WordPress.org user accounts, then basically all you need to know is that everyone contributing to the WordPress software or its side-elements needs one. Users reporting bugs, themes and plugin authors updating their products, translators working on locales, posting on support forums – all need a WordPress.org account to do their work.
It’s almost like liking Hawaiian pizza became a requirement for all of these actions.
Reddit, which has become the source of truth these days, catches the essence of the problem nicely:
When someone orders pizzas with pineapple for a group, it’ll be considered ruined for many people.
Redditor IlloWoll
Pineapple aside, the WordPress turmoil is real
Any joke manifests in a context. If the context is a battle where you were legally ordered to remove a checkbox that was introduced to prevent people from using WordPress, it transforms into something else.
The proof that this is more than an innocent joke is that all tech magazines have criticized it. TechChrunch, Gizmodo, FastCompany, 404 Media have written not-so nice headlines when presenting the matter.
The battle for WordPress between Automattic and WP Engine is getting extremely petty and a bit childish
Gizmodo
The latest twist in the embarrassing WordPress saga involves pineapple pizza
FastCompany
WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic Matt Mullenweg is trolling contributors and users of the WordPress open-source project by requiring them to check a box that says “Pineapple is delicious on pizza.”
404 Media
We are on “war” territory, as Mullenweg has put it. And the WordPress community was quick to respond just like antibodies respond to allergens. I read this comparison somewhere in the Repository, which have been covering the #wpdrama extremely well. Recently, they published an open letter written by a group of WordPress professionals making their requests for a better governed open source project, which they all depend on.
In the comments to the article, Mullenweg acknowledges the issues at stake but asks for better defined, practical solutions.
On X, the official WordPress.org account rolled out a poll to ask people’s feedback about the checkbox. 80% voted “No” to the question “Should this checkbox be required to use the .org login form?“
In the Make WordPress #community-team Slack channel, Patricia BT posted :
Could the .org login box be changed to something a bit more serious? Maybe something like “I adhere to the Community Code of Conduct” so everyone is following the code (…).
We are the community and people (meetup attendees, end-users, customers, etc) ask us (who are more involved here) about what is happening and they need trust.
At the end, she’s mentioning Matt and the new Executive Director of WordPress Mary Hubbard, who hasn’t engaged in public discussions on her own since joining the project in October. At the time of writing this, her Slack message did not receive any answers.
Let’s all laugh together, or not laugh at all
While the checkbox will be removed and the community has won this one, it’s a victory with a bitter taste. As Hendrik Luehrsen well frames it: good joke, bad timing.
In September, I supervised a survey researching how the WordPress brand comes across. One of the findings was that people expect the WordPress brand voice to be more professional. Perhaps this is the painful gap we see between WordPress.org owner’s vision and what the community wants.
This year, marking WordPress’s 21st anniversary, Matt Mullenweg stated on his personal blog that:
“Core should be opinionated and quirky: Easter eggs, language with personality even if it’s difficult to translate, jazzy.”
His personal handprint is visible in many parts of WordPress. At the State of the Word event on December 16, Matt welcomed everyone with his signature Texan “Howdy.” Meanwhile, in the top right corner of the WordPress dashboard, we are greeted with the same “Howdy, admin” phrase.
I think humor is a necessity and it should be part of every human manifestation, no matter if it’s a national security institution or a software powering over 40% of all websites.
However, for people to laugh, they need humor that is not on them. Ricky Gervais puts it even better:
“I think comedy is about empathy. I can’t laugh with people I don’t like. I think you should never be above the audience.”
If Matt plans to work for the rest of his life on WordPress, as he stated on Monday, he needs to first be part of the community, not above it.
By the way, when writing this article, I got curious as to what other spaces have had their communities invaded by pineapples on pizza. Here’s what I found about that:
“Pineapples on pizza” don’t just happen in WordPress
To me, pineapples on pizza are a funny gimmick. We all need to be surprised from time to time. It’s creative, it’s nerdy, it’s fun. Moreover, the reference is not new in the online world.
In video games like Cyberpunk 2077, there’s a “Pizza Desecration Act” that makes the pineapple and pizza mix illegal.
The US federal agency CISA released an infographic called “The War on Pineapple” mockingly stating, “To date, we have no evidence of Russia (or any nation) actively carrying out information operations against pizza toppings.”
Mario (from the Nintendo game) settles the pineapple on pizza debate, too, “I always like Pineapolli but usually not on top of pizza, but, you know, it’s a wonderful world where everybody gets exactly what they want in life.”
Any other pineapple references from the pop culture that are equally important to keep the conversation complete?
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