WordPress forces users to agree that pineapple is good for pizza

Welcome to WordPress! What do you think of pineapple on pizza? Answer wisely otherwise you won’t be able to log in.

Over the weekend, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, introduced a little joke to his platform: a checkbox that users must select to indicate their agreement with the phrase “pineapple is delicious on pizza.” Failure to check the box results in an error message urging users to “Please try again.”

Interestingly, this is a sought-after field.

I don’t like pineapple on my pizza, does this mean I can’t log in to wordpressdotorg?

Enough games. @wordpress Please provide transparency about the purpose of this field. https://t.co/nFyqBdZeaM pic.twitter.com/xzBWLJxU5r

– Carrie Dils 🇺🇦 (@cdils) December 16, 2024

This step raises a number of questions, primarily: “…why?”

The answer is that the checkbox is a cheeky response to a legal dispute between WordPress parent company Automattic and the increasingly petty web hosting and plugin company WPEngine.

The first shot was fired in September by Mullenweg, who wrote a blog post aimed at distancing WordPress from WP Engine, which hosts about 1.5 million WordPress sites. “WP Engine is not WordPress,” the WordPress co-founder wrote, insisting that WP Engine leverages the WordPress name and “needs a trademark license to continue its business.” Mullenweg also considers WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” because it strips away basic features like saving revision history and does not contribute to the open source project.

This clearly ruffled some feathers in WP Engine land, and the company responded by sending Automattic a Cease and desist letter. Mullenweg chose not to pause or stop, and instead did the secret third thing: escalate.

Sent its own automatic Cease and desist from returning to WP Engine And you updated WordPress Trademark policy To send a snapshot to the web host. The new policy notes that “WP” is not a trademark, but asks organizations not to use it in a way that confuses people. “For example, many people think that WP Engine is the ‘WordPress Engine’ and is officially associated with WordPress, which it is not. “They have never once donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite generating billions in revenue in addition to WordPress,” the page says.

Mullenweg also blocked WP Engine from accessing elements, plugins, and themes from WordPress.org, effectively breaking a group of websites whose functionality was caught in the crossfire of the dispute. WP Engine Mullenweg was charged with Abusing his authority over WordPress. As the back and forth continued, Mullenweg A check box has been added to the WordPress.org login page asking people to confirm “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.”

The move, which was widely mocked by the WordPress community, was in part the catalyst for WP Engine seeking a preliminary injunction against Mullenweg and Automattic to demand an end to interference with WP Engine’s access to the WordPress.org platform. Federal District Judge in California Granted This request Last week.

This brings us back to the pineapple check box. The move appears to be some sort of sarcastic response from Mullenweg, but few in the WordPress community seem to be in the mood for jokes. WordPress runs at 44% of all sites. The ongoing battle may be a joke to at least one of the major players, but the reality is that it has an impact on a huge amount of information and people’s livelihoods. Ideally, getting there wouldn’t depend on a person’s opinion of pineapple on pizza.