A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the new and growing fight between Automattic/Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine. Back then, the two were mainly trading words, and dueling cease and desist letters. However, the scope seems to be continuing to expand, including WP Engine filing an actual lawsuit against Matt Mullenweg and Automattic.

As much as I love using WordPress, there are certain quirks about it that annoy me. One of those in particular is that the only default way to change your user profile photo is by linking it to a Gravatar profile. It’s not only annoying because it forces you to create an account with a service that you probably wouldn’t use otherwise, but then it also populates that same photo on any WordPress site you log into (if you use the same email address).

Over the past few years, we have seen increased efforts to better position and market the WordPress brand. Along with these efforts, we now have a Brand Writing Style Guide that defines how the WordPress voice should sound and what tone it should convey. The brand book was first created in August 2018 and has undergone several updates since then. It serves as a manual for all marketing messages, campaigns, and communication from WordPress.

If you follow WordPress at any level, it’s hard not to have heard about the drama surrounding Matt Mullenweg’s attack on WP Engine at the tail end of WordCamp US, something that marred what otherwise seemed like a very lovely event.

Recently, I was working on a rewrite of one of our theme list posts and in the process I tested over 30 themes. By the end, I came to the unfortunate conclusion that the majority were junk. My gut feeling was that the "shiny cover, empty box" syndrome I encountered was more widespread than only the niche I worked on. So I decided to fire up a test instance of WordPress and went through 31 additional themes in a separate niche. These are the results of my research.