plese summarize 

if you didn't know there is a big fight going on in WordPress between some powerful people and first I wanted to stay away from it and I acted like everything was fine but things kept getting crazier what started as a legal battle over a trademark has now escalated to a point where normal WordPress users are affected by it because some of the most popular plugins like ACF are not available anymore and one big hosting company is banned right now there's a lot of panic and frustration from users and to be honest I was also panicking for the last few weeks many moments I felt a bit unsafe that the tools that I use every day would disappear it didn't turn out to be that dramatic but the founder Matt felt more out of control with every new announcement that came out in this video I want to tell you a little bit about the Battle what you can do about it but specifically how this battle is actually hurting the end user because that's what I care about besides that I also want to offer some solutions instead of just criticizing and my mindset about WordPress has changed which I will also share in this video the positive part about this whole experience is that it forced me to understand how WordPress really worked and I realized that I didn't know a lot and me sharing my vision as a ux designer is my way of contributing before we get started I want to say a few things first I am not affiliated with any of the companies that are part of this fight and have never received money from any of them two I don't think I ever said one negative word about the WordPress founder and lastly all of my criticizing words are with the best intentions I'm not here to create drama okay now let's dive into it why WordPress is the way it is in order to understand this drama we have to understand how WordPress really works because WordPress is not like the other website platforms one of the key Concepts is that WordPress is open source and that's a big deal in this drama let me show you why open source basically means that the code for the software is made publicly available for anyone to see use modify and share it's like sharing the recipe for a dish that others can use and modify and make their own all the free plugins available on the WordPress directory are also part of Open Source and they are licensed under a so-called GPL license which is a type of license that ensures freedom for the users to use modify and share the software and there are even different versions of GPL but this is the main concept so because of this license you can basically do anything that's why we have plugins that literally change the interface of Wordpress that is not possible on a platform like web flow or framer where the company decides how the interface looks this also means that legally you can basically download Elementor under the GPL license and modify it to your own needs but only the free version then not the pro version because the pro version of Elementor is downloaded from their website which doesn't fall under this GPL license for my understanding because it's not part of the plug-in directory you can't find element Pro in the plugin list and open source also means free this is why WordPress itself is free and you just have to pay for hosting which makes it one of the cheapest option if not the cheapest to run your website on and yes I'm aware of wordpress.com we'll get into that soon but these companies that develop those plugins like Elementor need to make money somehow so that's why there are pro and paid plugins also paid themes by the way this means that the free plugins are basically marketing for the pro plugins for these companies this creates a beautiful Dynamic where these companies have to compete with each other to create great free products to get the attention from users that's why you have so much functionality for free in WordPress I mean compare it for example to framer beautiful platform it's very tempting don't get me wrong but you have to pay $40 a month in order to Simply get analytics per website that is a lot or webflow where the hosting can literally get into the thousands of dollars if your traffic starts hitting serious numbers on WordPress that is almost impossible WordPress is cheap compared to the others and that's one of the reasons why it's so popular so this vision of open sourness creates a good environment for plug-in companies but also for the users so let's start out by giving WordPress some credit for that they have built an incredible platform where you can just add things on top of it however you like but now that we know that WordPress is free who pays for WordPress itself then I mean somebody is paying for all the servers to keep all of those plugins alive it's around 60,000 plugins and who is developing WordPress itself then who is doing the support what about all the events this is where contributions and volunteers come in a key concept of Wordpress as well WordPress expects companies who make serious money with WordPress to contribute in form of money or manh hours so for example this means that probably a percentage of Elemental employees are actually working for WordPress to make the platform better or they just give a percentage of their revenue to Wordpress so WordPress can do stuff with that money Matt even started a project called five for the future which is a program that allows organizations to contribute the idea or goal is that companies should contribute 5% of their resources to keep the project going and before we get into the drama this concept I think is great we have a platform that's free for everyone to use and we all contribute a little bit to it to keep it alive to keep it going and because it's open source it cannot be sold to a big investment firm it's part of the people and I also said something about volunteers because there are also just a lot of volunteers who work for free for WordPress for example on the event F or on the cat to also contribute to the platform so I just wanted to start with that because many people don't have all the facts and they Judge Too Fast in my opinion so now we're going to get into the fight let's first talk about who is actually fighting who the fight is between WP engine a big hosting company and Matts the co-founder of Wordpress and the CEO of automatic the company behind wordpress.com woocommerce jetpack and more plugin sort tools so this is where things get a little bit complex so let's talk about the relationship between wordpress.org wordpress.com automatic Mt is so confusing wordpress.org is the home of the open-source WordPress software this software is maintained by the contributors and volunteers like I just explained and it's owned by the WordPress Foundation a nonprofit organization that will ensure that WordPress will stay free forever okay then we have Matt mulen wag he is the Project Lead for WordPress .org guiding the overall direction of the platform however wordpress.org is not owned by him or any company it's managed by the community and protected by the WordPress Foundation wordpress.com is a hosting company for profit so not a nonprofit which is owned by automatic which is the company that Matt founded his name is literally in the company name wordpress.com is a hosting company that makes sure your website runs they maintain it but it's different from a company like side ground or hostinger where they give you the full version of Wordpress no with wordpress.com you get a limited version of Wordpress and you have to pay quite a bit in order to unlock things for example installing plugins that's free with the other hosting companies but not on wordpress.com but important to say automatic does not own wordpress.org so Matt has like a dual role he is a key figure in both the open source wordpress.org project and the for-profit company automatic so who makes the decisions then well the short answer is mainly Matt since he is the Project Lead for wordpress.org I mean that's the version we use every day and then you have WP engine which is just another hosting company like the other hosting companies you know and they also manage your website and have all kinds of features and you can already see that this name here is quite confusing we'll get into that in a minute we can now talk about the drama when things were still lovely a few years ago Matt was actually friends with WP engine he was actually an investor when the Dynamics started to change WB engine was bought by a big investment firm called Silver Lake Matt wasn't happy about that and he sold his shares this was in 2018 and then WP engine got a new owner new leadership and they started implementing some tactics to basically squeeze out more money money for their investors I mean that's often what these big investment firms do they want to get a return on their investment but the things that they did were against the vision of Open Source which Matt is trying to protect in a blog post he said Silver Lake doesn't give a dang about your open- Source ideals it just wants a return on Capital so he's basically saying don't give your money to WP engine vote with your wallet he argued that a big investment firm like that can ruin an open res project in the long term that's why Matt slowly turned so aggressive because he felt like they were killing his baby WordPress this blog post was published on 17th September which is the day that word Camp us started so he was calling out WP engine for not being open source on the day the event started where they were one of the main sponsors he was also arguing in this blog post that they didn't contribute enough back to the WordPress project like many other companies they contribute a lot more and they basically didn't do anything they only cared about money and I've heard from some trusted sources that even people within WP engine so employees of them agreed with Matt not everybody in WP engine agreed with the new leadership in that company so we should not put WP engine as evil here like like in every company not everybody agrees with its leaders at the end of the day it's a battle with powerful people at the top so I just wanted to give that perspective but Matt couldn't convince them he even sent one threatening message to them right before the keynote but then he said I'm going to deliver my presentation and then in the presentation he basically called out WP engine directly and even put a photo of the board on his keynote and he basically said you're probably not going to see them at the next Work Camp that's what he said and people were quite shocked that that happened because Matt is known as the nice guy I mean look at him he's always smiling he's always so nice but then he comes out of the corner super sharp but Met's train had left the station one day after work Camp ended Matt doubled down on what he said on stage he posted a blog post on wordpress.org calling WP engine a cancer to Wordpress Yes you heard that right and this is where things starting to get a little bit more crazy I found some footage from the wp engine office this this is what it looked like it's horrible two days later WP engine sends out a so-called cease and desist letter basically asking Matt to stop making false and harmful statements against W engine I'm not saying they're false I'm not saying they're right that's what they said next day Matt did the same he also sent a letter he was like if you send me a letter I will send you a letter but in that letter Matt was mainly focusing on WP engine abusing the trademark for WordPress and woocommerce the trademark is a big thing so what is that exactly well you know by now that WordPress is free to use edit and distribute but it doesn't give you the right to use the brand name for whatever you want for example if I want to sell t-shirts tomorrow with the WordPress logo on it that would be illegal unless I have a trademark license which costs money those trademarks exist to protect Brands so that users are not misled which makes sense you want to know what kind of communication comes from the actual company or not but WordPress is open source software so hosting companies can put on their website like we we sell WordPress or or we sell hosting with WordPress on it as long as they don't pretend they are WordPress themselves and that's a key part because in Met's eyes WP engine crossed many of those lines and basically abuse the trademark and I have to agree with him on this for example the copyrighting instead of saying hosting for WordPress WP engine called their package WordPress core hosting they Ed the logo too many times on their page and of course the name WP engine there's WP in it but that's not illegal actually on their website uh it said this you're free to do whatever you want with WP uh but then later they changed it and actually called out thep engine directly and they said as long as it's not confusing but that's of course subjective and it's really hard to fight in a court case I think so and with trademarks it's not that if you make one little mistake you have a big problem it's often a list of things and then a company says like okay this is too much now we're going to sue you uh unless you pay for the license then there are still rules but then it's better but WP engine did not want to pay for their trademark license actually for years Matt was trying to make a deal with them and at some point he was just done and he said like okay you know what I will send you an agreement and in that document it said that they should give 8% of their uh monthly Revenue to Wordpress and they would be allowed back at work camps as well but 8% is a lot and Matt knows that no other company pays 8% he admitted that in an interview that I saw WB engine refused but whatever met can fell lawsuit for the trademark and WP engine can say we don't agree we'll see what happens in court so yeah this is quite messed up so far but now a little break from our sponsor my new WordPress merchandise web shop the perfect place to get your official WordPress merchandise a sliek modern web shop built on the newest Shopify technology so you can view your products easily just like this for example this beautiful WordPress T-shirt with the logos on it for only $1,000 5% of the profits of this web shop will be donated to the wp engine victim fund isn't that a great deal get your official WordPress merchandise today at the official WordPress merchandise web shop. shopify.com and contribute in this way to the future of Wordpress and don't forget your coupon code at check out Silver Lake 8% okay that was obviously a joke but now I think you're starting to get the point with the trademark if you overdo it it's just not okay this would be totally illegal and I've already taken the web shop down okay let's continue 25 September a new block post came out on wordpress.org called WP engine is banned calling them out on the trademark issue he basically says WP engine no longer has free access to wordpress.org resources implying that if they would pay they could get access back I think from what I've seen that's actually what Matt wanted but this decision of Matt already has a huge impact because this meant that all the wp engine customers which are more than 1 million websites could not update their plugins and their themes anymore from the wp admin this made some websites crash completely and others just started dysfunctioning so many of the customers of WP engine were not happy someone for example here on my own Discord server said I cannot afford right now to change hosts not everybody has time you need updates right and this person said if WP engine are being punished for trademark violation why are the end users of WP engine being punished by not being able to download plugins from the directory in the same way that any other WordPress user can yeah and here is where it starts to get concerning for the end user because this fight is now also hurting the customers that use WordPress and I have to say though the wp engine customers uh didn't have to move host but the experience of using Wordpress will be a little bit less great because WP engine has to then update the plugins themselves and keep everything compatible and they're probably delayed it's not a nice experience so many WP engine customers wanted to migrate but so far it's just impacting a few people but then we get into the next phase which is that other plugins were also being attacked so according to Matt 's words he went nuclear on them and he started grabbing some of his other secret weapons in order to punish them the power of the plug-in Direct Factory he has with GPL and now it's getting spicy tree October the first step he did was to disable updates from ACF the most popular plugin on WordPress for dynamic content I'm a big fan of ACF myself I've been using them for years I've been promoting them for years my whole online course is filled with ACF I love ACF and to be fair there was a workaround where you could install ACF via their website but how is AC CF going to reach their users for the free version of the plugin they don't save an email when you install a plugin so as only a small percentage of those users would actually know about that solution so yeah then for two weeks there was basically no solution for ACF if you didn't know about it and this is the point where I started to get a bit more annoyed because I was like okay you're going to block the ACF plugin uh from getting updates and now I also have to tell all my followers that we should update the plug-in manually so so what is going on here are we going to get to a situation where we have to uh uh update half of our plugins manually now is is updating the plugins already not enough work like come on but Matt already had his next step planned on 12 October he took over ACF with the power of gppl this process is called forking remember all of the plugins on the directory are owned by everyone so WordPress can take it over at any time if they want you can see here on GitHub 7 years ago we reserve the right to maintain the plug-in directory in the best of our ability they can just disable or remove any plugin from the directory when they want even for reasons not explicitly covered by the guidelines okay they can just remove developer access to a plugin and they can just change the plugin without developer consent in the interest of public safety and that's what they said they basically said like we found a problem in ACF a security problem and that's the reason why we're forking it of course that was not the reason they were already in a fight with WP engine and this was a perfect way to take over ACF because I think Matt really wanted ACF which makes a lot of sense because let's be honest WordPress needed a custom post type plugin a custom FS plugin five years ago maybe 10 years ago why is it not part of Wordpress core in the first place but apparently he had the power to do this so why did he wait all of those years but like I said they forked the plugin which basically means that they took it over but then you have to change the name and forking is legal in this system but then you have to create a new plug-in but that's what they didn't do the new plugin called secure custom Fields because it's more secure than Advanced custom Fields already has 2 million installs and many reviews which obviously is not possible in one day so they did not just create a copy of ACF and introduce a new one they literally took it over and kicked the people of ACF out I asked jet GPT if this is actually legal jgpt said no it basically confirmed what I thought I'm not sure if jgpt is right jgpt is not always right I'm not a lawyer but I'm not the only one questioning this if that's legal forking is legal but this is maybe not foring I don't know and many people share this opinion this decision was not respected in the community and many people got mad at Matt WP engine says they never gave permission for this takeover again I'm not sure if it's actually legal for him to do this but uh this never happened before in the history I mean that's at least what they say but mats may can get in trouble with this because I watched an interview where the host basically ask him like Hey did you warn WB engine that this was going to happen and he didn't really have an answer you can watch the interview back uh I by the way link all of the articles in the description if you're interested but Matt probably didn't warn WP engine that this was a consequence and I personally think it's because it's not really related from a legal perspective if it was about a trademark but then he used the power that he has with GPL to basically mess with them in other ways and this was not just ACF they they bent all of the plugins from WP engine I'm not so sure if this is what open source is about because open source basically means that you can just use the software for free so why are they being punished by having their plugins uh removed from updates if they don't pay I mean I understand they have to pray for the trademark that's a law I understand but the contributions that's where it gets a little bit muddy so let's talk about those contributions it's not contributing illegal from what I understand it's no it's just a bit morally wrong it's like showing up to a birthday party where you know there's a lot of food and you expected to bring a gift but you show up with empty hands you will still be accepted but you will not be respected so it's not so cool from WP engine they basically built their whole company on WordPress even it's in their name and they didn't give a lot back compared to other hosting companies because Matt said that uh in his interview that the other hosting companies give back a lot more and again when it's open source you're doing it together so so mat is trying to protect the open source ideal of doing this together were all contributing to make this better I I found another interesting article from the founder of Ruby on reals which is also an open source project and he basically says that some companies contribute and some companies don't it's completely up to them and that's probably how it is with WordPress as well and the way Matt Compares contribution is also not fair in my opinion in this interview he constantly compares the hours per week contributed from his company automatic and WP engine automatic pays a lot of people to work for wordpress.org to make wordpress.org more successful and he says WP engine doesn't do that well they just send one person or 40 hours per week and they contribute like a few thousands a lot more but this is not completely Fair because automatic profits a lot from making wordpress.org better because they have wordpress.com because for beginners what are they going to do they go to Google they type in WordPress of course they're going to go to wordpress.com and then they buy they're not going to just go to WP engine could also be but the fact that they have wordpress.com just makes it very hard for a beginner to not think that that's the official platform where you can get WordPress even though it's not the official the full version of Wordpress it's the limited version a lot more expensive and so it's not fair to compare those contributions from those companies to each other even though WP Manion should have contributed more but WP engine has also contributed more in different ways for example by creating ACF or another free Plugin or tool that I use a lot called local WP where you can uh run a WordPress website locally on your computer they also have other plugins like I showed you they have sponsored events it cost like 80 grand to to be a big sponsor on a Work Camp event and of course I know you could say like okay they also do that for themselves it's marketing but not with everything I mean ACF and local WP are great tools the free versions are great I never paid them a dime okay I did buy ACF Pro but on most websites I just use the free version and with local WP as well so I think those are contributions again they probably should have done more but Matt really disregards those things as they are uh just for their uh benefit which I don't agree with but let's talk a little bit about the users perspective because I think that Matt forgot a little bit that all of the people like me didn't really know what what was going going on I mean now I spend time researching this for this video but what we feel like we just see two giant companies fighting over something and then every day more tools that we use get removed it's it's scary it's a scary place to be and I don't know if Matt really realizes that so yes I respect Matt for trying to defend the open source ideals but he has taken this fight way too far so is Matt completely wrong wrong here well I would say partly I think many people are way too dramatic people were saying like oh if your plug-in becomes popular then he just takes it but that's not true Matt has good relationships with many of these companies this was a targeted attack on WP engine and many of the WordPress companies they want to contribute because they believe in open source and so I think that's not fair to say that met will come after you when you become too successful and I think it's good for a leader to sometimes show your teeth just the way he did it here was way too much way too aggressive he could have just threatened them with the trademark and then leave all of the plugins out of this battle and another thing where I think Matt's mindset is wrong from a user perspective is about the trademark situation he basically says if you pay for the trademark then you can use it and we will not be too hard on you and he even says that he pays for the trade Mark with wordpress.com but paying for a trademark does not remove the confusion that users might have and this leads me into my next section of this video the hypocrisy Matt basically blames WP engine for confusing the user but is Matt not doing that himself in many other ways I think Matt doesn't take user experience seriously enough anyways in many parts of the platform let's talk about it with my biggest point you already saw a little bit of it my opinion on wordpress.com why is this domain not owned by the community it's literally wordpress.com so I would suggest that Matt would stop calling out WP engine for confusing the users as long as he has wordpress.com and he owns that I think that domain name belongs to the community and he should not trick beginners into thinking that that's WordPress .org the Gutenberg Mass let's be honest the way to build websites right now is also very confusing with Gutenberg so Matt is also confusing users I mean look what we have we have the old themes way of building a website we now have Gutenberg with blog themes on top of it and we have page Builders of course and by now it's clear what the user wants we want a visual way to build our website all all of the platforms or all of the page Builders inside of Wordpress and platforms outside of Wordpress have shown that that's what the user wants even developers many developers are using no code tools to build their websites some of them are more advanced and developer Focus like bricks and webflow some of them are easier like Elementor but this is how the general public wants to build a website without coding and some people want to have more options to customize it and WordPress has realized that way to late they started with Gutenberg changing it to making it a more customizable blog post with the introduction of blogs and then they realized okay we need to go a step further we need to go into full sight editing which is basically like a beige Builder but then inside of a theme Gutenberg itself is like half a page builder because there are many features uh Missing in there so you have to install a theme on top of Gutenberg in order to make it usable because Gutenberg itself is really really Bare Bones so then what is Gutenberg for a beginning user is it half a page builder is is it a foundational block and then you have to pick a theme but what theme then an old theme or a block theme and then let's talk about those block themes apparently when you install WordPress you automatically get a block theme installed because the default theme called 2023 or 2024 is now a Blog theme full sight editing first of all why these confusing names just call it default theme I've been using Wordpress for 5 years and I didn't even know these themes are from WordPress of course you can click on it and then see the developer name but I didn't do that and I think many people don't know and secondly why make a new theme every year do do I now need to upgrade every year with with the with the default theme and why do I still have 2023 as the default when I install uh WordPress right now when almost in 2025 like what happened to the 2024 version and to make it even more confusing when there's a new WordPress uh update they give you this screen like oh this is what updated in WordPress but they mix that with updates about the theme so then you're like wait is this now in WordPress no no no it's only part of that theme so only when you have their theme installed then you have those features so also the communication is so confusing another thing that's confusing is some quirky things in the interface that are just so confusing for beginners uh when you update a plugin for example it shows the progress just by showing you what's it's doing in the background I mean is this Microsoft Doss from 1995 like that's literally what it looks like is a progress bar too much to ask those are just little things that annoy me so now I want to offer some suggestions as I said in the beginning of this video it's not only criticizing sometimes my suggestions that I give to plug-in companies actually have an effect I don't have a lot of Hope here for WordPress and I don't even know if everything is possible but I'm going to try anyways contributions and plug-in managements we all understand that WordPress isn't free to run there should be money coming from somewhere right but maybe it's better to use peer pressure in order to get companies to do what you want instead of just Banning them maybe it's better if Matt would educate the public more like hey look at all of the contributions that all these companies made and that's why we have this and then the public would understand a lot more if he would not be happy with some other companies but that's a more positive way to go about it and if it's legal to let companies pay a percentage for simply using Wordpress then just do that and have clear boundaries like the app store for example you have to pay Apple 15% and maybe this is against open source and this doesn't work in WordPress I don't know it's just an idea hire good ux designers yes we need more ux designers in the WordPress core team if you don't want to get the same response as when you launch Gutenberg and then you need better ux designers because people freaked out that's why the fourth most popular plugin in WordPress is to disable Gutenberg I mean there is a reason why Elementor is the most popular plugin on the platform it is more intuitive I think they should also put more ux designers in the plug-in quality control team right now developers decide which plugins get accepted in the plug-in directory or not that results in some plugins being super unusable and not user friendly at all so why not have some rules for design when a new company wants to have their plug-in in the directory I mean you should care about your uses that's how you do it quality control not just from a development perspective this is also a big one stop treating we press like a blogging platform it's not 2010 anymore I think that WordPress is used a lot more right now for simple business websites they don't start with a Blog maybe a Blog is one feature that they have maybe not but why do we still have comments in the sidebar I mean come on why do we not have cpts like I said before we need custom post types inside of the interface why not just call it content types like this and just have different content types there and then people can make a blog when they want instead of just pushing the Block in our throat and then lastly I would mentally prepare users for changes that are coming so let's say that this happens again and you want to take over a plug-in or ban a company then it's better to put a notice in WordPress for at least a month be like hey this is going to change to this plugin you can do this option or you can do that option whatever but then at least the users are mentally prepared instead of the immense amount of fear that is pushed into the market right now so yeah my final thoughts first point is are we really doing this together when this whole drama started I was not aware of the power that Matt had over the platform and over the plugins and the speed in which decisions were made uh looked like this was not a community effort this really looked like one man with a lot of control made a lot of decisions because he was mad and those kinds of scenarios are exactly what open source is trying to protect us from on a platform like framer or webflow you cannot really control what happens management can decide anything and this feels the same I'm not saying it is the same because it's absolutely not I understand that WordPress is open source and is very different we have a lot more influence and there are a lot more plugins and we can change everything but still it felt a little bit like the same but maybe I'm too too emotional about this point I'm just questioning if this was one man doing a lot of things or this was a community decision the risk for plug-in and theme companies now that we know that plugins basically belong to everyone with GPL it creates a risk for plug-in companies because if wordpress.org can just take over the plug-in and kick you out that's not really nice as a developer it can be a risk so maybe in the future plug-in company should not have the plug-in in the plug-in directory if they don't want to get kicked out but then they miss out on that marketing and there are already a few companies who have opted out like the developer of pots he basically said he he has enough so is fear of take over the price you pay for exposure on WordPress I don't know Matt has caused damage to the WordPress brand honestly I think Matt's in tensions were good but I think the amount of damage for the brand is quite big and also for his personal brand so if Matt stays then I really hope that he learns from this experience because he probably knows that not everything was great that he did and that he can improve things for the future instead of having to be so aggressive and putting so much fear for so many of the rbr users because I think that's also not what he wants it and then lastly I think he's just fighting the wrong battle like the founder of of Ruby on real said if one company doesn't contribute enough just suck it up I mean you have all of these companies contributing and then there's one that doesn't do what you want just let it be just use peer pressure keep the energy positive and put your energy and actually improving the user experience for the platform because that's why I showed all of the things that I think are wrong with the experience on the platform there's so much work to do to make WordPress an intuitive nice platform so why not put the energy into that instead of fighting one company who doesn't contribute enough but that's just my opinion what can and should we do should we leave some people say that should we leave where press I don't think so there is simply no good alternative right now first of all uh especially not in terms of what you can do with dynamic content and again don't forget the freedom that you have and you get so many free features which you don't get on the other platforms for a good price and honestly I'm really excited for the new interface they're working on I really hope that they will launch it because that has taken way too long but there are some exciting things coming on the horizon is this the end of Wordpress also no just know that you and I are very invested in this because we work in this tool a lot well I don't know if you are invested but many people that use WordPress a lot they care about this issue right most website owners on WordPress probably don't even know that this is happening and WordPress will go on uh 40% more than 40% of all the websites in the world are on WordPress so yes this will probably have some brand damage but it will not do a lot what can you do if you are an ACF user like me there are two things that you can do the first thing is nothing if you update your we right now and you have ACF it will automatically convert into secure custom Fields with exactly the same features my prediction is that secure custom field will actually Implement features from ACF Pro into the free version of secure custom fields to mess even more with ACF but many people think that that's morally wrong first of all that they took it over and secondly that they're going to do that so if you are morally against that then you can keep using ACF if you want but then you just have to download it from their website I'll provide a link down below but that's a manual thing you only have to do it once once you install it then you can update it normally but yeah it's a little bit more work but we don't know maybe what mat did with this forking is illegal if that's the case then he has to give ACF back and then we will convert it back to ACF so I'm just going to wait to be honest I'm just using secure custom FS right now even though I know it's morally not okay and I don't think it's cool what he did but this situation is not done yet okay so that's why right now I'm just using secure custom Fields but I will update you guys if I change my mind so what am I going to do well let me tell you that this trauma made me realize what kind of platform I am a part of I did not know that I had to do so much research and discover all of these Concepts right but now I know but to be honest I felt like a ping pong ball in the last month being bounc left and right we didn't know what was going on I was scared it was not a nice experience and so I came to the conclusion that I should educate myself better on the tools that I am using so that I can be more intentional with my decisions personally in life I'm trying to be more intentional because when I was a little bit younger I just went with the waves but now I realized like oh I want to know why I do something so I said to my myself from 2025 I going to explore more tools outside of Wordpress yes but also inside of Wordpress you know I have been a big fan of Elementor for years I still like the tool but as we all know it's it's not perfect I have some things that I don't like about Elementor where it's going H but especially with this whole drama I was just like you know what we're going to explore do you remember that I made that video about why I use Elementor for 2024 and I made the analogy about the cruise ship well now my plan is to go for some swims next year I'm not going to leave the ship the the WordPress Elemental ship but I'm going to go for some swims I'm going to explore and I'm actually really excited to do that personally because I want to get into live streams I mean right now I'm still in Bali this is a rented studio so I I'm going to go back to Europe and I'm going to build my own studio and after that when I have everything and good internet then I will start live streaming and I want to use live streaming in order to explore other tools but also in normal videos I'm just excited about that seeing what is out there uh because then you can make good decisions about what tools you use and I think that just will make me feel a little bit more safe but also educated maybe I can even offer more things to my clients or better solutions for specific websites whatever that's a conversation for another video video lastly I want to thank some people for making this video possible I think I spoke with 10 different people uh in order to get the information that I needed to make this video I am not going to say their names uh because this topic is very sensitive but you know who you are if you're watching so thank you and of course thank you if you're still watching because this was a long video let me know what you think in the comments about this whole situation and hopefully I will see you in the next video