It introduces a new prominent page in your wordpress settings that recommends popular services to you. All other services are behind a link that says "Find more connectors in the plugin directory" and are less visible.
See image https://developer.wordpress.org/news/files/2026/03/image-1.j..., which is the second image on "What’s new for developers?" at https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2026/03/whats-new-for-d...
* The dev team has a disagreement about putting one of the company’s own projects on the available plugins carousel or whatever inside their main product.
* They eventually decide not to.
* The CEO says “this has been an important part of our product for 20 years. It’s silly that we’re even debating this”, and put it there anyway.
And that’s about it? Based only on what I read here, there wasn’t any compelling engineering reason not to do a thing, and the CEO made a product decision to do it. That sounds like something I’ve heard 1,000 times at different shops and I’m not sure what the problem is.
Perhaps I’m misreading this, and the main point isn’t “CEO overrides valiant dev team”, but “CEO makes recalcitrant dev team stop bikeshedding”.
I say this out of no love for Matt’s… “interesting”… decision making the last couple of years. This sounds reasonable to me though.
This bush league kind of attitude is why people insinuate that most software development is not "real engineering".
When Boeing or NASA lets making money get in the way of good engineering practice, people die.
Most software development doesn't have anywhere near the real world impact of the Boeing/NASA engineering you reference.
Good engineering practice recognizes the risks and scales the effort to match it.
A CRUD app for internal users has a different set of requirements than a revenue generating SaaS app, just like a backyard fence has different building criteria than a highway bridge.
This is an excellent way to get stuck with only the engineers sucky enough to have to put up with that, which is not the norm.
However, in this specific case, it looks like engineers were making a product decision, not an engineering one, and management decided to make a different product decision. That feels categorically different than "mauve has more RAM".
Obviously it isn't, but that's what Matt likes to pretend.
But it seems the clean, sustainable, long-term way to do this was to have the akismet plugin simply self-register. Why was this hack easier than just doing that?
Comment spam is terrible and will continue to get worse.
Decent alternatives exist.
Increasing the visibility of Akismet should help increase revenue.
This is 100% a financial move.
I went looking earlier this year and found nothing even close to Akismet on a price-to-effectiveness basis.
AlienRobot•1h ago
>Fueled-sponsored core committer Peter Wilson
>Bluehost-sponsored core committer Jonathan Desrosiers
>Human Made-sponsored core committer John Blackbourn
This is a terrifying way to describe people.
mooreds•1h ago
renewiltord•1h ago
nixosbestos•1h ago
When I did OSS work paid for by my employer, I was careful to note and credit who paid for the PR.