This meant that all customers with websites hosted on WP Engine were no longer able to receive updates from WordPress.org servers.
The ban was later temporarily lifted to protect users and allow WP Engine to build their own update servers. Since WordPress is open source, the WP Engine team was able to build their own updater to ensure that users of their hosting platform could receive software updates.
The server ban officially went back into effect on October 1st. Shortly after, WP Engine filed a federal lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg.
Due to the escalation, the WP Engine team has been banned from their WordPress.org accounts. This means that the WP Engine team is no longer able to release updates to their WordPress plugins from the official WordPress.org servers.
One of WP Engine’s proprietary plugins is Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is popular among developers venezuela telemarketing data and is used by over 2 million websites. To ensure that security updates are available to all users, the WordPress.org team forked the ACF plugin , renamed it to Secure Custom Fields (SCF), and took over the original ACF plugin directory page without WP Engine’s consent. The reasons given were to maintain and provide updates to users who were unaware of the drama.
This decision was not well received and sparked a lot of negative comments from developers, influencers and press outlets.
As of this writing, all other WP Engine plugins are still available for download in the WordPress.org plugin directory; however, the WP Engine team is still banned, so they are unable to use WordPress.org servers to release updates.
In short, the root of this WordPress drama is a legal dispute hosted between hosting company WP Engine, Automattic, and Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress).