[jiayo]

Anecdote: I'm helping a family member set up a personal brand website. He has a brand/marketing person for the content/design, but wanted me to manage the tech side of email, domains, providers, etc. I've used Wordpress a handful of times in my life, but it's an easy recommendation to make. We've spent maybe 30 mins a week for the past few weeks chipping away at it. We chose https://getflywheel.com/ as the managed WP provider[1]. They are owned by WP Engine.

Today, we got to installing the WP Mail SMTP plugin[2]. Oops, can't search for plugins. Maybe this has something to do with what I read on Hacker News yesterday, I think out loud. The Flywheel status page tells us to download the plugin zip and upload it, and we do. Crisis averted. But now... the plugin itself depends on talking back to the wordpress.org plugin registry. And it's blocked. The setup wizard fails with an unrecoverable javascript error. And we give up for another week.

I showed him the TechCrunch article. We agree that this is petty. Does he care about who is at fault, or the intricacies of trademark infringement, or the stewardship of public APIs? Nope. He just knows his first impression of Wordpress is that it's unreliable, both technically and organizationally.

[1] Could I have hosted it for him on DigitalOcean for cheaper? Yes. But I want him owning everything and pay someone to support it who isn't me.

[2] https://wpmailsmtp.com/