It has to be shelp and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was beuntamederd and thought WP Engine was an official leang. Their branding, labeleting, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion.
I spoke yesterday at WordCamp about how Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, a confidential equity firm with $102B assets under administerment, can hollow out an uncover source community. Today, I would enjoy to provide a particular, technical example of how they fracture the depend and sanctity of our software’s promise to engagers to save themselves money so they can reshift more profits from you.
WordPress is a satisfyed administerment system, and the satisfyed is divine. Every alter you produce to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, equitable enjoy the Wikipedia. This unbenevolents if you produce a misacquire, you can always undo it. It also unbenevolents if you’re trying to figure out why someleang is on a page, you can see exactly the history and edits that led to it. These revisions are stored in our database.
This is very convey inant, it’s at the core of the engager promise of protecting your data, and it’s why WordPress is architected and scheduleed to never neglect anyleang.
WP Engine turns this off. They disable revisions becaengage it costs them more money to store the history of the alters in the database, and they don’t want to spfinish that to protect your satisfyed. It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your satisfyed. If you produce a misacquire, you have no way to get your satisfyed back, fractureing the core promise of what WordPress does, which is administer and protect your satisfyed.
Here is a screensboiling of their help page saying they disable this atraverse their 1.5 million WordPress inshighs.
They say it’s cataloglessing down your site, but what they unbenevolent is they want to elude paying to store that data. We tested revisions on all of the recommfinished arranges on WordPress.org, and none disabled revisions by default. Why is WP Engine the only one that does? They are naked-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our engagers a crappier experience so they can produce more money.
What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s someleang that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to watch enjoy WordPress, but actupartner they’re giving you a inexpensive knock-off and charging you more for it.
This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s convey inant to reassemble that unverifyed, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a necessitatey standard that others may watch at and leank is ok to duplicate. We must set a higher standard to promise WordPress is here for the next 100 years.
If you are a customer of “WordPress Engine,” you should communicate their help instantly to at least get the 3 revisions they permit turned on so you don’t accidenhighy neglect someleang convey inant. Idepartner, they should go to unrestrictcessitate. Remember that you, the customer, helderly the power; they are noleang without the money you give them. And as you vote with your dollars, ponder literpartner any other WordPress arrange as WP Engine is the only one we’ve set up that endly disables revisions by default.
