Transcription: OpenAgents Episode 126 - OpenPress and the End of WordPress

Source: https://x.com/OpenAgentsInc/status/1841710204691288356 Wiki source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/OpenAgentsInc/openagents/Video-Series.md Media title: OpenAgents - Episode 126: OpenPress and the End of Wordpress Our agents are hungr... Upload date: 20241003 Transcription model: gpt-4o-mini-transcribe Generated at: 2026-06-01T16:42:36Z

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[00:00] Speaker: Well, folks, I asked our agents, and they said that they're bored and looking for work. So, you know, we watched this video about WordPress running 43% of all sites on the internet, apparently. And it turns out that WordPress is basically run by one maniacal, extortionate, villainous thug, Matt Mullenweg. Holy shit. So unbelievable. So Theo had a video called This Might Be the End of WordPress last week. That was pretty good. He then interviewed Mullenweg. I listened to that. I was like, well, Mullenweg's clearly the villain here. And then this WP engine. Great company, from what I could tell. I used them happily 10 years ago. They're also here in Austin. I see their, you know, big ass building downtown. Really successful company building on WordPress. You know, as the founder of WordPress, you'd think you'd be happy about that. But, ooh, you're using our, you're using WP and my mom got confused. Like Mullenweg, what a fucking idiot. OK, so I don't really care. I'm a developer. I haven't used WordPress in a long time. But I'm now really happy to harvest this bloated, fracturing ecosystem for ideas and code for things that our agents can improve upon, because you've got plenty of folks. Where's that tweet? People talking all about, like, doubting whether or not they want to continue building on WordPress at all, because it's so unstable, given that it's supposed to be this, like, beautiful, open kind of community owned thing. But it's not. It's run by one, you know, what's the phrase? So you've got BDFL. That's supposed to be, like, benevolent dictator for life. Like Linus Torvalds is the benevolent dictator for life of Linux. You know, he named the thing after himself. He's the curmudgeon who kind of protects it and, like, you know, you use Linux, you're probably happy with that arrangement. But it's still open source and awesome. And then what's the acronym for Mullenweg? Like crazed malevolent dictator. I don't know. I don't know. So we just added a lightweight agent centric sites product to the open agents Inc roadmap. What should we call it? I think we'll call it OpenPress. I thought, like, AgentPress, not OpenPress. Maybe OpenPress. I don't think that exists as a thing. There's like a 3D printer, maybe. No one's using it with one word. All right, so here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna go to the open agents repo and let's make a repo for OpenPress. Public. Now, license. Ooh, here we go. What is, didn't I want to just call it, like, public domain? Damn. Okay, so here's what I wanna do. Let's go ask here. Yeah, I was talking with open agents. Yeah, speculate about why WordPress runs 43% of the web. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If I want to have a truly open source version of WordPress, starting from scratch, which of the GitHub licenses should I use? I want no license shenanigans. This must be as public domain as possible. We got cloud 3.5 silent working, so we're gonna use this in a second to, like, write some readme and some initial specs and plans in that repo and then, you know, invite anyone who wants to chime in on other things. Because basically I want to be asking people who have been recent users of WordPress, like, if you could improve on it, aside from the sole dependence on crazy dictator, what are other opportunities that you see to improve the experience? Because we might do that. Okay, MIT. Okay, I don't want to do MIT. Let's just do zero. Unlicensed dedicates work to the public domain. That's what I want. Provides a fallback license for jurisdictions that don't recognize. Give more detail on unlicensed versus CC0. CC0 is more comprehensive and designed to work internationally. CC0 is more widely used. Okay, we'll do CC0. And if someone wants to suggest an improvement to that. Okay, OpenAgents Inc, OpenPress. Voila. Okay. Do, do, do. And open CMS. Fresh repo. Hell yeah. Okay, so let's... I like this tweet. So things like this where someone in the WordPress community says a thing that they like about a WordPress competitor, Webflow. So this is funny. This conversation always cracks me up. I'm leaving WordPress because it's controlled by one person and company. Oh yeah, where are you moving to? Webflow. Presumably similarly structured. And then we're addressing this. Because I don't want to build any dependence on me. God, no. And then this person, they're smart. With Webflow, you can export your code with one click. It's not a plugin packed house of cards. All right, so for tech stack, I'm just like gathering some details that we're going to put into the initial readme. Like as an example of like a cool feature, I like that. And then for language, I think PHP makes sense. WordPress is PHP. I don't know that we'll want to do how they do it. I mean, I haven't even looked at their code base in a decade. But I'm gonna say that at least to start, let's use Laravel. Laravel's got a massive community around it. It's something that I've been familiar with for six years. And I think it would be not too difficult to take the best WordPress plugins, code patterns and stuff and work it into the like solid base that Laravel has. Yeah, maybe. That's what I'm going to do. You can do your own fork of called OpenPress too and pay me zero dollars. Okay, so let me find my chat here. So I've got, I already put that in there. OpenAgents Inc, OpenPress main. Okay, add a readme factoring in these tweets. So. Oh yes. Let me get some nice tweets. Agents, I can't wait to automate this. Where was the response to that? Anything else I want to do that I tweet about WordPress recently? I got a bunch of stuff on here. I thought I had some more good stuff I tweeted about WordPress. So a little bit later in this video, I'm going to, well, I'll just say it now. I want to build a website for my new project called the Atlantis Port Company. And I need a website because I just made this Twitter. I can't even like update my username yet because I'm rate limited. Apparently one request is too many for a new account. But I want a website. And so I'm going to use that as kind of the Guinea pig to kind of start driving out the initial experience of OpenPress. All right, so do, do, do. We just started new repo called OpenPress, intended to be a truly open source and extensible competitor to WordPress and written in Laravel. Add a readme factoring in these tweets. I need to update my tools there. Let's just start with that. Certainly, I'll create a readme for the OpenPress project, incorporating the ideas from the tweets you've shared. I'll use the create file function to add this file to the repository. I've created a readme file for the OpenPress project, incorporating the key ideas from the tweets you shared. The readme includes an introduction to OpenPress as an open source WordPress competitor built with Laravel, key features and advantages of OpenPress addressing the points mentioned in the tweets. The vision for the project, emphasizing openness, modern technology, and agent-centric approach. Placeholders for getting started and contribution guidelines, license information, and ways to stay connected. The file has been successfully created in the main branch of the OpenAgents Inc slash OpenPress repository. You can now view and edit this file. Do we have any changes? Chat, let's see what we got. A truly open source. Look at this. Lightweight and performed. We're building OpenPress from the ground up, avoiding the bloat and technical debt that plagues older systems. Our goal is to create a streamlined, efficient platform that doesn't rely on a plug-in packed house of cards. That's not bad. That's not bad. Ooh, it's head license, MIT license. Remove getting started for now. Licensed under CC0. You can link to the license in the current repo. For the copy in the first half or so, try to rewrite to use two-thirds the words. More concise. Okay, well, we don't have contributing and remove community coming soon. No coming soon. That's not bad. That's not bad. So maybe to finish up, I'll do a little Laravel new. Maybe some people here are new to Laravel. Watch this. Laravel new OpenPress. Okay, so this will be, I guess, kind of like the control dashboard for you log in to spin up one or more sites. You're a site builder, basically. I like to use Laravel Breeze, just the super basic auth. I am a React developer. I'm going to use React with inertia. Gotta have dark mode. SSR is too complex. I don't care. TypeScript, yes. Definitely pest. Git repo, no. I may need to manually move this stuff over into our new repo because I have the readme license already. SQLite for now. Run the migration. Sure, why not? Yes, create it. Okay, so CD OpenPress. Code. We have a code base. And let's try opening up, what did it say? OpenPress.test. All right, we have a webpage, a website. Very nice. Log in and register. Okay, so I'll do a little bit of this offline. And I would love to ask anyone who cares in the audience, who's a WordPress user