Since the beginning of the year I have taken a hiatus from working on WordPress Core. That is over. I’m back working for the benefit of WordPress, though not necessarily on WordPress. I was one of the 20 signatories of the letter. I was actively involved in the development of the AspireUpdate plugin for AspirePress and I’m currently actively involved in the FAIR Package Manager Project from almost the beginning. There are many people involved in this project and while some are still not ready to openly declare their involvement for fear of retaliation; I’m sorta bulletproof as I don’t rely on WordPress for my livelihood.

FAIR is a natural extension for me as I’m still one of the Upgrade/Install component maintainers and I’ve been actively developing solutions to updating and installing plugins and themes from outside of dot org for over a decade. Yes, I’m referring to Git Updater. You should also note that code I helped develop runs in Core on every plugin update, both manual and auto-updates. I’m referring to the Rollback and Rollback Auto-Update features which were developed with the assistance of Colin Stewart.

FAIR is an ambitious project that has reached MVP stage and was released at the Alt Ctrl Org Conference in Basel, Switzerland during WCEU2025. This is not a fork of WordPress. Again for the cheap seats, NOT a fork. What it is is a decentralized, federated project currently based upon AspirePress, which serves as a mirror of dot org, Git Updater, which serves as a collector of package meta data, and the FAIR plugin, which serves to reduce reliance on dot org and serve updates from a mirror.

Please download and try it out. It’s seamless. The basis of this decentralized, federated system is the BlueSky’s ATProto protocol. You can read more about it here. Once all the pieces are working it should mean that anyone can host their own packages (plugins/themes) on a node. Nodes would affiliate with an aggregator to allow discovery, installation, and updating.

Honestly it’s all very exciting and I’m very much enjoying working with a phenomenal group of collaborators. Stay tuned.