CERN’s massive WordPress migration, what plugin licenses really pay for, Envato’s new 50% fee, marketing lessons from 10k installs, and paying WordCamp organizers.
Hello WordPressers!
Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup, WP More newsletter issue 45, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.
This week is all about money and who actually gets it.
Plugin companies are rethinking what a license fee even covers, Envato just raised its cut to a flat 50%, and one founder is sharing the real receipts behind five years of plugin growth. Add a fresh push to pay WordCamp organizers and CERN’s enormous move to WordPress, and you’ve got a packed issue.
Let’s get into it.
In this Issue:
- What your plugin license is actually paying for in the age of AI
- Envato’s new 50% author fee, and what it really represents
- Five years and 10,000 installs later: marketing lessons from Accessibility Checker
- Why one organizer thinks it’s time to pay WordCamp speakers and organizers
- CERN just moved the birthplace of the web to WordPress
What is Your Plugin License Actually Paying for?
AI is quietly rewriting the plugin business model. Casey Burridge, who runs growth at GravityKit, points out that when something breaks, your customers don’t file a ticket anymore. They paste the error into ChatGPT along with your docs URL and get an answer faster than your support queue can even assign it. Custom development is following the same path. AI coding tools can now write the hook or integration your dev team had planned for next quarter.
Burridge isn’t writing off support and updates entirely, security patches and architecture decisions still need real humans, but he argues the renewal pitch needs a third pillar. His bet: MCP servers that let AI agents work directly with your plugin, SaaS backends that keep core logic out of reach, and becoming the product AI recommends when someone asks what the best WordPress plugin is for a given job.
Read the full blog on Casey Burridge’s blog here.
If support and updates are losing their pull as selling points, distribution is facing its own reckoning too, just ask anyone selling through Envato.
Envato’s Flat 50% Fee is a Wake-up Call, not a Death Sentence
Starting July 1, 2026, Envato Market drops its tiered system for a flat 50% author fee across every account, paired with a non-exclusive model. Maria Ansari at BloggInc argues the headline number misses the real story: that 50% has always functioned as a marketing budget you don’t control, covering traffic acquisition, conversion testing, and placement inside Envato’s discovery system.
The piece isn’t a leave marketplaces now argument, going independent means owning licensing, fraud prevention, and customer acquisition yourself, and revenue often dips before it stabilizes. But brands like OceanWP, Melapress, and Blocksy have already built hybrid or fully independent distribution, and Ansari’s point stands: marketplaces are a channel you rent, not equity you build.
Read the full blog on BloggInc’s blog here.
Building that kind of equity outside a marketplace takes consistent, often unglamorous marketing, and Amber Hinds has plenty of receipts for what that actually looks like.
Five Years, 10,000 Installs, and No Shortcuts
While other plugin founders describe AI eating into their sales, Amber Hinds of Equalize Digital just crossed 10,000 active installs on Accessibility Checker, more than doubling from 4,000 in seven months and growing plugin revenue 44.3% in 2025. Her five-year breakdown is refreshingly unglamorous: weekly meetups since 2021, a podcast, hundreds of blog posts, and years of free accessibility help in Facebook groups before any of it converted into customers.
Her six-person team logged 2,362 hours on marketing in 2025 alone, on a budget that’s ranged between $25,000 and $71,000 a year. Nothing here is a growth hack. Hinds’ real point is that marketing and product quality compound together, and that the overnight success people see now is five years of unpaid groundwork finally paying off.
Read the full blog on Amber Hinds’ blog here.
That kind of long game depends on people willing to organize the events where this community actually connects, and increasingly, those people are asking to get paid for it.
Should WordCamp Organizers Finally Get Paid?
Rodolfo Melogli just spent months organizing his own event, Checkout Summit, and came home from WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków with a blunt take: the people running flagship WordCamps for free aren’t being compensated, they’re absorbing months of real work as a donation. A 50 euro ticket doesn’t cover travel, accommodation, or the year of planning behind it.
He’s careful to say not every volunteer role needs pay, just the people carrying an event on their shoulders for months. Amber Hinds added her own experience in the comments: WP Accessibility Day left the official WordPress community in part so it could pay speakers, easier to manage for a virtual event with no travel costs. Melogli says future Checkout Summit editions will set aside a real budget for organizers and speakers too.
Read the full blog on Checkout Summit’s blog here.
Paying the people who run our community events is one thing, but this week also brought proof of just how far WordPress’s institutional reach now extends.
CERN just Moved the Birthplace of the Web to WordPress
Thirty-five years after the first website went live at CERN, the organization has migrated home.cern from Drupal to WordPress, officially switching over the same day its team took the stage at WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków. The numbers behind it are wild: 183,346 content items, more than 510,000 files, and 580 WordPress sites now running on CERN’s own Kubernetes infrastructure. The audit covered CERN’s 800 most important Drupal sites, and WordPress beat five other CMS platforms in a six-month evaluation.
New sites spin up automatically in about a minute through a custom-built WordPress Operator. CERN plans to retire Drupal entirely by year’s end and open-source its migration tooling. As one of the engineers put it, the goal was a platform anyone at CERN could use regardless of their technical skills, accessible by design, not by accident.
Read the full report on The Repository here.
Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:
- Core Committers Float Chrome-Style Canary Approach for WordPress, Question Whether RTC Belongs in Core
- Anne McCarthy Named WordPress 7.1 Release Lead
- WordPress 7.1 Roadmap Focuses on Collaboration, Guidelines, and Responsive Styling With RTC Still Unresolved
- OptinMonster Plugin Hacked in CDN Supply-Chain Attack
- Awesome Motive Breach Widens as Uncanny Automator Confirms Customer Data Theft, MonsterInsights Users Hit With Phishing Campaign
- Developer Traces 13-Year Backdoor Campaign Across 44 WordPress.org Plugins to a Single Operator
- WordPress Plugins Team Adds Three Reviewers, Re-Opens Applications as Submissions Hit New Records
- WordPress.org Marketing Director Open Sources AI Agent Skills and Brand Writing Guide Powering Project’s Social Media
- U.S. Court Orders WP Engine to Reveal Strategy Deck Sentence, Finds Mullenweg Was “Evasive” in Deposition
- WordCamp Europe Draws 2,458 to Kraków, Bouncing Back From Basel Dip as CERN Goes Live on WordPress
- WordPress.org Launches ‘Protect the Shire’ Initiative, Adds 24-Hour Cooldown for Plugin and Theme Auto-Updates
Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing hard-hitting WordPress journalism.
WordPress Must Read
→ Future of the Web 2026: Chapter 1 (wpvip.com)
→ From a 7 KB file to a 13-year backdoor operation (anchor.host)
→ The WordPress Conference We Need Next (remkusdevries.com)
→ Diversifying to break a $1.6M/yr plateau (indiehackers.com)
→ WordPress Is the Doorway, Not the Room (regionallyfamous.com)
On Other WordPress News
→ Core Committers Meeting – WordCamp Europe 2026 (make.wordpress.org)
→ Announcing the WordPress 7.1 Release Squad (make.wordpress.org)
→ WordPress 7.0.1 Release Schedule (make.wordpress.org)
→ What’s new in Gutenberg 23.4? (June 17, 2026) (make.wordpress.org)
→ WordCamp India 2027: What’s Next? (make.wordpress.org)
→ Meet Desktop Mode: A New Workspace for WordPress Admin (wordpress.com)
→ How effective are our advertising efforts for WordCamps? (make.wordpress.org)
→ How to Bring Your Community to Make WordPress Slack (make.wordpress.org)
→ Recap: Restoring removed version history (make.wordpress.org)
→ The Story Behind the Gifts from the WCEU 2026 Local Team (make.wordpress.org) → Update on the status of the plugin team – June 2026 (make.wordpress.org)
→ WordPress Education at WCEU 2026: More Than Learning to Build a Website (make.wordpress.org)
→ Develop Locally on Linux with WordPress Studio (wordpress.com)
→ How AI and Automation Spotlight the Best of WordPress (make.wordpress.org)
→ What’s new for developers? (June 2026) (developer.wordpress.org)
→ AI Contributor Weekly Summary – 10 June 2026 (make.wordpress.org)
→ Plugin Directory screenshots gallery update (make.wordpress.org)
→ React 19 upgrade temporarily reverted in Gutenberg (make.wordpress.org)
→ Call for WordPress 7.0.x Release Managers (make.wordpress.org)
From WordPress Community
→ Standing with Eric Binnion & his family (gofundme.com)
→ Where Have All the WordPress Speakers Gone? (elliottrichmond.co.uk)
→ Imokol Faith Ruth receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community (yoast.com)
→ How Was My WordCamp Europe 2026 in Krakow? (callmelana.com)
→ WordCamp Europe 2026: Worth the Wait (wordpress.com)
→ Rino de Boer’s WordCamp Europe 2026 recap thread (x.com)
→ Did I enjoy WordCamp Europe 2026? #WCEU – Imran Siddiq (youtube.com)
→ General, automated WordPress-to-WordPress sync is unsolvable (adamadam.blog)
Conclusion
That’s a wrap for issue 45.
Plenty to chew on this week: AI reshaping what a plugin license buys you, Envato resetting the rules of the marketplace game, a marketing playbook built on five patient years, a real conversation about paying the people behind WordCamp, and CERN proving WordPress can run at a genuinely massive scale.
Reply and tell me which story stuck with you most, and if you found this useful, share it with another WordPresser who’d enjoy it too.
Nishat, WP More
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