Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, likes to pick a good honorable fight against closed, proprietary technology platforms.
Matt is now choosing to pick a very valid fight against the fast-growing Arc XP platform. Dan Froomkin describes the start of Arc XP today:
The Post started licensing its technology to other news organizations in 2016, and its digital publishing division, Arc XP, is now a booming business employing a staff of 300 that is continuously rolling out new functionalities. It powers more than 2,000 sites for media organizations and non-media brands that can afford its hefty price tag.
Matt responded on Twitter with a recommendation that users look at the open source Newspack product instead. Newspack is an entirely open source product. All the code is available on Github.
I disagree with some of Matt’s stances, but this one is 100% accurate. No good can come from major newspapers standardizing on a Jeff Bezos platform, and WordPress is the best and logical alternative. Arc XP has a big backer, but WordPress is the dominant choice for publishers and should remain so. Almost all exciting new publishers are launching on WordPress. Check out the previous posts here in KinshiPress for lots of great examples.
With WordPress, publishers can own their content, own their platform, and do it all for a vastly lower price than with Arc XP.
In addition to Newspack, you’ll find a lot of developers working hard to improve WordPress as a publishing platform. Check out PublishPress for publishing workflow plugin, Leaky Paywall for an eCommerce option, Multicollab for editorial comments, and many more.