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AspirePress Demo

At the recent AltCtrl-Org event in Basel, Switzerland, our own Matt Leach did a quick demo of AspireUpdate and AspireExplorer, both of which connect to AspireCloud to browse WordPress packages available for install and update. If you missed it and haven’t downloaded AspireUpdate or the FAIR plugin, give this a watch — it’s fast-paced and under 10 minutes. The FAIR project was announced onstage immediately following this presentation. AspireCloud is the current reference implementation of… continue reading.

AspireExplorer, AspireUpdate, FAIR, Updates, June 11, 2025

Aspiring to FAIR Package Management

Word of the announcement of the FAIR Package Manager at the AltCtrlOrg side-event to WCEU in Basel, Switzerland has traveled quickly. The announcement took place immediately following Matt Leach’s demo of AspireUpdate and AspireExplorer, immediately before a Q&A session whose topic was suddenly focused completely on the FAIR announcement, partly due to the excitement in the room and partly due to the fact that the panel participants (including Joost de Valk) were already familiar with… continue reading.

AspireCloud, Community, FAIR, Vision, , June 9, 2025

“Everest” (1.0 is not just a number.)

As this post goes up on our blog, Matt Leach is taking the stage at the Alt-Ctrl event in Basel, Switzerland. He’ll be representing the AspirePress team there to demo something we are super-proud of — and we’ve put a lot of work into it. Today we are pleased to announce the release of AspireUpdate 1.0, a WordPress plugin that enables site owners to update their software from the repository of their choice — whether… continue reading.

AspireExplorer, AspireUpdate, Releases June 6, 2025

Telemetry in WordPress

The recent discussions about telemetry and data in WordPress are not surprising. While anyone who has spend time with the API code knows that a great amount of data is transmitted to the WordPress repository, seeing it weaponized is something that is shocking to many in the community. We’re also shocked at this abuse of the data, and we are sad to see that it’s being used in this way. Telemetry is a vital part… continue reading.

Uncategorized November 8, 2024

If WordPress.org is not for the community, then we will be

This post, written by our founder Sarah Savage, is her speaking on her feelings about the vision she has for WordPress, the AspirePress future, and the ways in which we can serve the community. It reflects her views, and her commitments to the community. When I saw the news that lawyers for Matt Mullenweg and Automattic were filing a brief that stated plainly, “wordpress.org is not WordPress”, I was shocked. Like many of the members… continue reading.

Uncategorized October 24, 2024

A vision of a distributed package repository in WordPress

Many if not most WordPress users are aware now of the challenge that having a single-point-of-failure in the package ecosystem provides. Even though WordPress users are (currently) able to upload plugins directly through the user interface, distributing a plugin outside the repository that .org offers is incredibly challenging. AspirePress exists entirely to solve this problem. Our focus is on building a sustainable, distributed, federated model of managing and distributing packages for WordPress. The advantage of… continue reading.

Vision October 24, 2024

Publishing and distributing first-party packages for WordPress

Yesterday, the WordPress.org team started a long-term supply chain attack against Advanced Custom Fields. This involved effectively forking the project, repackaging it as Secure Custom Fields, and deploying it under the original slug which led to thousands of users updating to SCF without notification or the ability to select whether they wanted SCF. This is an unfortunate abuse of authority and only continues to highlight the significant vulnerability that the community faces with WordPress.org being… continue reading.

Updates October 13, 2024

Forking, branching and flavoring WordPress

There’s been a lot of discussion in the community – on Twitter, Reddit, in the Slack community for AspirePress – about forking the WordPress project and taking it away from the Powers That Be(tm) and making it truly community oriented. I wanted to share some thoughts that have come up around this in our community with the broader WordPress community. Forking Forking is an act that says “thank you for what you’ve done; we’re going… continue reading.

Community, , , , , October 11, 2024

AspirePress releases AspireSync for downloading themes and plugins from the WordPress repository

I’m pleased to announce that AspirePress has released our first tool in the fight for distributed, federated mirroring of WordPress.org. It’s called AspireSync, and it’s designed to let you download plugins and themes in bulk from the .org repository. The tool is currently released as version 1.0-alpha-4. AspireSync is designed to be run as a fully containerized tool, meaning that you can download the container and go. It’s backed by a Postgres database, and it… continue reading.

Releases October 10, 2024

A vision for AspirePress and a community-run .org mirror

The problem In the last few weeks, we’ve seen that every WordPress instance in the world has a single point of failure. That single point of failure creates a risk for security, reliability, and credibility for the entire ecosystem. Further, that single point of failure could be leveraged to distribute malware or damage the community as a whole. This post is about laying out a vision for the future of WordPress, the future of distributing… continue reading.

Vision October 8, 2024