Forking WordPress  ## Metadata - Author: [[WordSesh by WPSessions]] - Full Title: Forking WordPress - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #Forking - #WordPress - #CommunityLeadership Author: [John Jacoby] Source: [WordSesh 2024] Reference: [Forking WordPress Transcript](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y6HcQcQWXU) date created: {{2024-09-26}} {{21:00}} --- # Title: Forking WordPress: Community, Contributions, and the Future ## Table of Contents:  - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) Assessment](#-deib-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### References: - [Forking WordPress Transcript](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y6HcQcQWXU) ## 📝 Summary: In his WordSesh 2024 presentation, John Jacoby discusses the concept of forking WordPress, community contributions, and the future of the open-source platform. Jacoby shares insights on how forking can be a positive force for innovation rather than a divisive issue. He emphasizes the value of community-driven development, decentralized decision-making, and understanding the motivations behind why contributors might fork WordPress. Forking, according to Jacoby, is not inherently negative; it represents an opportunity for growth, exploration, and the diversification of the WordPress ecosystem. ## 📖 Main Content: Jacoby starts by recounting his personal journey in WordPress, including his experiences with BuddyPress and BBPress, both of which are forks of WordPress. He argues that forking should be seen as a natural and potentially beneficial practice that allows developers to experiment and push boundaries without being constrained by the core project. He describes the importance of decentralized leadership, especially in open-source communities, and advocates for creating distinct distributions of WordPress to serve niche needs—such as those focused on higher education or enterprises. Jacoby reflects on the challenges of maintaining backward compatibility and the necessity of sometimes taking risks by creating different "flavors" of WordPress to address particular requirements. He also speaks about the emotional aspects of forking and the community dynamics that can sometimes make this challenging. He concludes by emphasizing the shared values of openness and collaboration, which should guide the decisions of those involved in WordPress, whether they are leading, forking, or contributing. ### 🗒️ Notes - **Forking as a Tool for Growth**: - Forking is a way to improve WordPress by experimenting and trying new approaches. - It allows contributors to address needs that aren't currently met by the core. - **Community and Leadership**: - Decentralized leadership is vital for an open-source project to thrive. - Maintaining backward compatibility can hinder progress, and sometimes new versions must be created to innovate. - **Different "Flavors" of WordPress**: - Jacoby encourages distinct versions tailored to specific needs, like educational or enterprise use cases. - Examples include custom versions of WordPress with default configurations for LMS or multi-network capabilities. - **Emotional Dynamics of Forking**: - Forking is often seen as negative, but it can be a way for individuals to explore their vision for WordPress. - It’s essential to maintain community cohesion and not see forking as inherently divisive. ## 📖 References: - [Forking WordPress Transcript](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y6HcQcQWXU) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase:  1. Jacoby discusses how the concept of forking is often misunderstood as a negative reaction to dissatisfaction. Instead, he frames forking as an opportunity to reimagine WordPress and pursue different paths of development that may not align with the core at a given time. 2. He also elaborates on the importance of creating different distributions of WordPress to meet unique needs—whether that’s for educational institutions, enterprises, or developers who want certain capabilities built-in by default—so that users don’t have to reinvent the wheel for specific use cases. ## 📰 Newsletter: **🚀 Exploring Forking: The Key to WordPress' Future?** In his latest WordSesh talk, John Jacoby made a compelling case for the value of forking WordPress—arguing that it’s not just about diverging from core but about creating room for innovation. From tailored versions for higher education to multi-network default setups, the potential for custom distributions is vast. Want to know how forking could shape the next decade of WordPress? Dive into Jacoby’s vision for a more experimental and dynamic future for the platform. 👉 [Watch the full talk here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y6HcQcQWXU) ## ✅ Action Items: - Reflect on how forking could play a role in diversifying the WordPress community. - Explore potential use cases where a custom distribution of WordPress could better serve niche needs. - Consider how the concept of decentralized leadership could be applied within your contributions to foster a more inclusive and experimental community. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: 1. Forking WordPress to create specialized distributions can lead to increased adoption in underserved sectors like education and enterprise. 2. Decentralized leadership within WordPress could result in greater contributor satisfaction and increased innovation. ### 📊 Methodology: - **Surveys**: Distribute surveys to WordPress developers to understand their attitudes toward forking and decentralized governance. - **Case Studies**: Analyze other open-source projects that have successfully implemented forks to understand best practices and outcomes. ### ❓ Questions: - How can forking be encouraged in a way that supports both individual creativity and the cohesion of the overall WordPress project? - What specific features or use cases would benefit from a dedicated distribution of WordPress? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Investigate the long-term impact of popular WordPress forks on the core project. - Study the role of forks in other open-source ecosystems to identify transferable lessons for WordPress. ### 💡 Implications:  Encouraging forking could lead to a richer ecosystem of WordPress installations, each optimized for specific use cases, which could make WordPress more attractive to new markets and contribute to its sustainability as a leading open-source platform. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: 1. **Visual Learners (Spatial)**: - **Present**: No diagrams or visual aids are provided. - **Improve**: Add flowcharts or diagrams showing different pathways that forks can take. 2. **Aural Learners (Auditory-Musical)**: - **Present**: The talk is available in audio format. - **Improve**: Provide an audio summary or integrate discussion prompts that users can explore in group settings. 3. **Verbal Learners (Linguistic)**: - **Present**: The presentation is rich in explanations but lacks analogies. - **Improve**: Include storytelling elements or relatable analogies to help explain complex concepts. 4. **Physical Learners (Kinesthetic)**: - **Present**: No interactive components. - **Improve**: Suggest practical exercises for attendees, such as creating their own basic fork to understand the process. 5. **Logical Learners (Mathematical)**: - **Present**: Logical progression of arguments is present. - **Improve**: Add data or case studies to strengthen the logical flow. 6. **Social Learners (Interpersonal)**: - **Present**: Encourages community involvement. - **Improve**: Include group discussion prompts or link to community forums. 7. **Solitary Learners (Intrapersonal)**: - **Present**: Offers reflection points on why someone might want to fork. - **Impr - Document Tags: [[fork]] [[jjj]] [[wordpress]] [[wordpress contribution]] - Summary: Forking WordPress, by John James Jacoby. The first instalment of WordSesh sets off at a pace with some gritty questions and thoughtful responses from the honourable JJJ. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y6HcQcQWXU all right says i'm on the air so hello word sesh good morning good afternoon good evening and good night right so whoever you're tuning in thank you for uh joining me for uh my fourth annual uh word sesh and one i'm very excited to be here uh whenever scott reaches out and asks me to to hang out with y'all for another 50 minutes i am always super happy and uh ecstatic to do so and when he had asked what i wanted to uh what i maybe wanted to talk about um i had a couple of different things and um and i've been thinking a lot about you know community and contributing to core and crowdfunding i think a lot about bockhuber and wpcli and open source and raising money and why money is even necessary and you know how building open source software and apps and things is uh is sort of a tough challenge and kind of a tough gig but uh one of the things that um that i've been thinking a lot about in terms of just uh myself uh is sort of where where i am and and kind of how i got here and uh and and what that i don't know what that means i guess for what it is that that i i hope to see for for wordpress in the future so uh for the next 50 or so minutes uh i'm gonna talk about uh three things that are that are very near and dear to my to my heart one i'm gonna talk about myself and so i am literally talking about my heart uh two i'm going to talk about the wordpress community uh and three i'm going to talk about wordpress the the software itself so um so me my most most most of y'all would would look at me and know me as the uh the project lead for buddypress and bb press uh and and that is generally how i try to introduce myself to people that are you know in the in the wordpress community because i think that that's the easiest and shortest way to uh to get ramped up or to recognize uh what what my contributions largely uh would be uh but uh uh when i think about my um my involvement in wordpress uh and looking back i i have largely only been involved with forks of wordpress and so uh when i when i discovered wordpress was mostly because i had discovered bb press uh and largely because i was trying to integrate it with wordpress mu and so uh it's depending on how you and what your definition of the word fork is to you or what it means and i think in the wordpress community that um that the word fork has somehow uh somehow have a a negative connotation to it as in i'm i'm going to take my ball and go home or as in i don't like the way that things are here and so what would a what would a fork of wordpress look like and while i think that those are certainly reasons to fork a piece of software because uh spiritually you don't like the direction that that's going or you don't like that the community isn't you know reacting to you or due to what it is that you want to do or your accomplishments in a certain way and that it is uh it is very easy to have a mindset of us versus them uh and then that i think is a natural sort of of way to feel at first if you feel undervalued if you feel uh like your contributions to anything in general are not giving you the uh the reward that you are hoping to get from it and so uh in thinking about forking wordpress and thinking about this talk it got me thinking about my time at automatic and so i had blogged about about what i feel like my relationship was with automatic when i was there and i'm not going to talk too much about it if you're interested you can read it uh but the uh the gist of it is that i for the most part uh had felt like there were certain things that i uh either wasn't appreciated for or there were ideas and visions and things that i had hoped to accomplish that uh weren't uh they weren't something that automatic as a company was interested in pursuing and that is going to be the case for wordpress as a piece of software for as long as wordpress is around there are going to be big ideas there are going to be uh big initiatives they're going to be small things there's going to be all sorts of ideas that are really good ideas that just may not be right for the state of wordpress at whatever time that these ideas come across and uh we are a family for better of force and uh families depending on who you are depending on how you grew up depending on your experiences with your own families or having a surrogate family or being adopted or whatever your family situation is uh they are infinitely complex and infinitely dynamic and they are always going to be something that abs and flows that is ups and downs that has goods and bads and uh and what's important with the family and what's important for us together to stick together or to not stick together uh is to understand that this uh we've got a long time to figure this out there is not a whole lot of urgency with any of this we do set up three month release cycles we do want to try and make sure that things stay alive and that they are dynamic and that they look uh active and that they look fun and exciting and that it is rewarding to jump in and start contributing and helping out and that is like any family that is any community that is your local that is the local neighborhood that is the block that is the village that you live in you decide whether or not you're walking down the sidewalk and you pick up a piece of trash or if you leave it you decide if uh you see a kid fall off his bike and you go and you help them or you let them cry you you decide what your values are and what's important to you and how frequently and how deep that you are willing to stick your neck out for any one of the issues that you believe in and so when someone decides to fork a piece of software if someone decides to fork wordpress it will be because they have ideas they have thoughts about what they want wordpress to be that are not where wordpress is at the time and so that is what started with wordpress mu that is what started with wordpress multi-site multi-site was a big idea it was an idea for wordpress.com to host multiple sites and multiple blogs on one installation of wordpress and so what do you do you have the version of wordpress that everyone wants to use that's easy and turn key that makes sense for the majority of people but you have the version of wordpress that you need to run a business you've got the version of wordpress that scales sideways to have multiple sites on one installation with users in the middle and so what do you do you fork it you say okay we need someone to work in a vacuum we need someone to go in the corner and solve this problem so that the rest of wordpress doesn't have to worry about it but this guy these people that care about multiple sites in wordpress can focus on solving that problem in the best way that they know how and so i've heard i have joked uh code quality and multi-site being bad or uh the contributions or the the function names or the database schema all these things that could be so much better and it's very easy just to look at wordpress's code base it's very easy to look at wordpress multi-site and say this is you can say i don't like it it could have been better i could have done better we could have done better this shouldn't have happened and on and on and on that's terrible absolutely terrible embarrassing outlook to have on any of the things that it is that we're working on wordpress multi-site powerswordpress.com powerswordpress.org buddypress.org bbpress.org all of wordcamp.org if the code is crap it wouldn't work seems to work okay so when someone says that they don't like it or that they're not going to use it because it isn't this certain ideology or a certain approach or this certain framework the haters are going to hate it's just how it's going to be and so with bb press and back press these were forks of wordpress that were really imagined to solve a different problem from a different direction he took the spirit of what wordpress was you took the things that made wordpress great and he said okay let's let's flip it a little bit let's improve the code base let's take what we've learned let's try something different new but let's make sure that this piece of software is still going to work and integrate with wordpress itself you fork wordpress you change the schema a little bit you use something from a different piece of software old bb press use mybb you say okay we're gonna take this code and our experience we're gonna make a better version of wordpress and it old bb press bb press one has a lot of great code in it a lot of cool ideas a lot of really sharp ahead of their time approaches and ideas to things like multiple databases multiple installations scaling across uh multiple instances of bb press and um and and you you look at the effort that went into just to solving these problems and uh unfortunately if you get to where we are today all of the effort that went into back press it's wasted because nobody uses it anymore nobody likes it anymore it's not rewarding to work on anymore that's okay uh because it was an experiment it was something to try it was solving a different need and a different problem in a different time when that was the vision for the whole family and suite of of software that rotates uh generally around wordpress at this point today and so when i think about forking wordpress i don't think about it in a way that is in any way negative it is easy to think about it that way it is easy to say i am frustrated with whatever with open track tickets that aren't getting anywhere with initiatives or ideas that i feel like this piece of software should do and i can't stand it or i don't like this person or this person's a bully or i don't like the way that this person is whatever i don't see it that way when i see forking wordpress i see a world where the only thing that ever beats wordpress is wordpress a different version of wordpress a different outlook from a different direction of wordpress a wordpress that has the rest api in it that ditches php old school compatibility stuff you take it you fork it you cut all the stuff out you make wordpress the type of wordpress that you want it to be and you do it in a way that on a long enough timeline on a five-year wordpress mu type of timeline you can merge these two things back together in a way that everyone is still happy uh and friendly and can appreciate all the work that happened to make that other version of wordpress good enough to make the better current version of wordpress better this is not i don't i don't imagine a hard fork uh being received very well uh it alienates contributors it alienates matt it alienates uh everyone that uh has poured their hard work into it and it's different than the b2 fork to wordpress b2 was uh was abandoned it was a piece of software that uh you know you knock on somebody's door and they don't answer and you knock and they don't answer and you go okay well either i'm breaking in i'm gonna find another door to knock on and so you know if matt and bike found another door they took it they made b2 into wordpress and they had a vision for it matt had uh things that he wanted to do and so he did them he did them in a way uh and we've all done them now in a way where to a certain degree depending on your perspective and how you view wordpress and how you use wordpress that everybody's installation of wordpress is already a fork of wordpress everybody's installation is using a different variety of plugins and themes drop-ins mu plug-ins building app frameworks oauth ldap shared user tables multi-site installations multi-network installations the sky is the limit these are forks these are forks of wordpress in every direction and so whether or not a fork is a separate distro separate distribution of wordpress that comes with separate packaging or whether or not it is a fork to have a different audience that cares about a different set of values i think that when it happens when we get to a point where we are comfortable saying that there are certain things that certain groups of people want to try and tackle inside of wordpress that it is okay to do those things privately or is separate from whatever the things are that are potential roadblocks or things that are in whoever's way that feels like they are better off trying to accomplish something alone or figuring something out and so the my motivation for that and thinking about this and is is very internal it's very personal to me in a way that i know that if i need to learn something if i need to get good at something if i need to level myself up to a certain amount of mastery in a topic or an idea i need to do it alone i need to sit in the corner i need to study it i need to think about it i need to tear it apart if you see how it works i need to understand the components i need to figure out how it works inside and out and then i get to come out with this education and knowledge and say hey guys i got it i figured it out and sometimes that's not easy to do in public all the time incomplete ideas incomplete thoughts fuzzy concepts that may or may not actually make any sense to anybody else and so there is a aha moment and a wake up moment where you can take ideas like uh turning wp settings into a bunch of do action calls okay well this is something that i've had in my head for 10 years that has never really been achievable until recent developments in wordpress core and so it would have been easy to say you know what i this i have to have and maintain my own version of wordpress in order to get this done uh but it didn't instead we stick it out you figure out other ways to occupy your time and get the other things that you're passionate about done and you sit on those ideas until you're uh until you're ready to to execute on them and so i've said it before i probably said it in the word camp talk and if anyone that has heard my talks probably sick of hearing me go on about stuff like this but i read something that um that michelangelo before he would introduce and start creating some art statues canvases whatever that he would just sit and stare at something for sometimes days at a time and someone would say what are you doing and he would say i'm working leave me alone he's not painting he's not chipping away at a block of marble he's thinking about what it is that he wants to do and i i i relate to that i can see that there are things that i want for buddypress or bbpress or for wordpress or the community or leadership or wordpress.org profiles.wordpress.org god there are so many things that would be awesome to do that it's hard to decide where which one what's what of these things are the most valuable which ones of these things are the are the things that are worth spending time on which ones which parts of these things are the things that uh require uh heavy lifting a hard a hard fork of an idea to sit alone and try and whittle whittle your way out of and i think if you look at the uh the landscape of wordpress.org buddypress.org bbpress.org that is very easy to look at all these things and see a uh a level of incompleteness and i think when i look at wordpress as a piece of software multi-site specifically user roles specifically post statuses specifically that i can see a level of incompleteness in wordpress as a software that i for whatever reason find hugely rewarding to stick around and try and figure out and despite quarrels or despite not seeing eye to eye despite being misunderstood despite incomplete thoughts on track and having stuff get shut down doesn't make any sense to anybody anyways yet that i get that we are all in this together and i think that that is important for the wordpress community to settle down and understand and feel calm and realize that either we are in this together to try and make the web a better place or we need to settle down you need to take wordpress in a different direction for yourself give yourself some time to reflect think about what it is that you want for wordpress to be and do and then hopefully come back in a way that people are going to be more receptive to that's not unusual that happens all the time there are forks of software all around us if you look at and i i i've said this before but i whether or not this is true it might not be true uh and i i i am comfortable speculating and totally making this up but i imagine that wp engine runs a very specific flavor of wordpress for themselves they have some kind of extra caching plugins or drop-ins or something else that's bolted into their wordpress that is different than my wordpress that lee has a different version of wordpress that is uh unique to what it is that they need their environment to be i can tell you for a fact wordpress.com is a different version of wordpress than you will ever see in your entire life and it is probably the coolest version of wordpress that anyone could ever see it is it makes me sad that more of wordpress.com is an open source and available for everyone to see because there is so much cool stuff on wordpress.com that if you are a wordpress enthusiast that appreciates the behind the scenes type stuff is the coolest wordpress installation you'll ever see the history that's involved the decision making that's gone into it uh these are these are these are we are celebrating the forks of wordpress we are we are taking the ideas and the things that make wordpress great and we are choosing to make them better uh in a way that elevates the entire wordpress community and ecosystem as a whole now the whether or not you feel or believe that a company like wp engine or paige lee or automatic has any kind of obligation to open source their secret sauce or to put it on github or to talk about what makes it cool uh is your opinion you use this is okay you could be upset that automatic doesn't open source more you could not care at all and focus and worry on you worry about your own thing but these are these are spiritual forks that have that everyone has been running that no one thinks about his forks that are okay and so bob huber tweeted you know what is a what would a fork of wordpress look like and so if he was asking me that question in my imagination uh a fork of wordpress is a wordpress that gets rid of drop-ins wp settings is actions so that everything is a drop-in literally every piece of wordpress is pluggable if you need for it to be most people will never care that that is even possible or take advantage of that as an option but that makes wordpress itself infinitely flexible in a way that you don't ever need to fork the code base itself you may want to distribute your own version of wordpress and at that point in my imagination wordpress becomes more of a dependency in your installation than it is a fork of wordpress but uh but for for whatever it is if we get wordpress to the point where it doesn't matter if it comes with v1 or v2 or v10 of a rest api it comes with all of them or comes with none of them uh that that is what the installer the owner of that wordpress installation they are they are exercising their freedom to have whatever version of wordpress that they want and so that's uh it's a slippery slope it's dangerous it's uh it makes it unpredictable a little bit whatever there are all sorts of pros and cons to having all these different flavors but we literally already have that you can you know imagine a world where there is a rest api built into wordpress core and you ping some wordpress installation for buddy press endpoints and they're not there that'll happen you're going to hit you're going to look for them and they're not going to be there oh well right like as long as we are able to engineer wordpress in such a way that these things don't actually cause any kind of fatal problems or errors these are solvable problems like these are these are things where we can make wordpress as a piece of software and an environment friendly to users and machines and everybody uh and we are we have been right like every time every time that someone wants to patch core for a very brief moment in time you are running a fork of wordpress you have taken wordpress you have changed it you have modified the code and then you decide whether or not it is worthy or ready uh to get pushed upstream back into the project and then others decide and so there's a whole forking process that happens in very minute and small sort of ways and so uh if everyone forked wordpress on purpose and if everybody was running their own version with their own custom code and everything else then we would for sure have a little bit of chaos and that's maybe not super awesome to have but depending on how you feel about growth and people's individual growth and the growth of wordpress as a platform and the growth of the web uh i think a little bit of that i think a little bit more of separate forks and distributions that are there to address and solve very specific needs uh is healthy is healthy for uh individual growth professional growth and everything else there's no reason why we couldn't ship a version of buddypress that came with wordpress in it that are you turn key you have a turnkey install the turnkey installer buddypress that already works right out of the box you download one zip you you unzip it you run it and go or you deploy it in a docker container that just comes all ready to go whatever whatever it is uh is it is it a fork not really it's a separate distro and it's probably the same version of wordpress core that everybody else already uses all over the place but it is different it's modified it is a changed piece of software because of the plug-in and theme architecture and ecosystem that we have so i think the i think it's important for the future of wordpress to get comfortable with the idea that all of us get comfortable with the idea of there being official okay healthy forks distros of wordpress that come with specific configurations specific plug-ins and themes to solve very specific problems um because if we're not if we don't get comfortable with it then we will be encumbered by our own uh our own one funnel our own place for everything has to go at the same time if everything always only bubbles up to a team of 10 20 core committers and contributors that's a lot of pressure on them whether or not they feel it whether or not i feel it whether or not anyone can look at it and say that they're capable or not capable or that it affects them or positively or negatively it's a lot it's a lot of pressure to put on a few people to be the guardians of 26 of the web and over the course the past two or three years the wordpress community the wordpress leads matt the strides that have gone into the wordpress foundation and separating the trademark out of matt or automatic and say what you will about matt being all over the place and all these things matt's a nice guy matt has tried really hard to make sure that we are okay with the state of things and as a community i think that it's really powerful to know that there is someone that everybody for the most part likes and believes in and can see that is a very brilliant individual that has largely been hands off from wordpress as a project for a pretty long but the longest that i've seen really whether or not there's whether or not there's a secret back channel whether or not there's some sort of illuminati thing whatever seems a little silly but uh he he is he has taken a piece of software that he loves and he has given it away to let us do what we want with it that's incredible what do you do with that right i mean that is well how many times in your life do you have the opportunity to create a thing and then set it free right i mean children are about the only thing that you can imagine or the thing that like you can raise and and and turn into and try and do your best to like tur make the best possible thing that you could do out of it uh and then give it away uh the the joy of doing that for the web as an individual must feel immense and uh if i were mad i know that matt's gonna be you know talking in you know 20 hours or so and i doubt i mean if he wants to address me that would be cool but if he does it that's okay too it's been a while since we've chatted but uh if someone when someone if someone forked buddypress or forked one of my plugins uh if someone forked wordpress i imagine the process of seeing that happen is probably the emotional process of seeing that it's probably pretty funny it's probably a little it's probably a whole series of events that would happen uh one what are you doing why are you doing this why are you not part of the whole why what what happened went wrong where you did not feel comfortable uh contributing to what we've already got going on here and then i think the question is did anything actually go wrong maybe maybe it didn't maybe you just want to do something else that we're not doing you know i think uh in the end knowing that someone else is putting effort into something that you similarly love or enjoy or agree with uh knowing that the gpl for the most part expects sort of demands hopefully tries to enforce the fact that a fork of wordpress would still be something open that uh ideally there would be something to learn from that fork and ideally it's quality enough to bring back in in a way that uh everyone is able to benefit and feel good and happy about what that looks like but um i this is a topic that i haven't i haven't i mean i've i've i've thought about it recently i've i've sort of i sort of i don't know belted a little bit about out loud and private with uh with some with some small intimate sort of groups of people uh generally not out of anger uh but largely out of wanting to see some things happen that are really difficult to happen in the current state of wordpress and the responsibility that it has to maintain backwards compatibility maintain 100 stability all those things there's something that i enjoy personally about tearing something completely apart and re-imagining it as something else and uh because my wordpress career has largely been spent working on and with forks of wordpress already with multi-site and back press the concept of a fork of wordpress does not at all feel foreign to me in any way and as a result it almost makes it difficult for me to imagine feeling like it is a bad thing and so if i went to matt today and i said hey matt i'm thinking about forking wordpress and here are the reasons why i would want to do it it would be hard for me to imagine matt's response to be anything other than wow that's super awesome and i can't wait to see what you accomplish i think that if matt was upset about a fork if matt or automatic or someone specifically or anyone specifically or someone looks at uh why who or why there's all sorts of speculation about the reasons and the drama and everyone wants to make everybody be a hero or a villain and wants to turn this into a good or a bad thing but it the reality is that there are no villains really there are nobody that is trying to uh to do anything that is going to burn anybody else's house down here we are all trying to take what resources that we have and what we know about software development and community and leadership and apply it in the best way that we know how and so one of the things that i would like to see in terms of distributions or forks of wordpress is is very similar to what we already have with uh with linux we look at the core of ios or the core of mac os or the core of what will probably eventually be windows the core of uh you know ubuntu these are a core piece of software these are wordpress core with very specific package managers very specific ideologies about how to solve very specific problems for an audience of people that happen to think the way that these specific distributions of linux happen to work and so my my real world analogy for this my real world application for why a fork or many forks of wordpress are healthy is the number of places that exist in the world that you walk past and drive past and look at and admire that you never go to that you never have a need to go to a certain car dealership because you're never gonna buy a mitsubishi you never go to bank of america because you're happy with your bank the way that it is you don't change your insurance company you don't do whatever you don't go to a different coffee shop or a different cafe because you like what you've got you've solved those problems you've offloaded the processing of that decision making to these places that find you joy and so if wordpress core uh universally across our entire wordpress community essentially provides us with maximum joy then we're able to take plug-ins and themes and other things and solve different problems in different ways to provide an open community of installation types for wordpress that are an infinite combination of things that let anyone walk right by and go i have no need for this one because i don't care about lms's and i don't need this one because i don't care about communities i don't need this one because i don't need forums i don't need this once i don't need an online shopping cart but i do need this one for this reason and so we've talked about in the core direction a long time of having installation types and uh and what it looks like to walk someone through uh installing wordpress do you want a community do you want a shopping cart do you want this do you want this and then having rec i mean all these ideas are great ideas they're super good uh but it's it's going to be hard for that to be part of wordpress's installation process i think that there could be a bundler there could be a separate application that bundles these things together uh it could be it could be anything literally it could be it could be anything but um companies like apple as much as i hate to use apples for apple for examples for things because one it's totally played out two everyone uses apple as an example for everything uh and and three my experience trying to beta test most of apple software is like is maximally terrible all the time but you know i can't i can't help myself so um but apple as an organization does an incredible incredible job of taking every open source open and available protocol and thing and making it sweet email notes reminders calendar chat uh the the operating system itself uh these the majority of these things are an open protocol with a whole lot of polish and finish and thought and design and architecture bolted on top of it to take the basic fundamental protocol of something like email and making the simplest mail app that you could really make and not everyone's gonna like it if someone else is gonna try a different app somebody else likes gmail more than the built-in app they're all that thank heaven that there are thank developers thank everyone that there are decisions there are forks there are different ideas and implementations of these things that we can use but apple does a good job of taking the open source the things that are available webkit and then adding their level of sophistication and simplicity on top of these things that uh is is invisible you don't think that apple is a master of of honing in on the open source but they truly truly are uh the the other application for this as much as it's not necessarily open source but i'll use it as another real world example is cars cars and automobiles are built largely from components that are not from ford or tesla or subaru they are from nippondenzo they are from uh ngk they're from enki they're from companies that want to make wheels and tires and spark plugs and suspension eibach h r these are companies that have been around for decades that care about automobiles and so you take off the shelf components you take springs with a certain compression rate you take struts you take wheels that are a certain size and dimension that fit the car that it is that you want to build and you eventually fork automotive industry into being a car that you've designed with a shell that looks and feels the way that you want it to look these are things that happen in the world around us constantly we don't think of them as forks you don't look at a tesla and think of it as an engineering fork but it absolutely truly is you take the suspension components and you reimagine them you're taking sometimes you're fabricating stuff sometimes you're writing your own plugins sometimes you take off the shelf stuff and sometimes it just happens to work okay so these are these are things that are so common that the idea of having separate forks and distributions of wordpress uh should not in any way be scary feel uncomfortable feel foreign feel like a thing that shouldn't happen these are things that have to happen for growth for happiness for the future of wordpress in general and for individuals and groups that are not comfortable contributing to core to still have a way in a place to make wordpress be what they want and need for it to be and so i've got some time for questions i think i've got the 10 minute mark so my closer is that i have it in my mind to eventually have a distribution a separate distribution of wordpress one that doesn't come with a kismet one that doesn't come with hello dolly one that doesn't come with gravatar integration built-in one that turns off ping-o-matic one that strips wordpress of the things that uh are not wordpress and comes with things that make wordpress in my opinion maybe a little bit better maybe a little bit different uh things like having multi-site turned on automatically uh why even if you only install one site multi-site's already turned on if you want to add a new site you can just add a new site if you want to have multiple networks we have multi-network turned on automatically these are things that we can just have script done install easy so that the question of how do i turn on multi-site how do i install it this way uh could just be that way out of the box not and wordpress is still wordpress it's still exactly the version of wordpress four six four seven and on and on and on and so i don't know exactly what the implementation of this looks like i don't know what the name of it would be i don't know what i would call it and i don't know that anyone would use it but it is a thing that i do want to try because i think that there are a growing or there is a growing segment that wants to try and use wordpress in a different way they want to have a restful api right out of the box they want to have oauth maybe out of the box they want to have a database scalability across multiple database servers or reads and writes right out of the box they want to have a certain way a certain thing uh without having to go in and solve these problems or find these plugins or find the best way or thing to do these certain things so in that way i will leave you where i started which is when anybody asks uh what the competition is for wordpress so we look at the numbers for uh what are the installation numbers for drupal and what are the installation numbers for uh for ghost or what are what what is the market share for joomla or this or that or whatever else we need to set ourselves up so that the only piece of software that is ever competing with wordpress is wordpress and i think that means that we will secure uh i mean the web as a whole we will make sure that the web is safe secure it's easy to use uh see it's accessible to everybody um and then all of us that are able to improve it and make it better uh can do so in a way that is safe and friendly uh and accepting and warm and inviting and encouraging and uh and all those things so um i guess i've got five minutes so um if there are questions uh i'm happy to to scroll through the chat and uh try and go back or forth and see uh see who's who's got what to say uh without scrolling far too far back uh jonathan mentioned wordpress for higher ed and enterprise i mean yeah i mean those are very too clear and obvious applications where uh having a uh a version of wordpress specifically geared towards higher ed where uh site creation is easy for schools uh and uh roles are easy to distribute for for instructors and tas and uh and students to be able to join and write or blog or have an lms involved or have whatever it is that whatever it is that it needs uh boone girgis has just taken this pretty far with buddypress and commons in a box though it isn't a fork of wordpress it is largely just a package of uh uh of uh of of buddypress and some tools to help with uh the commons space jorban asks what he should eat for dinner ma i feel like the obvious answer is pizza rolls that's just me um oh uh mr misner asks uh about about bedrock yeah i mean the roots is and it's already a fork right i mean it's it is a whole different approach to wrapping an environment a very cool environment around uh wordpress already so um and here's the thing about while we have time and while i'm here uh and since this is a hot topic uh i've i have i have seen right mumblings and grumblings about uh negative interactions between some of the folks that build bedrock and roots right like some things that somebody said that somebody doesn't like somebody disagrees with and everyone wants to fight and we don't like this guy and that guy's kind of a jerk whatever else and those things might be true they they they might who knows doesn't matter what matters is your output the output matters more i think than i mean yeah you shouldn't be mean to people like that is like generally personally how i feel about the world i'm not going to try and force that on anybody but uh if what they want to do is build bedrock and roots and they want to build the best version of that thing that they can who cares that's awesome they should totally do that they should continue doing that everyone that that looks at that should feel nothing but impressed and proud that they have solving a specific need for the rest of the wordpress community it's a big deal uh that they have that they've they've chosen a pack and they have what they have themes right they have uh or one specific theme and a bunch of other like plugins that go around their the theme roots through this theme uh it's cool it's super cool um so uh i noticed john block says that we need a dependency manager and there is no such thing as a dependency manager there ah they don't exist they all everyone's terrible everyone hates every dependency manager under the sun that's ever exists they're not good there's no such thing dependencies manage you let's spa um what do we got for scroll back i've got uh two minutes gosh i don't know what else to say uh thank you for linking everything in here for bedrock and sage i appreciate that that's very helpful um i don't know i think that's it i think i'm out i think if anybody has questions please uh feel free to follow me on the twitters if you'd like jjj uh generally blog at b j-a-c-o-b-y but i am really trying to get one of those sweet sweet dot blog domains so if anyone knows you know anyone that could get me jjj.blog that would be pretty cool uh otherwise thank you very much for tuning in and uh hopefully um we get some good discussion about this happening and going and hopefully uh everyone um gets where i'm coming from hopefully i haven't offended anybody and if i've said something that offended somebody please let me know because i didn't mean to and uh you know we'll chat later so thank you scott and brad for uh letting me enjoy the fourth annual inaugural uh word session i'll be lurking in the shadows and in the comments for the next 22 hours i guess so bye y'all thank you very much, Forking WordPress, WordSesh by WPSessions, 01j8t66mt7ftse3q1zvgdwj007.