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I like to think that one of the reasons for WordPress's resounding and continuous success among developers has been its open source, libre GPL license. That be

I like to think that one of the reasons for WordPress's resounding and continuous success among developers has been its open source, libre GPL license. That being the case, I can see a well-prepared, well-publicized and well-maintained fork easily taking the cake from WP.org in the near future, as WP.com becomes more like the SquareSpace they admire so much.

radus 8y ago
https://github.com/ClassicPress/ClassicPress https://github.com/ClassicPress/ClassicPress
justinator 8y ago
This won't happened without a community and communities take resources to run. What's going to happen with the entire plugin ecosystem? Say I'm a plugin developer - am I going to jump ship to an untested fork with no company backing it, or am I going to go with a safe bet? I'm happy to see a fork of Wordpress if that's the itch that people want to scratch (more power to them!) but the value of the app isn't in the code itself, is it?
- syshum 8y ago
  Some of the larger dev shops that use wordpress as a core should work together to start a non-profit foundation, then fork it. This model has proven successful before in other projects faced with similar issues
  - dwd 8y ago
    The Joomla fork of Mambo is a good example.
  - photomatt 8y ago
    If the reason to fork is just Gutenberg, there's an official plugin available (Classic Editor), created and supported by core, that disables Gutenberg and gives you pre-5.0 experience for as long as you'd like to run it. And then you don't lose the infrastructure, updates, security, events, the benefits of the thousands of people who work on making some part of WordPress better every day.
mtberatwork 8y ago
> resounding and continuous success among developers Purely anecdotal, but from a hiring stand point, it's extremely difficult to find good software engineers that are willing to work on or maintain a Wordpress-based project even as part of their duties. No one seems to want to touch it. I have yet to come across any engineer that would classify Wordpress as a resounding success in their eyes.
- photomatt 8y ago
  WordPress developers are keenly aware of all of the parts that aren't ideal in the code, and if you look at things where we're able to work in a more de novo fashion (like Gutenberg) you'll see best-in-class approaches and code. However as you see in some other comments on this thread, backwards compatibility has been key to WP's adoption which can make it challenging to fully iterate the user and developer experience. With Gutenberg we're doing this, and it has generated a huge amount of pushback and even conspiracy theories. Hopefully in a year or two we'll look back at this as something we're not sure why there was even an issue. The last time people threatened or actually forked WordPress like this was when we first adopted WYSIWYG in version 2.0, in 2005. Part of why WordPress today has 10x the market share of the runner-up is because we think a lot about these decisions, listen to tons of feedback, but are willing to occasionally choose controversial-at-the-time decisions that turn out right in the grand arc of things.

radus 8y ago

https://github.com/ClassicPress/ClassicPress https://github.com/ClassicPress/ClassicPress

justinator 8y ago

This won't happened without a community and communities take resources to run. What's going to happen with the entire plugin ecosystem? Say I'm a plugin developer - am I going to jump ship to an untested fork with no company backing it, or am I going to go with a safe bet? I'm happy to see a fork of Wordpress if that's the itch that people want to scratch (more power to them!) but the value of the app isn't in the code itself, is it?

syshum 8y ago
Some of the larger dev shops that use wordpress as a core should work together to start a non-profit foundation, then fork it. This model has proven successful before in other projects faced with similar issues
- dwd 8y ago
  The Joomla fork of Mambo is a good example.
- photomatt 8y ago
  If the reason to fork is just Gutenberg, there's an official plugin available (Classic Editor), created and supported by core, that disables Gutenberg and gives you pre-5.0 experience for as long as you'd like to run it. And then you don't lose the infrastructure, updates, security, events, the benefits of the thousands of people who work on making some part of WordPress better every day.

mtberatwork 8y ago

> resounding and continuous success among developers Purely anecdotal, but from a hiring stand point, it's extremely difficult to find good software engineers that are willing to work on or maintain a Wordpress-based project even as part of their duties. No one seems to want to touch it. I have yet to come across any engineer that would classify Wordpress as a resounding success in their eyes.

photomatt 8y ago
WordPress developers are keenly aware of all of the parts that aren't ideal in the code, and if you look at things where we're able to work in a more de novo fashion (like Gutenberg) you'll see best-in-class approaches and code. However as you see in some other comments on this thread, backwards compatibility has been key to WP's adoption which can make it challenging to fully iterate the user and developer experience. With Gutenberg we're doing this, and it has generated a huge amount of pushback and even conspiracy theories. Hopefully in a year or two we'll look back at this as something we're not sure why there was even an issue. The last time people threatened or actually forked WordPress like this was when we first adopted WYSIWYG in version 2.0, in 2005. Part of why WordPress today has 10x the market share of the runner-up is because we think a lot about these decisions, listen to tons of feedback, but are willing to occasionally choose controversial-at-the-time decisions that turn out right in the grand arc of things.