Congratulations on your decision to fork WordPress! You’ve taken on a mammoth task, I’m impressed with your willingness step up to the challenge of a lifetime. I’m here to give some advice on the things you might not have thought about yet, and what you’ll need to help the long term success of your fork.
Forking, I’m please to share, is beautiful. It continues to be an important feature of the Open Source ethos, even if it has become more involved as projects have matured. Forking is a valuable tool for Open Source communities to demonstrate that they believe a project should move in a different direction.
Before we get into the details, however, I do have to offer a few disclaimers. This post is not:
- An active call for people to fork WordPress. In the spirit of Open Source, I think it’s important that we publicly talk about what this process looks like, even if it can be an uncomfortable discussion.
- An announcement that I’m forking WordPress. I don’t have the free time for that.
- An offer to wrangle your fork of WordPress. I am happy to discuss your plans and offer advice, though.
Disclaimers out of the way, let’s begin!
Before you Announce
First of all, let’s talk about that big old elephant in the room: the current level of instability in the WordPress world. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this the major factor in motivating your fork. Unfortunately, this approach won’t get you very far, so the first thing you need to do is take any feelings you have about it, and set them aside. You need to decide what you’re in favour of, instead. What are are the positive motivational factors that will make you jump out of bed, and push this project forward for the next decade or more? What will motivate others to join you for the long haul?
Build a community, not an angry mob.
Think carefully about what your fork is going to be named. I’m willing to bet that you first jumped to calling it {Adjective}Press, or perhaps something with “WP” in the name. That’s a great idea if you’re planning on your project being forever defined as a protest against WordPress, but you need to think beyond that. How will you define your brand to keep it relevant for decades to come?
Oh, and make sure you can get the domains and social media handles for your name. Having to try and get them later is just expensive and frustrating.
Talk to people. Not just your circle of friends and colleagues who agree with you, find people who can offer different perspectives, and decide how your fork is going to help them. Talk to WordPress core contributors (not just committers!), and learn their take on it. Can you present an argument that would convince long term contributors to switch to working on your fork?
Figure out funding, at least enough to bootstrap your project. As much as I’d love to be, most of us are not post-economic. You can only get so far as a volunteer project, you’re going to need at least some people to be paid to work on it. There are big, complex problems that crop up along the way, it’s hard to solve them if everyone has to context switch between their day job, and their volunteer work.
The Meta Project
If you’ve made it this far into starting your fork, give yourself a pat on the back. You’ve made it much further than many others do. Your next challenge is deciding the process of building it. You could stick with the BDFL approach, which certainly has benefits, particularly when first starting out. It might be hard to sell what many folks see as a key weakness in WordPress, though. Perhaps you might like to explore a democratic governance model, or some sort of hybrid approach. Everything has a set of benefits and trade-offs, you’ll need to decide what works for you.
You’re going to have a bunch of technical dirty work to figure out. Where will the code be hosted? How will you track issues? Provide support? Discuss plans? Build community? Track data? Host themes, and plugins? What will you do about mobile apps?
At first glance, each of these are fairly straightforward to answer, but it’s very easy to get lost in the possibilities. My advice here is simple: pick something, use it until it stops being valuable. You can always switch to something different later. Switching governance models might be hard, but switching server-side tools is relatively easy.
Do the dirty work, but don’t get stuck in the weeds.
Start thinking about how you’ll build your in-person community. Meetups, conferences, hack days, helping people move to your project, there are countless opportunities here to build your community.
The Moat
WordPress has three substantial factors that have made it largely unassailable for many years.
First, there’s the massive community that’s built up around WordPress over the years. Regular meetups and conferences are an integral part of building a popular Open Source project. You can’t really piggy back off the work that WordPress has done over the years here, either. The only way forward is to put in the work to build and maintain a community that you’re proud to be a part of.
Second, there’s the vast selection of plugins and themes that are available to download for free. The quality between options vary wildly, of course, but that’s largely irrelevant. The fact that so many options exist means there really is something for everyone. You’re going to need to figure out how to either maintain long term compatibility with existing WordPress plugins and themes, or you’re going to find yourself reproducing them all.
Finally, you’ll need to deal with inertia. The vast majority of WordPress site owners have no need or motivation to change, so you need to make it easy (ideally, your fork would be a drop-in replacement), and beneficial. What will your fork do better to solve real problems?
Tell Your Friends!
It’s around about this point that you’re probably getting ready to talk about your fork publicly. Go ahead, you’ve earned it!
Launch day is inevitably a mix of strong emotions. Elation if you get a huge positive response from the public, maybe discouragement if the public response is a bit more muted. Relief at having made it this far. Optimism about the future. Maybe even some doubt could creep in that you’re the right person to be wrangling such a huge endeavour. Whatever you end up experiencing, try not to stress about it too much. It’s a big day, but what really defines your project is what you do with it tomorrow. Next week. Next year.
Go right back to the start, and remind yourself of the positive reasons that you’re choosing to build this project. Tell the world those positive reasons, and welcome anyone who wants to join you on the journey.
The Long Haul
Not every day is launch day, however. Most of your days will be… kinda boring, to be honest. That’s a good thing! Too much excitement will inevitably burn out you and your community. Sustainable effort, day after day, is how you build something to last.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Of course, there’ll be ups and downs. It’s always okay to go back to the start, and reminder yourself (and your community!) of the positive reasons that you’re all working together on this.
Oh, and please try to remember that one day, you’re probably not going to be the right person to lead your project any more. This isn’t something to fear, or to look forward to, really: projects, communities, and individuals all grow and change. It’s probably going to be a weird time when you get to this point, but it doesn’t have to be a time of upheaval and uncertainty. If you’ve run the project well, you should hopefully have a deep pool of talented folks who can step in to continue what you began.
Have Fun!
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to remind you to have fun! It’s easy to get lost in conflict at times, but it’s important to remember that… it’s just a CMS. It’s not going to be the end of the world if you take time away from the project, it’s actively beneficial for you to have a life outside of the internet. Friends, family, pets, hobbies: make time for the things that matter in your life.