What is WordPress Post Forking
Post forking began with the question "What if we could re-imagine WordPress’s ease-of-use and intuitively dumb-simple workflow to introduce a layer of GitHub’s collaborative fork-and-merge horsepower under the hood?" Post Forking sets out to answer that. Authors can "Fork" another author's post to add content or change wording and submit a request back to the author to merge the changes in. By scheduling a merge, sites can update pages or post without someone needing to push a button.
Future versions could enable any visitor to a site to submit a change request. Imagine your users adding sources ala wikipedia to your site (with you being the one that controls what goes in and what doesn't) Two versions have been released so far and it has been downloaded over 1100 times.
Help Make Post Forking More Usable
Right now, there are numerous usability challenges that make Post Forking hard to use. The language used is very focused on developers and isn't consistent. Screens don't contain instructions and aren't obvious for how to use them. The best way to fix these problems is through formal user testing and iteration.
What this will fund
The main goal of this fundraiser is the fund the continued improvement of Post Forking. In order to do this, I'm cutting my normal consulting rate more than in half. If fully funded, the fundraiser will cover my design / development time and also:
- I will conduct three rounds of User Tests with iterations in between each round in order to fix the current usability problems.
- The prioritization of development of Post Forking over other projects
- The promotion of Post Forking at WordCamps and WordPress meetups.
The Patronage Model for Open Source
For centuries, the Patronage Model was the way that art was produced. Kings, Queens, and other aristocrats would pay artists so they could focus on creating new and interesting pieces of art. Artists from Michelangelo to Shakespeare all received support to create the works of art that we know today.
We can apply this same model to our Software. You can support the development of Post Forking so that it's usability can be prioritized.
Each Perk is named after a "fork" of Jazz.
How Can Publishers Use Post Forking?
Two years ago, Wired Magazine wrote a story on github and put the story on github so anyone could make changes. 32 people contributed to it, including translating it into 8 new languages. Grammer, spelling and wordchoices were all fixed by people other then the author and editor creating an ultimatily better story.
This is the UI right now. This is what I want to make better.
Creating a new branch is as easy as using the quick-actions on the post edit screen:
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Or on any post screen, there is a metabox to create a new branch of a post
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The branch edit screen is the same post edit screen that you are used to.
The other half that I want to make better is the terminology. Branch and Fork are understood by developers, but the concept isn't ingraned in the journalist and writer world.
The License
Post Forking is licensed under GPL and will always remain free as in speech. Users will always retain the freedom to run the program, for any purpose; The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish; The freedom to redistribute; The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
The Impact
Post Forking has the potential to really change the way people collaborate and produce content in WordPress. With the new model of "Features are Plugins First", this could also one day become a part of WordPress Core, but only if it is highly usable and development can continue.
