[wp-hackers] Proposing WP Flavours (various WordPress forks)

[Callum Macdonald]

On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 21:21 +1300, Lynne Pope wrote:
> I've been maintaining a private "fork" of WordPress since 2.6.5 because the
> UI changes in 2.7 didn't suit some people (making WordPress less
> accessible). I can tell you it is a LOT of very hard work. Coding is the
> smallest part of it and doesn't take anywhere near as much time as
> monitoring the core changes does. Keeping track of core changes and running
> diffs all the time is a real chore if you have others depending on you
> keeping up-to-date.

I think the amount of work depends on the type of fork you're looking
at. I can imagine that keeping the old UI would be A LOT of work. I also
used to maintain a private fork with some simple core mods and it was
also a lot of work, more than I expected.

At the same time, removing the TinyMCE editor might be a much simpler
maintenance task. It can be removed with a couple of code tweaks and
deleting a folder or two. Major updates would require a quick test,
minor version updates can probably be assumed to work.

I'm proposing to create an platform that allows people to maintain
flavours of WordPress with as much automation as possible. I see a wide
range of flavours to suit different needs, each would be a different
amount of work and would fall to the maintainers of that flavour to
decide if it's worth the effort.

As of yet I haven't had anyone confirm they want to maintain a specific
flavour, so right now it seems unlikely I'll move forward. If anyone is
interested, please let me know.

Warmly - Callum.