• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

WP Realm

WordPress news, community news, reviews and more from all over the world

  • News
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • eCommerce
  • About
  • Contact

Ghost: WordPress forked for blogging

5 November 2012 by Remkus de Vries 9 Comments

John O’Nolan, who worked as a Deputy Head of the WordPress UI Group a few years back, has jotted down his concept for a fork of WordPress. One that, in his words, will focus very specifically on blogging again instead of being a full blown CMS like WordPress itself.

I actually like some of the ideas he’s suggested in his post. I think it would be a huge undertaking to do such a fork, but it’s certainly a refreshing approach focussing on just blogging again. So what do you think, is John on the right track?

ShareTweet

Filed Under: News

About Remkus de Vries

Avid and heavy WordPress user since 2005, so effectively a WordPress oldtimer. Started as developer and agency owner, now works as Head of Partner & Customer relationships at Servebolt.

Co-founded WordCamp Europe in 2012, and WordCamp Netherlands back in 2009.

Principal owner of WP Realm.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Tammie Lister says

    5 November 2012 at 14:48

    It certainly is interesting, not ‘wheel reinventing’ but as is said that’s the not the point of the concept (and it is just a concept at this stage). I do wonder if a fork or plugin would be the ideal there. Maybe similar to what BuddyPress does for social networking – perhaps this could do that for blogging by becoming a suite of plugins (like BuddyPress) or something along those lines.

    Perhaps ‘imaginings’ like this is what will push forward the project or at least see offshoots. I can’t help thinking I’d like more if they went the way BuddyPress did but I am biased to that format as like it and seen it work. It’s certainly a nice exploration of an idea and I do think that task based WordPress offshoots (plugins, forks.. whatever) is going to be something that happens and it already does in the sense of some larger plugins. I’m also interested to see design explorations not confined by existing code – that’s always nice to see.

    Personally I’d kind of like to see a bit more fresh thinking UI wise (I kind of like wheels being open to reinvention or at least some thought given to ‘what if…’) – it for me is a bit too much of a mashup that wise. Maybe that would change during the project creation if it happens, after all this is just the concept UI.

    The bigger WordPress is the less you want it to do everything for a site. I know recently I’ve found myself removing links in admin bars and admin – this is the first step to ‘flavours’ of WordPress.

    Reply
  2. modemlooper says

    5 November 2012 at 16:22

    Don’t need a fork but WP could have a switch to blog mode and trim down its UI

    Reply
    • Remkus de Vries says

      5 November 2012 at 17:19

      Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I’m actually in the middle of building a custom dashboard (plugin) all together to provide for a more simplified Dashboard for my clients and I have actually used the same inspiration as John has..

      Reply
    • Ryan Hellyer says

      5 November 2012 at 21:33

      What John is suggesting is more extensive than just a UI change.

      Reply
  3. Ryan Hellyer says

    5 November 2012 at 21:32

    An alternative to this approach is simply to yank a large proportion of the guts out of WordPress and turn it all into plugins. Remove theme editors, menus, widgets, bla bla bla and turn all that cruft into officially supported plugins. That way if someone wants a lean mean cut down machine then they can have it. At the moment you are stuck with EVERYTHING, and that everything seems to be growing unfortunately larger with each new release.

    Reply
  4. Arman says

    6 November 2012 at 05:03

    I really think that John is on his own path. You could tell that by the way he’s come out about it. No comments under his own announcement with the copy entirely made up of images. It sounds like he doesn’t care what you and I think about his approach and I think that is good. You can’t be revolutionary by being affected by the chatter. That’s how you come out with iPad mini.

    Either way John has good credentials and his mock ups are certainly easy on the eyes. I think we should support him not to oppose against WordPress but to support its growth. After all isn’t this the point of an open source eco system where people are allowed to explore the possibilities and take control of where their favourite platform is going?

    Reply
  5. Daan Kortenbach says

    6 November 2012 at 11:41

    John’s bandwidth limit has exceeded, I guess his proposal hit a nerv.

    Btw, I’m totally digging the admin dashboard!

    Reply
  6. Tammie Lister says

    7 November 2012 at 12:28

    One thing that came to mind was the fact Markdown is said to be essential. I’m not so sure beyond the techie blogger / techies if that is true. How much does the average blogger even know of Markdown or use it? I could be wrong but to me that seemed to not indicate it was fully aimed / considering the majority market of bloggers. Nothing against Markdown just further focuses the market this system is aimed at. I would also tentatively suggest to get full traction wide spread amongst bloggers some auto hosted option like WordPress.com would be needed.

    Reply
  7. Robert says

    27 July 2013 at 02:04

    We had a really great chat with John about the future of Ghost earlier this week. If you’re interested you can check it out here: http://wpbacon.com/podcast/wordpress-ghost/

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

SUBSCRIBE

Our posts to your inbox. It's a wonderful thing.

Recent Comments

  • Remkus de Vries on Building a Multilingual Website? These are the Questions to Ask.
  • Tuba on Building a Multilingual Website? These are the Questions to Ask.
  • WPML, qTranslate eller Polylang: hvilken du skal velge og hvorfor? (2020) - My Blog on Building a Multilingual Website? These are the Questions to Ask.
  • Marian Malahin on Building a Multilingual Website? These are the Questions to Ask.
  • WPML,qTranslate X或Polylang – 三种最流行的多语言WordPress插件比较(2019) – wordpress on Building a Multilingual Website? These are the Questions to Ask.
Copyright © 2012 – 2023 WP Realm
Have you seen how fast Servebolt serves this site?