Editloft

Every publication that runs on more than one person eventually hits the same wall. A draft is finished, or someone thinks it is. An editor has notes, but they live in an email thread nobody can find. Three people believe they own the same story. The homepage says one thing and the calendar says another. WordPress is happy to publish your work; it just has no opinion about who decided it was ready.

For a long time, the plugin that solved this was Edit Flow.

Edit Flow gave editorial teams the thing WordPress left out: a way to see the whole pipeline. Custom post statuses, so a story could be a Pitch before it was a Draft, and Needs Review before it went live. A budget view that showed every piece in flight and where it was stuck. An editorial calendar you could actually plan around. Comment threads attached to the draft itself, so feedback lived next to the work instead of in someone’s inbox. If you ran a newsroom, a magazine, or any team where more than one person touched a post before it shipped, Edit Flow was how you kept the trains running.

Edit Flow is still around. But it’s carrying fifteen years of architecture decisions built for a different WordPress. The block editor, Full Site Editing, modern PHP: the platform shifted considerably. What I wanted was a fresh implementation of the same editorial ideas, designed for the WordPress that exists today rather than adapted from an older one.

So I built Editloft. It’s a fork that keeps the editorial discipline and rewrites the underlying machinery for modern WordPress: block editor, Full Site Editing, current PHP. The idea is not to reinvent how editorial teams think. They already had it right. The idea is to make that thinking run cleanly on a modern install.

Custom statuses are the heart of it: your posts get a real lifecycle again instead of choosing between Draft and Published and pretending that covers it. Editorial comments keep feedback attached to the draft it belongs to, where the next person can actually find it. The calendar shows the month the way an editor plans it, and editorial metadata carries the details a team tracks alongside a story. More is coming, one module at a time, in the open.

Editloft is available today. The code lives at https://github.com/thisismyurl/editloft, licensed GPLv2 like the project it grew from, free to use and free to read. It runs on WordPress 6.4 or newer with PHP 7.4 or newer. Download it, try it on a staging site before your production one, and tell me what I got wrong.

If watching a plugin grow up is your idea of a good time, you’re in good company. It grows in public now.