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’m building 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.

The custom statuses module is the part that works today. You can give your posts a real lifecycle again instead of choosing between Draft and Published and pretending that covers it. The budget view, the calendar, the notifications, the comment threads — those are next, one at a time, in the open.

A word on where this stands. There is nothing to download yet. I’m not going to pretend otherwise or hand you a date I’d have to walk back. This is early, and I’m building it the slow, visible way, where you can see the commits land and tell me when I’ve got something wrong. When it’s ready, the code will live at https://github.com/thisismyurl/editloft.

If watching a plugin grow up is your idea of a good time, you’re in good company. I’ll be over here, making it.