AspirePress exists to promote the WordPress ecosystem, and to build WordPress into what we all aspire it to be. |
In the fall of 2024, the WordPress community came to the realization that every WordPress-powered website has a single point of failure. That single point of failure creates a risk for security, reliability, and credibility for the entire ecosystem. Further, that single point of failure could be leveraged to distribute malware or damage the community as a whole.
To address this problem, we have to move in two major steps:
- First, we have to get out of disaster mode. We need to assuage the fears of the community by providing a reliable, functional solution that they can use in days, not months.
- Second, we want to offer offer a truly distributed, federated and comprehensive update solution that benefits everyone in the community.
The first project goal is to offer a viable solution to the centralized control of the .org website. We are actively developing the initial release of the software packages to achieve this goal and keeping it updated on GitHub. Currently we are testing packages in Alpha or Beta states.
The long-term goals of the project are to effectively ensure three key elements of the mirror system:
- Fully Distributed - anyone can set up a mirror and host WordPress assets (eg plugins and themes);
- Federated - you can join a network of mirrors and have access to their assets, and share your assets with the federation
- Funded - there be an opportunity for commercial benefit for those who host mirrors, as well as providing open source contributions to the community.
What this looks like in full is for discussion and planning of Phase 2 and beyond, but right now we need to focus on getting something on the table that the community has contributed to and supports so that we can move forward.
None of these concepts is particularly ground-breaking. For example, the Domain Name System (DNS) is distributed and federated. A good mirror should work like DNS: publication of a plugin to one mirror should result in propagation of that plugin to other mirrors that support it and wish to make it available.
This project cannot be done by an individual or tiny group alone. We have laid a good foundation with a vision for the project, but need experts at devops, coding, marketing, social media, documentation and more to come together to help drive this project forward.
For this to be a true community project, we need your help. AspirePress has accumulated a community which continues to grow. We still need people to commit to GitHub, write documentation, test and offer their feedback and critiques, and assist with translations. This is a full-court press for the community, and it takes a lot of people to make an open source project work, and requires more than code, including devops, social media, and documentation. Non-coders like designers, copywriters, marketers, as well as users and supporters, who are always welcome! (And speaking of supporters, funding is also a necessity to help defray costs.)
For code and testing, you can file issues on GitHub or submit pull requests on the related repositories. Your feedback and involvement is more than welcome, so if you want to contribute in any way or just to connect and provide moral support, please reach out! We have an active community on Slack.
