Out of a great meeting today arranged by Michelle Harrison with a group of TRU Instructional Designers, came a new idea for our SPLOT collection. Blame/credit Brian Lamb. But it would facilitate a space where someone could seed the beginning of a ? story? discussion ? brainstorm? and anyone could click to clone a copy and modify it, eventually creating a possible branching line of information.
It’s purely out of respect for Mike Caulfield that we teasingly started it Smallest Federated WordPress but it’s really not federated nor the same thing Mike has been tirelessly advocating with Smallest Federate Wiki (I do have an idea, Mike! I really do! I really really do!).
Since I have started SPLOTs named “The Comparator” and another one called “The Writer”, I am thinking this is the “Brancher”. Here’s a quick sketch that explains very little
So it all starts with someone, let’s say for hypothetical purpose her name is “Michelle” creating a seed or a “root” let’s internally call it “ID 12”. It’s a short thing, no more than a paragraph. She shares it and her also hypothetical colleague “Brian” clicks the branch button, and it creates a copy as a new node, maybe know internally as “ID 16”.
Brian makes some changes to it, adding, deleting, etc, and saves. This node then records in it, that it’s root is “ID 12” and it’s parent is also “ID 12”; e.g. each node reports back to its root that it is descendent.
And so it goes. New branches could happen from every node (multiple paths) but all report back to the root.
I think the data could be stored in a way to trace out the different paths.
Anyhow, this is just a root of an idea; I need to jump back in and polish off some of the other things started (I have great progress on a WordPress Theme for something like the ds106 Daily Create).
Pesky internet upstart Hendricks got me thinking about this at Open Ed
Am working on something like ping back ++
Would the post forking plugin have any value in something like this?
You are a mensch. Shoulda known there was something.
I guess a difference is this kind of plugin is aimed toward a dicument converging edits to a sungle whole. I was imagining something that coyld split and grow in different directions, like maybe some fork s are one tgat stay on a similar parh and others are a radical new directoon.
I thought it was more like what you were looking for as well.
Maybe just exposing the backend like you did with the other SPLOT and using the duplicate post plugin . . .
I could do a chunk of it with Gravity Forms being auto embedded at the base of each post. It can pull the URL of the page where it’s embedded and use it to do some auto-trackback construction. With minimal coding I think you could pass the post content to the GF post content field for editing . . . but that’s mainly me avoiding real programming.
May also be a reason to use pages vs posts and do something to force child/parent relationships . . .
Maybe. I was hoping to store precendents and descendents in pist meta, so one could make maps and trees.
That certainly sounds good. I think I was considering the page list plugin you mentioned a ways back and I tend to think around actually writing code which is often not the best path.
I wanted cross site forking, i always feel a bit sad when a plugin gets so close….
Seems like a thing for sn API (written as if i know what i am talking about)