Thinkmill
[Feature Request] Add Open Authoring Support with GitHub Fork + PR Workflow (Like DecapCMS)
Hi Keystatic team! 👋
First off, thank you for building such a modern, thoughtful CMS. The GitHub-backed approach is awesome for developer workflows and content versioning.
However, one major feature currently missing — and very useful for community-driven projects — is Open Authoring, like what [DecapCMS](https://decapcms.org/docs/open-authoring/) supports.
💡 What is Open Authoring?
Open authoring allows contributors who aren’t collaborators on a GitHub repository to:
- Authenticate via GitHub
- Automatically fork the repo to their own account
- Create a branch and edit content in the CMS UI
- Submit a Pull Request back to the main repo
- All without using Git or needing write access
This enables non-technical contributors (like writers, translators, editors) to easily contribute through a visual interface, while maintaining version control and review workflows.
🎯 Why This Is Important
For open-source or community knowledge bases (e.g. multilingual projects, documentation, religious or educational content), open authoring is a game-changer. Contributors can submit translations or updates without technical friction.
We’d love to use Keystatic for such a project, but this feature is a blocker. Otherwise, we’d need to keep using DecapCMS for now just to enable this flow.
✅ Suggested Features
- Auto-fork GitHub repo if the user is not a collaborator
- Let users edit content via Keystatic UI on a new branch
- Submit a PR to the original repo
- Optional: Approvals from maintainers, notifications, etc.
📦 Example Use Cases
- Open documentation sites
- Multilingual content contributions
- Public religious/educational repositories (e.g. Seerah content, where anyone can contribute translation or lessons)
🙏 Thank you!
Keystatic is amazing already. This one feature would make it perfect for many community-first projects.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
This would be very useful, especially for open source projects where anyone could contribute content or documentation.
To learn from the work that went into Netlify/Decap CMS and others, it's important to plan for multiple Git providers from the start.
By implenenting Open Authoring with a plugin-based architecture, it would be easier to support multiple Git providers, and allow the community to help maintain plugins without having to learn the entire Keystatic codebase.
Take a look at how Sveltia CMS has implemented this: https://github.com/sveltia/sveltia-cms/tree/ed125ae20680d319faf5d9d9351e4b3db9e2a6e4/src/lib/services/backends/git
Another idea for the implementation is to make the Open Authoring logic decoupled from the Keystatic UI, to allow them to evolve independently. One challenge with Netlify/Decap was that it started with one provider and gradually added partial support for more. However the CMS was shaped by the first Git provider and that made maintenance quite hard.
