I’ve had this discussion privately with a number of you but, given the talk about migrating the petitions, it might be time to raise it publicly for discussion.
I think it is time to face reality and rethink the overall direction of ClassicPress. The whole idea of petitions and community-led changes for an amazing version 2 was a nice vision. But to me it is just pie-in-the-sky stuff. And it naturally leads people to think we are not “progressing” (whatever that means), because none of it looks like ever happening.
I would much rather see the community use our (very) limited resources to consolidate what we already have. This means focusing on two areas:
- Make sure we have a light, stable and secure CMS core. A framework that can be built on by our users in whatever direction they choose.
- Develop as wide and diverse an ecosystem as possible (ie plugins and themes), so that users can have lots of options for extending the core for their individual requirements.
The good news is that we have already achieved (1). We are there… job done!! We just need to keep up with security updates (tracking WP 4.9). Maybe we could look at removing a few things like XML-RPC or gravatars. But, over the past year, I’ve come to realise that (2) is a much more important area, where we really should be focusing our efforts. People won’t give up on CP because we haven’t improved the media library. They will leave because there is no compatible plugin that does what they want.
To that end, my proposals are quite radical. Drop the whole petitions idea. Rethink the roadmap and make it more modest and achievable. Let’s just settle for the fact that CP1 is ClassicPress and work with that.
And, yes, I know the standard response is that we need more developers. We have been saying this for the past 2 years. Every dawn I scan the hilltops but I see no sign of the cavalry coming to save us.