5,000 CP sites... so where are all the contributors?

General Discussion
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A recent blog article gave us the stats of…

very roughly 5,000 active ClassicPress websites

I’m puzzled. I can’t understand from this why we only seem to have a dozen or so active contributors. Are each of them managing 300 - 400 sites?

Anyway, for those siting on the sidelines, there is now a page that gives a summary of current active projects, tasks that need work, and who to contact. So if you own one of those 5,000 sites and want to keep using ClassicPress, then please consider contributing.

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There’s a simple explanation.
The majority of our target is composed by “users”, not devs.
People that just install CP with some WP plugins and having no experience they don’t know that this can harm their site.
And we aren’t marketing to them directly…

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Working on my first PR to core. :wink:

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How many sites does WordPress power? And how many contributors are there to WP?

I would not be at all surprised if the proportion of contributors to sites is actually significantly lower in WP than in ClassicPress.

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Good point!

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Because the majority of people that use CP are not developers. They are people that need websites for their unrelated with webdesign jobs.
Mine is one of them. Just because I can’t contribute to the development of CP, doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate this cms and I haven’t recommend it to other people that they made their websites with it.

Here is the website of a friend of mine.
https://myhomejob.eu/

She has not finish updating it, but it is her website on CP.

Anyway… if you expect from us that we don’t know a thing, to contribute to CP in order for you to use it I’m afraid that you are going to abandon it soon… lol

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Contributing can be done in many forms.
Languages, writing, design, etc.

So it doesn’t need coding knowledge to contribute.

But, not everyone who uses a tool also contributes to it.
A minority does - in fact - have time or will or means to contribute to the tool they use

As a comparison to WP, which has probably more than 1000 pledged contributors if not more, we still “win” even if WP has 10k contributors

There’s roughly 60 million websites using WP “they” say. Some say it’s much more (400 million, however this seems to be somehow wrong to me)

I think there’s an approximate “steady” number of contributors in cp if about 10 people
So ca 0.2% contribute!

WordPress would need ca 120k contributors to match those 0.2%

Five for the future sums up to ca 500, maybe 1000 and not all of them do even contribute to WP (many literally just have a profile but you can’t see a single contribution in years)

Even if, it’s no way close to 120k

Not even if the entire automattic team and the entire plugin devs would contribute you’d come to that number.

So I think it’s true that relatively more people contribute to CP than to WP, even considering the “unmentioned” contributors to WP.

(I hope my math is right lol, not my strong Suite)

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It might actually be a very powerful “feature” of CP to mention!
If people see that relatively more people contribute to it than to WP this can set the whole project into a different light.

It’s all about perspective.
If I say 0.2% contribute it’s looking like nothing, but if I say 10 times more contributors than WP, it looks like a lot.
And that seems pretty much to be the fact (relatively speaking)

And I think we’d win more if there’d be some more exposure of those contributors (I’m working on the list still to show them all on our page)

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The “Currently Active Projects” post is a great start to giving some of us ‘users’ an idea of where we could help. I see that it has even been linked to on the “Get Involved” page, that page was a terrible neverending loop that went nowhere a couple weeks ago.

I wonder if a ‘contributing’ page would be useful, with that link and some others at github - not just that one on the home page under the “become a contributor” link (I remember some “how to” pages about testing back in 2019, but the may have been for the beta for CP1.0.)

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Thanks for the feedback. That was exactly the idea behind it, so good to hear that it is useful.

I hadn’t even looked at that! It takes you to the GitHub repo which is probably intermediately daunting for a lot of people. Thanks for pointing that out… I’ll put together a more general page and use that button to link to it. :+1:

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This page is a good one, most of it is greek to me, but I sure wish I would have discovered it before I ignorantly made my first PR! :blush: As a simple ‘user’ I was just looking for any way to contribute. (first chance I get I will be volunteering for ‘documentation’)

Maybe under a heading, For coders?

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Yes, good point. I still find GitHub challenging so I can imagine others are the same. Going straight to GitHub makes people think contributing = coding. As you say, you don’t need it to help with the docs. @anon66243189 has that well organised so ask him where to get started. Any help much appreciated!

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As @ozfiddler points out, documentation is a great place to help. We’re slowly trying to rewrite docs for CP. This is a good place to start:

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I’m currently working on a new “contribute” page for the website and it will include a lot of links to various projects.

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Done. This page is now linked to the “Contribute” button on the home page.

@viktor - could you please read it over when you get a chance and add anything I may have missed, or correct anything that needs fixing? One thing I am not sure about is the Slack link. How does this work? Is it invite only?

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I’m rather surprised that at now “three years old”, but only 5,000 known sites using ClassicPress?

Sounds like time to find more means and ways to promote it. I only discovered ClassicPress just late last year.

As for the lack of contributors,

Well,

There are many angles to answer for this, especially in lieu of the last two years’ worth of headaches.

If, at around 5,000 known users, you have around a hundred or so contributors - I look at the averages here. WordPress has been around for many years - at powering roughly %37 of the web, and probably has a far smaller PERCENTAGE of contributors, in comparison to their many millions of users. - So this may be a bit surprising in terms of percentage of actual users to contributors.

Plus,

Look at how much commercial weight is behind WordPress, as compared to ClassicPress. “Grassroots” alternatives always have a bit steeper hill to climb, when they do not have anywhere near as much commercial power behind them. In other words, it takes some time for success to become apparent.

Selling points:

The ten-page write up on why ClassicPress would be viewed as a better alternative to WordPress was a very good start. I would also add to the promotional idea that - ClassicPress remains, and will always be “community-driven”, and NOT driven by corporate interests or politics. It is the more personal “selling points” like these - that help to gain traction and interest of the people.

PLUGINS/THEMES:

I have also noticed quite a few topics reporting that certain themes and plugins no longer work in ClassicPress. Perhaps it is time to consider adopting and “porting” many good plugins and themes to become specific to ClassicPress? - Eventually, that is going to have to occur - because the more that WordPress changes, the more that ClassicPress will become its own project - severed from its former connections to WordPress by incompatibilities. - This is a fact of life with “forks” from the original projects. They eventually must diverge and split away from the original projects they were spawned from.

So now it becomes even more important to promote how ClassicPress stands on its own, as a viable “alternative to”, and builds up a dedicated support network of its own.

I would be more than happy to help, because I would love to see ClassicPress become a serious contender in the world of CMS’s!

Would like to see some great-looking ClassicPress sites showcased - as WordPress does. When more people see more beautiful, functional, enterprise-level looking websites done with ClassicPress, that is what speaks the loudest in favor of ClassicPress. - IMHO.

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Hiya. :wave:

I read your whole post and don’t really contend with any points, but the first thing I thought when I read that was, “well, two of those three years have been and continue to be the worse years of my family’s life”.

I know that’s why I haven’t contributed until recently (here in discussion). Anyhow, not trying to be depress folks, just pointing out that those “three years” have been rough for a lot of people all over. :slight_smile:

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Shouldn’t that page replace this existing page under ‘Community’?
https://www.classicpress.net/contributors/