I don’t know who left the community. It’s probably someone who put loads of energy into trying to carry this project forwards. The relevant question regarding that fact is WHY did that person leave?
- Lack of time
- Lack of motivation
- “Realizing” that this project is leading towards a dead-end.
- …
From my perspective, I am keeping an eye on this forum to keep track of what’s going on. At some point I had this huge willpower to jump in and help, but I lost it. Anyway I still keep an eye on this forum because I actually like the idea and want to see where it goes, and maybe I’ll have some willpower again to jump on the development boat.
Why I lost willpower to help developing CP:
I want to leave a few ideas here, which may or may not reflect why this project is gaining attention or not.
First of all, WordPress is still the king and that’s what you stick to if you want to make money (and in the very end, it will always be about money/benefit). Maintaining old projects, tweaking new ones, … that’s where money goes. It’s very unlikely to get the chance to build a new website from scratch for some open-minded client who likes the idea of ClassicPress. Possible, but unlikely. They are throwing money into something and they just “want it to work”, “don’t do weird experiments with my money”.
People don’t care about the backend, they just want to stay on the “safe” road and use their favorite plugins (ACF Fields and so on…). So when it comes to choose CP over WP they will probably just go with WP because it’s THE ONE.
When a client wants to jump out of WP, they usually prefer another CMS (be it Sanity, CraftCMS, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, blablablah…). The thing is… jumping out of WP to go with a clone of WP where the only real practical difference is “We don’t have Gutenberg” is not something that happens or will happen often (unless it’s someone who likes CP and wants to support it).
So here comes the most important thing and what I really think is the main point of the situation.
It happened when trying to switch to TinyMCE V5, and it will happen with whatever relevant change that wants to be introduced into CP. As long as Backwards Compatibility is an obstacle, CP will be a boring and tedious project to work on. WordPress will keep evolving, plugins will keep evolving, and at some point CP will just be left behind.
You can’t ask every WP plugin developer to keep compatibility with CP (read WP 4.9). So that gap will just be growing as time passes.
So yeah, what’s my view on this:
CP can keep trying to be a frozen WP 4.9 and face an ever growing list of issues with modern WP plugins. I’m not hating on CP, just saying what I see.
Or CP can for once stand out and try to be something different. And I’m not talking about reinventing the wheel here, many other great CMS already reinvented the wheel and there’s no need for a new wheel.
I’m talking about: “Hey, f***k compatibility. WordPress is one thing and ClassicPress is another thing. We will be removing the so much hated technical debt, we will build our own ACF plugin and we will have a community that will support major needs, like an ecommerce solution and a few others, but we cannot make sure that the list of a megazillion WP plugins will work with CP. If you need a list of a megazillion working plugins, just choose WP instead”.
What’s the gain with this?
Many, many, many people HATE WordPress because of the mess it is. ClassicPress can target all those users who HATE WP but love PHP and the traditional way of doing things. (Yeah all this Jamstack superpower isn’t always the best tech-stack anyway!). It will take time but in the end, it will attract people who want to give “WP” a second chance. And that’s where CP has its place.
I know. CP v1 until mature enough to go with breaking for v2. It’s possible that the time for v2 has arrived… before v1 gets boring and people jump out of the boat and into other interesting alternatives.
Repeat, no hate. I actually would love to see CP succeed.