Can you help me argue for ClassicPress on a WordPress podcast?

@LinasSimonis. I tried to here but it stopped me posting. I also tried to join the forum via the Facebook connection but that apparently is not connected.

Maybe that should go as it could lose impatient folk like me…
or may should stay as a great way to attract the truly engaged.

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No, not really a factor for me. To choose WP, you have to be willing to put up with the decisions of a group that doesn’t think like I do. I know this going in, and it is a factor I consider.
I’ve been looking at JAMstack because of an existing(old) static site that doesn’t really need a CMS, but needs a search. The existing search was written for PHP4, and I’ve had trouble updating it, so I’ve explored other options.

Very well said - this is the key for me. WordPress is not and can never truly be a tool that is usable by anybody to do anything imaginable on the web, it is fundamentally a tool to deliver HTML and CSS. I saw WordPress going a different direction so I got involved with ClassicPress in order to preserve that behavior that still has a close correspondence to the standards which originally made the web great.

Page builders muddy the waters a bit, in my opinion, but they are welcome in our ecosystem. I expect we will see more alternatives to Beaver Builder as we release our directory and make it easier for plugin developers to get their products released and fully supported under ClassicPress.

I think keeping the core of ClassicPress free and open-source (and free in all senses, such as free from commercial interests that unduly influence the direction of the platform) is very important. However, I also want ClassicPress to be a place where developers who participate in our ecosystem can make money. There is a balance there that we will be refining over time but the general idea is that the best is yet to come.

Some of the fastest and most accessible sites today are the ones that have been serving straightforward HTML and CSS for 10+ years with only very minor changes.

For those who haven’t seen, there are some interesting discussions going on around these kinds of alternatives. I think of it more as “different tools for different purposes”, and if that approach works for you and your clients then why not?

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Thanks @1stepforward I did take a peep earlier, but a useful reminder for me to study it a bit harder. It’s useful for sure.

Nice to get comments here to help make it more real world for me. Our podcast debates are a bit of a sham as we only polarize to be sure we dig a bit deeper. It’s hardly ever that we think one is exclusively better than another.

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Thanks @james. I greatly appreciate this. I am a quite overwhelmed by so much response so quickly.

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@David_Waumsley Take your time, this will still be here later, and so will we if you want to follow up on any of that :slight_smile:

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One thing I would add to everything else everyone has said is about writing experience. A big portion of WP users that are not happy with Gutenberg are writers/bloggers. I see bloggers and writers constantly complain about the poor writing experience compared to the classic editor.

Writers don’t need to build pages/layouts, they simply need to be able to write. That’s where Gutenberg failed them. Copy/pasting issues, lack of footnotes, lack of text colors, editor crashing and not saving posts, etc.

Gutenberg was forced upon the WordPress community prematurely. Probably 1-2 years prematurely. It’s only now getting a bit more useful with many bugs fixed, more controls, and more features.

But then they go and remove the WP menu from the block editor page. They’re increasing the number of clicks needed to complete the most basic activities in WordPress.

Automattic is using an open-source community to help it compete with Wix, Weebly, SquareSpace, Webflow, etc. For some users it’s good, for many it’s a painful realization they don’t really have any control over their WordPress.

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Side note - this has been changed. New users can now post a reasonable number of links in their first post(s) here. There are still some restrictions to help guard against spam, but the way for each user to further lift these restrictions is through normal, human participation on the forums. More details here: Understanding Discourse Trust Levels

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@viktor Thank you. Nathan, the main person behind the podcast, is someone who really likes the writing experience, but I think too that those most upset with it are writers.

One of my clients is an author who only wrapped right or left aligned images around her text in her post The block editors made doing such a simple thing very difficult.

I have seen that since she has deactivated the classic editor, but it gets reactivated. I assume too much to learn for no obvious gain.

Bugs! Looking at the Gutenberg issues on GitHub they are more than double to what the were when released.

Your last point is the one that gets to me most. I think WPs success was in being a simple stable framework where others could build on top of for their type of user with some reliability. The community has already met the demand for Wix, SquareSpace type solutions

Search volumes for WP related things dropped of in 2014, but were replaced with searches for the WP based page builders. Now Automattic seems (purposefully or accidentally) to be in competition with those who have kept WP growing.

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This. Exactly this.

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Thank you for everyone’s help. The episode was released:

No doubt I will be doing some other content on CP, but on my YouTube channel.

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Thanks for the lively podcast. :slight_smile:

I’d like to respond to a few of the points made. I’d also like to note that (at least in my mind) it’s not really a CP vs WP thing – WordPress seems to be after a new type of user whereas ClassicPress is providing a stable, comfortable place for those who aren’t interested in (or perhaps can’t afford the costs associated with) the new direction of WordPress. I don’t see the two platforms necessarily competing for the same new users.

  1. 5:20 ClassicPress wasn’t necessarily a reaction to Gutenberg – it was a response to a long pattern of poor decision-making in WordPress. Gutenberg was really just the “straw that broke the camel’s back”. Other things that went in without sound decision-making processes, such as customizer and capital_p_dangit(), also contributed to the notion that WordPress wasn’t as trustworthy as it once had been. Gutenberg was simply a too huge to continue to ignore the underlying problem. It cost a lot of people actual frustration, time, effort, and money. Edit: I hear at 37:15, you do actually make this overall point about the decision-making.

  2. 8:45 It was mentioned that your feeling was that we’re not porting any code from beyond WP 4.9. In fact, we’re still looking at WP’s active development and incorporating (particularly) security patches as they come up.

  3. 19:58 There was an argument made that ClassicPress users will always be constrained to less choices for plugins in the future. The same argument could have been made against WordPress when it was 2 years old. In fact, if a plugin supports WordPress 4.9 – which a vast majority will continue to do – then it will work on ClassicPress without issue. It could be argued that our ecosystem is better because we can use (or fork) virtually all of the top WP plugins (an argument you also made later on) – and we don’t have thousands of insecure “zombie plugins” polluting the ecosystem. Of course, as ClassicPress ages, there will be less a need to use any WordPress plugins. And, WordPress will probably have “zombie blocks” in the system by then. To clarify, “zombie” meaning unmaintained, unloved, unhelpful.

  4. 20:00 To clarify, it’s not an upgrade to WordPress from ClassicPress, or vice versa. You migrate from one to the other (and back, if you choose.) No “upgrade” involved. WordPress and ClassicPress share a vast amount of code, including many core functions/files that aren’t going anywhere (in either platform.) Migration takes a matter of minutes via the Migration Plugin.

  5. 34:45 The premise that Gutenberg’s bad user reviews are a result of only unhappy people posting reviews while happy people just carry on using Gutenberg without leaving a review…is flawed. If that logic held true, we’d see the same thing across the entire WP plugin review ecosystem. The vast number of low reviews are very specific to Gutenberg, and perfectly reflective of the community’s reaction to its being forced in prematurely. I think you tried to make this point at the end, but, it trailed off…

  6. 36:00 About Gutenberg being forced in… this was the most relevant part of the discussion on why ClassicPress is. If Gutenberg was left as an optional plugin, ClassicPress would probably never have been born.

  7. 39:35 Yes, WP is still supporting the Classic Editor for now. However, that will become problematic and someone in the community will have to take it over if they want to keep it alive. In fact, WP just shipped a version that broke the Classic Editor.

Thanks again for having the discussion!

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Thank you. All excellent points. Great feedback.

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After so many years @mikeschinkel still waits for this to get implemented in WordPress: #14513 (Time for a wp_post_relationships table?) – WordPress Trac

The good thing is that he opened a petition in ClassicPress and this specific project is part of ClassicPress Research repository: GitHub - ClassicPress-research/object-relationships: ClassicPress EXPERIMENTAL plugin: One-to-many and many-to-many relationships for post-to-post, post-to-user, post-to-taxonomy, post-to-term, user-to-user, user-to-taxonomy, etc.

You cannot imagine how many tickets are there open and still waiting for approval, review, and whatsoever.

There are so many things I don’t like about how Automattic handle things, but since they are a large company, I don’t trust them and cannot write anything that wouldn’t go against me in any possible way.

Since they don’t listen to their own community, their own voicing, I expect nothing from them.

To me WordPress development feels like a buffer overflow getting severely out of hand.

Instead of fixing and stabilize itself, it piles features on top of features for the sake of competition.

Based on w3techs.com, WordPress has nothing to afraid of, be it Wix, Shopify, or the rest of competitors.

Quite frankly, I don’t get it…why…why they behave this way?!

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I think it’s a simple case of domination (i.e. huge egos) and eradicating any potential competition. Like all big tech companies, they think they can do what they want. The reason they exist becomes unimportant and even lost altogether. Automattic wants to be the Facebook or the Google of the web world.

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Because Automattic answers to investors, not open source community. They owe investors over $600 mil :joy:

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That’s why I said

There are so many things I don’t like about how Automattic handle things, but since they are a large company, I don’t trust them and cannot write anything that wouldn’t go against me in any possible way.

Yeah, I know about the multi-million funds.

Can’t they just give me $500K? I’ll be more than happy for the rest of my life :smile:

Really good discussion David. Very civilised and thoughtful. I see Code Potent has already pointed out the word you wanted was “migrate”, not “upgrade”. :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m always amused when someone says you just need to make the effort and invest “3 minutes” to learn how to use Gutenberg. I gave it a helluva lot longer than that and eventually gave up. And I’m an experienced WP user. I’m also a writer and I can tell you that when I write something I don’t fire up Adobe Publisher and start playing with layouts. I just want to type words and break them up into paragraphs. Full stop.

Nathan did raise an interesting point though, and it’s something I’ve started thinking about myself. He pointed out that there are plenty of smaller CMSs that are quite successful with a very limited user-base. But if CP tries to “match” or “compete” with WP then it is doomed to failure. I think that’s a very good observation.

And thanks for the mention of Classic Commerce! :+1:

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Thanks so much for listening. Ha, yes, “migrate” that was the word I needed.

Yeah, even if you do manage to learn to use the block editor you have to relearn it with ever update.

If you use it as a page builder with the help of 3rd parties you have to learn that too knowing that the Guttenberg will eventually make it redundant.

What I did discover on trying to migrate to CP is that the installer plugin does not work for me and the instructions to get around that are too technical for most.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: CP migration plugin not working with WP5.6