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

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