[Community Poll] The Future of ClassicPress

If all that people want is WordPress without Gutenberg, there’s absolutely no need for ClassicPress at all since there’s already a plugin that provides what you’re looking for. It’s called Classic Editor +: Classic Editor + – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org

The idea that the question is whether CP should essentially mirror a stripped-down version of WP or not is therefore entirely misconceived. Those who desire that objective should be using that plugin. It’s really that simple.

CP (and the work that goes into it) only makes sense if it’s its own CMS with its own decision-making process and its own features.

So the question is actually what’s the best way forward to make CP successful in that endeavor.

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But that’s what it says on the front page of classicpress.net - in the Less Bloat bit.
So are you then saying CP is misconceived?

I don’t think there is anything wrong with having CP as a sort of LITE version of WP.
I also don’t think its wrong to be 3 (or 30) steps behind WP in terms of features/development/whatever (in the vein of having a LTS version).
And lastly I don’t think it’s wrong to NOT have feature parity as WP 4.9 did everything what most people would want from a CMS already (I think).

So then, and that’s also why I voted “continue as-is”, continuing with 4.9 and updating it for modern stuff is probably the way to go.

But problems seem to start when people question or wonder about the mission, (vision?) and perhaps even leadership of ClassicPress as a whole.

Figuring that out, as @Mte90 also wants, is an important step in determining the direction of CP.

And as for the WebP discussion that keeps popping up as an example here. That has no place in this particular topic.
WebP as a format is fine, Google inventing and pushing it is less fine. The end.
Just add it when it makes sense. Right now I have a hard time on macOS to even find apps that can use it (converters for example). Perhaps it’s too early to add it as a mainstream thing.

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Lol, you cant refer to the Less Bloat “bit” as saying that’s all CP is! There are other “bits” on that page for a reason!

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I voted to continue as-is.

WordPress itself didn’t continue to try to be backwards compatible with b2 for very long and honestly I think the fact that ClassicPress is continuing to try to maintain some compatibility with WordPress here is holding the project back.

It’s time to start a new path. One that’s unique to CP.

I don’t have a problem with backporting features from WordPress when possible but a 2.0 version of CP that’s based on WP6? Oy vey. Not good.

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That’s not at all what I’m saying.

Several people have expressed similar, implying that it’s better to be compatible with WP, as if that is the only reason to backport from WP.
Let me just be clear that the beginning of CP had several developers with WP core experience. James was the last of those, and with him gone, the CP team won’t win any resume contests. The whole point of backporting from WP is because they have thousands of developers, millions of users testing every combination of version and plugin and host to find problems (plus a testing team), a security team, and a performance team. CP has none of that and it’s kind of silly to not take advantage of their efforts. But the more things we ignore or fall behind on, the harder it is to backport anything.
There are many things that continue to evolve, outside of WP, like PHP, Javascript, CSS, HTML, and various bundled tools (like jQuery and TinyMCE and PHPMailer and Simple Pie and Requests…).
CP can’t stand still at 4.9. That’s dead. But if you tried to backport all the PHP8 stuff, you’d find it very difficult because of all the formatting changes they made, plus all the bug fixes, plus all the new features.
The new fork bypasses the backport problem by taking it all at once and deleting the block stuff that is unwanted.

I personally think that CP doesn’t have any features of value that WP doesn’t have. It has a bunch of fixes and a few features from WP, but it’s a dead end, especially with the limited roster of people who contribute code.

Exactly this…

Who would want to use plugins and themes made for WP5+? WP5- is what we chose ClassicPress for. Just take it from there, I would say. As an end user non-developer I can’t oversee all consequences, though. Working on plugins and themes compatible with CP as it is should have priority, if you’d ask me. Just keep up with technological standards in the background. How a site looks and works in the front end doesn’t solely depend on CP, but also on the theme and design and coding skills.
Secondly: would it be helpful to start a crowdfunding in order to attract, say, three good developers who could help the core developers team on a project basis? From what I read the most vulnerable part in CP is the small number of core developers. And they happen to be our golden egg. A crowdfunding could also help spreading the news about CP.

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Very well said. And that’s exactly what I meant when I started WP CMS. I wanted something that has the mission that ClassicPress has but without being so old and so crazily behind WordPress.

CP can be a CMS on its own, of course. And being an exact shadow of WordPress just without Gutenberg is also somehow stupid, I agree. But you cannot ignore everything that was stated above, and just throw away all that “free work” that can be used to help CP stay updated.

Instead of wasting time in fixing things like:

“CP code is using http://api.wordpress.org/themes/info/1.0/ and that endpoint doesn’t return the necessary data, upstream is using 1.2 now but we can’t just swap over as the return is now a JSON object rather than serialised PHP.” (Slack #core)

That time could be used to work on Core Plugins and other interesting features, that indeed make CP different.

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Good ideology, and so CP may want to stay “where it is” and not worry about new filters/hooks (use old functions/methods like how WP migrated use of ‘get_usermeta()’ [1/many examples]. WP 4.9 commands and functions (to incld. REST) SHOULD stay with older stuff. (see Mission of CP comment next.)

This->would be most important before even deciding on the answer to this thread! Should CP only be concerned about security fixes and PHP compatibility BEFORE it updates any cool stuff from 5.0+ core?

As @joyously and others mentioned of how many scripting languages there are to keep up with… this alone should be a task for heroes and heroines. Don’t try to keep up with the Jones. Just keep up with tech and security.

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Wow… interesting and somewhat strange discussion. I must admit when I read path one I thought the same as Tim:

There are actually a number of possible plugins that do the job nicely and that is what I am doing for all my sites. Why would I want to use a CP based on WP6 when I can just use WP6?

I suggest that before you start thinking about what path to take, it might be more advantageous to ask yourselves where you want to end up. It is customary to leave choosing a path until after you have some destination clearly in mind. But then, that’s the problem with CP - it never really knew where it was going, beyond “WP-without-Gutenberg”. So, it means you get statements like this listed as a con for one of the options: “We won’t be able to catch up with WordPress”.

The conversations here mirror what I have always observed in computerland - there are basically two sorts of people. One group just wants stuff to work, and keep working and ideally not require any thinking about at all. The other group likes shiny new things and wants to see constant evolution - if something isn’t changing on a weekly basis then it is “stalled” or possibly even “dead” (of course you need this second group, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to sell new iPhones every year).

When I was contributing to CP I always thought that the ambitions greatly outweighed the available resources. I occasionally suggested a drastic pruning back of the project, but this was always met with widespread disapproval. I still think that if CP is going to survive at all (and I very much doubt it) then you will need to define a narrower subset of users and focus your limited efforts on catering to them. Personally, I would be aiming for the first group mentioned above, as they are the ones who are most disadvantaged by the changes, and the least interested in them.

Well, I am not expecting any different reactions to my suggestion, so won’t go into any more details. But I do think you should first try to work out what CP wants to be, before you start looking for any specific paths. I get the impression that there are a lot of different views here about that.

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Isn’t even the current filter/action thingy that disables gutenberg a grace-period kind of thing with the vague promise to keep it around for now?
Plugins removing Gutenberg for WP won’t last forever I’m sure. When WP and themes start relying on blocks too much there won’t be any escaping it.

Keep that in mind as well…

Plus on a lesser note, WooCommerce is turning into a weird thing, everything I click its dashboard on my test site I’m more and more frustrated by all the bloaty nonsense and reshuffling of menus and pointless crap. Surely there are more people who think along those lines that just want to sell stuff without caring what WooCommerce is up to in the background.

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if this project doesn’t care about the new performance stuff (that are developed mainly by Google contributors to the WP and this community don’t understand that there is a reason behind it)

Lean has the future, also for Google. CP is leaner than Gutenberg, as far as I know. That aspect will appeal to the masses. Large new datacenters have become subject of political discussion, at least in Western Europe. It will not only be a climate/goodwill matter, but also an energy-efficiency/market-growth one for large corporations, in the near future and it already is. On top of that I find Gutenberg user UNfriendly compared to CP. Two topics to bring to the market.

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This would be WHAT to add to CP if we took route one (Refork 6+ performance goodies (only?)).

But there would be other goodies to grab from 6+ as it evolves. Very interesting conversation and I hope it has a very altruistic resolve as compared to anything too ‘opinionated’ towards what-parts-to-include. What I mean by this is, to keep performance on the front burner and maybe see/learn from other (Google) devs as to what they think as well. Maybe expand a bit outside the direct WP environment community and take baby steps so they are the right steps to take without losing sight of the future and CP being the “old” WP that works just as well as the new (without the JSON and dependencies WP employs).

There is no reason why we need to “fork” WP post-GB if we have a method to incorporate any new performance and scripting language (PHP vers.) into the current fork… dare say in the form of a plugin maybe.

Focus on HOW we would make CP performance and scripting language compatible and then build the thing. Discussion on whether or not to do A or B may not be half as productive as discussing how to implement B and then if it is not realistic in its goals and results; back to A.

But truly I think leaving CP as-is with PHP compats would ride well.

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fact is that we can’t keep up with standards (we could implement PHP8 and very late only because we backported from WP) and an outdated piece of software doesn’t attract users.
as of now CP is not able to stay at 1.5 and go its slow pace because everyone is evolving, PHP8.1 is already there but we are behind. And we need to update jquery and add some things that will enhance performance making CP more usable and convincing even more people that it is stable enough and reliable to be used in production sites.
we could do this on our own if we had tons of people involved in developing the core, and we wouldn’t need wp.
the re-fork thing is meant to make a clean start, not to become wp.
it’s a “reset point” what do we want to keep from WP6? surely the PHP compatibility, the performance updates, the security updates, the libraries that got updated and we missed because we are understaffed. what we don’t want? blocks, fse and the yadda yadda coming in with them.
we clean it, then we backport eventually the things we improved in CP versus WP (it is proven that a CP site is leaner and faster compared to an exact same wp replica of it, so we have surely done something right). The fork is just a way to bring CP afloat again.
Then IMHO we can discuss what to do for the future, when we have a more solid base to work on. and we can have a plan to slowly diverge from wp and stand on our own with our own userbase, by setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound goals, that is).

See you in 2 (ish) years when CP is again behind with a small team and the discussion to re-spoon WP 8 or 9 comes up.
Not saying you guys shouldn’t do the re-fork per-se but it too requires people, a team, a decision, and it solves nothing in the long run.

If you look at it that way it may just be more sensible to update CP to work with PHP8.1 - Is that really so hard? Follow and resolve errors until it works… Don’t fix what ain’t broken. I’m not overly familiar with core development but still chasing errors in plugins is kinda the same… Never takes that long to patch up methods and such and perhaps re-do or update code to better suit modern needs along the way.

Same for jQuery, it works fine as-is for now. A minor(ish) update as a drop-in replacement takes little time I think since no major version change occurs. A proper update can be done later on. Not a real priority,

And as long as CP works reliably, normies won’t know CP is a bit behind on whatever. Because it works. They don’t know code or simply don’t care, so whatever for that. Just look at ignorant so many WP users can be for development/code/quality of plugin and whatever… If it works for them, that’s all they care about.

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I thought ClassicPress was a response to the dictatorial regime imposed by the top management of WordPress. If it was really so, it should have no dependencies with the dictators.
Until it has dependencies with WordPress, it will always have problems. If this is what you want, continue on the same way, but change the name and call it SlavePress.

No matter if it is a lot of work, the options that I see are two: really fork it (change wp_ with cp_, disconnect the plugins directory, disconnect everytthing), or kill this project. No matter there are not enough plugins. You start with fewer plugins. You start with very simple websites, and then the CMS will grow. You can’t start with the same level of WordPress. You have to start little and become bigger.
If you try to start big, you don’t start. ClassicPress is not started yet.
I don’t see any leadership here. Lots of talks and little substance.

WordPress has success because is led by someone. A discutible leadership that I don’t like, but it has it.
ClassicPress has people who discuss how to do things, but after so many years it looks like the status is always similar. The number of contributors is not really the problem here, it’s a matter of missing leadership.
The real fork had to be done years ago, but if you want to continue with this project, you need to do it right now. If you do it now it will require years but it will be a great project, if you don’t do it, in some years this project will die or will continue to live death as it is now.

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Actually, that’s a big problem. Can someone be a leader if there is nobody to lead? Contributors are the ones getting work done. Without contributors nothing will get done.

The main problem is that CP community isn’t that small, there’s a lot of users. But 99% of users have a lot to say but no willingness/ability to help get sh*t done.

A lot of users over the past 4 years wanted CP to be separate from WP, yet 3-5 users actually contribute to the core development.

I saw someone on Twitter complain that it took us too long to get PHP 8.0 support, yet I haven’t seen that person contribute to CP anything.

This is the nature of open source. But it’s more visible on a smaller scale, with a smaller user base.

This is also why we went away from petitions and fully democratic process. People want things, but are not willing (or able) to help get it done.

So people getting work done are the ones who end up making the decisions.

Fully democratic process and committees hurt CP in the early years, drove people away from the project. This is why we are where we are today.

The few people that contribute are basically working part-time jobs for free. This isn’t sustainable, they will burn out eventually.

Either path, 1 or 2, requires contributors to do the work. Lots of people commented, only 2-3 will contribute most likely.

Note: Core development isn’t the only work that needs to be done. Non-coders can contribute too. Documentation, translations, forum moderating, system administration managing infrastructure, writing blog posts, etc. Everyone can contribute regardless of skill, if they’re willing to.

:man_shrugging:

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Either path, 1 or 2, requires contributors to do the work. Lots of people commented, only 2-3 will contribute most likely.

ClassicPress is a mess, this is what it is. It’s since a couple of years since I try to upload some plugins to CP. Still not possible. My way to help could be submitting my plugins, but this was very difficult for me, and now after some years, it’s still difficult.
You think there are not enough developers because the system is a mess and without solid leadership. With the same developers after so many years, the result was different.
If you need developers you should collaborate with big companies like Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, and so on. They would have a lot of interest in making ClassicPress great, and I’m sure one of these big companies would invest money and time in their developers.

It seems that the developers of CP are working like hamsters without a guide. And now after all this time still debating whether to break away from WordPress? Please. Of course, you miss developers, they work without a clear goal.
CP needs leaders. Once it has leaders, those leaders will look for developers if they are not enough.

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I agree, it has been difficult. That’s why we’ve been working on a new, CP-powered directory for plugins/themes which we will launch soon. If you’d like to submit your plugins, please PM me and I will provide additional details. You can read about directory requirements for plugins here.

We tried over the years. It’s difficult to convince developers to work for free especially when CP user base isn’t as big as WordPress. It’s hard to make it economically appealing to developers to contribute, and we don’t have a budget to pay them. It’s a catch-22. Not enough users means not enough developers will be interested, and not enough developers means not enough users will be interested.

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