I agree with you that a lot of people have a misunderstanding, and it’s worth a separate discussion, for sure. From the beginning, our focus has been to get as much distance from Gutenberg as possible as soon as possible, or we’ll become the anti-Gutenberg and not much else. That’s why so much of our message does not include a lot of anti-blocks sentiment.
That said, I’m not sure that this opportunity needs to be a place we spend a lot of time on the “why we forked” question. I think it’s more about speaking to the relevance of ClassicPress to the educational community. If we can make a compelling argument about why ClassicPress is a viable preferred alternative, we may gain traction with educators… and that could go a very long way.
At the very least, we generate a tweet thread that anyone can reference to learn more about ClassicPress. I’m not really seeing a downside to this, other than the time spent to craft the message, but welcome further feedback.
Blockquote PressED is a conference (#pressedconf19) looking into how WordPress is used in teaching, pedagogy and research. The conference happens solely on twitter.
I’m not sure how much (if any) this is going to help, but here goes.
It’s the “teaching, pedagogy and research” aspect that I’m struggling with. How do we say that ClassicPress is a better alternative to WordPress in those specific fields?
I’ve only got one very tenuous thought…
Many school websites, in the UK at least, are built on WordPress and in some cases, pupils help to design and update content as a learning experience. This means learning a bit of HTML and CSS.
But this learning process will change if schools stay with WordPress, as it’s likely that instead of learning HTML, pupils will be taught how to drag and drop or click and click.
With the advent of things like the Raspberry Pi, schools are also being encouraged to teach pupils how to code and this seems at odds with the direction WordPress is taking.
I like your thoughts here, @1stepforward, and I don’t think it’s tenuous at all. I was just having a conversation with my lead dev today about how the “dumbing down” of technology has resulted in an entire generation of coders who must rely on helper technologies to get a job done and they don’t have a clue of how things actually work. These latest steps by WordPress continue that dumbing down process.
I think that @anon71687268’s comments highlight many of the more compelling reasons why ClassicPress began. They are a good basis for comparison/contrast. But I would encourage all of us to balance any comparisons with at least an equal amount of focus on what we’re doing right, rather than focus too much on what WP is getting “wrong”.
Here’s what we’re doing right. Here’s why it’s relevant to you, the user. Here’s why we’re the preferred alternative to WordPress.
One other thing I’ve thought of, which may or may not be relevant, is that through ClassicPress, I have learned an awful lot. Even though I’ve worked in IT for 30+ years, there’s always something new and working in Open Source is a difference experience to working in a corporate IT environment. I would not have had this opportunity with WordPress and probably wouldn’t have wanted it either. But if you find the right OS project with the right community, you can learn a lot very quickly. And it can be very rewarding.
And lastly, Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as LearnDash and LearnPress. I haven’t had chance to give this any thought yet but obviously CP is ideally suited to these systems, but is it any better than WordPress? Is there anything we can squeeze out of it?
I don’t mind your using the ideas…just, please rewrite them in your own words as the verbatim text is already part of an unpublished article I’ve written.
My idea is to write it as your citation, with a link to the codepotent.com page. If this is in your article, I can link straight to this article, because my article will not be published in the next 2-3 months, yours will be first.
I’m starting to think that our presentation could work very well positioned as a message specifically from the ClassicPress community, to the educational community and the world at large. These are your voices, and your experiences. These stories are authentic and real and more powerful than well-curated bullet points on a powerpoint slide. What else? What other voices can we add?
Actually this may be a good point to mention. Anyone involved in teaching anything about WordPress would need to have a set of prepared resources - handouts, study examples, slideshow presentations. etc. It must be a pain to have to constantly revise and rework these as WordPress keeps changing. With ClassicPress you will have a much more stable basis for teaching.
Some clients are conservative. They taught me to respect established workflows and the huge layer of UX accumulated over the years. Some things don’t depend on trends: trust, care, reliability, relationships. Sometimes the real progress is a return to classic values. ClassicPress implements this principle.
/* Wish I could use Russian to express this elegantly */
I can understand the en word stability or reliability are not elegant as the Russian expression of the same concept. But you got your point across even using a limited language (no offense for en speaking people, Russian is a very profound and complex language on a philological level. And has a greater vocabulary for the nuances it allows to express. That is why every Russian literary masterpiece in it languages may seem plain/boring. I wonder how much we lose in not studying Russian at school)
I like both of the directions being discussed here. First, @1stepforward and @ozfiddler’s thoughts on contributions. I have also found great value in contributing to ClassicPress, mostly around learning how to organize a project of this size and helping others contribute successfully. It’s a work in progress but I know we will continue learning and growing together.
Second, @norske’s thoughts on reliability/stability. “Some things don’t depend on trends: trust, care, reliability, relationships.” This is what we’re going for, and we’re still in early stages with some challenges to work out around plugin compatibility etc., but to me this is why we chose “Predictable” as part of our tagline.
This is also tied up with our thoughts around governance and how to collect and act on user feedback. Due to this structure we never would have adopted something like Gutenberg as the default option, but I agree we need to look deeper than just being “anti-Gutenberg”. Possibly a more productive take on that situation: why was that able to happen at WordPress, and what are we doing differently?
Then ultimately all of that relates back to contributions: ClassicPress users have the opportunity to make ClassicPress what we want it to be.
I agree think that our messaging should include the ways in which we are taking action to ensure that we maintain an open, community-led project and that we don’t fall into some of the same issues that other CMS solutions have experienced… though personally, I think it’s better to generalize, rather than call WP out specifically. Anyone who knows what’s going on will know, anyway.
