Longevity for CP

General Discussion
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As this question was directed specifically to me, I’ll answer from a personal viewpoint and be completely honest.

When I spoke to my mentor (who has invested in my business, Holly Social) about ClassicPress, I told him that I want ClassicPress to be my legacy. ClassicPress is not the thing that will make me wealthy (I’ve set it up as a not-for-profit after all), nor do I want it to be. Instead, it is the thing that I can look back on and say “I made the world a little bit better by doing that”.

This is driving force behind my passion for ClassicPress, and I will fight for it to be a success today, tomorrow and 20 years from now.

My vision is to find ways to fund our growth for the benefit of our users without relying on donations (and that adhere to our democratic structure). By doing this we guarantee a sustainable future without a conflict of interest.

ClassicPress is here for the long run, and although we will have some major hurdles to overcome in the coming weeks, months and years I promise you that I will give it my all.

And from a completely selfish perspective, I run 50 websites that will need ClassicPress for the foreseeable future.

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12

Great to hear that. I laid your efforts and will do whatever I can to support them

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You mean “laud your efforts?” Sorry, I used to be an English teacher a long time ago.

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Let’s do everything we can to help you reach that worthy goal. I can come up with plenty of ideas and you are free to pick what you like and discard what you don’t.

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16

And that is the best we can hope for in life. You don’t earn extra points for being the richest corpse in the cemetery. And unlike the Egyptians and their mummies, you can’t take your riches with you when you die.

At 66 years of age, I can look back on my life and see the mistakes I’ve made; the grand plans that never worked out, the projects I started and abandoned (and the people I have let down), etc, etc.

But what does last is the help I gave to people when they needed it the most. I didn’t get rich, I didn’t become famous, but I did leave some breadcrumbs along the way.

No one can see into the future and all we can do is make plans. If they work out, then good. If not, then so be it. By making CP a non-profit project, delegating responsibility and having a bottom up philosophy, Scott is showing the humility that makes great leaders. Being prepared to step back and pass the baton when the time comes, will ensure the project survives.

Empires come and go, and WP is the latest one that is teetering. Meetup made the same mistake of ignoring users this time last year, and still has a platform that is broken and stuck between the old and new one - making it virtually unusable.

There is a lot to be learned from the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” lesson. Keep it up-to-date certainly, but don’t suddenly do a 180 and expect people to stay loyal.

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17

In this comment I’ll discuss longevity and long-term planning from the technical side.

ClassicPress versioning works using semver which is an industry standard that sets rules for how software can be upgraded across versions.

The main rule is that a breaking change must come in a new major version.

To put it another way: After ClassicPress v1.0.0 is released, we guarantee that your sites will continue working on any future ClassicPress releases in the v1.x series. This means full compatibility with all plugins and themes that are supported by WP 4.9.x.

We plan to support the ClassicPress v1.x release series with bugfixes and security updates for as long as people need it.

If there are potentially breaking changes in ClassicPress v2.x, we will add a new screen to the upgrade process explaining the changes very clearly and carefully. We will also do as much as possible to automatically confirm that your site can be safely upgraded to the new version.

Upgrades to a new major version which contains potentially breaking changes will always be optional and clearly communicated.

So, that’s our basic plan for backwards compatibility, which is an important part of longevity. You can stay on ClassicPress v1.x (with full plugin and theme compatibility) for as long as you need it.

Another important part of longevity is what will actually go into ClassicPress v2 and future versions.

The community is determining this via the petitions site, and we are listening. For now, the top category of petitions is “remove X feature that I don’t need”.

We can’t just remove features for everyone, as this would break sites. However, we can move things like XML-RPC out into core plugins, which are enabled by default but can be disabled and deleted.

We will be as careful as possible, but this is a major re-architecting of the ClassicPress code, so it still has the potential to break sites.

We agreed in our December 12 committee meeting that based on community feedback so far, the main goal for ClassicPress v2 will be moving older and less-wanted features out into optional core plugins.

The goals and direction for v3 will also be determined by the community. And like Scott and Wade have stated, I plan to continue contributing to ClassicPress for a long time.

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18

Darn auto fill. You’re right

19

Truly reassuring to read all you said. You folks have already proven your commitment with the alpha and beta releases. NOTHING broke on my sites

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20

I agree with you Dick. And it’s for that very reason that I think ALL OF US – and that includes busy, busy me – need to help out in any way we can. That’s what Open Source Communities are all about, relying on the energy of all. One hour a month to ten hours a month, dev work or writing, anything that one can do I bet would be appreciated and will help answer our question of “Will this live long?”

I need to spend more time looking at Dries work lifting Drupal off the ground but what I do know is that it was the excitement of innovation and imagineering that got devs and others so excited that they found the way to work on pushing Drupal forward, even with busy schedules.

What people miss when they say elsewhere “Oh just install the classic editor” is that the path here could result in a far more exciting, enterprise quality Drupal than we have ever seen before. Inside this group sits brains! All these brains imagining!! Let’s start a fire! What fun, eh?? Far more fun than just a classic editor…leading to who knows where.

I’ve been called crazy before … go ahead and do it again. Someday I’ll believe it but it’s going to take me some time.

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21

The problem with “just install the Classic Editor” is logic. The Classic Editor will only be supported until 2022 or 2023. And there’s nothing written in stone that says they can’t change their minds on that or “tinker” with that Classic Editor if enough stake holders want more bodies using ol’ Gutenberg. Also, what happens when that Classic Editor is finally no longer supported or is pulled? Ooops! Didn’t think of that. Now we have all these sites with no backward compatibility and no way to go forward. The Classic Editor argument is a band-aid and a caveat rather than an actual solution.

As far as what little ol’ me can do in a sleep retirement town in Florida, to start I intend to host as many WordPress meetups as possible and put ClassicPress on each one and create websites for each meetup where I put ClassicPress in the footer and I intend to actively endorse it to all. In person, in groups, in forums. And use it on all my WP sites. If I can do more later on, I will. I’ve offered input in marketing conversations here, and if asked, will do whatever I can.

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The Classic Editor plugin will be supported until December 31, 2021. Link

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Exactly.

What happens after 2021? You hope your sites can switch over to Gutenberg without breaking (which probably won’t work at that point since ol’ “Goober” doesn’t have backward compatability), you redo all your older sites (which probably isn’t realistic), or you switch to ClassicPress if you can.

If Gutenberg were rolled out incrementally as software companies traditionally do, it wouldn’t be the issue it is. If Goober were tested and rolled out with actual community input, it wouldn’t be the 1-star dog it is. If it were actually needed, that’s be a huge bonus.

ClassicPress is a great blessing to WP developers who don’t want to get the “Jersey salute” from Automattic.

Now it’s time for my morning caffeine intake and to get some other work done.

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24

I agree with you on all points. Was just confirming the end date for the Classic Editor plugin.

Goober, LOL. I like that.

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25

It’s nice that they’ve declared an end-of-life date for Classic Editor, but that is essentially a trap. It gives people the feeling that nothing changes for 2 years, and that they can hold off on doing anything more than installing the Classic Editor. Meanwhile, under the hood, Gutenberg continues to evolve and moves into more areas of WordPress. I predict that, when Classic Editor is retired, the WP community will have another big kerfuffle and a lot of site managers/owners/whatevers are going to wish they had just switched to ClassicPress while it was still easy.

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Some related discussion on GitHub:

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Of course it’s a trap. If you were Automattic/Mullenweig and you’re looking at making stake holders/investors happier with you and building a mega company (which in and of itself I don’t take umbrage with, it’s just how they go about it) you want as many people as possible using your “new and improved” way of doing things to crow to investors about. That’s why they always harp on how many millions of people “use” Gutenberg. They actually have it installed, against their will, and its’ a key point they don’t like being pointed out and will obfuscate at every turn. Gutenberg still has more 1 star reviews than 5 - which from a business standpoint is tone-deaf: to force a new editor that no one likes and is full of weird bugs. I think you’re absolutely right about switching over. I’m at the cross-roads where I have many sites, many of which I’ve switched over to CP. Others, other developers have said just don’t update or use Disable Gutenberg. Again, it’s a logic trap with faulty reasoning: WP surely won’t let Disable Gutenberg work forever. At some point it has to be blocked, or become obsolete or too much trouble to maintain; just at the Classic Editor plugin will be cut off after that end date. If they didn’t cut it off, everyone would just use it indefinitely and problem solved.

The only real solutions I can see are either do not update and run the risk of security holes after a while and everything getting buggy, update and take your chances your current or older site will work down the road which is unlikely (without alot of work on rebooting it), or use CP. It’s kind of like a Gordion Knot we as WP developers / users have been put into. And the great irony is that small business owners and most agencies and hosting companies don’t even know what’s going on or understand the changes coming.

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28

Graham

That was the best response I have seen to an equally awesome mission statement from Scott. I would not have joined the forum at this time until I read both your content. I noticed your avatar and thought you might have been an Aussie… and funny that the resonance of your reply could be related to our ages being within a year - but I am about as far from you as you can get and still have internet :):grinning:

I only found out about Classic Press today, from WPTUTs youtube channel, and was slightly intrigued at why another or alternative to WP was available (I actually think WP is really illogical) and have been constantly hoping for a simpler solution to CMS or indeed Web site software/systems. Again to bring this whole response back to relevance - it was both Scott and your responses that have inspired me to make the change to CP - I have nothing to lose and perhaps I may be able to help in some small way.
The idea of making the world a slightly better place is a wonderful project.
Cheers
Peter

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Hi Peter,

I used to have a username “Fossil Features” on Paltalk! Thank you for the kind words.

Indeed you have nothing to lose (assuming you backup your site first just in case) and everything to gain. All my sites are now on ClassicPress and there have been no problems.

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People wonder about the long-term viability of CP, but it looks like more and more people are coming in. Also, some plugin/theme developers don’t like Gutenberg. With all the planned structural business, it may put some of them out of business. So I can see them coming over to CP.

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31

Its quite normal people are windering for the longevity of CP. We witnessing a software that is the last of its kind a “blog CMS” (I don’t know of any of them still being around). It has been with us for 15 years and just has made a killing mistake. It has pushed away a lot of people and the WordPress support forum is a PR disaster. When you read a WordPress admin saying that is perfectly acceptable to be condescending you ask yourself some questions.

People are running around lilke a chicken without its head. They don’t know where to go and CP look like a good alternative but will it still be there in 5 years? Some may still even be running legacy blog that are as old as WordPress itself. Also there is the huge fracture with buisness needs and “common” people needs. WP 5.0 as moved bith world quite hardly.

Personally I’ve read some petition that have been accepted that doesn’t feel good and a lot of other petition feel completly detached from a lot of “common users” needs and very dictated by technical people.

A lot of people a having there eyes on classic press but how much will stay? even in the plugin developer world. Is CP viable for them or do they stay safe on the biggest WP market?

People still need to be convinced that its the good move for them.

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