Originally published at: Migrate WordPress 5.8 Website to ClassicPress | ClassicPress
Recent discussions on Twitter highlighting that ClassicPress does not yet support migrating from WordPress 5.8 and my personal experience doing precisely that, migrating a WordPress 5.8 website to ClassicPress, has motivated me to write up this short post and share my experience. Updating from WordPress 5.7 to 5.8 has ruined my website with one Click.…
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We hope to have WP 5.8 supported by the migration plugin by early next week 
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Re: shims - has anybody started a “generic” WP 5.x compatiblity plugin yet?
If not, I wouldn’t mind scoping all of them up and publishing a generic one for CP at github, and later in the beta CP plugin directory.
One that comes to mind is the get_template_part function, which has changed = enhanced to what everyone uses in … I think it was WP 5.5., ie. allowing for variables to be passed to the loaded template = local scope, without having to rely on the rather unsafe globals / $GLOBALS method (as its prone to accidential overwrites).
… ie. WooCommerce has been doing that for ages, I myself have been using a custom template loader for my plugins, which does exactly that - and more - for ages, lots of themes and theme frameworks do, and so on … there are probably countless more examples for this.
cu, w0lf.
Good to hear from you @fwolf. I haven’t seen a dedicated shims plugin and Google doesn’t turn up anything. So I doubt anyone has done it or released it publicly. I think the CP community will welcome your shims plugin. It will definitely come in handy as WP and CP diverge more. It could even be a recommended plugin by the migration plugin. There was at least one user asking for help because the website broke after migration to CP because his theme wasn’t compatible with WP 4.9.
If you do create the plugin, one recommendation I would have is to include an admin notice about the plugin being active and the need to review the website for issues. Non-technical users may assume the plugin fixes everything, then in reality it simply prevents the entire website from crashing if functions are missing. Something similar to the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin.
The other thing that would be helpful, although would take extra time to build and isn’t completely necessary, is to show a list of items where these functions are used. Either a list of all other files where they are detected, or simply list theme and plugin names where these functions are detected. This would help users troubleshoot and replace those plugins and/or themes.
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Thats a good idea, I gonna remember it, as soon as I start work on this (probably next week, as I’m still bound with a total horror of a job right now :().
I’m going to look into this, maybe there is an option to either use Query Monitor or Debugbar for this. So one would get helpful pointers during execution when one of these plugins is active - as its primarly for developers, after all.
cu, w0lf.
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This section that you have written is great! Is there a similar post that outlines the hazards of Block spaghetti comments? I would like to point this out to some other developers. We are also embarking on an institutional site that will have some long-term content and something like this would be very useful for explaining to a client just why not to pollute content with presentation.
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Update, the Migration Plugin now supports migrating from WordPress 5.8. We recommend using version 1.3.0 of the Migration Plugin to help avoid any theme conflicts, you can download it from the Get ClassicPress page on the webite:
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One of the best posts I’ve seen about the Gutenberg and its unfortunate use of comments is by Greg Schoppe. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. It’s very detailed and thorough.
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Great write-up… and the comments are thoughtful and interesting, too. Thanks for sharing.
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I just came across this question @bkjproductions. Here is the best article I’m aware of that explores these issues: What’s so bad about HTML Comments as structure? | Greg Schoppe
I stumbled today on another, more recent, blog post that talks about Gutenberg and its approach to storing content and using comments.
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This one shows exactly why Greg Schoppe was right. And why the Gutenberg developers are never going to be able to sort it out.
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I migrated from WP5.8 earlier this week on a 10 year old website… I had no noteworthy issues.
Just make sure your plugins work on WP4.9 and downgrade/replace those that don’t beforehand.
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This. Really, this is the best explanation what to do before migration. I vote this sentence to be included in the migration doc’s.
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IMO It is pretty clear already
I personally would, if I could/if it would have an effect, vote for #peopleshouldreadthedocs lol.
But that does not happen 
(not saying I do read the docs, I belong to the same people who read them after the first failed attempts, I guess we are all in the same boat)
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Part of the trouble is that some devs have no idea which version of WordPress their plugins are actually compatible with. Frankly, I think some keep the “requires at least 4.9” simply get more eyes on their plugins. Many times, we’ve seen devs saying “requires 5.x” when that isn’t the case. And likewise, we’ve seen plugins declare compatibility with 4.9 and then brick a 4.9.x website by calling 5.x functions. In other words, even if a user does the (very preliminary) research of looking at the WP page to see the required/supported version, it may or may not actually be accurate.
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A petition requiring people to RTFM? Yeah, I’d cast a vote for that!
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