Speed of development

Projects Core Development
1

So, it took the team almost a year to add a new page to the admin section and to update emojis. Emojis don’t belong to WordPress, they should be removed, along with the insecure XML-RPC protocol and the REST API. Also, custom logo design, which can already be achieved via countless plugins and simple hooks.

I don’t even want to mention the other changes, such as a PHP notice, a stray CSS .map reference. Really? Really?!

I was so looking forward to ClassicPress to actually improve the platform and remove legacy and useless code. I’m sure than in less than a month, an experienced developer could easily remove emojis, all obsolete code references, Flash, XML-RPC and REST. And there’s plenty more.

Here’s my list of WordPress features that should be gutted:
getbutterfly [dot] com/thoughts-on-wordpress/

Emojis, smilies, WordPress Capital P, oEmbed, pingbacks and trackbacks, Gravatars, declutter head, declutter widgets, remove support (and code) for PHP lower than 5.6 (with 7 coming next), remove SWFUpload, move XML-RPC and REST API to plugins (non-trivial, I agree), remove WordPress Password protected posts, tagline, post formats, post via email, update services, privacy policy, user contact methods (AIM, YIM, Jabber), keyboard shortcuts, jQuery dependency, jQuery Migrate, version parameter from scripts and stylesheets.

My hopes were so high with ClassicPress. I even migrated 4 or 5 sites to CP, but when I saw there’s no progress, I switched back to WordPress. I even started my own fork and almost removed everything I wrote above, but I don’t have the resources (time and motivation) to maintain and support a different fork.

Yeah, I have more to say, but I’ll stop here. I check the CP forums weekly to see progress, but I don’t. Hopefully, now that the holiday season is over, we’ll see more progress and more updates. But I won’t switch again until I see at least several updates with real progress. I don’t need to change my login logo, and if I do, I use a 10-line function in my plugin or theme.

2

@Ciprian

There is another fork of WP with the letters CP.

You may want to look at that one. They have removed just about everything, to the extent it hardly looks like WP anymore.

You can’t do anything useful from the admin backend and have to have your cPanel or equivalent open to change the simplest of settings.

They even removed the ability to access the raw HTML in the editor, meaning you can’t even put a PayPal button on a page.

Might be fine for people who know what they’re doing, but a pain in the neck for everyday users.

If you’re going to strip the guts out of the CMS, then you might just as well make it a new one and not call it a WP fork at all.

5 Likes
3

@Ciprian never thought about opening your own petitions, AND since you had time to make a fork (and noticed the hard work behind it…) get involved by spending your previous time by coding for CP instead of criticizing and expecting people to bow down in front of you?
No?
Really?
That reproach is not because I am very happy with CP and I disagree with you.
It’s because you took the occasion to be very rude.
You could have worded your thoughts in form of PROPOSALS, you could have been proactive. Instead you yelled in the face of the whole team. That’s unfair.
Sorry if I sound harsh. But really… It hurts seeing all the team be treated like this.

9 Likes
4

Welcome to the CP community @Ciprian.

I see you joined the forums just 3 hours ago but, sadly, it appears your sole intention was to have a rant. Perhaps instead of complaining, you could get onto Github and help out.

A lot of people here work very, very hard and as @ElisabettaCarrara says, if you want a say in what the priorities are, create a petition or two of your own. You can have as much say in what goes on here as anyone else in the community. The more people that help, the quicker we will reach our goal.

Just try to be a bit more helpful and constructive.

7 Likes
5

Hi Ciprian,
Personally, I think it’s great to read your passion for WordPress/CP. If you have the skills to create your own fork then why not bring those skills to bear on ClassicPress? I’ve moved my sites to ClassicPress but unfortunately don’t have the skills to contribute to core. Someone like yourself would be very welcome. :+1:t2:

7 Likes
6

@Ciprian I can see you are really obsessed with the mess WP added to the core, and you really want all that out in CP, but do know this is an open-source project, and if you wanna help, then please contribute ideas, instead of forking a whole CMS (it’s doable but I’ll say almost impossible). I love quotes, here we go again (re-worded to fit this context):

Contribute a little, it doesn’t look much but its sure worth something to someone. Together we can change CP, don’t be selfish, who will cry when you die?.

Stop checking the CP forums weekly to see progress, help make a progress. You know… short of words…

7 Likes
7

Ciprian, thanks for taking the time to post. It appears you are new here on the forums and you’ve chosen to make your introduction by expressing your disappointment in the project.

I invite you to get more involved here before passing judgement. This 100% volunteer community has done a lot of work and has undergone a lot of changes in the last year, and much of that is difficult to articulate in a blog post. If you’d been with us over the last year, you would have witnessed much of it.

Our community is what sets us apart from others in this space, and the responses you have seen from others on your post reflect a tight-knit, supportive community who is unified toward working toward a common goal. We warmly welcome others who share that same vision.

I invite you to learn more about ClassicPress – our vision and roadmap for the future, in particular. Petitions and code contributions from the ClassicPress community direct the path of future versions, so if you want to make a positive change, I’d encourage you to visit our Petitions page, begin attending #core meetings in Slack and visit our Github repo (Contribution Guidelines is a good place to start) to see how you can help.

Reading between the lines of your disappointment, it sounds as if you might have something of value to share with this community. If that’s the case, welcome. We’d love to have additional help.

12 Likes
8

Hi Ciprian,

Thanks for taking the time to post here. Any constructive feedback is always welcome and I know that others have shared your concern for what they perceive as a lack of “progress”.

There are a couple of points I would like to make in response.

First… it seems to me that the main reason for lack of progress is a shortage of core developers. If you have already been working on developing your own pruned-down version of WP then it sounds like you are well qualified to contribute to the work going on here. So, I’m curious to know… is there any reason you haven’t joined the community and started to actively work on ClassicPress? You say you had high hopes for it, but what has stopped you from getting in and helping make things happen?

And second, I should point that that not everyone shares your view of “progress”. I look after a good number of business and community sites and I can tell you that they are all humming along very nicely on CPv1.0.1. I really don’t care much if nothing is changed (apart from necessary security updates). And I can assure you that my clients have zero interest in all this, as long as their site is stable, reliable and secure.

Updates are mostly things that excite (some) developers and aficionados. Actual business people who just want a site to work yesterday, today and tomorrow do not care one iota whether it has emojis enabled, or XML-RPC, or REST API. I doubt they would even notice their logo on the login screen. Personally, I plan to stick to V1 for as long as possible, and I’m quite happy to see no major changes.

After all, it’s the major changes to WP that brought us here in the first place.

9 Likes
9

A lot of the changes listed in the OP are things I use and don’t want to lose. Major structural changes are for V2, not V1, which isn’t supposed to break plugins.

2 Likes
10

Why would I ever remove oEmbed (my site would break down), Gravatar (forget about Automattic, this is damn good), post formats (like seriously?), post via email (;/), Keyboard shortcuts (It’s better we drop the fork, and start a new CMS from scratch).

5 Likes
11

In addition to code changes, there were also policies and processes put into place, as well as the inftrastructure to run the show.

A little less looking forward and a little more helping out will take you much farther in open source.

If you don’t have time and motivation to maintain it, then you haven’t really forked anything…you just made a copy and stripped some stuff. It’s unclear to me someone would intentionally waste their time on this rather than just contributing to the project. And, lovely introduction to the community.

11 Likes
12

To be honest, I’m so with @Ciprian: “I was so looking forward to ClassicPress to actually improve the platform and remove legacy and useless code.”

Not everyone here is a coder. I’m a USER of ClassicPress, I’m not in any way skilled or interested in developing this CP fork of WP. For the simple reason that I don’t have those skills, but are very much interested in USING it.

However, it indeed takes a very - and I mean: VERY - long time to implement what seem to be quite basic tasks. That certainly doesn’t improve my trust in ClassicPress. Nor does it improve anyone else’s, I presume.

And THAT is what is important. However, I’m sorry to say, ClassicPress has failed miserably in that respect. In fact so miserably that I’m thinking of totally abandoning this fork.

13

You hit the nail on the head with the word seem. What seems easy to a non-coder isn’t as cut and dried as they would prefer. You have to consider the many things that can break. Like, the Uncategorized category… it seems like you could just rename it in 10 seconds and move on. However, that’s not the case since doing so will break other things.

If the project isn’t moving at the speed you prefer, or if you don’t trust it, then just move on. There are other platforms you can use. There’s no need to stick around and write posts to demean the efforts of others.

11 Likes
14

Yawn. :yawning_face:

It amazes me that here’s another person who has joined the forums, just a couple of hours ago, merely to have a moan. Coincidence?

If CP isn’t for you, move on. Stick with WP or find a different CMS altogether. In the meantime, the CP community will carry on regardless and help each other to reach the common goal.

ClassicPress has not failed at all. It’s the most successful fork of WP to date. It may not be moving at a pace we’d all like but it is moving. At least we now have got a stable, Gutenberg-free platform to build on. And that is what is happening. We’re laying the foundations for better things to come. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was WP come to think of it.

14 Likes
15

You see, @anon77835956, you say you are a user. Ok. That makes me say… Instead of criticizing, do please go elsewhere. CP might not be for you.
But in “being with @Ciprian” you miss an important point.
This last IS a coder. Attempted to make his own fork and discovered it’s not an easy task. He than behaved like the fox with the grapes, not being able to grasp it he criticized it.
Both of you have the right to your opinion, but, guess what? It’s not an opinion when one throws the stone and vanishes.
You may have a point, CP needs other devs to perform at a faster pace. Instead of criticizing… Maybe you can put your two cents in on how to attract the right people who may contribute and help the project advance?
Or are you here just to destroy?

2 Likes
16

Remember, it is (at least) a hundred times easier to criticize others’ work than to build something of value yourself.

Here’s what we have actually been doing in the core code (not to mention many other efforts around community, organizational structure, marketing, etc) since the inception of the project: Comparing LAST_WP_COMMIT...dc739de · ClassicPress/ClassicPress · GitHub

Among other things this includes preparing thousands of sites to be able to quickly receive security updates in case a critical issue appears with the WordPress/ClassicPress code.

Doing the infrastructure-related tasks like this first is a much more responsible and stable approach to development than some other proposals, for example, removing lots of code without investigating who depends on it or what might break as a result.

Still, disabling/removing features people don’t need has been a frequent request, so we’re going to start making this possible for version 2: ClassicPress | Stable. Lightweight. Instantly Familiar.

Currently we have a small group of talented developers working on ClassicPress, all volunteers. If things aren’t moving as fast as you’d like, send more talented developers our way, or open a chat with me or the other directors about making a substantial donation so that we can work on ClassicPress full-time.

11 Likes
17

Just as remainder for everyone: ClassicPress, like WordPress, is not intended to be a personal project for a single person needs (also if the second one seems more for a specific company needs).

Also, we are talking about a project with a community so there are a lot of other needs that are not only the core and require, as @james said, an infrastructure to builds the package or doing tests, release the localization files (a common issue that we already saw in other people complaining of the “slowness of this project”, often someone doesn’t remember that the world is huge and English is not the only language available around), documentation, marketing, community and discussions and so on.

Also, as WordPress we don’t have any companies that can put their employees and paid them to work on the project. ClassicPress is full volunteers managed compared to the other one, we have a life, we have a job, we have other things to do, and so on.
Basically like a lot of the Open Source projects, they are made by volunteers, and as everything if there are very few people that works you cannot expect a lot of things. Companies can hire new people, projects needs to onboarding/mentoring/talent souting and this require time.

9 Likes
18

Funny enough, I suspect the same guy created both accounts, you all shouldn’t waste time replying. You can’t change the rude guys! Just accept the fact some peeps will strongly disagree or perhaps find a way to bring the good progress down, it is either you ignore stupid anonymous messages or you keep on arguing and explaining about the steps you took to do this and that (waste of time to me).

What’s up with the current development :thinking:?

3 Likes
19

I think a lot of this discussion is not just people trying to convince this one guy. I think a lot of the people replying here want to show future readers why this person’s points are wrong and what is actually happening. In that aspect it’s not a waste of time. It shows the community is quite alive and that people continue to give it their best.

10 Likes
20

That was painfull, but that was also motivating)

And if we omit the emotional level of the original post, it’s rather interesting. When I read it, I recall my own first impression when visiting classicpress.net for the first time. From that outside point of view things look quite different, that’s true. When you dive into the project you see the progress and it’s obvious. But when you spectate it from a shore it looks like being a bit… m-m-m… neglected? (Sorry, can’t find a proper word). I mean that the website and even forum demonstrate just a tiny piece of things that happen.

And although the opinion above is focused on dev aspects, I think the real deep reason of that impression is more emotional than logical. We probably just need some short “wow-effect” impulse that gives people some drive and refreshes enthusiasm. Maybe we should focus on some kind of single “killer feature” for next release (1.2.x)? Any ideas?

And, BTW, I don’t think we need to explain our speed of development at all. Meaning all that obvious things like lack of devs, volunteering, part-time etc. It’s a weak position. Let’s show some strength and self confidence instead) We produce quality — no excuses required. Tired to wait? Well, we understand that. Subscribe for a 2.0 release notification and feel free to come back later.

Still think the idea of building this fork is great and I’m pretty sure that CP has great future :wink:
Cheers!

12 Likes