Ecosystem Team
Been involved in a mixed bag of things recently (which has been good!).
Plugins & themes update
Work has continued on the development of our three “Classic” plugins and there are new minor updates ready to be released for all three. One change we have made is to make all plugins installable via composer and packagist. A bit of good news regarding Classic SEO is that I’ve been able to obtain the original, unminified CSS and JS source files direct from Rank Math (who, I have to say, were very obliging). These will be integrated into a future version of Classic SEO.
Latest installation stats - Classic Commerce: 45; CC Compatibility plugin: 24; Classic SEO: 140.
At present, updates for these plugins are served from different servers which does not provide optimal performance. We will soon be setting up officialplugins.classicpress.net to provide a central update service using official ClassicPress infrastructure.
Following comments from the community, we have been looking to expand the “Classic” plugins. Work is underway as part of the ClassicPress research programme on Classic Forms (a fork of Contact Form 7), a brand-new theme (currently called “Theme One”) and also Classic Code Snippets, a plugin to display code snippets on a page or post.
Other developments
After the release of WP 5.6, I carried out testing on the CP migration plugin and discovered an issue which had the potential to break websites during migration. To fix this, I submitted a PR to the CP core containing a backport of the relevant WP changeset.
One of the problems we’ve faced with regard to releasing new updates is that Travis, the code testing facility, removed their free open-source plans at the end of 2020. This meant having to migrate all existing tests to GitHub Actions which has been quite a significant project. I have been working with @mattyrob to help complete this transition for ClassicPress core. Huge thanks to @mattyrob for his massive contribution to this.
During this period, I’ve rewritten the ClassicPress Donations plugin and it now includes a “custom amount” feature. This is undergoing testing and, all being well, will be uploaded to the CP website shortly.
Following the Marketing Meeting: January 17, 2021, @Padraig and I updated the website to replace the tagline and other associated content that appeared in numerous places. Thanks also to @omukiguy for carrying out related changes to the CP core.
And last but by no means least, I have been updating some of the documentation pages as well as the Get ClassicPress website page which I expect to go live shortly.
