Team Updates: September 2020

Archive Team Updates
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Community Team

Been a busy couple of months!

Directory Update

Biggest update from me is the launch of the new ClassicPress Directory. As mentioned in the announcement post, this is very much an alpha and we have a ton of features planned. Special thanks to @anon71687268, @1stepforward and @james for their help on this too.

Works With plugins are now welcome on the directory as well. We are in the process of moving the larger thread of Plugins Confirmed Working on ClassicPress v1 maintained by @azurecurve, and spreadsheet compiled by @1stepforward, onto the directory.

Forum

We processed some forum updates, no downtime was needed! Biggest change is IE support has been dropped.

Focus this month:

Based on feedback from the community, we will be working on fixing the bugs/oddities on the directory. We appreciate the feedback and welcome more going forward!

Besides bug fixes, our focus for the next little while is setting up the forum login to the directory so developers can update and manage their plugins (and themes too - soon).

@Team-Leads please add your team updates below.

Please note: Replies from the community are welcome.

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Marketing Team

The Marketing Team held a meeting on July 28th.

These things were discussed:

  • Possible brand revision/expansion
  • Tagline change to “ClassicPress: the CMS for Creators. Stable. Secure. Instantly familiar.”
  • Change in brand voice
  • New page on the main site geared toward WP 4.9.x users
  • Discussion about “evangelists” and how we need to back up our words with actions (Plugin Directory)

Action items from that meeting included:

  • Think about the next market segment to target
  • Like/retweet/share social media posts from the CP account
  • Tweet/post about CP and tag CP so we can retweet/share
  • Come up with content you’d like the CP account to post/share on social (whether for creators or developers)

@LinasSimonis offered to help with “short ideas” to help, as well.

Further conversation was had post-meeting with regard to

Social Media Campaign

Promotion via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn continues. We are beginning to be mentioned more often by people who are disgruntled with WP, particularly after the 5.5 update.

We need people to continue to like and share our content to continue to get in front of potential users.

Other Outreach

@james and @BlueSkyPhoenix will both be presenting at the HeyPressto Conference on September 24th. If anyone else has been asked present a topic about ClassicPress at this event, please let us know!

If you are not presenting, you can support ClassicPress by liking/commenting/retweeting the presentations.

We have also been approached by Backdrop CMS to participate in a discussion at their upcoming conference at the end of this week. @james is discussing it with them.

September Focus

  • Continue current social media campaign
  • Prepare for HeyPressto Conference sessions
  • Provide marketing support for the release of ClassicPress v1.2
  • Provide marketing support for the release of the ClassicPress Directory
  • Begin work on next phase of social media campaign (to begin 11/1/20)
  • Begin working on messaging/other modifications to the main website (thanks again to @Padraig for his work here!)

Other News

The other thing that has kept me busy over the last couple of months (along with @wadestriebel and @james) is the formation of the ClassicPress Initiative. Forming a nonprofit organization was always part of the overall vision for ClassicPress, and although it was a bit more difficult in the midst of a pandemic, I’m pleased that the vision is finally coming to life.

Day by day, we are gaining momentum!

Next Marketing Meeting

Everyone is welcome to attend the next marketing meeting. Please indicate your availability for our next marketing meeting by completing this poll.

Meeting date and time will be announced on 9/24.

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Ecosystem Team

Plugin Development

Classic Commerce

The first release candidates of Classic Commerce were released on 29th August with significant contributions from @ozfiddler and @james.

Also, with the help of @BlueSkyPhoenix, CC also had a slight brand revamp to remove any traces of WC colours and give it its own identity.

Work has started on the first public release and this will be available within the next few days.

The number of active CC installations is now up to 30.

Classic SEO

The first public release of Classic SEO was released on August 30th and it is now active on 82 sites.

Work is already underway on version 1.1.0 with the focus on fixing any bugs from v1 and beginning the process of a) removing unnecessary bloat and features and b) untangling the obfuscated code left over from RM.

ClassicPress Website

New Web Page

Completed and published the new ClassicPress for WordPress 4.9 Users page, the content of which has been widely used in a social media marketing campaign over the past few weeks.

Migration plugin

Created a small shortcode plugin that fetches the latest version of WordPress compatible with the ClassicPress Migration plugin.

This follows the discussions here Get ClassicPress Page (latest WP version?).

As an example of its use, on the Get ClassicPress page, in the sentence

It is possible to migrate from any version of WordPress from 4.9.0 up to and including 5.5.1.

the “5.5.1” will be updated automatically as soon as the plugin is updated.

SEO

Started doing SEO work on the website, beginning with basic stuff such as image alt attributes, page headings - and installation of Classic SEO of course (thank you @james). This has required a number of changes (pull requests) to the CP child theme and also an update (via PR) to the plugin that fetches comments from Discourse.

Donations

Created a small plugin for the new donations page. The plugin displays the donations options in an easy to use format without any clutter and as radio buttons instead of a dropdown.

Privacy Policy

Drafted new Privacy Policy page.

New Directory

Set up a Google spreadsheet and form listing all plugins that a) are developed specifically for CP and b) that are known to work with CP. The spreadsheet was based on the initial work carried out by @azurecurve and @anon71687268.

The data from the spreadsheets is being used to populate the directory being developed by @wadestriebel.

Also involved in initial discussions and planning for the new directory itself.

Technical Outreach

Not much to report. Contacted the following developers with a view to them confirming support for ClassicPress:

Developer Response (quote)
Shield Security “Absolutely, yes, we’ll include a link to ClassicPress. We’re currently doing a complete site rebuild, so we’ll incorporate it into that once it’s released”. (from Paul Goodchild). Update: no link to or mention of CP as of Sept 15.
Beaver Builder “I talked to Simon about this and he pushed the change to the readme. Happy to help promote ClassicPress!” (from Justin Busa). Update: link to ClassicPress added on WP repo Beaver Builder – WordPress Page Builder – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org English (UK)
Elegant Themes (Divi) “I am afraid that maintaining 2 versions of Divi would be difficult for our team. It may be possible in the future but this is not something we are interested as of right now.” (from Mitch Skolnik)
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2 posts were split to a new topic: Re: Marketing Team Update September 2020

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Core team

Version 1.2.0-rc1 was released on September 3rd with the new custom login image feature, PHP 7.4 support, and several months worth of bugfixes and minor changes. Thanks to community members for helping test this release and provide feedback, in particular @ozfiddler.

Version 1.2.0 was released on September 15th, with the same changes as 1.2.0-rc1 plus a fix for a couple of minor issues with the new “custom login image” feature.

Version 1.3.0 has not been scheduled yet, but the focus will most likely be on improving the built-in plugins and themes features, including upgrading plugins from .zip files and preventing installation of plugins / plugin upgrades that are marked as incompatible with WP 4.9.x.

Those changes will be a nice segue into our own directory. Work has started on the ClassicPress plugin/theme directory (mainly @wadestriebel and @1stepforward) - I haven’t done much there yet except for offer input, but soon I will be helping to integrate the directory with GitHub and with ClassicPress itself.

There has been some community interest in another core development meeting - at this time I am looking for a volunteer to put together an agenda and run the meeting.

Infrastructure team

We are now running Classic Commerce to accept donations directly on our main site, as planned in the last Infrastructure update from July.

On September 2 I had a call with a couple of account representatives from DigitalOcean, they seemed pretty interested in our project and they were able to help me eliminate a manual task related to provisioning/refreshing servers.

Thanks to @1stepforward for a number of changes/fixes on our main site, including building a nice donations block widget thingy. I’ve been reviewing and deploying these as they come up, and the ClassicPress servers are still receiving regular maintenance and working as intended.

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Sure has! This is HUGE progress!! Many thanks to everyone involved for all their various contributions.

:clap:

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Awaiting updates from @invisnet and @ElisabettaCarrara

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