I’ve read a lot about ClassicPress since the WordPress/WPEngine debacle. My waning faith in WordPress has now totally evaporated and I realize I cannot in good faith leave my client’s websites on WordPress - they need to be migrated.
ClassicPress is an obvious destination but I’m wondering what do people who have already made this step, generally miss the most? If anything?
Note I have never used the stupid editor and always install Classic Editor and Classic Widgets first. I also loathe how WooCommerce has evolved since around the same times as the stupid editor.
There’s a few other plugins that I use a lot:
WooCommerce, ACF, Contact Form 7, Wordfence, Duplicator, WP Mail SMTP, WPBakery, lots of WooCommerce plugins.
I don’t know what I would do without my core plugins but I don’t mind adapting to similar things.
So, what should I be aware of before trying to migrate quite a few websites?
Much appreciated
I can offer you FX Builder to replace WPBakery.
I am also working on a free security/firewall plugin. I already have a paid plugin that helps with blocking lots of malicious requests, but I will only promote my free ones here.
Updraft works for backups - maybe not a 100% replacement for Duplicator.
If you search the forums, you will find an alternative to WooCommerce.
I am not aware of any Contact Form 7 replacements.
Good to know re ACF, thanks, although the ACF the interface will be missed I think I can replicate my use cases. At the core ACF fields are only pairs of custom fields. If I write anything useful I’ll share it.
I’m wondering if older versions of the other plugins could be used? Obviously they wouldn’t be updates for functionality or security but maybe stripping them back to the essentials could mitigate many of those. I would take some time to figure out what all the patches did but I have about 200 sites so it might be worth it.
Classic Commerce is exactly what you’re suggesting: a fork of an older version of WooCommerce. Many plugins for WooCommerce still work with it.
In my view, UpdraftPlus is superior to Duplicator, and Fluent Forms is really easy to use. So too is @Ciprian 's FX Builder, so I think you should be good to go!
Fluent forms looks great and I much prefer the older codebase of WooCommerce - before they converted the database schema and rearranged half of the hooks.
I’m not sure I like the look of updraft as I only use duplicator to transport local website to online servers and rewrite the links - but I can probably find an older version.
Thanks very much for your input, it’s all very useful. I think I’ll start early next week.
@74gee
Andy, we are in exactly the same boat as you! We have a ton of sites running off WordPress, WooCommerce, Elementor , and our preferred plugins. And I personally hate the Gutenberg editor, as do our clients and other designers as well. We disable it with code on every site we build.
But now with the fiasco WordPress has become, we can no longer justify building WordPress or WooCommerce sites. Like you we would like to slowly start migrating clients, and our own sites to ClassicPress.
Based on my recent experience and as Tim and Ciprian have answered here:
Fluent Forms is awesome and works perfectly on Classic Press. As Tim points out it can import from other form plugins.
WordFence - No. Unless you just use it as a firewall and disable the scanner. But you can use WordFence Login Security instead with ReCaptcha v3.
Classic Commerce, yes but you have to test with your WC plugins.
As Tim also points out UpdraftPlus is far better than Duplicator. We use that to migrate CP sites now.
@Ciprian 's FX Builder will make you feel right at home if you use WP Bakery. But cleaner and simpler.
The correct answer is you will have to migrate a staging site and test it out. You won’t know until you try - but most plugins will be compatible.
I’m definitely missing a good alternative to ACF, Toolset, or another robust cpt and custom field plugin with ClassicPress. With Toolset especially the older Views and Layout plugins are also very nice to have.
Beaver Builder is working on options for creating advanced query loops and frontend views that could potentially replace Views and Layouts but it’s in alpha and not yet compatible with ClassicPress, although they’ve mentioned that it will be supported in a later alpha or beta version.
What exactly are you missing there? It’s a genuine question, because ACF and the rest don’t actually add anything that isn’t already accessible in core.
If we could get a clearer idea of what’s missing (beyond good marketing by ACF), we could consider adding it directly to core
I’m not a dev. So Tim @timkaye, maybe I missed your point?
But I know my dev liked ACF for the reason they don’t have to code out entire CPTs, add them to the backend and then the front-end as well. So even though he is completely capable of that, and has coded custom plugins, he does recommend ACF for taking out all that work.
I can’t speak directly for @kraisor, but adding ACF into ClassicPress core would be an amazing game changer. But I suspect it would need to be a CP Plugin.
If in core, that means people could setup CPT on the backend and then display it on the front end as well. While that would be fantastic, I don’t think that is any small undertaking.
There really isn’t anything to coding a CPT. And once you’ve coded one, it’s a simple search and replace job in a text editor to build another one. There’s even a simple setting to decide whether or not it should display on the front-end.
So what this tells me is that many users want a UI to build these things with. Interestingly, though, there are many good plugins that provide the ability to build CPTs, and they haven’t had the traction of ACF. Nor has Pods, though it’s actually more powerful. So that tells me marketing also plays a significant role.
All of which suggests to me that a CP plugin that purports to do what ACF does is probably not going to get much traction, because it won’t have the marketing behind it. But adding a UI to core might be more worthwhile.
I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. Usability is definitely a significant reason for tools like Toolset, ACF, Pods, Metabox, etc. Not to mention there’s more to the features for something like the Toolset suite than just creating CPT, custom fields, etc.
There’s also convenience, the same reason people don’t change the oil in their cars even though it’s extremely easy to do.
IMHO the CPT stuff is plugin territory, but we could have a standard CPT plugin that gets installed with CP like Pepper one is? That way it’s in core, can be activated if needed and it offers the visual settings people are asking for. I might be able to help make this happen
When migrating from WP last week, I was able to keep almost all of my plugins. I use Two-Factor, Antispam Bee and WP Armour (Extended) for security, WP Fastest Cache (Premium), and WPForms Lite for the contact form. Other plug-ins that I could keep are Avatar Privacy, Embed Privacy, Impressum Plus, Lightbox mit Photoswipe, Shariff Wrapper, Simple Yearly Archive, Statify and even wp-Typography.
ClassicPress Pepper seems to conflict with one of my plugins. I have tried quite a bit to find out which without success.
I replaced The SEO Toolkit with Classic SEO and WP Mail SMTP with azurecurve’s SMTP.
It’s interesting to note that this thread made it possible to switch to ClassicPress + Bricks Builder: ClassicPress 2.1.0 Release Notes - #21 by timkaye. I guess, we’ll never know what we will miss until we dive right into it.
We have long switched to code generators for CPTs and Metaboxes as this translates to a lean and maintanable site.
I’ve just migrated my personal site to ClassicPress and ACF (Pro) is working for me. There are a couple of visual glitches, but they’re not affecting functionality.
