Hello!

First I’d like to thank you for giving a us a lively exemple of how open source work, or “if you don’t like it fork it”.

Until yesterday I wasn’t aware of the existence of “Gutenberg” and I guess many others are in the same case. As I’ve installed an auto-update plugin it has been a total surprise. And what a surprised :

“What happen to my blog what the fuck did you do? It was working great why did you break it?”

Wait what? I didn’t do anything! … Wordpress 5.0 … Gutenberg … uh what did went throught their head?

As you may I’ve guess I’m administrating the websites and blog of familly and friends and Word press have been my goto since … since version 1.0 doamn is that already been so long? And now today this Gutenberg thing is making me doubt. Its apparently meant to help the less tech savy of us but at the same time they are the one that are the more lost in front of it.

All my word press install are more or less taylored for its users most of them use a TinyMCE plugin for WordPress that add a lot of functions because for my users it look like their goto wordprocessor so very familiar and easy to use. I let you imagine the shock to them.

after some research I’ve discovered a plugin to disable it but its only temporary and very patchy solution for me. Plus roaning around Wordpress forum have been quite revealing about the Wordpress team and quite distressing.

So here I am contempling to jump out of a sinking boat.

I won’t hide it from you I think about moving to ClassicPress. But I have some doubts and questions. I already went on the fork road in the past and it wasn’t really pleasant.

Roaming on you forum gave me a reasuring glance at the future this ship will keep sailing and that’s great.

But what do you see for the future of ClassicPress?

How long do you plan to keep it compatible with Wordpress, its themes and plugins? Is the migration compatible with Wordpress 5.0?

What do you plan for the future of the editor? its well known that Wordpress editor is not the best thing on earth but Gutenberg wasn’t the solution? What do you think you could do to make our life better editor wise?

Will you go the full WYSIWYG way? full HTML? or something else. I’m personally a HUGE fan of markup thing and deeply regret their disparition. I still remember all my BBCodes!! from good ol’ forums phpBB and the likes. They where really practical. But HTML isn’t really problem too. But if there is a thing I hate above all its Markdown. I really hate that thing with all my soul and hope it could die fast and no one ever use it again. But I digress here.

Do you plan a rewrite? One thing that a lot of developoers friends have agains WordPress is its antiquated ways of developement but its also because it have a whole lot of plugins and theme legacies to keep alive and making them change is not easy. So as you are new here what do you think about making a rewrite with more modern developement paradygm? and new API for plugins?

For me these question are kind of important to know where I puting my feet.

Any way think you and keep that great work!

Welcome @DerpFox,

Thank you for your interest in ClassicPress, and your detailed questions about the future. We understand how scary a jump like this may be.

To start, I highly recommend looking through this discussion about the longevity of CP: Longevity for CP

We will be maintaining full compatibility for any plugins that support 4.9.x. Here are some more details from another thread: Switching to Classicpress (large site)

Yes, our migration plugin now support WP 5.0. You can find out more details about the migration plugin here.

For version 1 there will be no breaking changes to ClassicPress. Meaning these types of changes (or a full rewrite) would only be taking place in V2. For version 2 we will be using the petitions site to guide us on what features we add and what features get moved out of the core and into a core plugin.

Hopefully those details will help with the doubts you were having If you have any other questions or concerns we would be happy to discuss those too!

Thank you for your answer!

You’ve answered a good number of things but not really what I wanted to know.

If I make the change I want to be able to plan for at least the next 2 to 5 years. That is why I asked some very specific question. You petitions page is great but they are “only” petition no tactual things that are on a road map. also the service you’re using for that is not that good you can only “upvote” things and not “downvote” them, for exemple I just read a suggestion that I don’t like and don’t want to happen and can’t do anything to show it.

I’m personally very fond of Gimp road map. You can look at it and know what will come for next version, next major version and in the distant future.

So 1.x wont break anything major. But what about version 2.x? What for the distant future? What is your general road map. I need something specific, thing you will do not some people idea on what could be done maybe.

I don’t want to make the jump and discover in a year that I’ve made a mistake. I only manage WordPress installation for people that are not tech savy, peopel that have needs for their blogs. If it was just for me I would do it, I do that all the time for me but here I’m making a choice for others, I don’t have the luxury to make a mistake. And WordPress is certainly not a thing I want to use anymore.

Also the only thing I could personally petition is for a build in sitemap generator or if not possible an official plugin. Same thing for SSL … WordPress SSL support is abysmal and I need a plugin to force SSL on all my page.

An other question that I have is “what about plugins?” what do you plan to appeal plugin devs to dev plugins for ClassicPress? Or what can we do to make people devloping for our actual plugins also supporting ClassicPress? I’m not sure what to say to the author of the plugins I use.

You shouldn’t need any force SSL plugin to make your site secure you just change the url in your site settings then use a good search/replace plugin or ideally wp-cli to update all the urls in the database.
Its probably another plugin doing something wrong forcing you to use yet another plugin to force SSL.

I did that from a fresh install just changing the URL in the settings (at that time) didn’t do anything more than having only the index using SSL. That is why I had to install a plugin to do that.

I understand, that being said this is our roadmap. The issue is we are listening to the community and what the community wants. That means we don’t have a concrete roadmap until the community has voted. V1 will be maintained for the foreseeable future so if you decide to stay on V1 (WP 4.9) you are welcome to.

This is by design. If you don’t agree with a petition you are welcome to discuss the reasons why in the comments. Just downvoting wouldn’t achieve anything other than making the person who submitted the petition feel as if they have been silenced (leading to them likely not submitting petitions again in the future).

If you ever discover this, you are welcome to migrate back to WP. This is relatively easy using FTP but we plan to include this feature in our migration plugin.

These would be great petitions to see if the wider community is interested in something like this.

Reaching out to plugin devs, I suggest you read the following discussion:

This is something we are working on, but will take time. We have begun work on the plugin directory and with that we will hopefully start seeing more plugins list support CP.

I think it’s worth emphasizing what @Pross said. You shouldn’t need a plugin to force SSL. WordPress (and, therefore, ClassicPress) supports SSL without any difficulties out of the box so, if you are having problems, you really need to investigate why. Moving to ClassicPress in itself won’t help you with SSL.

I am wondering when you last tried “just changing the URL in the settings”. The reason I ask is that the main reason for SSL not working is images not being loaded over SSL. A couple of years ago, if you had uploaded images while your site was not on SSL, and then changed your site to use SSL, WordPress would still serve the images over a non-SSL connection. That behavior has since been corrected, though, so if that was the cause of your problem, you might find that it has now been solved.

If the problem still persists, then I would look to see what is causing it. Images in your theme is another possibility or, as Pross, says, another plugin.

It might take a while to pinpoint the issue, but it will be worth taking the time to do so to resolve it. Using a plugin to force SSL is not really a long-term solution, and I would very much like you to get the best out of ClassicPress if you move to us (or WordPress, if you don’t).

That won’t prevent people from visiting http addresses. Unfortunately, that will potentially dilute any search data you’re getting as Google will look at your http and https domains as separate properties. A better way (for Apache servers) is to add a couple of lines to .htaccess – this forces everything through SSL and doesn’t require any database search/replace or plugins.

# FORCE SSL CONNECTIONS
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://yourdomain.com/$1 [R,L]

I think a roadmap is a great idea. I’m a big proponent for more organization and top-down planning. We can only do what we’re doing at this point.

I’ve noticed all references to ClassicPress are being removed quickly from the WordPress.org plugin repository and support forums (no real surprise there, just disappointing)…so my guess would be for the near future whatever works with 4.9 will work with CP. That being said for the future, I’m guessing more plugin developers are going to chase after Gutenberg compatibility and go where their bread is buttered unless we can get a few more plugins to fork or support CP openly.

My current and older sites are all CP and doing fine for now. We need more developers and hard-core marketing guys to get behind CP with their full weight (and alot of spare time) to give it more support so it can strengthen to where it needs to be.

A roadmap for the list of confirm feature from petition is a good start.

Update on this: https://make.wordpress.org/support/2018/12/concerning-forks-and-recommendations-on-the-forums/

As mentioned in the post, we encourage anyone having issues with the WP forums to reach out to them on https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ in the #forums channel.

We’ve started working on a roadmap and you can expect that to be posted on the main ClassicPress site soon.

We still have a lot left to do for ClassicPress version 1, but we are also thinking about and planning for the future.

Here are some more specific thoughts about what will go into version 2: Longevity for CP

Please do, as we’ve mentioned here, community contributions are a vital part of our future direction.

We are taking a very long-term view of any improvements here. Start by reading the following petitions:

• https://petitions.classicpress.net/posts/76/finish-the-custom-fields-api
• https://petitions.classicpress.net/posts/103/add-an-object-relationship-table

These are common patterns that appear on almost every site that uses WordPress as a CMS. With these low-level APIs (and more) baked into the core software, plugins will be free to innovate at new levels based on a tested, proven foundation.

Also, adding new low-level APIs this way that extend what is already there instead of replacing it will not break existing sites, by definition.

The rest is up to you (plural, our community of users). You’ve asked us what we’re going to build; now I’ll ask you: what would you like to see in a CMS?