A lot of people have a lot of things to say about ClassicPress:
“It’s stupid”
“I don’t see a point”
“It’s a waste of time”
I would like for them to “see” the point, that’s why I wanted to ask you:
Why do you use ClassicPress instead of WordPress? Especially why ClassicPress instead of WordPress with Classic Editor and Classic Widgets plugins?
What is the “point” of using ClassicPress to you?
Please share a few words to help everyone outside looking into our ClassicPress community better understand why we use ClassicPress. Link to your ClassicPress website or websites. This is a great opportunity to share your work and connect with other ClassicPress users.
Do note, I may quote you on the website with credit/link to your website.
Let’s hear it.
This is not the place to criticize ClassicPress or tell us why you stopped using it. Feedback belongs in the community feedback forum or Github.
Using it on a few projects because of earlier mentioned small ecosystem and:
it’s faster loading
look and feel of the ‘old’ Wordpress, ease of use
adding an extra plugin (ClassicEditor) to deactivate functionality doesn’t make sense apart from that the Classic Editor will most certainly one day be gone.
I switched both my sites to ClassicPress over a year ago. Before that I kept stripping all the crap and bloat from WordPress but got tired of doing so.
So I switched happily.
My sites are faster and more responsive now. Most plugins work just as well. I’ve also switched from WooCommerce to Classic Commerce, which has been a great ‘upgrade’ too.
On the surface you won’t see the difference with ClassicPress vs WordPress but having the lighter ClassicPress works so much faster and better… and best of all, no crappy Gutenberg block editor.
no appetite what. so. ever. for the goofy [REDACTED] ‘gubenborg’ “block editor” - haven’t played with blocks since i was a kid, don’t intend to have them forced down my throat now (truth be told though, i miss playing with blocks, but that’s just between you 'n me, k?)
don’t like the “woke”, “politically correct”, direction WordPress is heading
it sure seems like WordPress has become more and more disconnected from the community over the years (and reality too)
ClassicPress offers websites the ability to keep the separation of content and presentation. This is essential in running multiple authored websites to maintain a consistent look and feel across an entire website and brand. The last thing businesses need is every author creating their own style and look for every page and post they write.
To add something that was not mentioned yet: the community is Supportive, Friendly. The main cause for me to switch to CP from WP (in august 2019) was: the fresh ideas and ideals CP introduced were captive for me.
I have also a parallel WP site now. CP is perfoming faster (roughly 1.5x at backend). The test plugins and also stopwatch show that the core, even the theme is perfoming much faster. I have to add that the theme (WeaverXtreme) could be one of the best optimized; it means that even the best coders cannot make a theme to work so smoothly in more bloated WP. One can expect to switch out the bloat from the WordPress core one does not need, but who could remove it from the theme (or plugins)? And every bloated code in web adds workload to servers, to home computers or phones; and it consumes more energy. I can handle CP backend also with a 13-14 years old two-core laptop with simple Intel graphic, but with Gutenberg blocks one would need much more powerful graphic and CPU!
It is like that: once You buye a new phone, You want more speedy internet. Then You download more stuff, and make bigger videos (with better resolution). So, You would need soon a new hard drive, and also new phone to accommodate this stuff. And You need more speedy graphic and cooling for PC. And what the good of more pixels withot new 40…50 inch 4K monitor? And then You need a bigger table also. And then also a bigger office/room. And maybe also bigger home. And then You have to pay more, You need better salary also. And then You have to move into bigger city, to get a better salary. And then You need a cottage far from the city to regain your health and energy. And then You would find out: the old phone is still working better (for simple voice-calls) there at countryside.
Let’s call that “a vicious progress circle”. Mostly extensive progress (it depends, of course, of each one, how do we use the fruits of it).
Without blocks (personal) internet would not grow so fast. Once I tried also to build web with simple HTML (without any CMS, even without ClassicPress). One would never build gigantic web-labyrinths with pure HTML, where a visitor would get lost! CP gives us a more balanced output, less tinkles, yet one gets all that is really needed.
There is one more important point: the old-fashioned internet is more accesible, especially with impaired vision. I think the gradation would be: html > css > javascript. The more we tend to use the latters, the harder it becomes to achieve decent accessibility. A site with pure html – how easy to navigate with screenreader! (Having myself quite a good vision I have used them for testing a lot. Yet one could never know when one would be in need of using a screenreader, let it be because of age.)
This (separation of content and presentation) has been my reason for using ClassicPress over WordPress from the beginning. It’s also the reason I believe CP’s most important user base is designer/developers who create custom post types, custom fields, and specialized templates to manage presentation in the context of a multi-author business/organization website; post authors in that environment generally aren’t capable of doing those things.
IMO, WordPress is OK for individual users/small companies who run their own websites and don’t mind the time it takes to mix content and design in their posting process (and don’t know any better or any different).
Simplicity. Over the years WP got more complex, heavier, requiring more time and effort. I’ve been looking at CP for a while. I had to downgrade my WP installation version today, but I finally took the plunge. This is my first post. I have concerns: security, themes, learning curve for the twists and turns. But I’m ready for it. I have multiple sites in two languages so I started on a small one. Thanks for everyone’s work.
We’re here to help. So don’t be afraid to ask. This is very good feedback, we can try to focus on easing these concerns with content on the website and documentation. Our new directory that’s coming, will include themes. So you’ll finally be able to find them in one place.
Thanks very much. I’m still reading a lot of the forum and learning, so I feel a need to have some basic info before asking, so I don’t ask things already resolved and mentioned. I just installed wp-statistics, so I guess we start from zero there, right? Oh, will have a suggestion as to a simple theme that I’ve used on several of my sites, whose developer has stopped worked on it.
Back in the day WordPress was a brilliant feet of programming excellence, used by people all over, different languages and races, different political ldaoligys and faths.
The community around it was professional, mature and able to keep hubris and ego in check, they were honest and had integrity and it was about having a simple and secure tool that could be used by anyone.
Power corrupts.
As WordPress became more well known like all things entropy set in and it stoped being about having a tool that could be used by anyone, it stoped being about how far the code could be used to create somthing simple, beautiful and secure.
The rot of politics and greed set in and WordPress became what it is today, an insecure lump of bloatware.
This issue goes beyond just WordPress of couse, this issue is in most modern technology today, it stoped being about how far a simple line of code could be used to create beautiful program’s and became a hideous monster.
I use ClassicPress instead of Wordpress because of Gutenburg. I shouldn’t have to do a search when I need to remember how to share an embedded video or audio player. Once I switched to ClassicPress, the speed boost was awesome too! WEEEEEE!!!
I use ClassicPress because I don’t like Gutenberg. I tried it and didn’t like it. I disliked the attitude WP developers took toward users like me. I disliked the fact they pushed something into core that was nowhere near ready but refused to admit it.
For me, keeping CMS lightweight is important and I do not want any new features added to the CMS’s core. Sure, WordPress may seem secure, but then adding new features could introduce more vulnerabilities, so I want it to be kept to the minimum for blogging and commenting. However, I can imagine it would be difficult for developers to make ClassicPress compatible with PHP 8 and even 8.1, but then there is a RC version of CP 1.5 with support for PHP 8 and not 8.1. I’m still sticking with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for the time being.
Otherwise, ClassicPress is perfect for not requiring frequent updates unless security vulnerabilities at its core become critical to the point that I need to update CP right away. What I do not mind not having in ClassicPress is XML-RPC and REST API, but some users might need it as part of the core, but for me? Nah.
I am a relatively recent convert. I’ve been using WP for a long time, and it keeps getting worse with each release. With each and every site I’m managing for a client, I have had to construct an elaborate ritual of functions.php edits etc to keep wordpress lean. Classicpress seems to offer that lean, streamlined high performance classic Wordpress experience out of the box for me. My only concern is regarding things like plugin compatibility – IMO some essential tools, like metabox/CPT plugins, email marketing plugins etc should be available in the ClassicPress ecosystem to make it easier for people to switch over.
For me, it is a question of simplicity. I have been with WordPress a long, long time, and for a while it was no great challenge to keep up with things and have my site behave the way I wanted it to. The arrival of blocks, in particular, was for me a step too far. I don’t need that functionality, I just need a much simpler set of technologies that allow me to publish straightforward articles and podcasts. I have toyed with static site generators in the past, and other CMS, and I am sticking with CP because it seems to offer what I need and only what I need.
I am a bit worried about the future, because CP is essentially a volunteer effort, and while I am happy to support CP with a donation, I do wonder whether there are ways to make it more self-sustaining. One possibility, which squares with concerns others have raised about plugins, would be to have more of a marketplace for plugins. I would be much more willing to pay for efficient and fully functioned plugins designed for CP than I ever was for WP, where the proliferation of plugins and copycats makes it very difficult to be sure one has made a good choice.
