With the demise of Classic Editor - more moving to CP?

As you’re possibly aware, WP will be discontinuing support for the Classic Editor plugin in the next year or so.
There is of course other plugins/ options, but, will these also be disabled?

In your opinion, could this be a good time for ClassicPress to step up to the plate?
Would it be worth investigating possible marketing options?

More importantly, if we presume that a ton of people ‘discover’ CP and start to use it, can the current set up handle it?

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Yes, I think it is an opportunity. I try to bring up CP on Twitter in relevant conversations and Reddit. This also includes commenting on relevant articles like on WP Tavern.

In many cases, once someone learns CP exists they do tend to switch. Not always, but they do. The main barriers are the lack of plugins they need, but this is slowly becoming less of a problem since our community developers are building and forking plugins. Plus, more WP developers are making their plugins compatible with CP and some even switch to CP.

One big problem with the classic editor, TinyMCE itself, is that it uses an old outdated, and no longer supported version. How long will it work? It will get to the point when the browser changes or some incompatible core JS might break it. WP will most likely not upgrade it, it’s too much work and they are moving in a different direction.

CP, on the other hand, begun experimental work on upgrading TinyMCE to version 5. You can already test it using the experimental plugin and provide feedback. This, unfortunately, will be a breaking change upgrade. Some backward compatibility will be provided, but most likely WP plugins using TinyMCE will face issues if they don’t upgrade too.

We probably should do some blog posts around these issues. That will be good to share on social media. Help writing blog posts is always appreciated! However, the biggest thing we need to continue to do is to bring up CP as much as possible in conversations. Right now the main problem is still basic awareness that CP exists.

If anyone has any additional ideas, please do share.

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As long as millions of people are still using it, WP probably won’t stop supporting the Classic Editor. They’ll just keep extending it year by year. My guess is that it won’t be until WP 6.x that they actually pull the plug on it.

Within just a few weeks Classic Editor was a top 5 WP plugin – not a single plugin in WP history has ever experienced this type of adoption rate. Trust in WP has been going downhill for years and I don’t think they’ll take it further down the hill by abandoning those millions of users until they have millions of new users to offset it. Of course, nobody will be surprised if Matt pulls yet another “hold my beer and watch this” on the community. So, who knows.

Everything you see here is because “ClassicPress” (meaning the community, really) has already stepped up.

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Yes :slight_smile:

Our release downloads, API servers, etc are ready to handle at least 100x more traffic today. The first thing we would likely have to upgrade (again) would be this forum installation, and we are ready to take on these kinds of tasks before they start causing issues.

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I’m still seriously thinking about starting a blog dedicated to CP publishing… or maybe a blog about web publishing using CP and a couple other non-competing web publishing platforms.

Since I’m a newcomer, I’m not sure if I really want to dig in deep into the history of WordPress and ClassicPress, and that is surely a requirement (in my view) if I start a blog dedicated to CP alone.

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To them this is just a numbers game. They don’t really care about the people. I once read an article in WP Tavern (written a few years ago) that is pushing for Gutenberg, and when someone commented and pointed out the huge number of people installing the Classic Editor, the post author arrogantly said that these people are just “a drop in the ocean.”

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This is good.

Personally, I believe in being thoroughly prepared for any important task, even at the cost of seeing no tangible evidence of success for quite a while. (Being here, even for a short time, has shown me that this community thinks in a similar way.)

I would hate for millions of people to suddenly discover CP… only to realize that the CMS (and the community behind it) are unable to support them.

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