ClassicPress

★★★★☆

ClassicPress is a fork of WordPress, launched by people who couldn’t stand the block editor. For a while it was mostly WordPress Without Gutenberg, but they’ve been doing work lately to improve media management and clean up some of the older code that’s just kind of grown organically over the years.

I’ve experimented with it a bit off and on for a couple of years, and put in the effort to ensure my two (very niche) plugins were compatible. A couple of weeks ago I decided to finally migrate some of my blogs, and it’s gone really smoothly!

Pros

• Stable, and familiar to anyone who has used WordPress.
• No need to install the Classic Editor plugin!
• Nice media features including a column that lets you know where an image is actually being used, even if it’s not attached to a post.
• Easy migration from WordPress. You upload a plugin that checks for plugins or themes with known compatibility problems, then press a button and it installs ClassicPress.
• Most WordPress plugins and themes that don’t rely on blocks will work with it.
• A ClassicPress plugin directory and theme directory are available (though you currently have to install a plugin to access it from the dashboard).
• No need to pass a loyalty test in order to log into the support site.*
• It feels snappier so far, but that’s just subjective.
• Plugin developers don’t have to deal with Subversion!

Cons

• The community and plugin/theme ecosystems are a lot smaller.
• Plugins and themes that do rely on blocks (or tie deeply into WordPress code that’s diverged since the fork) won’t work. But you can usually find something comparable to do the job.
• Some plugins that are listed on both the ClassicPress and WordPress directories are out of date on the ClassicPress side.
• Plugin developers do have to deal with GitHub.

My Experience

Like I said, migration was super-easy. I did a couple of local sites first, then my wife’s occasional blog, Feral Tomatoes.

Plugins that work fine so far:

• Antispam Bee (replacing Akismet)
• Broken Link Checker (at least in local mode)
• Contextual Related Posts (replacing Jetpack Related Posts. YARPP should work too, though I haven’t tried it on here yet.)
• Statify (replacing Jetpack Stats)
• WP Super Cache
• Wordfence Security…once I turned off the scan options for modified WordPress core files, anyway. (It thought my site was reaaaaally broken at first!) There’s some debate over how well it works with CP, so I’m going to be keeping an eye on it to see if I run into any other problems.

Various IndieWeb and ActivityPub plugins are reported to be compatible, though I haven’t tested them yet.

• IndieWeb, Syndication Links, and Webmention
• ActivityPub, WebFinger, and NodeInfo(2)

Incompatible plugins:

• Search Regex. I haven’t used it in a while, though, so I figure I’ll wait until I need it before looking for a replacement.
• Yoast SEO. It’s overkill for what I want anyway, so I won’t feel too bad if I have to replace it with another plugin or several smaller ones.

There are still two big, complicated WordPress blogs that I manage that I’d like to move to simpler software, but haven’t settled on a target yet. I’ve been moving posts that are more garden than stream to other parts of my site for a while now (this is also why I’m writing this here and not on my main blog), and started cleaning out old stuff that doesn’t need the longevity (links without commentary, for instance, especially when the remote link is long-dead anyway). That’ll make migration easier, whatever I settle on.

I might use Eleventy, at least for the old archives. But if I do want to keep the online publishing flow (which I definitely need to for the group blog that I don’t post to anymore but still admin), ClassicPress is clearly a good option.