ClassicPress
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ClassicPress is a fork of WordPress, launched by people who couldnât stand the block editor. For a while it was mostly WordPress Without Gutenberg, but theyâve been doing work lately to improve media management and clean up some of the older code thatâs just kind of grown organically over the years.
Iâve 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 itâs 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 itâs 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 donât 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 thatâs just subjective.
- Plugin developers donât 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 thatâs diverged since the fork) wonât 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- Some plugins that are listed on both the ClassicPress and WordPress directories are out of date on the ClassicPress side.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.
ClassicPress also limits your login cookies with SameSite=strict
. This is good! If you click on a malicious link to your site, itâll log you out instead of accepting the cross-site forged request! But itâs a bit annoying in that I can no longer click on actual links to my dashboard from my local start page on the LAN, or from my own email when using webmail (or Operaâs mail client, oddly enough).
My Experience
Like I said, migration was super-easy. I did a couple of local sites first, then my wifeâs occasional blog, Feral Tomatoes. Then I had to do some research on plugin compatibility before migrating the behemoth** that is K-Squared Ramblings, which turned out to be a lot simpler than I expected!
Plugins that work fine so far:
- ActivityPub
- 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 havenât tried it on here yet.)
- Statify (replacing Jetpack Stats)
- Syndication Links
- WP Super Cache.
- Wordfence SecurityâŠonce I turned off the scan options for modified WordPress core files, anyway. (It thought my site was reaaaaally broken at first!) Thereâs some debate over how well it works with CP, so Iâm going to be keeping an eye on it to see if I run into any other problems.
Contextual Related Posts and WP Super Cache have since changed the minimum required WordPress version, but they do still work with ClassicPress. You just have to use something like WP Version Modifier for CP to tell plugins that youâre using a newer WordPress.
Various IndieWeb and ActivityPub plugins are reported to be compatible, and they didnât deactivate when I converted the site, but I havenât really tested them yet.
- IndieWeb
- Webmention
- WebFinger
- NodeInfo(2)
Incompatible plugins:
- Search Regex. I havenât used it in a while, though, so I figure Iâll wait until I need it before looking for a replacement.
- Yoast SEO. Itâs overkill*** for what I want anyway, so I donât feel too bad about replacing it. The Classic SEO plugin includes all the features Iâm using Yoast for, and W3P SEO offers most of them. I may still switch to a collection of smaller, focused plugins in the long run, but I was able to migrate immediately by just swapping in Classic SEO!
I might still move the older posts to Eleventy, but at least itâs on a simpler platform now than it used to be, and itâs shown no sign of new problems yet.
That leaves one more gigantic, complicated blog: Speed Force. Itâs got some additional complications like co-authors so that more than one person can be credited on a single post, and subscriptions through Jetpack. So itâs going to need some more research before I migrate that one.