As of today, TukuToi is officially sponsoring the ClassicPress Project with a yearly recurring sponsorship of USD 250.-
Our contribution includes also assistance in the form of Code submitted to the ClassicPress GitHub repository and several powerful Plugins developed solely for the ClassicPress CMS.
Why TukuToi Sponsors the ClassicPress Project
TukuToi is sponsoring the ClassicPress Project for many reasons.
Mainly, however, because the WordPress platform is diverging from the (in our opinion) ideal path of a CMS. The WordPress Gutenberg project, which has implemented an awful and useless Editing experience, among other goals, is neither developer nor user-friendly. All (!) of the clients TukuToi works with either have a hard time getting their sites built with Gutenberg features or switch entirely back to the Classic Editor.
Further, the Gutenberg project has proven detrimental to several formerly well-known and actively developed Plugins like Toolset. And Gutenberg does not stop there. The Gutenberg Project set itself as a goal to provide native Translation Management in WordPress as well in its last Phase four, thus clearly attempting to take over the entire market of Website Page Builders, Translation Management, and more.
Automattic, the Company “behind” WordPress, clearly follows a schedule to use the Open Source CMS WordPress for their own (financially driven) goals while blatantly ignoring the thousands of voices that spoke and still speak up against the Gutenberg Editor Experience.
Not surprising, perhaps, that since the first time, WordPress market share has been dropping.
What exactly is ClassicPress and who owns it
ClassicPress, forked four years ago off the main WordPress branch, attempts to be a viable alternative. It retains the Classic Editor natively in the CMS and tries to be a secure, fast and bloat less one-stop solution for both professional developers and end users.
Its relatively small community, without big corporations backing it up, has been challenged over the past years but bravely and consistently survived and thrived.
Several useful new features have been added to the CMS (not back ports from WordPress, rather real, developed from scratch new features), and of course, the project is constantly receiving the required Security Updates.
The ClassicPress Project is managed by the ClassicPress Non Profit Initiative. No Big Corps are either backing it up, nor like in the case of WordPress, de-facto owning it.
Admittedly, there have been challenges for the project sourced within itself.
In a recent “shakedown” in the community (challenging the project even more) the former Directorate of the ClassicPress Initiative has resigned and designated a new, committed and active group of Directors.
The new Directorate took the project into its hands and has proven to be very committed to the ClassicPress CMS from the first day. The project since has already gathered over 1000 USD in sponsorships and opened the previously intransparent management and access to resources to the active and committed community.
This might not sound like a lot, but considering the several (wrong) voices calling the project “dead” or “on the rocks”, and considering that the past fours years basically zero dollars were gathered, this is a lot, and speaks for the project’s potentials, if lead properly.
As a first big task to tackle, the new Directorate has initiated works in order for ClassicPress Project to get a Plugins and Themes Directory built with ClassicPress instead of relying on third-party tools.
Strict presence and involvement are now required from the Directorate, and anyone who wants to contribute will have more direct access to the resources to help.
It is planned to organise the project’s server resources in a more manageable way, which until now was almost impossible to manage by several people since one access gave the person access to every single ClassicPress instance – be it main blog or forums.
These are huge and long overdue steps for the community.
For over a year, TukuToi has already contributed to ClassicPress (building the Documentation Hub, providing Plugins, for a specific time reviewing Plugins submitted to the ClassicPress Directory, managing Facebook Profile and more). Due to an undesirable need to every time become vocal to speed up or initiate specific processes that needed direct interaction of the ClassicPress Initiative Directors (some of whom have been absent from the project, despite holding the title and responsibility of Directors), in our opinion, the project was at an impasse.
Proposals, actively accepted by the Community to resolve and facilitate the development and organisation of ClassicPress were met either with silence and non-action or open degrading. Privately, we have been accused of intending to challenge the Directors Seat for our own purposes.
We foresaw that without a massive change in leadership, which now has happened, the project would silently choke on its own.
The future of ClassicPress
With the new Directorate and new, transparent and OSS conform operation procedures, we see a new hope and future on the horizon, which might kick off the project to a level where we can use it for professional purposes.
Long due works on PHP8 compatibility, offloading certain features into Core Plugins, the Themes and Plugins directory are now actively being worked on. With WordPress going nowhere else but into a “Wixx-like” editor for hobby webmasters (no offence intended to anyone having this hobby), ClassicPress becomes the only viable solution for professional web development while retaining the powers of a CMS like WordPress.
Yes, programmers can build every website and project with raw Code. But the end user, or client, needs to be kept in perspective. Someone who runs a website does not necessarily understand PHP code but also does not want to have their website crashing on each change they make in a simple blog post. ClassicPress CMS is an ideal solution.
The web owner can work with an expert PHP programmer. The client can easily manage the website’s content through the CMS features without having to deal with unstable editors like Gutenberg.
With our commitment – in terms of Financial and Coding contribution – we intend and hope for ClassicPress to become a sustainable, well-known and widely used CMS for power users.
We look forward to an open, transparent and stable future for the ClassicPress Project!