Wherein we changed the CMS.
Changing one's CMS (Content Management Software) is possibly one of the scariest things that a blogger with hundreds of comments, automations, and modifications can possibly do. Although it wasn't a far jump to go from WordPress to ClassicPress. We still took all the precautions and despite lots of warning messages. We're happy to report using the migration tool ran as good on the local beta-mirror as it did in our production site.
Special thank you to @colinstu@birdbutt.com on mastodon for showing me that there IS an option away from WordPress.
Read on if you wish to continue listening to us ranting into oblivion.
What the hell IS ClassicPress?
Their website does a perfect job explaining themselves. But ClassicPress is a fork away from WordPress. Made by a community that didn't like the direction the WordPress CMS was going. Starting off with the Gutenberg block editor. This may be fine if you're an editor who likes to use block-based objects for writing. But for the older crowd who loved the classic editor that reminded us of our LiveJournal days, and how WordPress decided to hide that editor. That was a rather shitty move of WordPress.
There are other things that WordPress implemented and kind of left for dead throughout production. Such as the implementation of Video and Audio files. We, too, had to step away from WordPress and just write up our own HTML5 code when it came to playing local videos and audio. So we may play with ClassicPress's new player to see if it holds up.
One of the biggest things we liked about ClassicPress in particular is its attempt to stay close to the roots of HTML5 instead of relying on JavaScript for basic HTML functionality. It is possibly the most infuriating thing about working with WordPress CMS is to it has an environment that could be JavaScript-free. We did accomplish such a task, but not without throwing a lot of PHP excluded. We are, however, glad we made those changes to our theme because if we didn't, we doubt our migration would've survived.
Honestly, if we were starting a blog for the first time. We would've immediately installed ClassicPress over WordPress. But highly doubt they were around back in October 20th, 2012, when I first started.
Hatred of Automatic/WordPress.
When talking about WordPress, it's hard to talk about some of their recent actions without talking about their Commercial counterpart, which is "Automatic". If you were a first time WordPress user, it's impossible to avoid their products like Akismet which uses a bit of JavaScript in order to get the job done (we use AntiSpamBee which had some JavaScript, but it can be easily removed from the plugin). Or JetPack, which claims to speed up your website by doing a bunch of things that your Apache/Nginx host should've been doing anyway, while at the same time filling a WordPress site with so much bloat that it slows down your entire blog. If you just took the time to go through all the basics of Nginx and Apache, such as caching, compression, and some security concerns. You've outpaced what JetPack could do for you anyway.
Automatic and AI.
As your local techno Luddite, we don't necessarily hate AI entirely. It's a tool. And it's a tool that, if left in your hands that you can control. You can use it to assist you in doing great things. But you see, giving away the keys to the kingdom doesn't make Automatic Money. Their tactics, like many in Silicon Valley, leave AI to be used as a weapon on its customer base. By scraping any information they could from their commercial website wordpress.com . Or, anyone who uses JetPacks AI editor within its plugin.
Remember, if you use AI from a closed-source commercial company to write something. Nothing stops Automatic from stealing all the content off your site to teach their AI. And to us, we feel it's a matter of time before Automatic FORCES the wordpress.org community to embed AI into the base build of WordPress, just like how they forced Gutenberg. Because for a shit narrowband artificial intelligence (It doesn't even deserve the title of AI. It's a Large Language Model.) It requires ALL the information without spending the effort to scrape the internet for it. All while throwing the middle finger at every writer who uses their platform, saying your content's originality is forfeit.
So when faced with the question of who we would trust more. A group of devs that forked WordPress because it was not evolving in ways they liked. Or a group of devs with a commercial cooperation looming over them needing to justify their shit investment into AI?
We're going with the forked WordPress crowd here.
Why not Hugo, Jekyll, or another CMS entirely?
A lot of them didn't have a perfect solution for the comments section, which, despite getting 100–300 attempts a day from spam sites, we still like to keep open. Hugo's option was just to offload comments to someone else and map a plugin for it. There are plugins to make a comments section happen locally, but not without a lot of JavaScript or external script referencing, which to us is a lazy way to dev.
Although we expect breakage. Final Thoughts time.
All things considered, the migration from WordPress went remarkably well! So, Kudos to the team on that front. Even though we got a ton of warnings, the majority of those warnings were almost like IF conditions.. IF I used Gutenberg's block writing system. Or IF i used jQuery extensively. In which we ejected a lot of that a long time ago.
We'll be checking through many pages ourselves, but we also expect breakage to occur. If it does, contact us or leave a comment below.
Until next time. That's what server said.
END OF LINE+++