classicpress – Dan Q

WordPress to ClassicPress

As I mentioned in my recent Blog Questions Challenge, I recently switched my blog from WordPress, which it had been running on for over 20 years of its 26 year history, to ClassicPress.¹ I’m aware that I’m not the only person for whom ClassicPress might be a better fit than WordPress², so I figured I should share the process by which I undertook the change.

Switching from WordPress to ClassicPress

Switching from WordPress to ClassicPress should be a non-destructive, 100% reversible process, but (even though I’ve got solid backups) I wasn’t ready to trust that, so I decided to operate on a copy of my site. I’m glad I did, because there were a couple of teething issues I needed to tackle before I could launch.

1. Duplicating the site

I took a simple approach to duplicating the site: (1) I copied the site directory, and (2) I copied the database, and (3) I set up a new subdomain to use for testing. Here’s how I did each step:

1.1. Copying the site directory

This should’ve been simple, but a du -sh revealed that my /wp-content/uploads directory is massive (I should look into that) and I didn’t want to clone it. And I didn’t want r need to clone my /wp-content/cache directory either. So I ran:

rsync -av --exclude=wp-content ./old-site-directory/ ./new-site-directory/ to copy everything except wp-content, and then
rsync -av --exclude=uploads --exclude=cache ./old-site-directory/wp-content/ ./new-site-directory/wp-content/ to copy wp-content except the uploads and cache subdirectories, and then finally
ln -s ./old-site-directory/wp-content/uploads ./new-site-directory/wp-content/uploads to symlink the uploads directory, sharing it between the two sites

1.2. Copying the database

I just piped mysqldump into mysql to clone from one database to the other:

mysqldump -uUSERNAME -p --lock-tables=false old-site-database | mysql -uUSERNAME -p new-site-database

I edited DB_NAME in wp-config.php in the new site’s directory to point it at the new database.

1.3. Setting up a new subdomain

My DNS is already configured with a wildcard to point (almost) all *.danq.me subdomains to this server already. I decided to use the name classicpress-testing.danq.me as my temporary/test domain name. To keep any “changes” to my cloned site to a minimum, I overrode the domain name in my wp-config.php rather than in my database, by adding the following lines:

define('WP_HOME','https://classicpress-testing.danq.me');
define('WP_SITEURL','https://classicpress-testing.danq.me');

Because I use Caddy/FrankenPHP as my webserver³, configuration was really easy: I just copied the relevant part of my Caddyfile (actually an include), changed the domain name and the root, and it just worked, even provisioning me out a LetsEncrypt SSL certificate. Magical⁴.

2. Switching the duplicate to ClassicPress

Now that I had a duplicate copy of my blog running at https://classicpress-testing.danq.me/, it was time to switch it to ClassicPress. I started by switching my wp-admin colour scheme to a different one in my cloned site, so it’d be immediately visually-obvious to me if I’d accidentally switched and was editing the “wrong” site (I also made sure I was logged-out of my primary, live site, so I was confident I wouldn’t break anything while I was experimenting!).

ClassicPress provides a migration plugin which checks for common problems and then switches your site from WordPress to ClassicPress, so I installed it and ran it. It said that everything was okay except for my (custom) theme and a my self-built plugins, which it understandably couldn’t check compatibility of. It recommended that I install Twenty Seventeen – the last WordPress default theme to not require the block editor – but I didn’t do so: I was confident that my theme would work anyway… and if it didn’t, I’d want to fix it rather than switch theme!

And then… it all broke.

3. Fixing what broke

After swiftly doing a safety-check that my live site was still intact, I started trying to work out why my site wasn’t broken. Debugging a ClassicPress PHP issue is functionally identical to debugging a similar WordPress issue, for obvious reasons: check the logs, work out what’s broken, realise it’s a plugin, disable that plugin while you investigate further, etc.

In my case, the “blocking” issues were:

Jetpack: this plugin does not play nicely with ClassicPress, presumably because it fails if it’s unable to register a block. Fortunately, I wasn’t actually using Jetpack for anything other than for VaultPress (which has saved my butt on at least one occasion and whose praises I sing), so I uninstalled Jetpack and installed the standalone plugin version of VaultPress instead, which worked fine.
EWWW Image Optimizer: I use this plugin to pregenerate WebP variants of my images, which I then serve using webserver rules. It’s not a complex job, and I should probably integrate the feature into my theme at some point, but for now I use this plugin. Version 8.0.0 of the plugin doesn’t work on ClassicPress 2.3.1, so I used WP-CLI to downgrade to the last version that does (7.7.0), and then it worked fine.
Dan’s Geocaching Log Reposter: a self-made plugin that copies my logs from geocaching websites stopped working properly, which I think is because ClassicPress is doing a more-aggressive job than WordPress at nonce validation on admin REST endpoints? I put a quick hack into my plugin to work around it, but I’ll need to look into this properly at some point.
Some other bits of my stack, e.g. CapsulePress (my Gemini/Spartan/Nex server), have their own copies of my database credentials, because I’ve been too lazy to centralise them into environment variables, and needed updating (but not until live switchover time).

Everything else worked fine, as far as I’ve determined in the weeks that have followed. My other plugins, which include Advanced Editor Tools (I should probably look into Enriched Editor), Antispam Bee, Google Authenticator, IndieAuth, Post Kinds, Post Snippets, Regenerate Thumbnails, Syndication Links, Webmention, WebSub, and WP-SCSS all “just worked”.

4. Completing the switchover

I ran the two sites in-parallel for a couple of weeks, with the ClassicPress one as a “read only” version (so I didn’t pollute my uploads directory!), but it was pretty unnecessary because it all worked pretty seamlessly, despite my complex stack of custom code. When I wanted to switch for-real, all I needed to do was swap the domain names over in my Caddyfile and edit the wp-config.php of my ClassicPress installation: step 1.3, but in reverse!

If you hadn’t been told⁵, you probably wouldn’t have even known I’d made a change: I suppress basically all infrastructure-identifying headers from my server output as a matter of course, and ClassicPress and WordPress are functionally-interchangeable from a front-end perspective⁶.

So what’s difference?

From my experience, here are the differences I’ve discovered since switching from WordPress to ClassicPress:

The good stuff

😅 ClassicPress has no Gutenberg/block editor. This would absolutely be a showstopper for many people, and that’s fine: I have nothing against the block editor (I use it basically every day elsewhere!), but I’ve never really used it on danq.me and don’t feel the need to change that! My theme, my workflow, and my custom plugins are all geared around the perfectly-good “classic” editor, and so getting a more-lightweight CMS by removing a feature I wasn’t using anyway falls somewhere between neutral and a blessing.
⚡The backend is fast again! One of the changes the ClassicPress team have been working on applying to WordPress is to strip out jQuery and other redundancies from the backend, and I love how much faster and lighter my editor interface is as a result. (With caveat; see below!)
🔌Virtually everything “just works”. With the few exceptions described above, everything works exactly as it does under WordPress. Which is what you’d hope for a fork that’s mostly “WordPress, but without the block editor”, right, but it’s still reassuring (and, for me, an essential feature). There are a few “new” features to do with paging through posts and the media library and they’re fine, I suppose, but not by themselves worth switching for (though it might be nice to backport them into WordPress!).

The bad stuff

🏷️ Adding tags to posts takes a step backwards. A side-effect of dropping jQuery is the partial loss of the autocomplete feature when selecting tags to add to a post. You still get a partial autocomplete, but not after typing a comma: you need to press enter to submit the tag you were writing and then start typing them next, which frankly sucks. This is because they’re relying on a <datalist>, which isn’t as full-featured as the Javascript solution WordPress employs. This bugs me almost enough to be a showstopper, but I gather it’s getting fixed in a near-future version.
🗺️ You’re in uncharted territory when things go wrong. One great benefit of WordPress is the side-effects of its ubiquity. If you have a query or a problem you can throw a stone at your favourite search engine and get a million answers… and some of them will even be right! If you have a problem in ClassicPress and it’s not shared with (or you’re not sure if it’s shared with) WordPress… you’re mostly on your own. The forums are good and friendly, but if you want a quick answer to something, you’re likely to have to roll your sleeves up and open some source code. I don’t mind this at all – when I first started using WordPress, this was the case, too! – but it might be a showstopper for some folks.

In summary: I’m enjoying using ClassicPress, even where there are rough edges. For me, 99% of my experience with it is identical to how I used WordPress anyway, it’s relatively lightweight and fast, and it’s easy enough to switch back if I change my mind.

Footnotes

¹ It saddens me that I have to keep clarifying this, but I feel like I do: my switch from WordPress to ClassicPress is absolutely nothing to do with any drama in the WordPress space that’s going on right now: in fact, I’d been planning to try it out since before any of the drama appeared. I appreciate that some people making a similar switch, including folks who use this blog post as a guide, might have different motivations to me, and that’s fine too. Personally, I think that ditching an installation of open-source WordPress based on your interpretation of what’s going on in the ecosystem is… short-sighted? But hey: the joy of open source is you can – and should! – do what you want. Anyway: the short of it is – the desire to change from WordPress to ClassicPress was, for me, 100% a technical decision and 0% a political one. And I’ll thank you for leaving any of your drama at the door if you slide into my comments, ta!

² Matt recently described ClassicPress as “the last decent fork attempt for WordPress”, and I absolutely agree. There’s been a spate of forks and reimplementations recently. I’ve looked into many of them and been… very much underwhelmed. Want my hot take? Sure, here you go: AspirePress is all lofty ideas and no deliverables. FreeWP seems to be the same, but somehow without the lofty ideas. ForkPress is a ghost. Speaking of ghosts, Ghost isn’t a WordPress fork; they have got some cool ideas though. b2evolution is even less a WordPress fork but it’s pretty cool in its own right. I’m not sure what clamPress is trying to achieve but I’ve not given it a serious look. So yeah: ClassicPress is, in my mind, the only WordPress fork even worth consideration at this point, and as I describe in this blog post: it’s not for everybody.

³ I switched from Nginx over the winter and it’s been just magical: I really love Caddy’s minimal approach to production configuration. The only thing I’ve been able to fault it on is that it’s not capable of setting up client-side SSL certificate authentication on a path, only on an entire domain, which meant I needed to reimplement the authentication mechanism I use on a small part of my (non-blog) internal infrastructure.

⁴ To be fair, it wouldn’t have been hard if I’d still be using Nginx, because I’d set up Certbot to use DNS-based vertification to issue me wildcard SSL certificates. But doing this in Caddy still felt magical.

⁵ And assuming you don’t religiously check my colophon page.

⁶ Indeed, I wouldn’t have considered a switch to ClassicPress in the first place if it wasn’t a closely-aligned-enough fork that I retained the ability to flip-flop between the two to my heart’s content! I’ve loved WordPress for over two decades; that’s not going to change any time soon… and if e.g. ClassicPress ceased tracking WordPress releases and the fork diverged too far for my comfort, I’d probably switch back to regular old WordPress!

Reply to Ed Catmull on Change

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Matt Mullenweg said:

…

[a quote from Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc.] made me think a lot about the early days of Gutenberg and the huge resistance it had in the community, including causing the fork of ClassicPress. Now that we’re much further along there’s a pretty widespread acceptance of Gutenberg, and it’s responsible for the vast majority of all WP posts and pages made, however if we had taken a vote for whether it should happen or not, it probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the ground.

What’s funny is if you go back even further, using a visual WYSIWYG editor in the first place was very controversial, and many people didn’t want the classic editor brought into WordPress.

Matt Mullenweg

Long-term WordPresser here; I remember when 2.0 integrated TinyMCE and it was absolutely necessary to ensure that raw HTML editing remained an option, clear and up-front. Which I’m glad of: I probably hit raw HTML about once a month when I’m blogging, to this day!

I was among those who strongly resisted Gutenberg. Nowadays I use it every day! But my primary personal blog, which was already almost six years old when it migrated to WordPress 1.2 back in 2004, still uses the classic editor. I enjoy that I have the freedom to do that.

When we talk about open source meaning freedom, this is the kind of thing we mean. Years ago, I was in charge of the CMS for a major academic institution when the company behind that CMS made a gradual and concerted effort to become less-open-source. That CMS didn’t have the ecosystem and community around it that WordPress has, and so no forks took off, and so my employer got locked-in to upgrading to a new version that was mostly-closed-source and was in some ways inferior. Ugh.

(Incidentally, I got them off that CMS: they’re now using a mixture of WordPress and Drupal for most of their systems. Open source won.)

Change isn’t always good. But open source provides the freedom to embrace change in the way that suits you best.

The Continuum

Last week, I discovered Geneveive Raine‘s “The Continuum”, a super-compressed image comprised of 1-pixel-tall versions of her home page’s daily banners, stitched together¹.

I thought it was a beautiful idea, so I ~~stole~~ adapted it to produce an illustration based on the featured images of my blog posts:

Extremely tall diagram consisting of 2,062 horizontal lines in a variety of different colours, each representing a different blog post. — Only about 38% of my 5,445 blog posts have featured images suitable for use in this diagram. But here they are!

I generated a horizontal version too, but I’ve used the vertical version above because it’s more-suitable for use with a HTML imagemap².

Here’s the code I used to generate the images (and the imagemap), if you want to run it against your own WordPress-ish blog.

Footnotes

¹ Which was in-turn inspired by Movie Iris, a tool that visualises the frames of a movie as a radial graphic.

² What’s a HTML imagemap, you ask? You don’t need to ask: you shouldn’t be using it anyway. Relying on it means you’re setting yourself up for an accessibility nightmare. Anyway: I used one above: you can click on any “stripe” of the image to jump to the corresponding post. It needed some fighting-with because imagemaps can’t work with rescaled images, so I’ve forced the height of the image even as it resizes horizontally. Not that you’re going to click on the stripes anyway: it’s just about the worst way imaginable to navigate a blog.

Blog Questions Challenge

Since Kev Quirk made an adaptation of Ava‘s Blog Questions Challenge I’ve been seeing it everywhere in my blogosphere circle. I’ve gotta be the last person left on Earth to do it, but it has that old-school pass-it-along meme feel, like that 2006 one about describing your friends. I’ve not been tagged by name, but both Jeremy and Garrett did a broad “you” tag, so I’m taking it.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It felt like a natural evolution of my second vanity-site. It was 1998, and my site – Castle of the Four Winds – was home to a selection of the same kinds of random crap that everybody put on their homepages at the time. I figured I’d start keeping an online diary: the word “blog” hadn’t been coined yet, and its predecessor “weblog” had only been around for a year and I hadn’t come across it.

So I experimentally started posting a few times a week.

By the way, if you liked how my site looked back in the 1990s, you can wind the clock back! Give it a go!

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

1998: Static HTML and a bit of Perl

When I started blogging my site was almost entirely plain HTML². So my original “platform” was probably Emacs.

2000: Static files indexed by PHP

In the Summer of 2000 I registered avangel.com and moved my diary there. I was still storing posts in static files, but used PHP wrappers to share the structure and menus across the pages. It was a massive improvement.

Later, I moved everything to the (ill-advised?) domain name scatmania.org and reimplemented in pretty-much the same way. Until…

2003: Flip

The first real “blogging engine” I used was Flip.

I liked Flip³: it had a raw simplicity that I’d later come to love in young versions of WordPress. And being able to edit from the Web was a huge improvement over having to edit files, especially when I was out and about: I managed to post from my dad’s BlackBerry while cycling across the Outer Hebrides, for example.

2004: WordPress

I’d have outgrown Flip eventually, but I got a nudge in that direction in July 2004. At the time, I was sharing a server with some friends and operated by Gareth, and something went wrong and the server went completely offline. The co-located server disappeared back to Gareth’s house, eventually, and while I’d recovered many of the posts from my own backups, 61 posts remain partially-incomplete to this day (if you happen to have a copy of any of them I’d love to see it!).

I brought my blog back online using WordPress, whose then-new release version 1.2 included an RSS-powered importer: this allowed me to write a little code to convert my entire previous archive into a fat RSS file and then import it wholesale. WordPress was, as remains, pretty magical – a universal blogging platform that evolved into a universal CMS – and I back in the day I occasionally argued online with Matt about technical aspects of the future direction of the project⁴.

Incidentally, if you’d like to see more of my blog’s design history over the last 26+ years, I shared a lot of screenshots back in 2018.

If you didn’t know better, you might well not know I’m running WordPress. My theme and custom plugins are… well, they’re an ecosystem all by themselves. And that’s before you even get to things like CapsulePress, my WordPress-to-Gopher/Gemini/Spartan/Nex bridge, the pile of scripts I use to sync-up with the Fediverse, the PWA I use to post notes while I’m on the move, and so on.

2025: ClassicPress

Earlier this year I experimentally switched to ClassicPress; a fork of WordPress. There’ll doubtless be lots more to say about that, down the line⁵, but here’s the skinny: I don’t use Gutenberg on my blog anyway⁶, I appreciate having my backend be almost as high-performance as I’ve worked to make my frontend, and I enjoy most of the feature differences⁷.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

With the exception of notes (most of which are written in a tool of my own creation and then pushed to one or both of my Mastodon and my blog simultaneously), I mostly write right into the WordPress/ClassicPress post editor.

I often write ideas, concepts, and first drafts into my Obsidian notebook and then copy/paste out when the time comes.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

There’s no particular pattern, though it feels like I’m most-inspired to write exactly when I should be prioritising something else! That’s why it’s so helpful to be able to write three sentences into Obsidian and then come back to it later!

I’ve been on a bit of a blogging kick these last few years, though. Last year I wrote a massive 436 posts, although that admittedly includes PESOS‘d checkins from geocaching and geohashing expeditions. I’m a fan of Kev’s #100DaysToOffload challenge, and I’m on course to achieve it earlier than ever before, this year (my sixth consecutive year: I do the challenge strictly by calendar years!), as this post is already by 48th… all within the first 38 days of this year⁸.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

A mixture of both. Probably most of my posts are written in a single sitting… or, at least, are written in a tab that stays open for the entire time during which it’s written.

But others spend a long time in-progress. You remember how almost a year ago I gave a talk about why Oxford’s area code is 01865? And I promised that there’d be a blog/vlog/maybe-podcast version of that talk later? Yeah: that’s been 90%-there and sitting in a draft pretty-much since then, just waiting for me to make the finishing touches (and record the vlog/podcast variants, if that’s the direction I decide to go in).

And I’ve dusted off drafts that’ve been much older than that, before, too. So it really is a mixture.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I couldn’t pick out a favourite that I wouldn’t change my mind about five minutes later. But a recent favourite might have been last Spring’s “Let Your Players Lead The Way”, which aimed to impart some of the things I’ve learned about gamemastering (especially) while being the dungeon master for The Levellers these last few years⁹.

Not only was it a post that had been a long time coming, and based on months of drafts and re-drafts, but also I really enjoyed writing some post-specific CSS to give it just a slightly more-magical feel.

Screenshot from Let Your Players Lead The Way, showcasing its design in the style of the D&D Players' Handbook. — The downside is that I’ve now got one more thing to try not to break the next time I re-write my blog’s stylesheet.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I want to redesign the homepage to be simpler, less-graphical, and more-informational. I’m not sure how that’s going to look, yet.

I’ve been wondering about integrating some of my personal-geotracking into the design (Aaron Parecki does an amazing job of this with his dynamic site background image, for example).

I’m playing with the idea of adding a guestbook, like it’s 1998 again or something.

I’d like to tidy up my tagging taxonomy, and I’m not convinced AI is up to the task.

I need to decide how I feel about the emoji reactions feature I added in 2023. I’m still undecided. What do you think? 👍? 👎?

And as I mentioned: I’m experimenting with ClassicPress. It’s working out mostly-okay so far, but that’s a story for another post.

Next?

I feel like I’m the last person in the universe to do this quiz. But if you haven’t – and you have anything approximating a blog – then you should go next.

Footnotes

¹ I wouldn’t recommend actually reading my older posts, though. I was a teenager, and it shows.

² I had a slightly-fancier kind of hosting, by this point, that gave me a cgi-bin directory into which I could compile binaries (in C) or write scripts (in Perl). My hit counter? That was a Perl script I adapted from Matt Wright’s counter.pl and “enhanced” with some flaming text using Corel Photo-Paint.

³ While writing this post, I hunted down the original developer of Flip. He seems cool.

⁴ A year later he launched WordPress.com, which then evolved into the foundation of Automattic, and there soon came a point where I thought “I should work there, someday!” It took me a further 14 years before I applied for such a job, though.

⁵ Right off the bat, though, let me stress that trying ClassicPress is absolutely nothing to do with the drama in the WordPress space right now: in fact I’ve been planning to give it a try ever since the project got its shit together, re-forked WordPress, and released ClassicPress 2.0 a year ago.

⁶ I don’t have anything against Gutenberg – I use it on other blogs, and every day at work! – and Block Themes are magical… but I’ve never found any benefit to them here: I’ve no need for it, and I’ve got plugins I’ve written for my own use that I’ve never bothered to make Gutenberg-compatible.

⁷ My biggest gripe with ClassicPress so far is that in removing the jQuery dependency on the post editor’s tag selector they’ve only replaced it with a <datalist>, which is neat and all but kills the ability to autocomplete multiple comma-separated tags at once. But it looks like that’s getting fixed, so I’m going to hang in there for a bit before I decide whether I’m sticking with ClassicPress or not.

⁸ I’ll save you from doing the maths: if I complete 48 posts in 38 days, I’d expect to complete 100 posts on my 80th day: as it’s not a leap year, that would be Friday 21 March 2025. Let’s see how I get on!

⁹ Although I’ve been horribly neglecting them for the last couple of months, for various reasons.