ClassicPress

Reflections on a year of using ClassicPress

Last December, I migrated from WordPress to ClassicPress. Matt Mullenweg was shattering the once vibrant community with every post and interview, and at the peak it seemed his noisy irrelevant rants and gatekeeping by withholding services from people he disagreed with arrived almost daily.

ClassicPress offers an alternative for projects that don’t benefit from from full-site-editing and the block editor. ClassicPress launched in August of 2018, with the intention of continuing a lightweight content management experience predictable for content contributors, site maintainers and visitors.

Around this time I was also craving a simple platform for blogging and communicating my thoughts, free of gimmicks and feature bloat. I could just post a status update or blog post and move on with my day.

Happily my only setback was not informing my web hosting environment that I had migrated to WordPress, this led to a conflict when cPanel forced an unwanted upgrade back to WordPress. Thankfully An Honest Host, has great customer service and we worked through restoring from a recent backup and modified my install for ClassicPress preventing the problem in the future. Read the migration documentation and get ahead of any possible conflicts.

Thank you, ClassicPress, for a great 2025.

OpenGraph Support Testing

My migration to ClassicPress just a couple days old I took notice of some of the areas to customize my experience. I had an old plugin to add OpenGraph support to WordPress sitting in bitbucket that proved a good starting point.

As for the current theme I’m using ClassicSixteen, a well built clone of Twenty Sixteen, and have made notes of small adjustments to keep elements like headlines and elements consistent between templates. A simple solution will be to create a Child Theme to standardize between the two. A permanent solution would be to create my own lightweight theme using CSS Grid. Just one problem, my web developer skills have become a little dusty. 😛

Plugin in progress, no warranty or support provided: jd-opengraph.zip

Hello ClassicPress

Winter break, that time of year when I grab a cup of coffee, cozy up by a warm computer, and dive into a new content management system (CMS) or framework. In recent years, I visited Winter CMS, and Gatsby. This year is ClassicPress, the project began in 2018, with a familiar lightweight experience. Classic menus and widgets replace full site editing and a block editor. Fewer JavaScript calls and simplified rendering means less need for a caching plugin.

ClassicPress offers exclusive features, including user taxonomy and a feature for adjusting the media library folder structure. Oh, and they are a community-driven project. Over the coming weeks, I plan to build a personalized, lightweight theme, maybe something using CSS Grid and OpenGraph support. 😀