I choose to self-host my site on a VPS. But I know that isn’t for everyone. If you can install WordPress on a shared host, ClassicPress installs the same way. For that reason, many people shared hosting services have a one-click ClassicPress install alongside their WordPress one-click install.

ClassicPress has less of an admin tax than WordPress…the way WordPress used to be. An administration tax is the time you spend administering a site over actually creating content for it. WordPress and ClassicPress both have some of this…but as WordPress moves farther and farther away from its roots, you end up having to update things to work well with the latest. This means that while right now, most WordPress plugins work with ClassicPress…that might increasingly not be the case….at least not without a small amount of work.

For my own plugins, I intend to test them against both systems for the foreseeable future. But as WordPress drifts further away from its roots, and therefore from ClassicPress, people writing plugins that can work without the block editor dependencies becomes increasingly important.

If you already have a WordPress Site, you can install the ClassicPress migration plugin. You can install ClassicPress by following the other options here.

On my personal website, I do occasionally talk about the future of WordPress and my issues in developing plugins for my own use. But I also maintain the Gadget Wisdom infrastructure. So, recently, I wrote about switching my personal site to ClassicPress. I’m going to continue to write about that there, but wanted to cover a little of this here, in a different context.

Recent drama at WordPress finds a lot of people exploring exits from the community. WordPress drama is not a new thing. There were many times during the transition from WordPress 4.9 to 5.0 I considered leaving. But having built many things on top of a platform, I opted to remain.

More recently, I switched this site over to ClassicPress as well, a fork of WordPress. ClassicPress has a simple plugin to migrate WordPress instances…it will even let you revert back if need be. So, while the drama over on the WordPress side may continue, I get to keep the platform without the elements that frustrate me. There are concerns about ClassicPress as well. WordPress powers a significant percentage of identifiable websites. Forks of projects do not always survive, but there are many examples where they do.

ClassicPress is a fork of WordPress that removes the block editor…WordPress’s big change in Version 5. It retains a traditional editor, which many people prefer, and continues to iterate in that direction. As a result, it is leaner and somewhat more performative. It is WordPress as it used to be…but also with improvements…but in a completely different direction than WordPress while maintaining compatibility. The only problem is that the project doesn’t get the attention it could, especially now that people are questioning the governance of WordPress. But it is WordPress…like it used to be…before it went hard in another direction.