ClassicPress – the best WordPress fork you’ve never heard about

…and you probably aren’t going to use it either – why, you might ask? Well, let’s go back a little.

The story so far

So if you didn’t live under a rock the past decade, you know about a little vanity project called “Gutenberg”, which pretty much shifted focus from developing things that matter to creating a wanna-be page builder that still sucks after 8+ years, is hard to develop with, and generally speaking feels like a bloat rather than an actually useful tool for anyone.

Most of us, who don’t care about playing Tetris in the counter-intuitive UI installed in the Classic Editor (or whatever variation of it), accepted that the core team have their own priorities and moved on with our lives.

Someone took that a bit more personally, to a point, which created the idea of a project that would remove Gutenberg and FSE from the core, optimize already existing tools, remove obsolete libraries/dependencies, add a few useful tools, and stay loyal to the original vision – that’s how things started with ClassicPress.

The Experience

For the past few weeks I have been tinkering with a new version of my website – it was always running on WordPress, but except for improving LCP/FCP, TTFB, and a few other things, I wanted to have a smooth experience while adding new content or playing around in the admin panel.

Sure, you can install more robust solutions like No Gutenberg – Disable Blocks Editor and Global Styles – Back to Classic Editor, but disabling the block editor is just part of the issue, and installing another plugin on top of the others is just a quick fix rather than dealing with the problem itself.

So, I have migrated to CP.

Love how smooth it works and how much faster everything loads; can’t remember the last time I had the same occurrence in vanilla WP, even with all the optimizations (including scaling of database, etc.).

Removal of the obsolete js and replacing it with native HTML5 elements feels great (bye bye jQuery UI!), media library handling is more optimized (don’t expect a whole new way of handling media in WP, though), and many of the elements in the UI are more accessible.

It is the proper WP experience, period.

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The problems

Not everything was perfect, though, or even acceptable on certain points. So, what are my issues with the “best WP fork”?

1. Plugin repository

Most of the things you will find there are completely useless. You would think that you may find there some proper multilingual plugin, cookie consent, at least 1 option for e-commerce, and maybe something to bump your website’s security… but you won’t find any of those. Even the official WooCommerce fork is severely outdated (there is an unofficial version of Classic Commerce, but if you don’t look specifically for it, you’re out of luck).

The official solution for SEO is a fork based on Rank Math – I’m not really a fan of it (RM), but The SEO Framework works here just fine, so this particular issue doesn’t concern me too much.

As much as some people might not like it – plugins are a huge reason why most of the users choose WordPress.

Guidelines for plugin submission are a bit more strict and I appreciate that, but I’m not sure if it’s working well.

2. The fork itself

The latest version of CP is based on WP’s 6.2.7 – which you might have guessed, is a no-go for many of the plugins you are already using.

You find yourself either spending a lot of time looking for alternatives or patching up compatibility by editing core files of the plugins – and a lot of times it’s just not worth doing so.

The project of this scope requires a lot of attention, so it’s not “let’s bump our version” but actually something that has to make sense before releasing to the public.

There are not that many active contributors, so it’s even harder to maintain and test.

It doesn’t help either that there’s no roadmap – so most of the time any information about the future of the fork you can find is from the random forum threads or pull requests.

3. It’s a niche product

ClassicPress, as for now, is not really seen in any meaningful way; most developers treat it rather like a curiosity, and you can’t really see it being discussed anywhere.

It should be more recognizable, but as I said before – Classic Editor seems like a convenient, quick fix for a long-term problem, and the majority of people would rather spend time on a dozen other things rather than wondering if some essential plugin will work, and I can’t really blame them; as for now, clean code and a fully optimized experience for both sides of the website seem like the least of the priorities in the AI gold rush.

I would love to say that contributing would solve most of the problems, but I’m not really sure if that’s the case.

Should I use it anyway?

If you have enough time, your project doesn’t require anything too complicated, and you loved how WordPress worked before all the page builders craze – go for it, I mean it.

I’ve had my fun and few struggles dealing with migration to CP, but I appreciate the dedication of the maintainers and how fast it works out-of-the-box, and I solved my biggest problem with the WP.