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Last updated on December 10th, 2021
I haven’t had one of these posts in awhile, but thought it was time for another entry.
A year with ClassicPress
I’ve been using ClassicPress, the Gutenberg block editor-free fork of WordPress, for about a year now.
So far, everything’s been like the old-school WordPress, and I’ve kept my old blogging model intact—writing posts in a WYSIWIG post editor, without dealing with a block-based model that feels more geared toward competing with Squarespace/aimed at page designers than writing at length. There’s also some plans to cut down on some of WordPress’ bloat.
The downsides so far?
- A few plugins and themes have dropped support for ClassicPress (by virtue of dropping support for pre-version 5.0 versions of WordPress), and/or made clear they won’t go out of their way to support it.
- So far, I’m not sure if it’s grown in popularity as much as I’d hoped. WordPress proper still seems to have a firm hold on blogging/website creation, though its Classic Editor plugin certainly helps. I’m wondering what the long-term future holds for ClassicPress, especially if plugins/themes don’t keep pre-WP 5.0 support.
- ClassicPress shares some of the same flaws as WordPress, particularly: the amount of maintenance work required; a reliance on plugins for some basic features that should be built-in; and security concerns.
While I’m still open to alternatives, they also have their own downsides:
- Ghost crashed when I tried setting up a trial version on a Digital Ocean droplet.
- Grav seemed reasonably easy enough to install/maintain (a “flat file” CMS, so no database). However, like Ghost, the ability to reuse the same image seemed a bit more work involved than in WordPress/ClassicPress. No media library (from what I could find) means I basically had to look up the original image’s URL and copy/paste it into the new post.
- Static site generators (Jekyll, Hugo, etc.) didn’t seem easy to use or install.
- Exporting my existing site to any of the above still might be a lot of work (fixing formatting issues, etc.).
- I’d likely have to switch to Disqus for site comment support (since it doesn’t seem built into most of the above options).
Most of my traffic’s mobile-based
Looking at my site statistics information in Matomo (formerly Piwik), one interesting item: most of my site’s traffic comes from mobile devices. Looking back over the past three months’ worth of data:
Smartphones made up 52% of traffic during this period. Desktops, meanwhile, made up 40%. Tablets came out to 5%. Not a surprise, I suppose, given the shift to smartphone usage over the past decade.
I’ve tried making this site mobile-friendly, though there’s probably room for improvement. How do you access this site?
