ClassicPress V2.2.0 is out, and other news from the *Press world.

This is the second episode of The ClassicPress Series, My posts detailing tutorials and juicy bits about ClassicPress.

The big thing for today is the release last week of ClassicPress v2.2.0 that has a plethora of stunning new advancements.

As detailed on the changelog, one of the most striking things is the Media Taxonomies. Now you can have categories for media and divide them in folders. This comes in handy for sites who really need to categorize their media to manage them better (stores, photography businesses and the like come to mind, but also sites for painters, digital artists, maker and creative people).

Another very notable feature for me is the addition of a Object Relationship Database Table - Imagine having a library where you have to detail relationships between books, authors, publishers and the like and you need for each of them to establish a relationship with all the others. Well this was possible with a series of Custom Post Types and code to establish the relationships between them (basically a custom implementation). Now in ClassicPress this is made easier to do. This addition allows the general public a long overdue feature. It can as well be applied to store warehouses where some of the products might be related (think components of a piece of machinery, when an order for that machinery is placed, the warehouse software built on ClassicPress can be aware of which components are related to it). This opens up new ways of using the CMS and I can't wait to see people using this feature.

Minor changes were included too, and they revolve around making the CMS more clean and secure. A Pepper plugin was added to increase password security. It can be activated and offers a layer of security to users passwords.

Another thing I am particularly happy about is the ongoing work happening behind the scenes to make ClassicPress more accessible (previous version brought forward some cool changes to admin screens to make them accessible) and more modern and leaner. Old JS libraries are replaced with Vanilla JS (this version deprecates ClipboardJS and hoverIntent). This makes for better performance and a more robust and maintainable core.

Planned for the future: deprecating TinyMCE and Media Library, replacing them with ToastUI and FilePond (since this is a breaking change, it is expected to happen in v3 or even v4 and enough time will be given to users and developers to adapt to the change). As of now, Tim is working on two plugins that serve as proof of concept and are the starting point of this huge endeavor (thanks Tim for leading this effort!), and we welcome contributions to make this happen.

Meanwhile in the outer world...

A litigation between Automattic and WPEngine is taking place.

Automattic/Matt claims copyright infringement of the WP trademark, and blocks access to WP repos for all WPEngine users, while also accusing them of offering a modified version of WP to their users and profiting from it.

Aside from my personal opinions on the matter, that I shared some days ago here on the platform, this litigation is scaring developers and users away from WP.

Many people already lost trust in WP, both as a CMS and as in Automattic, because of the introduction of block editor in 2018.

Now they are seeing Automattic claiming trademark infringement when they previously allowed the use of the WordPress name and logos (because hey it's free marketing!) all the while using it themselves when they do not own it, because the trademark happens to be propriety of WP.org.

This means that now they do not like people using the WordPress trademarks and they can virtually go after whomever they feel is doing so. Pretty much everybody and the cat...

I was asked recently why I decided to use ClassicPress in 2018.

ClassicPress is empowering. We have a plugins and themes directory, this means if you can't access it you can still download the plugins and themes form GitHub with no issue. The power is in the hands of the developers who decide to list their software on the directory. They are free to do so or to offer them in another way.

WordPress, in its early days, was empowering too. The repos did not exist yet. People in secluded forums made translations available month after an official release and were kind enough to help people install them... developers followed the FOSS unwritten code of conduct and Ubuntu philosophy (I am because we are) and this created opportunities for contribution and growth. Knowledge was shared with kindness and this enriched the whole community instead of making it poor. I am very sad to say that at a certain point this started to change. I felt the platform did not allow me to push and overcome my limits. Gutenberg Editor was the last straw for me. I came to ClassicPress to find empowerment and freedom again.

I am very pleased to say that ClassicPress community made empowerment one of its goals and to this day this guides decisions for the future. This allowed me to bloom in the developer and designer I wanted to be. I learn everyday, I contribute what I can, I enjoy the CMS. For this I have to thank from the bottom of my bottomless heart all the people I met while on this journey (too long to mention you all, you know who you are...).