ClassicPress will live or die based on whether the plugins that people want to use will work with it.

Now that WordPress is eleven major versions ahead, the selection of popular plugins that are still compatible has shrunk considerably.

CP will say that there is a plugin for this, a plugin for that. Language management, as one example. But WordPress devs (CP’s target audience) have their own favourite plugins for each key purpose, most of which now require WP 5.x. To go back to the example: can I use Polylang Pro with CP? No, I have to use WPML (bleh!). There are many other similar examples, including SEO.

Hardly any major plugin developers are committing to keep their plugins compatible with WP 4.9 (the core version used in CP), and that is a huge issue when CP only seem to have a couple of productive developers on board and their own plugin directory (not developed with CP!) contains a bunch of small, narrow-focus plugins but hardly any big hitters.

CP 1.x was going to be the “LTS” version, where you could continue using your favourite plugins and expect no breaking changes. Trouble is, the plugins are all leaving it behind.

A CMS fork needs to inspire other devs to come on board, and all the going-round-in-circles and pointless meandering of the last 4 years (obsessively debating the login screen, anyone?) doesn’t seem to be achieving that.

4 years is a long time in software development and I would argue that remarkably little has been achieved in that time.