
ClassicPress
Look closely at any of my writing sites. See any difference? Any breakage? No?
I switched everything to ClassicPress, a new hard fork of WordPress, rather than update to WordPress’ 5.0.x. (Here’s a footnote: WordPress is open source, which means that others can take the code and make changes to it and create something new. A ‘fork’ is what it sounds like: it’s an offshoot that forms when people start making changes in a different direction.)
I don’t know whether 5.0.x would have broken anything on my sites. After all, they’re pretty lightweight and straightforward. But given the many people who are, innocently and in good faith, following the oft-repeated advice to always keep one’s site up to date and are finding their sites broken… well, who can say what would have happened?
At issue here is Gutenberg, the new “block-based” editor that WordPress is forcing down the throats of users. More properly, phase 1 of Gutenberg, which is going to expand outside the editor into other aspects in the future. There are countless sites right now covering the flaws in Gutenberg, ranging from site breakage to being a difficult and buggy and non-intuitive editor. I’m not going to repeat them. You can find them. Depending on which part of the Internet you hang out in, you might not be able to avoid them.
I’m not a coder or dev or website designer. I’m a disabled ex-medical secretary and a fantasy writer. Want me to do transcription, filing, reception, data entry? I’m all over it. Want me to spin a story? Just try to stop me. But when it comes to the increasingly complex world of computer sciences and information technology? Uhm… I know the fundamentals of how a computer works and can generally do what I want to do on one. I know the fundamentals of how a cat works, too, and I can keep one healthy and happy, but that doesn’t make me a vet or help much beyond recognizing when something is not right. Cats, at least, do not typically need upgrades once they have core vaccinations and have been spayed or neutered!