This post is part of a series on migrating to ClassicPress from WordPress.
In the last post, I downloaded the migration plugin. If the site you’re migrating is on WordPress 4.9.x then you are good to proceed; if your site is on WordPress 5, then you’ll need to wait a little time.
ClassicPress are about ready to release a version of the migration plugin which will allow migration of a WordPress 5 site. Once this updated plugin is released, all WordPress sites could be migrated to ClassicPress.
This post is part of a series on migrating to ClassicPress from WordPress.
The easiest way to migrate an existing WordPress site to ClassicPress, is to use the ClassicPress migration plugin available from here:
The file downloaded is a zip file, but, as the download page says, this does not need to be extracted; the zip can be uploaded directly via the WordPress plugin upload function.
This post is part of a series on migrating to ClassicPress from WordPress.
As mentioned in the series index post, ClassicPress is a fairly recent fork of WordPress which has announced itself as ready for use on live sites. Initially as a response to the inaccessible Gutenberg, they are now positioning themselves as a CMS business-focused CMS which is modified and enhanced version of WordPress (without Gutenberg) that serves the business website market
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From the About ClassicPress page, ClassicPress styles itself as a community-led fork of the WordPress content management system who wants to get back to basics and focus on open dialogue and democratic decisions. This is reflected in the mission statement and the Petitions site.
Like WordPress, ClassicPress is released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) (or later) license from the Free Software Foundation.
I’ve been a user of WordPress for almost 8 years and have been developing plugins for WordPress for quite a while. I’ve known about Gutenberg for a while, but only really delved into it farily recently.
If you’re hearing about it now for the first time, I did a post recently which might be useful: What is Gutenberg (for WordPress)?
I also did a post WordPress and the Problem With Gutenberg and why it is unusable to me. Some of my friends use WordPress5 now and are happy with the new Gutenberg block editor, as are many people online, but there are also many people who are unhappy with the new Gutenberg block editor.
One of the other issues with the development of WOrdPress, is the lack of transparency and development direction which appears to be completely controlled by Automattic. WordPress.org is, in theory, the independent open source project. However, the creation of Gutenberg appears to have been decided upon and drbvien by Automattic to benefit Automattic’s wordpress.com site.
The ethos of ClassicPress, is that the community will decide the development direction by way of the Petitions site.
ClassicPress v1 is fully compatible with WordPress 4.9.x and will remain so; ClassicPress v2 will potentially start to diverge from WordPress, but this will be by the petitions logged and voted upon by the community.
ClassicPress appears to align better to the type of sites I run, and the democratic structures for development offers the best opportunity for this to continue to be true going forward.
ClassicPress is a fairly recent fork of WordPress which has announced itself as ready for use on live sites. Initially as a response to the inaccessible Gutenberg, they are now positioning themselves as a CMS business-focused CMS which is a modified and enhanced version of WordPress (without Gutenberg) that serves the business website market.
In this short series of posts, I’m going to take a quick look at what is involved in migrating an existing WordPress site to ClassicPress.
My seventh book is now available to buy in eBook format from azurecurve Publishing, paperback and Kindle versions from Amazon US and UK.
This is a new update to the Workflow book I’ve written a couple of prior editions over the last few years. This edition includes coverage of the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018, and four additional chapters on customizing the workflow notification emails and securing web services, and some chapters and sections have been rewritten to either expand or make clearer the topics being covered.
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Continue reading “Microsoft Dynamics GP Workflow Third Edition Now Available as eBook and Paperback”
This post is part of the Hands On With Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 New Features series in which I am going hands on with the new features introduced in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 (which was released on the 2nd October). I reblogged the new features as Microsoft announced them along with some commentary of how I thought they would be received by both my clients and I. In this series, I will be hands on with them giving feedback of how well they work in reality.
The sixth new feature is Print Invoices in Functional Currency from SOP Navigation List. This feature of the day is one I requested back in 2014 on behalf of a client; it is the ability to print an invoice in Functional, by changing the Currency to Print drop-down, from the navigation:
ClassicPress is a modified and enhanced version of WordPress (without Gutenberg) that aims to serve the business website market; the concept of this fork was launched by Scott Bowler. I’m not going to try to speak for Scott, so I’ll link to the original post he did on why ClassicPress was created .
The Mission statement from ClassicPress is:
1. If it isn’t broken, we won’t fix it
The original idea behind ClassicPress was to provide a version of WordPress without Gutenberg, a drag and drop page builder, which was slated to become part of the core WordPress code from version 5.
It is our firm belief that the original publishing experience was (and still is) a tried and tested solution complimented by a wide array of plugins to extend its functionality. In other words, it wasn’t broken, so it didn’t need to be fixed.
This philosophy is central to ClassicPress. We won’t change things for change sake — just because something has been around for a while, it doesn’t mean it’s broken (in fact, it’s probably the optimal solution).
2. Business-focused CMS
The main target market of ClassicPress are businesses and as such we will move to being a full CMS. Blogs can be a part of an CMS, the other way around is often much more difficult.
The features that we will implement are all focused around offering one of our 3 key takeaways:
Powerful. Versatile. Predictable.3. We will facilitate democratic discussion and decision making
In order for decisions to made by the community it is essential that we provide a platform that makes it easy for every member of the community to share ideas, debate, vote and give feedback without censorship.
We will ensure the platforms and systems are in place and maintained to make this a reality.
4. We will make people’s lives better
There are many people involved in an open source project such as ClassicPress. Programmers, designers, marketers, businesses and website visitors to name a few.
It is our mission to ensure that we make the lives of the people who use ClassicPress better. For example, for programmers we will campaign for ideas that make programming more efficient, less prone to bugs and faster to do. For end users we might suggest a project to make websites load faster.
5. We will invest in the future of ClassicPress
ClassicPress will be registered as a not-for-profit company (a Limited by Guarantee company based in the United Kingdom).
We will be transparent about any money raised (or spent) and encourage the community to vote on how this money will be best used. It is our mission to ensure that we re-invest into the ClassicPress platform and any supporting systems.
In the long-term this might, for example, include hiring of a core team of developers to work on ideas voted for by the community.
I’ve joined the forums and slack channel for ClassicPress and have been both keeping a general eye on things as well as doing some beta testing for various aspects of the project. I’ve liked what I have seen so far and am seriously interested in moving my sites over to it when the first version is released (currently it is in beta).
For me the key item is that it does not contain Gutenberg (they’re open to a Gutenberg plugin that people can choose to use) and it works fine with all of my plugins (both the ones I have created as well as the ones from other developers (such as Contact Form 7).
While ClassicPress is still in beta, James Nylen, the development team lead, has given the green light for the announcement that it is safe to use in a live environment as there are no open bugs on our GitHub repository.
If they’re saying it is ready, but still in beta you might be wondering why?
The answer is quite simple; there are a few items which still need to be completed before the official version 1 launch (none of which will have a negative impact on sites using it):
Full details of the announcement are here.
I’m in the process of building a new plugin demo site on ClassicPress and will be looking to migrate all of my sites over as soon as I can; in the mean time I will be sticking with WordPress 4.9.8 (plus any 4.9 security updates) as I don’t find Gutenberg to be useful (and would go so far as to say it is would have a major detriment on my blogging if i did upgrade and try to use Gutenberg.
For me, ClassicPress is the future and I am participating in the new community where I can (mainly in beta testing of the various aspects).
This post is part of the Hands On With Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 New Features series in which I am going hands on with the new features introduced in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 (which was released on the 2nd October). I reblogged the new features as Microsoft announced them along with some commentary of how I thought they would be received by both my clients and I. In this series, I will be hands on with them giving feedback of how well they work in reality.
The fifth new feature is Print and E-mail Sales Order Processing Documents. This feature changes the printing behaviour of the Sales Document Print Options window, accessible via Sales Transaction Entry () to both print and email the sales document:
When it was announced, I wondered if, in some way, this was related to the print remaining documents functionality, but I tested with 2018 RTM and that was how that version worked. This new feature goes against the 2013 R2 feature in that selecting both boxes will then both print and email the sales document.
I’m not sure what the use case for this feature is. If you have an email address, you’d want to email the document, otherwise you would want to print it. This is exactly what the previous versions would do.
WordPress 5 with Gutenberg is due for release tomorrow on 6th December 2018. While many people, on WordPress.com and other hosted WordPress providers, will not have a say about upgrading, they can mitigate the effects somewhat by installing the Classic Editor:
For those with control over their sites, you can choose to upgrade to WordPress 5 or not (some postings by Matt Mullenweg had suggested that upgrading would happen automatically, but a few posts have been made clarifying that this would not happen).
Much of the community is recommending holding off upgrading until 5.0.1 at the earliest and I strongly agree with this sentiment.
Any upgrade you do, should be on a staging environment first so that you can test to verify that your theme and plugins will all work correctly after the upgrade to WordPress 5.
Whenever you do upgrade your live website, I would recommend having a complete website upgrade (database and files), so that you can roll back if necessary, and test immediately after the upgrade has completed.
This post is part of the Hands On With Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 New Features series in which I am going hands on with the new features introduced in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 (which was released on the 2nd October). I reblogged the new features as Microsoft announced them along with some commentary of how I thought they would be received by both my clients and I. In this series, I will be hands on with them giving feedback of how well they work in reality.
The fourth new feature is Option to Hide Business Analyzer for all Users. This feature allows the Business Analyzer section of the home page and/or the Business Analyzer fact panes on navigation lists to be switched off for all users.
Two new options have been introduced to the System Preferences window ().
Unmark the first, Display Business Analyzer on Home page, to remove it for all users; unmark the second, Display Business Analyzer on Navigation List pages to remove the fact pane for all users:
A few years ago I wrote a SQL trigger which would remove the fact pane for all users; this appeared in two editions of the Microsoft Dynamics GP Cookbook and was, much more recently, posted to this blog.
This new feature makes that trigger obsolete, as changing the settings in System Preferences will remove it for all users.
If they desire, users can still switch Business Analyzer back on for themselves on the home page and by individual navigation list. That sid, I don’t know of a single client who wants to use Business Analyzer in either of these ways.