The CMS for Creators.
Stable. Lightweight. Instantly Familiar.
Welcome to ClassicPress!
You’ve just become part of a growing community of people who value the firm foundation WordPress
provides for websites everywhere. Guided by our
community, we can leverage our collective expertise to maintain and develop the ClassicPress platform as
the content management system of choice for professionals, hobbyists, developers, sole-traders and
all website creators worldwide.
Our purpose is to provide a stable, secure, and instantly familiar content management system driven by the needs
of the community. We invite you to connect with us and add your voice to the
conversation..
Subscribe to our newsletter, Mastodon, or Twitter to receive the latest
announcements, news, and other updates about ClassicPress.
Installation
For more information about installing ClassicPress, see our installation documentation.
- Download the latest release of ClassicPress from our releases page.
- Unzip the package in an empty directory and upload all the files to your server using a remote connection
method such as SSH, SFTP, or FTP.
- Open wp-admin/install.php in the browser. It
will take you through the process to set up a
wp-config.php
file with the database connection
details.
- If for some reason this doesn’t work: Open up
wp-config-sample.php
with a text
editor and fill in the database connection details.
- Save the file as
wp-config.php
and upload it.
- Open wp-admin/install.php in the
browser.
- Once the configuration file is set up, the installer will set up the tables needed for the website. If there
is an error, double check the
wp-config.php
file, and try again. If it fails again, please go
to the support forums
with as much data as you can gather.
- If you did not enter a password, note the password given to you. If you did not provide a
username, it will be
admin
.
- The installer should then go to the login page. Sign in with the username and
password you chose during the installation. If a password was generated, it is possible to change it by
clicking on the username in the top right corner after signing in. It is also possible to reach this Profile
page by navigating to “Users” in the sidebar navigation and then selecting “Your
Profile” from the sub-menu.
Updating
Automatic Updater
- Open wp-admin/update-core.php in your
browser and follow the instructions.
- That’s it!
Updating Manually
Updating manually can be done via remote connection methods such as SFTP (preferred) or FTP.
For more information, see our manual update
documentation.
- Before doing anything, make sure you have a working backup of the entire site as well as the
database.
- Download the latest release of ClassicPress from our releases page.
- On your local computer, unzip the ClassicPress release file into a directory.
- On your local computer, remove the
wp-config-sample.php
file and the
wp-content
directory.
- Upload what's left over to your server, replacing the existing files (using either SSH or an application
that connects over SFTP or FTP).
- Point the browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php and
follow the instructions.
Migrating from WordPress
With the ClassicPress migration plugin, it is very easy to migrate existing sites from WordPress to ClassicPress.
Please follow the migration
documentation for step-by-step instructions.
System Requirements
- PHP version 7.4 or greater.
- MySQL version 5.7 or greater, or MariaDB version
10.4
or greater.
- Apache, Nginx, LiteSpeed or another web server that supports PHP and
MySQL/MariaDB.
Recommended Setup
Online Resources
If you have any questions that aren’t addressed in this document, please take advantage of
ClassicPress’ numerous online resources:
- ClassicPress Homepage
- This is the starting point, with basic information about ClassicPress and links to all other resources in
this list.
- ClassicPress Documentation
- Here you'll find up-to-date reference information about ClassicPress.
- ClassicPress Blog
- This is where you’ll find the latest updates and news related to ClassicPress as well as tutorials and
other interesting snippets of information. Recent ClassicPress news appears in your administrative dashboard
by default.
- ClassicPress Support Forums
- The support forums are a great way to get help from other ClassicPress users. Many community members and
ClassicPress leaders are active here.
- ClassicPress Zulip Chat
- There is an active online chat channel that is used for discussion among people who use ClassicPress and
plan its further development.
- ClassicPress Feature Requests
- Do you have an idea to make ClassicPress better? Consider sharing your idea on GitHub for the core team and
the community to share feedback and, possibly, implement the feature.
- ClassicPress Governance
- Last but not least, read about the ClassicPress governance structure to understand how we do things and how
you can help. ClassicPress is a community-driven and funded fork of WordPress that enables all stakeholders
to
shape the direction that the project takes. This page aims to explain how we handle this process to ensure
that power doesn't become centralised and that every voice can be heard.
Help Promote ClassicPress
ClassicPress has no multi-million dollar marketing campaign or celebrity sponsors, but we do have something even
better: you and the rest of our community. If you enjoy ClassicPress, please consider:
- Participating in our forums.
- Telling a friend about ClassicPress or sharing it on social media.
- Setting up a ClassicPress website for someone less knowledgeable than yourself.
- Writing a blog post about why you chose to use ClassicPress for your website.
- Writing to WordPress plugin and theme developers to ask them to support ClassicPress.
Community Funding
ClassicPress is a community-driven and funded free, open-source project managed by 501(c)3 non-profit
ClassicPress Initiative.
You contributions help ClassicPress pay infrastructure and administrative costs. There are several ways you can
financially support ClassicPress:
Credits
ClassicPress v2.0 is a hard fork of the WordPress 6.2
branch.
WordPress itself is a fork of b2/cafélog from Michel Valdrighi.
License
ClassicPress is free software, and is released under the terms of the GPL version 2 or (at your option) any later version. See license.txt.