When WordPress announced that the Gutenberg block editor would be merged into WordPress 5.0 core, the reaction was polarized. Many WordPress professionals — particularly those managing client sites with established workflows — viewed Gutenberg as an unwelcome paradigm shift forced upon them. Laravel developer Scott Bowler felt strongly enough to act. In August 2018, he forked WordPress 4.9.8 and called it ClassicPress.

The pitch was straightforward: WordPress without Gutenberg, governed by the community rather than Automattic's vision. ClassicPress kept the classic TinyMCE editor as the default, established a non-profit (the ClassicPress Initiative) to cover expenses, and implemented a petition-and-vote system for major decisions. The project attracted a modest but loyal following of developers and site operators who valued stability over WordPress's relentless pace of change.

For several years, ClassicPress maintained its WordPress 4.9 base, backporting security fixes while adding its own enhancements. But this approach had a shelf life — the WordPress ecosystem was moving forward, and plugins increasingly required WordPress 5.x or 6.x APIs. In December 2022, the community voted to "re-fork" from a modern WordPress 6.x base, stripping out the block editor while inheriting years of core improvements.

ClassicPress 2.0, based on WordPress 6.2.3, was released in February 2024. It represented a significant engineering effort: surgically removing Gutenberg and its dependencies from a codebase that had been increasingly designed around them. The result is a modern WordPress core without the block paradigm — proving that the classic editing experience remains viable.

ClassicPress remains niche but healthy. It serves a clear audience: agencies managing dozens of client sites who need predictability, developers who find Gutenberg's React-based architecture overkill for content-focused sites, and organizations that value slow, deliberate change over WordPress's move-fast approach.

ClassicPress demonstrated that a significant minority of WordPress users fundamentally disagreed with the Gutenberg direction, and that their needs could be served by a dedicated fork. While it hasn't threatened WordPress's dominance, it created a viable alternative for the long tail of sites that prioritize editorial simplicity.

The project's decision to re-fork from modern WordPress showed a pragmatic approach to fork maintenance: rather than maintaining an increasingly outdated base, they accepted the cost of a major rebase to stay relevant. This strategy may serve as a model for other forks facing similar divergence problems.