ClassicPress: WordPress without the block editor
The recent WordPress controversy is not the first time there's been tension between the WordPress community, the interests of Automattic as a business, and Matt Mullenweg's leadership as WordPress's benevolent dictator for life (BDFL). In particular, Mullenweg's focus on pushing WordPress to use a new "editing experience" called Gutenberg caused significant friction—and led to the ClassicPress fork. Users who want to preserve the "classic" WordPress experience without straying too far from the WordPress fold may want to look into ClassicPress.
In 2017, Mullenweg announced that one focus for the year would be "to create a new page and post building experience". The goal was to make it easier to develop sites using WordPress without resorting to custom HTML, shortcodes, or so-called "mystery meat": features supported by WordPress that were perhaps known to developers but not easily accessed by those simply authoring content on a WordPress site.
For much of WordPress's history, it had used TinyMCE as its default editor to create blog posts and site pages. This rich-text editor was fine for creating posts and pages with simple layouts, but WordPress was seeing competition from companies like Wix and Squarespace that offered drag-and-drop site-builder tools. However, while that competition was a problem for Automattic—the community as a whole was not convinced that WordPress needed to go in that direction.
