Fingers Crossed ...

I've been planning major -- but hopefully mostly invisible -- matching site updates to The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism and Rational Review News Digest for some time now ... and what better time than the beginning of a long weekend, so that if everything goes to shit I am less hurried trying to fix it.

So that's done ... maybe. Before I explain further, if you happen to be willing and have a moment, go visit those sites and let me know (in comments) if anything looks bizarrely wrong. Thanks in advance!

The explanation:

I've historically had terrible luck with a combination of things.

Ingredient #1 is Wordpress and/or various plug-ins demanding that I update the PHP version my shared web hosting account operates on.

Ingredient #2 is everything falling to pieces, despite assurances from various parties that that could never happen, any time I actually update the PHP version my shared web hosting account operates on.

So I've been putting off any PHP version changes for at least two years now. They almost always end up basically requiring complete site rebuilds.

Enter ClassicPress.

It's WordPress, the way WordPress used to be before the fancy-schmancy "block editor" and so forth. Did I mention that I don't use the "block editor?" I had a "classic editor" plug-in installed because I prefer the old way of entering posts.

And there's a plug-in that makes moving a site from WordPress to ClassicPress as easy as pressing a button!

Well, OK, no. As easy as:

1. Pressing the button and finding out that even though the documentation said I wouldn't have to change my PHP version, I have to change my PHP version;
2. Changing my PHP version and for once not having things completely explode, but heck, I'm committed to the change so might as well get on with it;
3. Finding out that some of the plug-ins which the migration plug-in thought would be compatible aren't compatible;
4. Disabling all my plug-ins (via cPanel, because now all the site will do for me -- or anyone visitng -- is announce a "critical error");
5. Going back into the ClassicPress manager and re-enabling the plug-ins one at a time to find the culprits (then de-activating and deleting the ones that cause problems);
6. On one site, figuring out a different (and arguably better!) way to do a thing that a supposedly compatible, and non-site-crashing, plug-in no longer actually does.

Not nearly as bad as it could have been ... unless some problem that isn't obvious at the moment becomes obvious down the road, anyway.

If everything is as it seems, I should be safe from "update your PHP version!" demands for a long time, and now I have what amounts to a version of WordPress I like  (pre-5.0) rather than the bloated, gimmicky, cranky newer version.

I expect it may also perform better from the reader end. ClassicPress is about half the code size of current Wordpress, which seems like it might require less CPU time to do X, where X is "pull up and display a list of posts."

Hopefully the nerve-wracking portion of my holiday weekend is over with!