The refork of WordPress, that was decided in late 2022, which is going to be ClassicPress v2.0, is happening right now. Its based on WP 6.2 and does not contain Gutenborg (ie. the Block Editor), but compatiblity layers for allowing “regular” block-focused plugins to continue working. So CP 1.6 is supposed to be the last version based on WP 4.9.
I’m going to test the current alpha / nightly release of CP v2.0 soonish under a separate subdomain. It should allow for using newer WooCommerce versions, which in turn would enable me to do a “proper” fork of WooCommerce with most things up-to-date and working, instead of having to rely on WC 3.9.x and a lot of backporting / rearranging.
“Soonish”, because these days, I’m quite busy with work and cannot exactly say when I’m going to have some spare time left to do a proper installation. Proper installation includes the complete data of THIS blog, with a potentially updated / enhanced theme (I’d love to switch this one over to the amalgam of Bootstrap 4 and 5 I’ve been using for client projects lately), and all the plugins that mostly stopped working.
I’d also like to test if WP Super Cache works again with CP 2, or if I still need to do a soft-fork. From what I could see from comparision of commits is: The incompatiblity is non-existent, its a decision made by the developers, changing the “Compatiblity” setting in the plugin identification block to “at least 5.x”, but the plugin by itself works perfectly well even in WP 4.9.x and CP v1.x, as soon as one changes the resp. line to “4.9”.