Nothing except converting to AMP.

Thanks a lot for providing your feedback, @gyrkin!

Our efforts are currently focused on Native and Paired modes, as these ultimately result in the best experience for users and developers, since you can keep your existing look & feel and don’t have to maintain two different versions of your site when using Native mode.

You can think of Classic mode as “Reader mode”, which provides a stripped-down basic template. While Paired and Native mode apply to all users, Reader mode is only really great on mobile, and only really presented to you by services that surface AMP content (e.g. Google search or Twitter).

I don’t think adding many new features to Classic mode is that valuable to our users as it wouldn’t align with our focus. That being said, I find your suggestion for adding menu support out of the box interesting. For now, the features you suggest could be implemented manually by overriding the Classic mode templates and/or using filters provided by the plugin to change links on the site.

It is true that the number of WordPress themes that “just” work in Paired or Native mode is still rather small, but we are working closely with vendors to change this and also try to provide extensive documentation. The AMP plugin already does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, it’s usually just a few small changes that need to be added to make a theme fully AMP compatible.

That being said, I would be very interested in learning which themes (and even plugins) you’ve tried that aren’t AMP compatible, as I want to learn about what they have in common.

Thanks for your reply, @swissspidy.

I understand your efforts. I have no problem with that. However, I think you should consider the needs of different users. The menu and search feature are the basic requirements a site should have. But you don’t offer it in classic mode. How are we going to succeed unless we give mobile users the opportunity to surf the site?

As for the themes I use, I have tried the popular themes in the repository. They all give errors for AMP in Native or Paired mode. I’m using the theme Kontrast right now. It has the same situation. So I’m trying to use the classic mode.

Yes, I am aware that there are alternative plugins. But as I said, they break the alignment of the pictures on the site. There are two options: Continue using this plugin and waive the menu and search feature. Or use different plugin and edit all content one by one. For now, the first option seems more reasonable for me.

I’ve tried 20 different themes and they all break with Native and Paired which lets me know that it’s not just an isolated thing. I’ve deactivated every plugin without anything changing.

Only classic mode doesn’t break.

@gyrkin @gooma2 Have you tried the themes listed at https://amp-wp.org/ecosystem/themes/

It’s true that many themes out there will not work as-is in AMP. So the Classic mode will continue to be a turnkey solution until more themes are compatible or we can get the AMP plugin to better convert them. Until then the Paired and Native modes are predominantly developer-focus modes to take an existing theme and convert 80% with the rest needing manual work, though supported by the plugin’s compatibility tool.

Hello @westonruter, glad to see a reply.

I tried Astra and Twenty Nineteen themes in my site. Both gives some CSS errors belongs to theme and other plugins. I’m not a developer. I didn’t want to move forward because I didn’t know what they were.

I’m gonna have to say it again. I have great respect for your efforts. But you must understand us too. We need simple features (basic menu and search near site icon) in Classic mode. It is very useful for non-developers. The biggest competitor of you has it. Why don’t you have it?

Unfortunately the latest version of Twenty Nineteen broke AMP compatibility which will be fixed in v1.1 of the plugin.

We’ll discuss adding new features to the Classic template.

@gyrkin Please follow https://github.com/ampproject/amp-wp/issues/2044 for updates.