About the FlatPress blogging engine

FlatPress is a lightweight, easy-to-set-up blogging engine. Plain and simple, just PHP. No database needed!

It's best suitable for personal blogs or small business sites. FlatPress is a single user system (see Tech FAQ) and does not offer an editorial workflow. But would you need that?

FlatPress works great out of the box, but you may also extend it to your needs with plugins and themes.

Important to know: FlatPress is not “WordPress on flat files”. WordPress plugins usually don't work in FlatPress. Anyway, sometimes you are just a few lines away from making them work :) In fact, many of the bundled filters on the text are from WP.
Themes have just nothing to do with WP, not at all.

Why should one even use a self-hosted blogging system in times of huge easy-to-use platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter? Why hosting the comments for yourself when you could do so with Disqus?

• FlatPress serves those who want to stay independent from these services. If you blog on such a platform and it shuts down, your blog is gone. If they think you violate their Terms of Service, your blog is gone. You may think of many other unwanted dependencies.
• FlatPress serves those who want to stay in control of what their blog does. Those who don't like their blog to load dozends of frameworks, images and other stuff from many different CDNs without knowing what their visitors finally get served.
• And FlatPress serves those who want to customize the blog to their needs. Not happy with the design? Create an own theme! A functionality is missing? Retrofit it with a plugin!

A personal blog in reasonable size is just not the kind of application that would need a database beneath it. Our project site flatpress.org contains more than 220 blog entries since 2006 and runs as quickly as a virgin install. No flat-file performance problems whatsoever!

• FlatPress is easily backed up just by copying its directory. And if something goes wrong, just delete it on the server and copy back the backup (more details).
• Because FlatPress works without a database, it eliminates a whole category of possible security problems. That makes it more secure.