Here, you find answers to general questions about FlatPress. If you have technical questions, please see the Tech FAQ.

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.

FlatPress is around since 2006, the software is mature and well-tested. And yet, we're still in Version 1.2 (as of March 2021). This shows we don't stuff billions of features in our software and publish new releases every week. FlatPress is meant to be a stable software without surprises.

FlatPress is free software maintained by voluntary developers in their free time. We don't get (or want) money for FlatPress. Free time is always rare, so we are aware we can't fix every reported bug within hours.

Luckily, we have a great community that helps us with testing, coding, and supporting each other. This open and friendly spirit is the heart of FlatPress. You are warmly invited to be part of it!

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.

Glad you ask, thanks for caring! :) In fact, there a are many ways to contribute to FlatPress.

Found a bug? Built a plugin? Designed a theme? Want to propose a new feature? Let us know!

• Open issues or pull requests on our GitHub project.
• Publish your plugins and themes on our wiki: Plugins go here, themes here.

FlatPress “speaks” some languages out-of-the-box. If yours is not included yet, feel free to create a language pack! You don't need to be programmer to do so, the guidelines show you how it works. We'd love to add your translation to the FlatPress standard download package!

Even if you aren't a programmer, you can easily support our project.

• If you have suggestions, feature request or want to report quirky behaviour, please do so on the support forum.
• Show off your blog sites on the support forum as well.
• Spread the word:
  • Tell the people you use FlatPress by leaving the “powered by FlatPress” link in your site footer intact.
  • If you are happy with FlatPress, tell your friends on your favourite social network.
  • If you know a software archive or a CMS compare site that does not have FlatPress, tell them! Ask your web hosting provider if they’d like to offer FlatPress in their software installer. Recommend FlatPress to people asking you for an easy-to-use blogging engine.
• Sometimes, we ask for intensive testing before releasing a new version. Take part in it and tell us what you think.
• To keep up to date, check out our project site flatpress.org once in a while. You may also subscribe to the RSS feed. The forums also have an RSS feed, did you know?
  And of course, you may follow us on Twitter and on Mastodon.