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Friday, July 6, 2018

Blog / News / Announcements / Hello, long time no see

Hello, long time no see

I owe you guys an apology.

You all will have noticed that I’ve been away from FlatPress forums for quite a while.

And you’ll all have noticed that it’s been quite a while since the last FlatPress release.

So, sorry about that.

Reason I’m breaking the silence today is that, in the last few days, this server has been compromised. Now it should be back online, but I am taking this chance to to say what you all already know.

The FlatPress project is basically dead.

FlatPress was born, believe it or not, 12 years ago.

In 2006, PHP 4 and shared hosts roamed the Earth. Many of these free services did not provide a SQL installation, and even the PHP installs were extremely limited. I started blogging with SimplePHPBlog (another dead project), but at some point, together with some friends (drudo and hydra) from the Italian community, we started developing something more extensible. FlatPress was born there.

But times have changed. Nowadays, there are fewer blogs. People use Twitter, Facebook, and, often, for longer texts, Medium. WordPress is still present, both as a hosted platform, and as the usual self-hostable script. It’s changed a lot, too.

PHP itself has changed a lot. In 2006, I chose PHP for FlatPress because it was everywhere. But today, as a programmer, I can host a Jekyll/Hugo/Pelican (etc.) blog on GitHub.io in seconds. These static web site/blog generators are a breeze to use, and there are many for non-programmers, too. They all share the FlatPress spirit, of being simple, easy to customize, with a flat-file post format that can be easily edited in a plain text editor. And, what’s better, they don’t even require a scripting language on your server, because they’re pre-rendered before you upload them!

Comments, you ask? We don’t need to self-host those either: we have Disqus, Facebook comments and many more.

Static web site generators are now really practical, and in my view, almost the norm. So, if you loved FlatPress, that’s what you should try.

So, here’s the thing:

The FlatPress project has no reason to exist anymore

It’s been ages since I’ve touched a line of PHP code, anyway. And PHP has changed a lot too. Nowadays I’m mostly a backend guy and I work with a range of technologies that span from Java to Scala, to native. Hell, I don’t even recognize HTML and CSS anymore. And PHP? And JavaScript? They’re completely different languages now! Not to mention that I’m pretty sure the FlatPress code base is pretty much crap now :P (but hey, it was my first nontrivial project!)

I have finished my PhD in DSL and programming language development in 2015, I joined the R&D department at UniCredit Bank; and finally I have joined Red Hat this year. You can follow me on Twitter if you’d like to

What now?

Code will still be on GitHub. If anybody is interested, you can contact me, and I’ll give access to the theme archive. The website will be probably still available up to October 2018, then it’ll probably shut down.

As for migration for your old posts, I have tried more than once to create a “converter” script for FlatPress posts to markdown (most of these platform use Markdown), or at least HTML. Unfortunately I’ve never had the time. Hopefully, someone from the community will.

Thank you

So, I take the chance to say, today, on my 32nd birtday, thank you FlatPress, and thank you, FlatPress community, it’s been one hell of a ride.

Edoardo Vacchi a.k.a. the NoWhereMan