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Friday, April 16, 2021

Blog / Project interna / Happy birthday, FlatPress!

Happy birthday, FlatPress!

2021-04-15_fp15.jpgToday, your favourite blogging engine celebrates its 15th birthday.

The beginning, …

It was April 16th, 2006 when Edoardo Vacchi a.k.a. NoWhereMan published the very first alpha version of FlatPress. The idea was to have a blogging engine that was as simple as SimplePHPBlog (which he used at this time), but more customizable and extendable.

Since then, FlatPress grew up, the software got more mature, the community, mostly Italian in the beginning, got more and more international. And FlatPress fulfilled Edoardo’s promises: Easy to set up, easy to operate, but also extensibly customizable with its mighty plugin system and its theming engine. And all this without requiring any database system beneath, just working on flat files. Hey, it’s called FlatPress for a reason! :)

But like many other Open Source developers, Edoardo lost more and more of his time to other private and professional obligations over the years. Also, the world had moved on, and many new blogging tools and social networks had risen. And so in July 2018, with a heavy heart he announced the end of FlatPress.

… the transition, …

This is where I entered the stage. I had run my FlatPress powered blog since 2013 and simply didn’t agree with him that FlatPress wasn’t needed any more. I offered him to take over the project, and you, the FlatPress community, encouraged me to do so. So I did.

We revived the project and the software, set up a new support forum, a new knowledge base wiki, a new website, and got publicly more visible on CMS sites, software archives, computer magazines, and of course our Twitter account @FlatPress.

… the present, …

Since then, the FlatPress journey continues with fresh power. And even after 15 years, you might not have unvealed every FlatPress secret: Did you know that the FlatPress engine is the blogging widget in the heavily used web site building kits of Deutsche Telekom and the huge German web hoster Strato? :)

I’m glad I had the chance to continue Edoardo’s (and his mates’!) work. And I am very proud of every single one of you how helped my on this journey. Thank you very much, each and every contributor!

… and the future

What’s next, you ask? Well, we have a version 1.3 to build! Francesco works on a completely new admin panel which looks awesome and waits to be released to first public tests. And thanks to all the folks out there reporting bugs and asking for interesting features, we will never run out of open issues. Like in every good open source project: “So much to do, so little time” ;)

To appropriatly celebrate this anniversary, Edoardo himself has a few words to say. Cheers to you, we will continue to take good care of your project!

All the best,
Arvid

Image: Derivate of “Birthday Gaming” by cheetah100 - licensed under CC BY 2.0