Hi from Edoardo (or, as some of you may remember me, “NoWhereMan”).

A few years ago, Samy, Drudo and I were all users of a self-hostable blogging platform called “SimplePHPBlog”.

SPB was actually simple: it was really easy to hack and customize; and because it did not need a MySQL instance to install, it would work pretty much anywhere. Thus, it quickly gained a small community of affectionate users that would extend it, modify it, and share their version with others; in true open source fashion.

Samy, Drudo and I met on Drudo’s forum for the tiny SPB Italian community. In 2006, PHP was not the sexiest of the programming languages, but it was ubiquitous; most free web hosting would provide an Apache server with an (often stripped-down) PHP environment: in most cases you wouldn’t even have access to a proper database backend.

SPB was great because it stored everything to plain-text files. However, every time SPB released a new version, you would lose all your changes; because SPB was simple to hack on, but it was not designed with an extension system in mind.

We decided to design our own version of SPB, where the storage format would be kept the same, but the engine would be completely rewritten from scratch. We borrowed from WordPress its plugin system, so that people could easily port some of the existing plugins.
And because of the “flat-file” data storage, we decided to call it “FlatPress”.

Later, we found FlatPress in many surprising places: people would not just use it for blogs, but also for magazines and all other sorts of publications. When today I meet a FlatPress instance in the wild, it still brings a smile to my face.

I don’t think any of us would have expected that 20 years later, the open source project the three of us started in 2006 would still be around.

At 20 years old, FlatPress was my first real foray into open source as a maintainer and not just as a user.
20 years later, my job at Red Hat might have changed shape, but it’s still eminently devoted to open source.

In a way, FlatPress’ 20th anniversary coincides with my own. So here’s to you, FlatPress: the little flat-file CMS that could.