Hi folks,

over the last few years, some of you have asked me how they could send me a small donation to recognize my efforts on the FlatPress project.
This means a lot to me, not for the money, but for your gratitude.

I’ve finally managed to set up a PayPal account and a SEPA bank account for this - so if you want to send a little “Thank you”, feel free to do so now:

• https://www.flatpress.org/donate

Thanks a lot to all of you!
Arvid

Hey folks,

hope you had a good start into 2022. These are strange and sometimes exhausting times out there, stay safe and keep smiling!

As you may or may not know, franah works on a complety new Admin Area for quite a while now. It presents all the known administrative functions in a stylish new way and also works great on your mobile gizmo, e.g. smartphone or tablet.

What we need to do now is testing the new Admin Area in every possible way. Is everything working fine, does it look good on any device, does it break anything?

This is where YOU come into play: Please help us testing!

Download the latest development snapshot here:

• https://github.com/flatpressblog/flatpress/archive/refs/heads/responsiveadmin.zip

(The “responsiveadmin” development branch contains everything you find in the main branch - but with the new Admin Area instead of the old one.)

You could set up a new FlatPress installation, say, under yourwebsite.com/responsiveadmin. Then simply copy the fp-content and fp-plugins folders from your productive website there, so you can edit your very own blog content in the new Admin Area. Also, add the folder of your productive theme to fp-interface/themes to see if your own blog theme works well with the new Admin Area.

Since we are in very early testing, we strongly recommend not to use the new Admin Area on productive sites. Let’s make sure everything works and looks fine first :)

If you have opinions about the new Admin Area, or you want to suggest changes or report bugs, please join the discussion on the FlatPress support forum:

• https://forum.flatpress.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=107

Thank you very much for supporting us!
All the best,
Arvid

You know our Twitter account @FlatPress, right? Well, you might say, “but FlatPress says in its FAQ it wants to make its users independent from such platforms!”. And you’re right!

From now on, you also find the FlatPress project on Mastodon. This is a social network service which works quite similar to Twitter. The main difference is the absence of one single central instance that controls everything. Instead, Mastodon has many independent instances which work together. The FlatPress account resides on the Fosstodon instance.

So if you already have a Mastodon account, feel free to follow @flatpress@fosstodon.org. And if not, why not give it a try?

All the best
Arvid

Original image from the Mastodon press kit.

Hi folks, I hope you’re all okay out there. The year 2020 has been a hell of a ride for many of us, hopefully you all got through it without major damage.

For the FlatPress project, 2020 was kind of quiet. Sure, we made big steps towards FlatPress 1.2 (see the progress in the Changelog), but we didn’t manage to release it yet. Even the security fix I planned to release didn’t work out as expected, it may even not be released until after 1.2.

However, 2020 also was another year with strong community support. Thanks a lot for all the emails and suggestions, for your contributions on the wiki, your testing efforts and your pull requests on GitHub. Also, thank you very much for kindly supporting each other on the forums, it is always a real pleasure for me to see that.

I feel a little sorry about the slow release cycle. FlatPress 1.2 should’ve been released long ago to enable FlatPress for PHP 7.4 and PHP 8. I’ll do my best to get this done real soon. But at least, we consequently stick to our project philosophy: We do not run a feature race here ;)

I wish you all some quiet and peaceful holidays. Let’s take a few days off and gather fresh momentum for the new year. If all goes well, life may go back to some kind of normal one day.

All the best,
Arvid

Image: Derivate of “meh” by Яick Harris - licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The ending year 2019 was the year of the FlatPress comeback. Our revival plan worked quite well: Since February, we have the new FlatPress version 1.1 that brought FlatPress to current PHP versions. Also, FlatPress regained a lot of publicity, especially in Germany by being featured in the LinuxUser magazine and being listed on Heise Download, the biggest German software download portal.

One of my greatest pleasures was to see that the FlatPress community – you! – also got back together. I am very proud to take care of this little blogging engine that is being used, enjoyed and enhanced all over the world. Throughout the year, I have received a lot of bug reports and enhancement proposals, there were new plugins and themes, and sometimes I just got a little “Thank you”. This all tells me that FlatPress as self-hosted blogging engine still is important, even (or especially!) in times of huge walled-garden platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

I’m excited to see what 2020 will bring. Franah is working on a completely new admin panel which already looks awesome, and we still have a few issues to be taken care of. Also, Matthias keeps testing the heck out of FlatPress which always brings some little glitches to fix ;)
As in 2019, FlatPress still won’t change the world, but it will stay your reliable choice when it comes to easily-set-up, self-hosted, standard-compliant, great-looking blogging sites.

For the last days of 2019, I hope you all have a peaceful time whereever you are. Take some days off, visit your families, and don’t forget to take care of those who need it. And then have a great start into a successful new year 2020!

All the best
Arvid