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 probably heard of the Log4j vulnerability “Log4Shell” which causes trouble for sysadmins and software developers all over the world currently.

Good news is: FlatPress does not utilize Log4j at all, and thus isn’t affected by this problem.

Stay safe out there!

I just released a bugfix release for FlatPress 1.2 “Legato”. It solves issue #82 which may have led to a blank page in the admin area. Thanks for reporting!

As a little bonus, 1.2.1 introduces a Dutch translation by Macmee - hartelijk bedankt!

Please see the changelog for a complete list of changes.

Updating from 1.2 to 1.2.1 is very simple, please see the update instructions on the download page.

All the best,
Arvid

In 2006, SimplePHPBlog (SPB) was a simple blog engine that stored the contents of a post in text files. At the time WordPress was already one of the most used blog engines. I was starting my first year at the university and I wanted something I could host on a free shared web hosting, easy to customize and with a database that was accessible and easy to backup. For me, SPB at the time checked all the items on this list, and there was a growing community of enthusiasts that provided plugins and themes.

SPB’s simplicity was one of the reasons why it attracted a lot of fans; an international community quickly grew, and from that, a smaller Italian community (SPBItalia) was born too. These communities developed mods and code extensions to customize SPB for their needs. However, the simplicity of its codebase at some point showed its limits. A heavily customized installation of SPB could diverge a lot from the main development line, leaving users with an old, unmaintained, possibly insecure version.

A more modular design could have helped. What makes WordPress great today was the same thing that made it great back in those days: a powerful plug-in API, a theming system, and a vast community that contributed lots of useful plugins and themes, making it easy to customize it, while allowing users to keep up with platform updates.

Luciano Porro (@drudo) founded the SPBItalia forums and developed many themes; Samanta Grasso (SamyWeb) became a moderator shortly after: she was one of the most productive modders and themers in the SPB community. We all met virtually on those forums, and, together, we decided we could do something more.

We released the first FlatPress version on April 15th, 2006. A lot of time has passed since then. I no longer do web development, and a lot of people, especially developers, are now using static website generators instead of dynamic scripting-based blogs. Yet, today marks 15 years from the date, and, to my great surprise, the project is still alive and kicking. This is why, in 2019, I handed over the project to another brave member of the community, Arvid, who is now leading all the future developments of the project.

I still remember fondly those days. Even though I have moved on to different projects, FlatPress has been an important part of my life as a developer.

So, here’s one to you, FlatPress! And, as we say here in Italy: cento di questi giorni!

Today, 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