FlatPress: The Cheap WordPress Alternative? Don’t Think So…

Over at Lorelle on Wordpress there’s a post about FlatPress, which is a flat-file blogging engine. She has a translated version of the benefits of using FlatPress:

The main difference between WordPress and FlatPress is that FlatPress does not require MySQL in order to work. This feature benefits those who do not want to spend a lot of money for a hosted site with a MySQL database, great for low cost hosting and saving money.

That seems a little far-fetched to me. When was the last time you saw a web hosting plan that didn’t include MySQL databases? And with all of the insanely cheap (or even free) web hosting plans that include MySQL (and other) databases, that argument just doesn’t seem to make much sense.

One of the commenters on there has some other thoughts on how this would be useful:

This sounds like a great adaptation of Wordpress for largely static sites (I’m exploring this idea for my small business clients).

The content doesn’t change often (and doesn’t grow), yet my tech-challenged small biz customers would enjoy the key benefit of a CMS site – access to their site’s content without going through a third party.

Just because a site is largely static doesn’t mean that a flat file backend is going to be a better solution. It may be a sign that you should be caching the pages rather than generating them from a database or flat file database each time, but that’s about it.

By the way, I have set up small businesses with Wordpress acting like a CMS before: no comments, all done through pages, no bloggy features except they can edit everything through the Wordpress editor. Works well.

But if their web hosting includes PHP (which you’ll need to run FlatPress) and not MySQL, then it might be time to start looking for a new web host. Switching to a more limited and less flexible piece of software isn’t the best choice.

All in my opinion, of course. I bet somewhere there’s someone with a good reason for using FlatPress, and more power to them. But I just don’t see it.

Another commenter over there:

I think this would be a wonderful way to build small sites quickly and yet still have the CMS/Blog feel. Raring to give it a go!

Also, some hosting providers charge an extra fee for mySQL databases, this could help them!

How would this be any quicker? If anything, it’s slower: most web hosts offer cPanel and Fantastico, so you can just install Wordpress automatically. And the lack of themes and plugins that you get for using brand new blogging software would also slow you down, because you’ll need to do more of that design and development yourself.

And if a web host is charging extra for a MySQL database, then it’s probably time to consider switching. I hate to sound like a broken record, but it’s true.