Flatpress Review – How’s It Compare To WordPress Blogging Platform?
Written by Kate Gilby on July 21, 2010 · Filed under Blogging, Internet, Review
Flatpress is a blogging platform which is somewhat different to the more popular and better known, WordPress, because it doesn’t require a database to run it. Written in PHP, Flatpress stores data in text files making it the only real choice for people who want to set up a blog, but who don’t have access to a database, or don’t feel comfortable using one.
Installing Flatpress is simple, but unfortunately it isn’t available in either cPanel or Plesk, so users do have to download and install it manually. This is easier than it sounds, just unzip it – you may need to to do this twice because the download file is saved in tar.b2z format – then upload it to your server using ftp. When you’ve done that follow the simple installation guide – really, it is very easy – and it will be installed in just a few seconds.
Once installed, you’ll be presented with the admin area which is neat and uncluttered and fairly intuitive, especially if you’ve ever used WordPress. There is an options section which lets you change the name and description of your blog, change the date and time format, number of posts per page, and also gives you the option to add text to the footer section.
Flatpress comes bundled with a choice of two nice looking default themes, and a range of plugins – including Akismet – but you can further customise your blog by installing new themes and plugins, once again this has to be done manually. I found it easy to install a new plugin, but got a bit lost when I tried to add a new theme because I couldn’t find the themes folder. Unlike WordPress, themes are installed to the fp-interface folder rather the one which contains content.
Flatpress In Use
The new post box is quite basic, and uses BBCode – if you’ve spent much time on forums and message boards you’ll be familiar with this – and is functional. However, I couldn’t find any way to upload an image or video. As far as I can tell these have to be uploaded to your server, then added to a post using BBCode.
Like WordPress, Flatpress uses drag-and-drop widgets which can be arranged as you choose, but they can’t be edited in any way, and there isn’t a text widget so you can only use the available ones and have no way of adding your own custom widgets. I guess you could get around this by adding code to the theme by hand – as early users of WordPress had to do – but this would be tricky for beginners.
Flatpress doesn’t have a tagging system, but users can create categories. Once again, this is a manual process. It’s simple to do – you just type the name of the category into a text box along with a unique number; to create sub-categories simply indent the text.
Summary
To sum up: Flatpress is a nice looking platform, I especially liked the way themes are applied to the dashboard as well as the blog. It’s extremely fast, and the actual process of writing a post is very easy. The platform has plenty of community support, and there is an accompanying message board offering advice as well as new themes and plugins.
On the downside, the lack of automation means it would be quite difficult for beginners to use. Also, BBCode isn’t as widely known as HTML which steepens the learning curve.
If you are new to blogging, I wouldn’t recommend Flatpress; you’d find it far easier to upgrade your hosting package and install WordPress using the automated installer, Fantastico. However, if you are looking for a simple but fast platform, and enjoy tinkering about in the ‘back-end’ it might be worth a look.
Do you have opinion to compare blogger and wordpress ? What make different on both I actually prefer blogger as my platform but wanna try wordpress too please tell me the benefit for using wordpress.
i know how to add an image to an entry. login, go to the upload tab and upload an image. then write/edit an entry, click the second dropdown menu (the one on the right with –), choose an image to insert from the dropdown menu. if the image is huge (something with a width bigger than 500px) then it wont be resized. It can be resized by editing “common.css” in “/fp-interface/themes/leggero/leggero/res/common.css”. Go to the ‘img’ tag and make the width about “450px” and the height “auto”. worked for me
btw flatpress is awesome!!! and really easy to tweak because ive been using it for about a week now (designing a blog for a client).
I’ve been using FlatPress for a while now – I think it’s great and, once you get under the hood, a very powerful way to rapidly develop a new web site.
I like the uncluttered feel of the admin panel – sometimes less is better and I get confused by all the options in WordPress.
With regard to the text widget – you are wrong as you simply create a normal page in Flatpress and click a button in the admin panel to turn it into a widget which you can then place on your side bar, or whichever bar your theme allows.
Normal tags (not categories) – tag cloud and all – are available through a plugin, and support for remote posting from Windows Live Writer, Firefox Scribewriter, or even Posterous is very good.
And you can either use HTML (instead of BBCode) in your posts or add a WYSIWYG editor (e.g. Tiny MCE) via a plugin.
You can also upload your photos and files via an upload section in the admin panel, then you just select them from a drop-down when you’re writing a post. It’s not perfect but, in today’s world of multi-tab browsing it’s not so difficult to open up a new tab if you want to upload something.
It’s actually a very, very, versatile piece of software – very easy to set up, very intuitive (no steep learning curve) and, the more you get to know it the more you’ll find it can do – and the support forum rocks. The author is constantly in attendance – as are several other users who can help with most problems. I’ve always had my questions answered straight away.
If you have your own server then getting up and running with a new blog is as simple as uploading it and taking literally about a minute to answer a couple of questions to set it up.
If you don’t have your own server then there are free hosts which offer great support for FlatPress. I have my own server and also have one blog running on 110mb.com.
No complaints so far – quite the contrary, in fact. I thoroughly recommend it to blogging beginners – especially if you want a blog which is clutter free and not choked up with ads you have no control over, unwanted flash, and lists of “friends” posts in the side bar – again which you have no control over.
And you can use it as a front end to a database-driven application if you want.