If you think you need more lightweight PHP blogging solution, I am a happy user of Anchor CMS[1]. There are some nice free themes for it too at Anchor Themes[2].
They had a Show HN a few months ago
Dear HN — if php blogging platforms are junk, what do you suggest?
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Dear HN — if php blogging platforms are junk, what do you suggest?
#12I'll bite. What makes WordPress too heavy in your regard (I'm a huge fan of WordPress my self, so quite biased), is it the way you use it, or the themes you use? At it's base, WordPress is quite simple, and it's the themes that define what it looks like and feels like to your users. If you are looking for something very simple then there's the simple twenty twelve theme which is very clean. The theme directory on wor…
For me, there is a lot of work setting it up, getting the themes where you want them, then finding one of 100 various plug-in's for SEO or twitter or whatever, and figuring out which is the best, and which has the least security holes. You are right, at the core, it is simple, but it is time consuming to me. And it falls over under load unless you have a bit of time or money to throw at it, or both. I like the idea o…
WordPress does not fall over under load, poorly configured Apache servers do that. When WP sites fall over in heavy traffic it's because they're on a small VPS or shared host, and Apache was allowed to spawn more processes than there is available memory. They only run into this condition when there's enough traffic that the baseline number of worker processes all get used up and new ones are spawned. It doesn't matter what's running on the server. I have done no special configuration and use no caching whatsoever, and my WordPress blog has been on HN's front page with hundreds of concurrent visits several times.
Re: Dear HN — if php blogging platforms are junk, what do you suggest?
#13I don't think there is a blog that can be described as both "lightweight" and support all of the features you've listed.
I use a PHP framework (li3) in my day job, but the framework that seemed to fit my blogging needs the most was Django, and even that is "heavy" compared to Wordpress, which is already configured and installed for a lot of ISPs.
I get what you're saying about Wordpress. I moved away from it because I wanted the ability to fine tune the look of the blog and not be stuck with their database structure.
However, the best approach, if you're not wanting to learn a whole new framework, would be to find an ISP you're comfortable with that ticks most of those boxes as far as analytics goes. Then use some kind of static blog system to take your text and turn it into HTML. Unless it's super obscure, the language does matter as much if you're using a static system. Just configure it the way you want and post the HTML that it creates from your files. And as long as you've structured the documents well, moving back to a dynamic blogging system later on isn't going to be that tough.
Re: Dear HN — if php blogging platforms are junk, what do you suggest?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, there is a lot of work setting it up, getting the themes where you want them, then finding one of 100 various plug-in's for SEO or twitter or whatever, and figuring out which is the best, and which has the least security holes. You are right, at the core, it is simple, but it is time consuming to me. And it falls over under load unless you have a bit of time or money to throw at it, or both. I like the idea o…
WordPress does not fall over under load, poorly configured Apache servers do that. When WP sites fall over in heavy traffic it's because they're on a small VPS or shared host, and Apache was allowed to spawn more processes than there is available memory. They only run into this condition when there's enough traffic that the baseline number of worker processes all get used up and new ones are spawned. It doesn't matte…
Eh, Apache is a common culprit, but it is not the only one. WordPress sites with a moderately complicated theme and several plugins can easily crumble under load even with an nginx+PHP-FPM setup. Yes, you can throw more hardware power at it, but that's true with Apache as well. If you're expecting a lot of visitors to a WordPress site, you will generally want to make sure you have a good cache.
Re: Dear HN — if php blogging platforms are junk, what do you suggest?
#15It sounds like you want Jekyll, but in PHP.
I actually starting building just that, it was called LiME (https://github.com/mattbearman/lime) - although I'd never actually used Jekyll at the time, I just knew the theory behind it.
Not long after I pushed v0.2 I switched to Ruby/Rails, stopped working in PHP, and LiME has sat stagnant ever since.
Still, it worked fine, although didn't have all the features of Jekyll, I'd love for someone to take it over.
Re: Dear HN — if php blogging platforms are junk, what do you suggest?
#16WordPress is not heavy when you use one of the many caching plugins.
SQLite should not be your go-to database if you want to handle "a few hundred thousand uniques a day". PostgreSQL or MySQL are much better for that purpose.
While some of the core WordPress code is terrible, WordPress is still pretty much the leader when it comes to usability and time-to-market. My recommendation: WordPress plus a caching plugin.