Over the past few weeks, ever since I posted an article on my blog at robertkorczak.com concerning which type of blogging engine is the best. I received tons of emails with some people telling me where I can stick my opinion while others were praising me for not being a sheep blindly following the masses towards WordPress.
It would seam that a lot of folks out there took my comments about WordPress very much to heart, from the response I got you’d think that I had run over their dog, that’s how harshly some of the readers out there took that article. So I figured it was only right to do a “Part 2” version of the article where I describe and explain my reasoning for generally liking Flat Press over WordPress. I remind everyone again that the choice of either software is very much dictated by what your requirements are and what you expect the software to deliver. Although they are both “Blogging /CMS” software they do have some very real and obvious differences between them.
Personally I run both WordPress and Flat Press, my main blog is obviously a WordPress blog but I use Flat Press as a very simple CMS for other sites as it’s quick and pages load much faster. From the customer point of view the page has to load fast or he/she will just move on to the next website and buy from them instead of you.
Thus, we end up with a follow up article on the subject of which blog engine is better. Once again the combatants are WordPress vs Flat Press and in this cage match there must be a winner.
Lets first clear up a few misconceptions, I don’t think that WP is a terrible platform, I think it’s grown to big for it’s own good and is in danger of becoming bloatware. I also think that it’s way too much of a resource hog.
Having said all that, the differences between WP and FP are great enough that in all honesty there isn’t going to be a clear winner in this battle and that is because both blog engines have their positives and negatives. So, it’s going to depend very much on your own personal requirements of a CMS that will be the deciding factor in which blogware is right for you.
So lets look at a few points about WordPress which will then be followed by a few-
words about Flat Press.
WordPress:
1. Do you have a dedicated IP or are you on shared hosting in which there are countless other domains and websites all using the exact same resources from the exact same machines that your domain/website is trying to access? The fact that WP is so CPU intensive means that in a shared hosting situation WP is going to run slow and it will take it’s time to bring up the web page. Studies have shown that most people surfing the net will not wait more than around 5-10 seconds before they decide to go to a different website for their purchases, or information or whatever it is that they came to your site for in the first place.
2. Versatility, In their own way both WordPress and Flat Press have their shining moments and personally I believe FP to be a lot faster. The best part of FP is that you don’t have to have access to any server side software like MySql. Where WordPress has Flat Press beat is in the expandability department. There are just so many themes, both paid and unpaid, that a WP installation can seem like a normal non-blog website. It’s just a matter of finding the CMS theme you want and go on from there. I’m sure there is a way to get FP to imitate this sort of behaviour but honestly WP wins this one because it talks to a database and if you’re on a dedicated I.P. Or you’re on a very fast shared hosting webhost then WordPress is absolutely worth considering.
3. WordPress can be difficult to use at times, if you’ve ever tried to put a YouTube video inside a post using WP then you know what I’m talking about. I had to go looking for a solution to this problem and I finally found an obscure plugin that was not intended for the general public. It was some tiny, hole in the wall site and the guy that coded this plugin was basically just sharing it with his friends. This raises another problem I have with WP and that problem is it doesn’t handle many html commands well, not well at all.
4. If you have a decent webhost they probably offer an easy install solution for WordPress. Yes, the software that those webhosts provide really does do a very nice job of installing WP. I’d even go as far as to say that a child in the 1’st or 2’nd grade could install it under the circumstances described above. It really is that simple, provided that your host has that service available to you. If they don’t and you want to install WP you’re going to enter teritory of computer code, permissions on the server and so on. Yes, I think that everyone who is a true fan of the internet should attempt to learn the basics of the internet languages that have developed in recent years. The more you understand about your websites functionality the better because this way you may be able to fix the inevitable problems that pop up from time to time without having to call someone like me to come and fix it for you.
So now lets take a look at Flat Press and it’s positives and negatives.
1. The first thing that struck me about Flat Press is how insanely easy it was to install. FP doesn’t require your webhost to do anything special or offer and special programs that do the installation. The only requirement that exists for running Flat Press is that your host needs to be running a relatively new version of PHP. I don’t really want to get into what php is but suffice it to say that I this day and age just about ever host, both free and paid, runs php as so many different little scripts rely on this language to function. It really is one of the two basic languages/platforms of the Internet. The other one being the original html or Hypertext Markup Language.
2. Even though both blog-engines are free to download and use, only Flat Press will run on just about any free server. You see, here is where Cost comes into the picture, WordPress has certain requirements in order to function and you might have to shell out some extra cash each month for a hosting plan that offers you MySql.
3. FlatPress has a built in html editor by default, you have to activate it yourself if you want to use it but that is very easily done from the controll panel that you’ll be using to admin the site. Also, just as in WordPress, FP also handles BB code for creating posts or spicing them up a bit. So if you so chose you could write an entry in html code as well as BB code. It’s just a matter of which one you’re most comfortable with. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to use either code if you don’t want to because just as in WordPress you can let the software handle the formating. I’d also like to add that personally I find the auto formatting to be far less buggy than WP. That’s just my opinion though.
4. You’ll get far less automated Spam on Flat Press because at the moment the FlatPress blogs have far to few people to get the spammers out there to take notice of the FP users. Naturally, as FP develops and should it become popular enough, it will raise the interest of spammers. Fortunately FP comes with a preinstalled anti spam plugin.
5. Yup, that’s right, FP has most of the popular plug-ins and applications, and often the exact same ones that WordPress users enjoy. FP is search engine optimized ,just like WP, which you will instantly see after installation. As I mentioned already, installation of FP is extremely easy, you simply take the zip file or the unzipped folder and ftp it to your server. Then you go into the folder you just uploaded and find the “install” file which you double-click followed by answering a couple of questions during the installation. Afterards the software will provide you with a link to the administrator log-in page. The user-name and password by default re admin and admin. Naturally you’ll want to get into the control panel as soon as possible and change the log-in information to something unique. Finally, if you so desire, you can go do a search on the Internet for Flat Press themes and you’ll find a decent selection, not a great selection but I would say not a bad one either.
So just as I stated in my first article on this subject, I personally like Flat Press better but I certainly use WordPress where I find it to be more beneficial. I hope this second article clears things up a bit and we can get back to our regularly scheduled lives.
By: Robert Korczak
www.robertkorczak.com
