

Dear HN — if php blogging platforms are junk, what do you suggest? - biturd

Wordpress is too heavy. I think many want a very lightweight blog engine. They are just one step ahead of the curve in they don&#x27;t want a shared solution because they want to control their own data. I don&#x27;t trust my blog on tumbler or similar, they may take it down.<p>Requirements:
* portable, leaning me to think php is the easiest and most host friendly for free&#x2F;cheap
* easy install
* no database for served files, fine for interim writing and working, SQLite for ease I would guess
* markdown
* template to make it look nice
* basic ability to add analytics, SEO, etc
* dashboard, stats. 
* ability to take to pretty much any host
* handle a few hundred thousand uniques a day and don&#x27;t have to worry, so HN&#x2F;reddit can hit it without trouble. Do this on Apache without a CDN etc.
* maybe even work on S3 or a free Amazon instance. Good learning experience to get others to learn the AWS system controls.<p>Ghost was suggested here the other day. I looked at it and saw it was all node and JS. I knew I was I for a server side config night of fun.<p>Another was posted yesterday and was semi-bashed because it was php.<p>So what do you suggest?<p>I know there&#x27;s lists and lists, but installing and testing to have them fall on your face is no fun. Some have zero pull requests&#x2F;downloads.<p>Looking for a &quot;I stand by experience&quot; recommendation. And to be honest, I think done right, php is an excellent language for this. Simple blog, content is king, ability to grow into a full fledged business if your writing is that good.<p>Suggestions?
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sadanapalli
I would suggest Octopress/Jekyll framework to serve static web pages from a
VPS such as DigitalOcean/linode. You may as well use Github Pages to host your
web pages if that meets your needs.

This will meet many of your needs listed.

~~~
allwein
Wanted to throw in a second vote for Jekyll. It's pretty easy to setup, and
nothings lower-load than straight HTML serving.

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nikdaheratik
I 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.

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Clorith
I'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 wordpress.org is also full of themes, there's even a
plugin that transforms your WordPress into "Ghost" (The same feel and layout).

But I would love to hear back on my original question as well regarding it
being heavy.

~~~
biturd
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 or working in a text editor of my liking, knowing that quote
marked in code aren't auto converted to smart quotes, knowing that the raw
markdown is raw, and I can move it anywhere.

I am sure you can do all this in Wordpress, I am just looking to remove all
that overheard, as starting a blog again is feeling more daunting than ever
given my current medical issues. If I can just get it off the ground I will be
happy.

But I feel I have to do something, so I want to do something that gets me to
my end goal as quick as possible, but allows things to possibly grow without
me thinking about what a Varnish, CDN, Cloudfront, etc all are.

~~~
dangrossman
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.

~~~
chc
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.

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mcintyre1994
You've said WordPress takes too long to set up, so to manage your expectations
I'd probably start by claiming nothing will satisfy all your requirements.
That said, what about a static blog generator? HTML is uber portable, hosts
anywhere, no install, no database, I think most generate from markdown, use
any template, SEO is kinda missing but just follow best practices - and you'll
be fast which is a benefit there, dashboard/stats is missing, can you make do
with something over log files and GA?

You said you think PHP is right for this, but why do you need that much power?

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MattBearman
It sounds like you want Jekyll, but in PHP.

I actually starting building just that, it was called LiME
([https://github.com/mattbearman/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.

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pestaa
You are in analysis paralysis. There will be no perfect solution. If you think
WordPress is heavy, you never really had serious requirements for content
management anyway. My suggestion? Stick with what you know.

~~~
krapp
To be fair to biturd, the less you're willing to trust Wordpress defaults, the
more hassle it is. Once you get to the point of writing a child theme and
writing your own code to enforce an html whitelist (as I do) and setting
secure defaults in the config file etc. then you're basically swimming against
the current of Wordpress' own practicality. You might as well just pick up
slim + twig + phpass and roll your own, and it would probably be more secure
anyway.

Although I do wonder, if there isn't a good static blogging solution in PHP,
why there isn't.

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workhere-io
WordPress 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.

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MichaelStubbs
I site with the static blog generator crowd. I've not heard of anything that
would meet all of your requirements but my favourite static blog generator,
Pelican, would come pretty close.

[http://blog.getpelican.com/](http://blog.getpelican.com/)

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bliti
I don't see what the deals with not using WP is. Its proven, reliable, fairly
secure, simple to install, and easy to extend via plug-ins. Who cares if it
has some crappy PHP in it? It works, and gets the job done right.

