[deckiedan]

Presumably because of how many webhosts have it available automatically.

I'd pondered a flat file based php 'blog' engine once - with all the benefits of markdown or whatever - no database complexity, easily rsyncable for deployment, git can keep revisions, etc...

[hayksaakian]

Sure makes sense. I asked because I always see post about Jekyll and octopress, and such. That are basically server-less.

[deckiedan]

Yep - and there's also some benefits performance and security wise to not having any serverside code at all (other than nginx, or whatever).

The problems you have with jekyll, pelican, et al is that you lose site-side search, 'related posts' (without some reasonably complex compile-side clobber), etc. etc.

Using extremely minimal PHP lets you deploy just as easily, you don't get too much of a performance hit (a hell of a lot better than wordpress, etc), you can still do search, related posts, forms, embedding, and all that.

PHP as a server-side 'clever templating' language really isn't that bad. It's only awful when used to build anything massivly complex (such as joomla! or drupal...), and that it encourages messy project design.

[mercurial]

> PHP as a server-side 'clever templating' language really isn't that bad.

I only touch PHP as little as possible, and work with a legacy PHP codebase, but AFAIK, it hasn't evolved a tag to automatically HTML-escape/JSON-escape content. So, it's as good a templating language as it is a programming language: pretty terrible. I'll trade PHP for something as barebones as Python with WSGI + Jinja2 any day.

[pestaa]

It's not fair to compare to compare pure PHP and Jinja2. Twig is the PHP-equivalent of Jinja2, and it is an extremely well designed templating engine.

[mercurial]

What's not fair about it when talking about PHP as a templating language? My point is that while PHP is often lambasted as a terrible programming language, people forget that its HTML templating part is even more abysmal. If you need to have a templating system in your "advanced templating language", this really tells you everything you need to know about its capabilities.

[pestaa]

It's not fair because PHP came way earlier than Jinja2. Both Twig and Jinja2 could learn from its predecessors.

[vesinisa]

> It's only awful when used to build anything massivly complex (such as joomla! or drupal...)

Or a Bitcoin exchange

[meritt]

If only Mark Karpeles had simply written mtgox in another language, there's no way he would have lost 750,000 bitcoins.

[72deluxe]

Wouldn't he have just recreated the same bug in another language? I think you are confusing a bug in implementation/code with the language.

[vidarh]

I believe you're missing the dripping sarcasm.

[uniclaude]

To be honest, not implying you're wrong, but you could have "related posts" with pre-computation, and "site-side search" with a mix of pre-computed data structures and front-end Javascript (which could be quite efficient, provided the blog is not too large).

[danpros]

HTMLy has a built-in search feature and related posts. I use file-naming convention than the speed always fast even though let say the blog has about 3k of posts with hundreds of tags, why? HTMLy don't read the content first but filter it first. I already test it with mini VPS (RAM 128 MB) and no speed penalty.