People who can't afford hosting with a DB are granted free access to WordPress.com, so what?
What if I want to self-host? What if I want a custom theme? What if it's my own damn business?
I think it (FlatPress) is pretty darn slick. Much much easier to setup than a DBMS system. I had it going in less than a minute. Also, I'd venture to say that it's much easier to backup and restore, too. Nice job, NoWhereMan. 
thanks
Also, the file format is quite human-readable. That's inherited from another flat file solution which was called SimplePHPBlog with which I fell in love with in 2005. The codebase was easy to read, but with simplicity in mind, which made it very hackable; but in the end it became difficult to maintain all the hacks, it wasn't very efficient with the use of resources, and plagued by many security bugs.
That's why I started working on FP, with two friends. Now it's mostly only me.
SimplePHPBlog looks dead at the moment.
Large code parts are derived from WordPress, am I right here?
small code parts. the plugin system, and the formatting filters. Not much more. The plugin system should ideally be compatible, but in fact it isn't so much.
Because flat-file storage for a blog is ridiculous.
Imagine the search procedure. Imagine the file size. Don't forget the server load.
The search sucks, and I have suggested many times to rely on google, instead.
The average file size is small, since it's all text.
The server load is the Achille's heel, but it is meant for low traffic sites.
flat-file storage is much more ridiculous for a forum engine, which is what many time people asked me for.
On a blog you just read posts in a predefined order most of the time, and sometimes you add one post --this is not designed to support multiple users at a time for editing. Comments are supported, though.
Also, I don't think there are many flat-file solutions using a data structure
designed for speed and low memory consumption for indexing
If your site does not match those requirements (being low traffic, non-multiuser) I am generally the first to suggest something else; PivotX is nice because it supports bot flat files both MySQL; otherwise there is WordPress, MovableType, etc. etc.
There is even an FP2WP exporter. You wouldn't believe people asked me for a
WP2FP importer... which I finally wrote, not without some concerns. ("why would you do
that??)
So it's not like I'm not concerned about performances
I've been thinking about caching the front page and the last few posts. It is really free, thanks to Smarty. Someone could write a plugin to enable that;
IIRC it's just matter of
add_action('init', 'enable_cache');
function enable_cache() {
global $smarty;
// todo: add a check for the frontpage... / last N posts...
$smarty->cache = 1;
}
I don't enable caching as a default because caching the frontpage is a little counter-intuitive for a end user ("hey, where is my post?")
bye
plugin.readmore.zip