LightPress

After having tested it for a couple of months on small and medium-sized blogs (eg autoblog.it, Jerome's blog, my blog), we feel that the 1.2 branch is stable enough to be released as a beta. The major features in this release are compatibility with the 1.2 packages from our themes site, Spanish translations for all of our templates (thanks bolonki!), and some performance tweaks.

This release should be very similar to the first 1.2 stable, with the exception of a few improvements to the admin console and WP integration that we will add in the next few weeks. Read the rest of this entry for a summary of changes from 1.2.0 alpha2.

I have just committed preliminary support for Lighttpd rewrite rules in LightPress. If you feel adventurous, you can download our development package and let us know of anything that needs fixing. I am not a Lighttpd expert, so any input is welcome.

It's been quite some time since our last release -- not quite what we intended. But I'm happy to announce an update to the stable 1.1 version of LightPress. This is a maintenance release, so there are very few new features as we have concentrated on bug fixes.

Notable changes in version 1.1.1:

• Fixed return-by-reference errors raised by the newest versions of PHP.

• Added PostsChronological plugin to display posts in forward-chronological order.

• Fixed bugs #31, #32, #36 and #44.

• Sample

  config.php

  file renamed to

  config-sample.php

  to prevent overwriting file on upgrade.

I've been promising this for some time, but now it's finally done: our very own themes site. Now you can try out some of the themes available for LightPress and download the ones you like. There are only a few themes up at the moment, but we'll be adding more as they get submitted. Should be fun!

The most trafficked blogs powered by LightPress are those published by the Italian nanopublishing company Blogo, which I helped found last year and later left. The 15 blogs are housed on an old Celeron 900, and backed by a dual-Xeon MySQL server which is mostly sitting idle thanks to our caching module.

In September, the old Celeron served 2.25 million page views, with a peak rate of 250 page views per minute on September 26 at 11:04:00. If you take into account that every page view involves several image hits (~10), at least one adserver hit (hosted on the same machine), and one stats logging hit (same machine, again), all of them served by a fat Apache, LightPress seems to handle itself pretty well under load.