Sencer has released a second round of benchmark results comparing WordPress, TextPattern, Serendipity and LightPress. I'm happy to report that LightPress continues to lead the pack at almost twice the speed of TxP and over three times the speed of WP. Memory usage isn't too shabby either.
This is without caching of course, since we have yet to add this feature to LP. A caching plugin is in the works and once it's available I hope we can get included in the second column as well.
If you're wondering whether or not to switch to LightPress, Sencer writes:
If you are a Wordpress user, the only reason for not using the Lightpress frontend is maybe certain plugins (though some are supported in lp) or if you don’t know any html and like the many ready-made templates for Wordpress (lp uses a different, IMHO easier templating system). Both of these points may change in the future.
I am not thinking about switching to Lightpress at the moment, so take this feature request with a grain of salt: I think it would be great if you added a UTF-8 compatible template to the base distribution. AFAIK Wordpress uses UTF-8 by default, and while english writing people won’t notice a big difference, a lot of other people may be irritated when their “funny character” turn into “funny symbols”. Or is something like that already in the making?
Good point. My site’s template actually uses UTF-8 due to the “funny symbol” issue (an artifact from WP I think). Changing over the existing templates shouldn’t be too difficult.
Sencer, I am still suffering from the developer’s syndrome, i.e. everything which seems easy to a developer should be easy for a user too, which is often not true.
Converting templates from one charset to another is very easy using iconv or similar tools, so I never bothered to do it. Will produce a set of UTF-8 templates today, and release 1.0.4. I seem to remember Jerome had a new plugin he wanted to release too.
I have converted the kubrick template to UTF-8 and am going to add it to CVS in a few minutes. If you are on a Unix system, converting is very quick:
for f in $(find ../en_US.ISO-8859-1 -type f); do
nf=$(echo $f | sed s/ISO-8859-1/UTF-8/);
iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 -o $nf $f;
done