May 21st, 2006
LightPress vs. WordPress: Which One?
This isn’t a review, but rather a collection of my thoughts after deliberating on whether I should try out LightPress on one of my blogs. For those who are out of the loop, LightPress is a fast front-end for WordPress - our favourite PHP blog software. Basically, it’s installed as a WP plugin, but it changes so much of WP that it could very well be called a trimmed down and optimized version of WordPress.
The advantages of LightPress are multiple (e.g. more intuitive templating, packaged anti-comment spam, RSS feeds for search results, etc.), but the feature I’m most interested in is its faster page rendering with less and faster queries compared to WordPress. This means that your readers will get faster page loads, while your blog consumes less server CPU time (highly important if you’re hosting on a shared hosting plan).
Of course, if LightPress brought only advantages to the table, all my WordPress blogs would be running LightPress now. Due to the trimmed code, many WP plugins and themes don’t run on LP. LightPress users have to depend on WordPress plugins and themes that have been converted for LightPress use.
Given these pros and cons, I’d say that, for me, the advantages slightly outweigh the disadvantages. But what’s stopping me from using LightPress is the fact that WordPress with WP-Cache (a WP page caching plugin) and eAccelerator (a PHP script caching module) has been proven to be a better solution to LightPress (check previous benchmarking article) if your blog serves enough page views to make caching worth it.
As a result, I’ve decided to stick to WordPress with WP-Cache and eAccelerator installed. The advantages of caching might not kick in until daily page views are high enough, but you wouldn’t really need to worry about page rendering time and CPU usage unless your blog had heavy traffic, right?
P.S.: Of course, if LightPress gets a page caching plugin similar to WP-Cache or Staticize… my decision would most likely change.
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2 Comments
June 16th, 2006 at 2:35 am
It has had a comparable caching feature since 1.1.0:
http://lightpress.org/post/110-release-candidate-1
June 17th, 2006 at 7:57 pm
Ah, thanks, but I’d love to see your benchmarking skills coming into play here.
As it is, the benchmarks done by LP admins are rather incomplete, to say the least.
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