There are some flat file blogging solutions around. They’re great for running niche sites where you don’t want more advanced features that require a database. About 70% of my niche sites run on PHP scripts that don’t use a DB or static HTML.

So far as updating goes, the best thing to do is to lock down access as much as possible. Most hacks to WP these days happen because of user registration backdoors, remote access via XMLRPC and bad/evil plugins. So the basic thing to do is to restrict access and only use a few well known and trusted plugins. You could even lock things down further by not allowing comments and making a few other changes.

As with any upgrade, you do have to weigh it and decide what’s best for you and your situation and not upgrade blindly. For example, just look at how many businesses are still using Windows XP and are avoiding upgrading to Vista and Windows 7 even though the security is, in theory, better on those OSs.

As for article directory scripts, I’ve tried a few of them and I’ve found them to be poor CMS systems as compared to WordPress and Joomla. I think there are some article directory components you can get for WP and Joomla but I haven’t tried any of them.

The drawback I see with trying to build an article directory as a flagship site is that it requires a very intensive moderation since there are so many tools out there that pound directories with automated entries and poorly spun content. Plus, since most of your content will be duplicate unless you heavily moderate it, you will have trouble ranking well unless you’re able to nail down considerable site authority.

I thought there are also Pligg and Scuttle? Or have these two scripts been devalued by the search engines because too many spammers use them?

Overall, a useful post on some of the alternative means of building flagship/authority sites. If I am not wrong, most or all of the scripts you mentioned use the MySQL database. What are your thoughts about scripts that use flat file databases? I know that they are probably less scalable if you do a lot of data entry, e.g. for social bookmarking sites, but for blogs and CMS which mainly dispense read-only data, could they be more resource efficient and easier to maintain?

I ask this because now that I have about 20 WordPress instances running (for niche sites), I find myself having difficulty keeping all my sites updated with the latest version. I believe that Drupal and Joomla would have similar problems. Being popular scripts, there would be many crackers targeting them and you would need to spend a lot of time upgrading them and testing them to make sure all the functionality still works.

I realize that by definition, you would not have more than one or two flagship sites. But still … the thought of having my primary means of income go down indefinitely because of an upgrade does not make me at all happy. And from prior experience (I worked in IT), the more changes the more likely there is that something would go wrong. A case in point is the recent WP 2.9 upgrade. It broke the scheduled posting function for some people, and the WP team needed to release a fix, WP 2.9.1 in a hurry. For other cases of bigger failures, I remember that my upgrades from WP 2.7.x to 2.8.x and from 2.8.x to 2.9.x caused a few of my plug-ins to stop working.

As an aside, I wonder what you think about using article directory scripts for flagship sites. They should be able to work as a pretty decent CMS, shouldn’t it? I’ve never used them before, and I have also never used Drupal and Joomla before, so I cannot compare them. But do you have any thoughts about this?