Things may begin to look a bit different around here as I am in the process of creating a GeneratePress child theme that resembles the old Pixelpost-style photography design I knew and loved. And before you say anything, just know that I am developing it live versus local because I want to. I am stubborn that way. Besides, this is an extremely low traffic website (visitors are pretty much nonexistent), so why not?
Anyway, if you are not familiar with Pixelpost, it was a fascinating little piece of software, especially if you were interested in photography and web design in the mid-to-late 2000s. It was an open-source, self-hosted photoblogging CMS built specifically for photographers. It ran on PHP and MySQL and was designed around a very simple idea: publish one photograph at a time, in chronological order. That distinction is important. It wasn’t really trying to be a general-purpose CMS like WordPress. It was much more narrowly focused on the photographer. That simplicity was actually one of its attractions.
A typical Pixelpost site might have been:
One large photograph
Title
A short description
Date / EXIF information
Previous | Next
Comments
And that’s about it.
Pixelpost had an almost stubbornly simple philosophy: The website exists to display photographs. It didn’t encourage you to build a giant content machine. It didn’t need elaborate menus, sidebars, widgets, related-post systems, massive category structures, sliders, advertising blocks, or 47 things competing for the visitor’s attention. The photograph remained the center of the site. A lot of contemporary blogging software was designed around text, with photographs being something you inserted into an article. Pixelpost essentially reversed that relationship.
Pixelpost first appeared around 2004–2005, right when digital photography and personal websites were exploding. It was developed by Linus Areng, who describes Pixelpost as something he originally built because nothing else suited the needs of a photoblogger. It subsequently attracted thousands of users before being handed over to the community, which eventually went quiet. Development effectively ended around 2009, which makes sense historically. WordPress was becoming increasingly capable, Flickr was becoming enormously popular, and social-media photography was starting to take over. Maintaining a specialized PHP/MySQL photoblog system became increasingly difficult to justify.
I think of Pixelpost less as something to bring back for everyone and more as an example of a very good photography-first design philosophy that has largely disappeared.