When I say flat files, you're probably thinking just posts, but there's more to something like Wordpress than just posts. For example, there's global site optio

When I say flat files, you're probably thinking just posts, but there's more to something like Wordpress than just posts. For example, there's global site options, there's individual post options, categories, taxonomies, etc. You get the idea. Sure, all of these can be maintained with static files as well. And that's what we did initially. But, over time, it becomes a maintenance nightmare. Plus, nothing like going into a nice fluid UI and checking/unchecking checkboxes. One common argument is these interfaces can be had with flat file CMSes as well. But then, you will end up re-writing an ORM for the filesystem which goes back to my original problem - SQL databases and their ORMs already solve this problem. It's easy to think flat file CMSes when you're dealing with small files. When dealing with over 30,000 posts, you need to find that file in a directory, open it up and you'll see a totally different structure of the file compared to the most recent ones. They lack consistency. In a database, if I added a new column all old values will be prefixed with null. But the columns are the same for every entry, unlike a static file CMS. Finally, think also about complex queries. Have you seen Wordpress's queries? To generate a simple Navbar menu, you will make so many joins. Especially if you are trying to render menus under different categories (eg. on category pages). Or, how about displaying related posts? It's much easier to query an SQL database, to get something related to the current post. Good luck doing that on 30,000 files whose contents reside inside of the file itself. There's no argument here. All I'm saying is, we tried all that flat file CMSes have to offer. At a scale of 30,000 (now it's actually close to 50,000) posts, it's no joke. In fact, we plan to open source our flat file CMS'es ORM. It's great for small blogs. But for big publishers, you need to use a hybrid approach.