Download websites that use SPIP

About SPIP

Longevity is the first thing worth understanding about SPIP. The project dates to 2001, which places it among the content management systems that predate the assumption that a website is built on a framework at all. SPIP was written in France, for French speaking editorial teams, and it kept that centre of gravity ever since: media outlets, universities, unions, municipalities and non profit organisations across France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec and francophone Africa. The software never chased the global market that WordPress took, and its community never appears to have wanted it to.

As of September 2026 we see SPIP on 6,680 sites. A PHP application under the GPL v3 licence, SPIP uses a template language of its own rather than a mainstream one, which has a practical consequence for anyone reading the list commercially. Sites built on it cannot be serviced by a general WordPress agency without retraining, and the pool of people who can maintain them is small and largely francophone.

The version column makes the maintenance culture visible. Our records hold 260 distinct releases across the installed base, with live sites clustering around 4.4.21. A platform that has shipped that many releases across that many years, and whose live sites still sit near the current line, is being actively looked after by someone. Active care is unusual for a system of this age, and it changes who the audience for the export is.

Vendors selling into the French public and educational sector use SPIP presence as a segmentation signal, because the platform correlates with an institutional buyer rather than a commercial one. Migration specialists use the same signal in the opposite direction, hunting for sites where an ageing bespoke stack is a candidate for replacement. Security teams and hosts have a third reason, since a self hosted PHP system with a custom template layer is exactly the kind of thing that falls outside a routine patch process built around the mainstream platforms.

None of those questions can be answered by checking domains one at a time, which is where a downloadable list differs from a lookup tool. A lookup confirms what a site you already know is running. The export defines the cohort, and the cohort is what you need in order to size a niche, plan a localised campaign or study how a regional platform holds ground against global ones. Detection relies on the markup and asset paths SPIP generates, so installations behind a full page cache, a reverse proxy or a heavily rewritten theme can pass without leaving a signature we can read. The figure is best treated as sites where SPIP remains publicly identifiable, with the real installed base somewhat larger.