Download websites that use Typecho

About Typecho

A self-hosted content management system leaves its version number in the open, and the spread of those numbers says more about a project than any feature list does. Across the installations of Typecho we can fingerprint, 15 distinct releases are in the wild, with 1.2.1 accounting for the largest share of the ones we can read. A blogging platform whose users mostly sit on one recent release is being maintained by hand by people who follow the project, not left running by an agency that walked away.

Typecho began in 2008 as a deliberately small alternative to the heavyweight blogging platforms of the time. Written in PHP and released under the GPL v2 licence, it keeps a codebase a single developer can read in an afternoon, runs on the cheapest shared hosting, and supports Markdown authoring, comments and a plugin and theme architecture that will look familiar to anyone who has used WordPress. The community that built it is largely Chinese speaking, and the documentation, plugin ecosystem and user base still reflect that origin.

For anyone studying the web as a market rather than as a technology, the origin is the interesting part. A Blogs choice like this one is not made by a procurement committee. The choice is made by an individual who is comfortable uploading files to a server, prefers a small tool to a large one, and is usually running a personal blog, a documentation site or a small business page on hosting they pay for themselves. Sites in this population tend to be technical, independent and outside the subscription website builder economy entirely, which makes them a poor list for selling hosted plans and a good one for anything aimed at self-hosting developers.

Detection here is inference from what the software leaves in the page and the response headers, so the count is a floor rather than a census. Installations behind aggressive caching, heavily modified themes or a proxy that strips generator information can pass unrecognised, and a blog can sit on a subdomain we never fetch. As of October 2026 we record 2,253 sites carrying it, and the real figure is somewhat higher.

The version breakdown is the part worth downloading rather than looking up. Whether one domain runs the platform is a question a browser extension answers. The list answers a different question: which sites are on which release, how the older releases cluster by country and top level domain, and how quickly the population moves after a security release. Security researchers use that shape to size an exposed set before disclosure, hosting companies use it to plan migration offers, and plugin authors use it to decide which release to keep supporting. Every record ships with the domain and the accompanying detections, so a version population can be crossed against server software, analytics and payment tooling instead of being read in isolation.