Textpattern grew out of the system used to publish , Allen's personal site, and an unnamed version was announced as available to alpha testers in 2001. In 2003, Textpattern was formally announced. The early alpha versions were followed by a series of beta releases which saw more widespread use, and which were themselves superseded by a series of "gamma" releases which expanded and refined Textpattern's capabilities. Since the final gamma version, Textpattern has been distributed under the GNU General Public License. The next version, in September 2004, was Release Candidate 1 for Textpattern 1.0. In a somewhat unorthodox move, Textpattern continued to accumulate features as the second, third, fourth and fifth release candidates were made public. During this time the official development team expanded to include several talented contributors from the nascent Textpattern community: with Release Candidate 3 and joined the development team, and was brought into the fold as Textpattern's release manager with Release Candidate 4. Due to a development process that extended much longer than originally envisioned, the first stable release of Textpattern was version 4.0 on August 14, 2005.
Release History
The 4.2.0 release, which was the next major release following 4.0.8, in September 2009 was a major update. The most notable new features were administrative-side enhancements and hooks for creating administrative plugins and themes. The 4.3.0 release in November 2010 introduced new features and improvements, notably more advanced image handling, and administrative updates in preparation for modernising and streamlining the core code. The 4.5.0 release in August 2012 brought many improvements, including a new HTML5 public theme and extensive modernisation of the administration area of the system. The minimum required PHP version was increased as well. The 4.6.0 release in September 2016 is one of the most significant releases to-date. Two years in the making, the update from v4.5.7 to v4.6.0 saw almost as many new commits to the code base as there had been in the entire previous project. The result was modernized code, an improved parser, and many new features. Minimum requirements for PHP and MySQL were increased with this release. The 4.7.0 release in May 2018 added support for themes, which had been one of the noted deficiencies of the platform compared to other software. This release was dedicated in honor of creator Dean Allen who died in January 2018. The 4.8.0 release in February 2020 contained over 800 changes to Textpattern’s code to add new functionality, enhance existing features, resolve some issues from previous Textpattern releases and lay more foundations for extending the capabilities of Textpattern in future. Textpattern 4.8 requires a minimum of PHP 5.5.
Developers
Since the original release, all of the original developers have departed the project: Allen and Palazón in 2006, Shiels in 2007, and Yurdagül in 2009. As of January 2017, the current developers are Stef Dawson, Phil Wareham, Pete Cooper, Oleg Loukianov and Robert Wetzlmayr.
Features
Textpattern offers a number of features and conveniences to designers, users, site administrators and developers, including:
Ease of publishing using Textile, a text-to-HTML converter which permits users to publish content without learning HTML.
Preview of both the final "look" of content and of its HTML.
Standards-compliant XHTML/HTML5 and CSS "out of the box", with all layout in the default setup handled via stylesheets.
A tag-based template system which allows the creation of reusable blocks of content and code, referred to as "forms", and a built-in "tag builder" to automate their creation.
Tags can be used as values of other tags' attributes.
Tags can be used to set up variables in order to verify whether certain conditions are met.
A privilege-based user hierarchy, allowing for an organized structure of writers, editors and publishers to work easily in concert.
A commenting system, including several measures to combat spam.
Built-in site statistics, including referrer tracking.
