Textpattern is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content ( content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

(CMS) for

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

and

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

. It was originally developed by Dean Allen and now developed by Team Textpattern. While it is typically listed among weblogging tools, its aim is to be a general-purpose

. The current stable version is Textpattern .

History

Textpattern grew out of the system used to publish ''Textism'', 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alpha versions were followed by a series of beta releases which saw more widespread use, and which were themselves superseded by a series of "gamma" releases which expanded and refined Textpattern's capabilities.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 (1.19), Textpattern has been distributed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. 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 contributors from the Textpattern community: with Release Candidate
Alex Shiels
an
Pedro Palazón
joined the development team, an
Sencer Yurdagül
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 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. 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.

Developers

All of the original developers have departed the project: Allen and Palazón in 2006, Shiels in 2007, and Yurdagül in 2009. As of March 2022, the current developers are Stef Dawson, Phil Wareham, Pete Cooper, and Oleg Loukianov.

Features

Textpattern offers a number of features and conveniences to designers, users, site administrators and developers, including: * Ease of publishing using

Textile Textile is an Hyponymy and hypernymy, umbrella term that includes various Fiber, fiber-based materials, including fibers, yarns, Staple (textiles)#Filament fiber, filaments, Thread (yarn), threads, and different types of #Fabric, fabric. ...

, a text-to-

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

converter which permits users to publish content without learning HTML. * Preview of both the final "look" of content and of its

. * Theme templates that permit both live and in-development layouts to operate side-by-side using the same live data. Development templates can be previewed and made live instantly without need for a staging environment. * A tag-based

template Template may refer to: Tools * Die (manufacturing), used to cut or shape material * Mold, in a molding process * Stencil, a pattern or overlay used in graphic arts (drawing, painting, etc.) and sewing to replicate letters, shapes or designs C ...

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 in tags"). * Tags can be used to set up

variables Variable may refer to: Computer science * Variable (computer science), a symbolic name associated with a value and whose associated value may be changed Mathematics * Variable (mathematics), a symbol that represents a quantity in a mathemat ...

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 aid collaboration and content publishing workflows. * A commenting system, including measures to combat

spam Spam most often refers to: * Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ...

. * Syndication of site content via

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

and

Atom Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...

. * A robust plugin architecture which allows the addition of features to any part of the system, including the administrative backend. * An integrated link management system. * An integrated image management system which allows the association of images with particular pieces of content. * An integrated file management system which allows files to be offered for download. * Separation of content from presentation with a concept of "sections" defined for presentation and "categories" for content organization. * An arbitrary number of custom data fields per article. *

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

publishing and support for many languages, including English, French,

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus *Czech (surnam ...

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

Estonian Estonian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe * Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent * Estonian language * Estonian cuisine * Estonian culture See also

...

, Latvian,

Dutch Dutch or Nederlands commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands ** Dutch people as an ethnic group () ** Dutch nationality law, history and regulations of Dutch citizenship () ** Dutch language () * In specific terms, i ...

, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Catalan,

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Polish people, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken * Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin ...

, Slovenian, Indonesian, Swedish, Icelandic,

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

, and

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

(including support for

polytonic Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography (), which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography (), introduce ...

References

External links

Official Textpattern Website
* {{github, textpattern/textpattern
Textpattern CMS Forum
Textpattern CMS support forum.
Textpattern CMS User Documentation
Textpattern CMS user documentation.
Textpattern CMS Tag Reference
Tag reference of all Textpattern tags (with code examples).
Textpattern Plugins
Textpattern plugin repository.
TXP
The internet magazine about Textpattern CMS and web related themes.
Textpattern Tips
Collection of ready to use code snippets and examples of ingeniously combined tags.
Textpattern Planet
Textpattern news aggregator.
Textpattern Russian
Russian language Textpattern information site.
txp:tag
Textpattern Tags Blog software Free content management systems PHP software