Textpattern

Textpattern

File:Textpattern.png
Developer(s)	Team Textpattern
Stable release	4.2.0 / August 28, 2009
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	CMS/Blog software
License	GPL
Website	Textpattern.com

Textpattern is an open source content management system originally developed by Dean Allen. While it is often listed among weblogging tools, its aim is to be a high-quality general-purpose content management system suitable for deployment in many contexts. Textpattern is written in PHP using a MySQL database backend. The current stable version is Textpattern 4.2.0

History

Textpattern grew out of the system used to publish TextismTemplate:Mdashthe personal site of Dean AllenTemplate:Mdashand was made available to testers in alpha versions as early as 2001. 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alpha versions were followed by a series of beta releases which saw more widespread use, and which were themselves superseded by a series of "gamma" releases which expanded and refined Textpattern's capabilities. Originally some concern existed regarding licensing, but since the gamma version numbered 1.19 (released June 7, 2004), Textpattern has been distributed under the GNU General Public License.

In addition to being the first GPL version of Textpattern, gamma 1.19 was the final gamma release; 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, originally consisting solely of Dean Allen, expanded to include several talented contributors from the nascent Textpattern community: with Release Candidate 3 Alex Shiels and Pedro Palazón joined the development team, and Sencer Yurdagül was brought into the fold as Textpattern's release manager with Release Candidate 4.

The fifth release candidate, however, included a notice that no new features would be added before the 1.0 release, and two weeks later, on August 14, 2005, the first officially stable version of Textpattern was released. Due to the extended development processTemplate:Mdashmany of the previous releases, even before the 1.0 candidates, were widely considered stable and mature enough for production useTemplate:Mdashthis release was named "Textpattern 4.0" rather than "Textpattern 1.0".

Shortly after the release of 4.0, Dean Allen seemingly disappeared from Textpattern and no longer contributed to its development.

The stable of developers has changed as some have joined the team (Mary Fredborg, Ruud van Melick and Robert Wetzlmayr), while Alex Shiels has moved on, now employed by Automattic [1].

On January 24th 2008 xPattern emerged as a software fork of the main Textpattern 4.0* codebaseTemplate:Mdashdue to perceived and unresolved communication issues between select plugin writers and the Textpattern developersTemplate:Mdashwith a community emphasis as the main goal. At this moment, there has not yet been an official release of xPattern.

Meanwhile, development of Textpattern continued with releases 4.0.6 through 4.0.8 containing more new features than the small increment in version numbers seems to suggest. Many of those that once joined the xPattern effort, are now contributing patches to Textpattern again.

Features

Textpattern offers a number of features and conveniences to 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 XHTML.
• Standards-compliant XHTML 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.
• 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 referer tracking.
• Syndication of site content via RSS and Atom.
• A robust plugin architecture which allows the addition of features to any part of the system, including the administrative backend.
• A built-in CSS editor.
• 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.
• UTF-8 publishing and support for many languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Czech, Japanese, Estonian, Latvian, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Catalan, Polish, Slovenian, Indonesian, Swedish, Icelandic, Russian and Greek (including support for polytonic).
• Unlike most other blogging software, Textpattern does not natively support Pingback or Trackback.

See also

• Comparison of content management systems
• Comparison of lightweight markup languages
• Textile — lightweight rich text markup language and text-to-HTML converter.

External links

• Official Textpattern Website
• Textpattern Development: Development timeline and source code repository.
• Textpattern Forum: Textpattern support forum.
• TextBook: Textpattern documentation wiki.
• Textpattern Resources: Site listing tips, tutorials, plugins and templates.
• Textgarden: "Out-of-the-box" Textpattern template site (started in July 2005).
• TXPQ Magazine: Articles and interviews relating to Textpattern.
• We Love Txp: Showcase website built with Textpattern.
• Textpattern Planet: Textpattern news aggregator.
• Textpattern Czech: Czech language Textpattern information site.
• Textpattern Russian: Russian language Textpattern information site.
• Textpattern Tips
• Russian Textpattern tips