Textpattern

Developer:	Dean Allen
Latest release:	4.0.4 / 18 October 2006
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	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 CMS suitable for deployment in many contexts. Textpattern is written in PHP using a MySQL database backend, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. The current stable version is Textpattern 4.0.4. Image File history File links Logo image for the Textpattern content-management system. ... Software development is the translation of a user need or marketing goal into a software product. ... A software release refers to the creation and availability of a new version of a computer software product. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... A cross-platform (or platform independent) programming language, software application or hardware device works on more than one system platform (e. ... A content management system is a computer software system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content. ... Blog software, also called blog publishing system is software for publishing blogs. ... A software license is a legal agreement which may take the form of a proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software. ... The GNU logo The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. ... This page as shown in the AOL 9. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... A content management system is a computer software system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content. ... The first use of the term weblog. ... PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic Web pages. ... MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user, SQL Database Management System (DBMS) with more than six million installations. ...

History

Textpattern grew out of the system used to publish Textism — the personal site of Dean Allen — and 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 GPL.

In addition to being the first GPL version of Textpattern, gamma 1.19 was the final gamma release; the next version, in September of 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 process — many of the previous releases, even before the 1.0 candidates, were widely considered stable and mature enough for production use — this release was named "Textpattern 4.0" rather than "Textpattern 1.0".

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 support Trackback or Pingback. Textile is a lightweight markup language originally developed by Dean Allen and billed as a humane Web text generator. Textile converts its marked-up text input to valid, well-formed XHTML and also inserts character entity references for apostrophes, opening and closing single and double quotation marks, ellipses and em... In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. ... The Extensible HyperText Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same expressive possibilities as HTML, but a stricter syntax. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Wikibooks XML has more about this subject: Managing Data Exchange/CSS In computing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. ... Look up template in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Referer is a common misspelling of the word referrer; so common, in fact, that it made it into the official specification of HTTP - the communication protocol of the world wide web. ... See web feed if you are unfamiliar with the general concept. ... The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. ... UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Catalan in Europe Catalan IPA: (català ) is a Romance language, the official language of Andorra and co-official in the Spanish autonomous communities of Balearic Islands, Valencia (under the name Valencian) and Catalonia. ... Polytonic orthography for Greek uses a variety of diacritics (πολύ = many + τόνος = accent) to represent aspects of Ancient Greek pronunciation. ... TrackBack is a mechanism for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a TrackBack ping; the receiving blog... Pingback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. ...

See also

• TextDrive

TextDrive is a managed webhosting company created by Dean Allen (creator of Textpattern, a weblog/content management system, as well as Textile [1], a lightweight markup language) and Jason Hoffman, designed primarily (but not exclusively) as a hosting service for online publishing using open-source tools. ...

External links

• Official Textpattern Website
• Textpattern Development: Development timeline and source code repository.
• Textpattern Forum: Textpattern support and discussion forum.
• TextBook: The Textpattern documentation wiki.
• Textpattern Resources: Site listing tips, tutorials, plugins and templates.
• Textpattern Template Competition
• Textgarden: "Out-of-the-box" Textpattern template site (started in July 2005).
• TXP Magazine: Articles and features about Textpattern, including a list of Textpattern-powered sites and a blogmap.
• TXP Blogmap: TXP Blogmap based on Google Map.
• Textpattern Czech: Czech language Textpattern information site.
• Textpattern Russian: Russian language Textpattern information site.
• Textpattern Planet