Textpattern
Encyclopedia
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 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 4.4.1
.
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 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 processmany of the previous releases, even before the 1.0 candidates, were widely considered stable and mature enough for production usethis release was named "Textpattern 4.0" rather than "Textpattern 1.0".
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 2011, the current developers are Stef Dawson, Jeff Soo, Sam Weiss, and Robert Wetzlmayr. Ruud van Melick is still active as "developer emeritus".
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, notably more advanced image handling, and administrative updates in preparation for the planned Textpattern 5.
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
content management system
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...
originally developed by Dean Allen. While it is often listed among weblogging tools, its aim is to be a general-purpose content management system
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...
suitable for deployment in many contexts. Textpattern is written in PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
using a MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
database backend. The current stable version is Textpattern 4.4.1
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 LicenseGNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
.
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 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 processmany of the previous releases, even before the 1.0 candidates, were widely considered stable and mature enough for production usethis release was named "Textpattern 4.0" rather than "Textpattern 1.0".
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 2011, the current developers are Stef Dawson, Jeff Soo, Sam Weiss, and Robert Wetzlmayr. Ruud van Melick is still active as "developer emeritus".
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, notably more advanced image handling, and administrative updates in preparation for the planned Textpattern 5.
Features
Textpattern offers a number of features and conveniences to users, site administrators and developers, including:- Ease of publishing using TextileTextile (markup language)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...
, a text-to-HTMLHTMLHyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
converter which permits users to publish content without learning HTML. - Preview of both the final "look" of content and of its XHTMLXHTMLXHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....
. - Standards-compliantStandards-compliantStandards-compliant is a term often used in describing websites and user agents' relative compliance with web standards proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium ; also used for emphasizing that one doesn't use proprietary methods or features of those browsers to ensure interoperability...
XHTML and CSSCascading Style SheetsCascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
"out of the box", with all layout in the default setup handled via stylesheets. - A tag-based templateTemplateTemplate may mean:*a stencil, pattern or overlay used in graphic arts and sewing to replicate letters, shapes or designs...
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 spamSpam (electronic)Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...
. - Built-in site statistics, including referrer tracking.
- Syndication of site content via RSSRSS (file format)RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
and AtomAtom (standard)The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
. - 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-8UTF-8UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
publishing and support for many languages, including EnglishEnglish languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, ItalianItalian languageItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, CzechCzech languageCzech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
, JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, EstonianEstonian languageEstonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...
, LatvianLatvian languageLatvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...
, DutchDutch languageDutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, NorwegianNorwegian languageNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, DanishDanish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
, PortuguesePortuguese languagePortuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, CatalanCatalan languageCatalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
, PolishPolish languagePolish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, SlovenianSlovenian languageSlovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. It is the first language of about 1.85 million people and is one of the 23 official and working languages of the European Union...
, IndonesianIndonesian languageIndonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....
, SwedishSwedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
, IcelandicIcelandic languageIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
, RussianRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, and GreekGreek languageGreek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
(including support for polytonic). - Unlike most other blogging software, Textpattern does not natively support PingbackPingbackA pingback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles...
or TrackbackTrackBackA trackback is one of three types of linkback methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to their articles...
.
See also
- Comparison of content management systemsComparison of content management systemsThis is a list of notable content management systems that are used to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them are built on top of separate content management frameworks.- Software as a service :- Proprietary software :...
- Comparison of lightweight markup languagesLightweight markup languageA lightweight markup language is a markup language with a simple syntax, designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form....
- TextileTextile (markup language)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...
— lightweight rich text markup language and text-to-HTML converter.
External links
- Official Textpattern Website
- Textpattern Development: Development timeline and source codeSource codeIn computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
repository. - Textpattern Forum: Textpattern support forum.
- Textpattern CMS User Documentation: 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
- txp:tag: Textpattern Tags