Tuesday 17 October 2006 by sencer

After quite a while and lots of work from many, many people it’s finally here. Textpattern 4.0.4 is available as always on the download page.

update: The download was repackaged 12 hours after the release to fix some line ending problems that caused spurious diagnostic warnings on some systems.

Updates are are strongly recommended and should be seamless for the vast majority of people, otherwise make sure that all plugins are also updated to their most recent version. We’ve also added a couple entries to the FAQ specifically for 4.0.4 where questions may arise.

Some of the more notable news are:

  • Fixes several security issues, one critical
  • Many subtle improvements to the admin UI
  • Lots of Textile improvements and fixes
  • Many improvements to admin interface XHTML markup and CSS
  • Simplify and improve comment preview and input form tags
  • Improved error reporting and diagnostics that help tracking down problems easier and faster
  • RSS+Atom fixes and improvements (including RSS 2.0 support)
  • Automatic support of SSL

Further changes include:

  • Add nowidow attribute to article tags
  • Adapt navigation elements to the user’s permissions
  • Fixed sending Last-Modified header
  • Better indexing for faster article list queries
  • Update to tagbuilders
  • Show (source of) plugin-help before installation
  • Improvements in translations (and translatables) (thanks Skubidu and others)
  • New translations: Indonesian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian
  • Improved handling of comma-separated values in tag attributes
  • article, article_custom tags: new ‘sort’ attribute
  • New conditional if_article_id
  • author, category, category1, category2 tags: can link to any section by name
  • Improved XHTML attributes on many tags (class, rel)
  • Time and date tags: new attributes for overriding language, GMT
  • css, feed_link tags: easier generation of xhtml ‘link’ tags
  • New link tags: link_category, link_date, link_name, link_url
  • Navigation tag improvements (new attributes, improved xhtml output)
  • Warn if article or comment tags are used in the wrong context
  • Stricter 404 checking (missing category, author, messy article ID)
  • Simplify and improve comment preview and input form tags
  • Improved article load/parse logic on individual article pages
  • Workaround some rare FCGI problems with HTTP headers
  • Fix some IIS clean URL issues
  • Improved multi-edit support on admin pages
  • Deprecate old-style PHP tags
  • Don’t lose your place in admin lists when returning from an edit
  • Extra diagnostic info and pre-flight tests
  • Better time zone handling
  • Remember and automatically reuse thumbnail size settings
  • Textile: fix inline class/style/lang
  • Warn when article and comment tags are used in the wrong place
  • New “if_plugin” conditional checks for an active plugin, with optional version number
  • Fix an occasional time zone bug
  • Fix 404 errors on clean category URLs
  • Add backtrace list to error messages in Debug mode
  • Add limit attribute to search_result_excerpt tag
  • Add escape and default attributes to custom_field tag
  • Fix image-upload for outdated gdlib-installations (wet)
  • Fix label attribute breadcrumb function (richard)
  • Add if_author, if_article_author (with attribute ‘name’)
  • Allow multiple sections for if_article_section (like for if_section, if_category)
  • Display link category’s title, rather than name, in the links page.
  • Extend article_image tag to optionally display the article image thumbnail.
  • Many minor bugfixes

Further reading:
FAQ-Entries specific to 4.0.4.
Textpattern Contributors
Forum-Thread for the announcement