Friday 28 November 2008 by

We are happy to announce that Textpattern 4.0.7 is finally ready for public consumption.

During long and – sometimes – laborious months since the last release in February, we added new features and enhanced existing capabilities, but nevertheless we expect upgrades from any previous version to be seamless and smooth. As usual, the download package contains a README.txt file which outlines the simple upgrade procedure.

Changes are numerous, so let’s focus on a few highlights here:

Enhancements

  • Unlimited nested template tags, and tags as attributes to other tags have made it into the Textpattern core as part of the new tag parser.
  • Many of the list-producing tags like <txp:section_list>, <txp:article>, or <txp:recent_comments> accept a form or use any contained markup as a stencil for their output.
  • More consistent layout across many admin side pages.
  • As some plugins depend on the sequence of their execution with respect to all other plugins, plugin authors and site administrators can assign a load order to determine which plugins run first.

New features

  • WYSIWYG preview for all articles, even those in “draft” or “hidden” state.
  • Textpattern 4.0.7 comes with an XML-RPC server out of the box, which replaces the separate download needed previously. There’s a bunch of desktop blogging client software which use this as a socket to tap into the Textpattern backend.
  • Articles can be tagged with an optional expiry timestamp, so they’d either vanish from the public site completely, or transform their appearance once a future date has passed by.
  • The communication channel from Textpattern to the database server can employ optional SSL encryption.

Oh, and there were some bug fixes, too.

The commit log keeps all the details if you are inclined to read some PHP gibberish. A bulleted list in HISTORY.txt has the definite record of all noteworthy changes, so we refrain from repeating every single item here…

Head over to the download page to grasp your own copy, and join the discussion at the forum. Many thanks to all who contributed one way or the other!