Team Textpattern is pleased to announce the release of Textpattern CMS 4.8.2, available for immediate download and deployment.

As is customary for maintenance releases, we strived to improve and optimise the established Textpattern scaffold, building blocks, nuts and bolts. The changes outlined in this release focus on fixing reported issues, along with some other changes and additions.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release with code for new functionality, reporting & resolving bugs, providing & improving language translations and overall improvements to the Textpattern ecosystem. We’re immensely grateful for contributors offering their expertise, time, attention, words, donations, signal boosting, evangelism and other activities.

Textpattern’s infrastructure and continued development is kindly supported by DigitalOcean, 1Password and BrowserStack. We are grateful for their ongoing involvement and support for Textpattern and its community. Thank you.

A ‘hello!’ or ‘thanks!’ helps us to gauge how far Textpattern has travelled around the world. There is no spyware, adware, user tracking or other junk in Textpattern. We consciously work to keep it fast, nimble and ready for pretty much anything you can throw at it.

You can show your appreciation by sponsoring Textpattern on GitHub. Alternatively, you can donate to Textpattern developers with PayPal.

Download

You can download Textpattern from textpattern.com using the following links, or from the GitHub repository directly. Please take a moment to ‘star’ Textpattern’s repositories on GitHub if they are of interest to you.

To take advantage of Textpattern’s multi-site capabilities, please download the .tar.gz archive as it includes the multi-site scaffold.

The Textpattern demo has been updated to offer Textpattern 4.8.2 test drives in complete safety. The demo sites are rebuilt every few hours using the Textpattern auto-installer.

System requirements

Textpattern 4.8 requires a minimum of PHP 5.5 as part of the system requirements, though a vendor-supported PHP version is highly recommended (PHP 7.3 and PHP 7.4 have active and ongoing support at the time of writing).

If you are upgrading Textpattern from a version prior to 4.8.0, please note the SimpleXML PHP extension is required. Most PHP web servers have this built-in and enabled already so you should be good to go. Check with your web host if you have any doubts.

Please note: we are intending to increase the minimum PHP version for Textpattern 4.9.

Installation and upgrade

As with any Textpattern release, please ensure you log out of the admin side prior to upgrade, perform and verify a full site backup (database and files, including any uploads), and refer to the README.txt file in the download archives for detailed instructions. The vast majority of Textpattern upgrades are smooth and take place without incident, but on the rare occasion something does go astray it’s preferable to safely restore the previous known-good version from your backup and troubleshoot any issues while your site continues to be available.

What’s new in this release?

The Textpattern 4.8.2 HISTORY.txt outlines changes for this and previous Textpattern releases, along with their respective release dates. We recommend you read the list of changes to understand how this may affect your current sites, especially if you’re upgrading from older versions. Please note that while upgrades from very old releases of Textpattern are viable, you may need to perform a multi-stage upgrade.

If you require clarification on any aspect of the release notes, we recommend you seek advice before starting a site upgrade. The Textpattern support forum is an excellent place to start, and the Textpattern user documentation is regularly updated with examples, explanations and background information.

The list of changes made in Textpattern 4.8.2 include:

Tags

• Fixed: <txp:if_yield> ‘else’ container returning 1 instead of contents (thanks, Vienuolis).
• Changed: Matching categories in <txp:article_custom> now performs AND. Use match="Category" for previous OR behaviour.
• Changed: ‘searchall=“0”‘ attribute filters by section.
• Added: valueless ‘replace’ attribute filters out duplicates.
• Added: ‘size’ attribute to <txp:images> tag to filter by aspect ratio.

UI and UX

• Fixed: Multi-edit rearmed correctly after async saves on Forms panel.
• Fixed: Sanitize custom field labels on Write panel (thanks, luuthehienhbit).
• Fixed: Notification on list panels if there were no assets recorded.
• Fixed: Incorrect search label for ‘name’ on Links panel.
• Fixed: Override forms on Write panel stay in step with live Theme/Section (thanks, cara-tm).
• Fixed: Image/thumb uploaders default to image types (thanks, Adi).
• Changed: Comments made by logged-in authors don’t go through moderation.
• Changed: Category links in breadcrumb permlink mode.
• Changed: Multi-edit only active when checkboxes are selected.

Language support & i18n

• Fixed: Update language list when deleting/switching to prevent stale entries.
• Fixed: Language errors when using article preview (thanks, Destry and jakob).
• Fixed: Date/time format when switching front-end language.
• Changed: When logging in, chosen login language is used as admin language.
• Changed: Password reset/welcome/activation and comment notification emails sent in author language.
• Added: Language selector on login and User Edit panels (if >1 installed).
• Added: Latest translations. Thank you to all translators for your hard work.

Database and server-related internals

• Fixed: Date tags return -1 in some server setups (thanks, the blue dragon).
• Fixed: Removed TRADITIONAL sql_mode for a smoother upgrade (thanks, Adi).
• Fixed: Plugin panel uses the tempdir pref correctly.
• Added: Support for table_collation variable in config.php to affect safe_create() calls, when used in tandem with dbcharset.

Plugins

• Fixed: Plugins loaded from cache show correct Textpack menu labels instead of untranslated strings.
• Fixed: Plugin auto-TOC strips out heading markup (thanks, Adi).
• Developer: New ‘pre’ pretext callback.
• Developer: Plugins can alter $pretext.
• Developer: Add ability to filter strings in Lang->getPack() and extract().
• Developer: getIfElse() function returns ‘else’ part of <txp:if_yield else />, and may be used as an EvalElse() replacement.

Further notes

If you find anything not working correctly or wish to propose improvements, please file a report on GitHub. There are templates for feature requests and bug reports.

We hope you enjoy this release and it serves you, your sites and clients well!