The next iteration of Textpattern CMS is now available for you to try out prior to its official release. It’s the culmination of a lot of hard work by developers, community members who have worked on patches, features, documentation, infrastructure and good old fashioned graft. Thank you to everyone involved.

Download

You can download Textpattern 4.8.0-beta from the links below, or from the Textpattern 4.8.0-beta tag on GitHub (please take a minute to ‘star’ our project too if you like it!)

If you’re undecided, you can give it a whirl in complete safety first on the revamped demo site, hosted on DigitalOcean.

System requirements

Please note that Textpattern 4.8 requires PHP 5.5 or newer. An actively-supported version of PHP 7 is highly recommended for performance and security.

What’s new?

Please see HISTORY.txt for a full list of changes that will appear in the 4.8.0 stable release.

Some of the headline changes are:

• Text/HTML tabs now in popup dialog, with optional live preview.
• Plugins can be uploaded with .php and .zip extensions.
• Plugins cached and loaded from disk to avoid eval().
• Custom fields support from/to filtering.
• Global public theme switcher.
• Dedicated live/dev theme switching.
• Support for PHP 7.4.
• Tag changes to comment form, image, yield and section_list tags.
• <txp:newer /> and <txp:older /> tags support pagination ranges.
• Support for id ranges in some tags and admin fields.
• Dark Mode support in Hive admin theme.
• Per-section article link format override and two new permlink modes.
• Category searching to a specified depth.
• Custom field aliases and URL filters via valueless attributes.
• Global ‘evaluate’ and ‘yield’ attributes.
• Link to phpinfo() in Diagnostics panel.
• Configuration file generated during setup can be downloaded.
• Removed obsolete ‘No widowed words’ preference setting. If this feature is needed it can be implemented directly with the <txp:title /> tag.
• Fixed warnings and a few bugs left over from v4.7.3.
• Improved password handling when using MySQL 8+.
• Honour ‘prefers-reduced-motion’ in official themes.
• Target WCAG 2.0 AAA contrast levels in official themes.
• Performance optimizations via cacheing and preloading frequent content.
• Latest translations. Thanks to all CrowdIn translators for their hard work.
• There are many other changes in 4.8.0 too, please see HISTORY.txt for an exhaustive list!

Beta notes

Do not use this beta release on a production site unless you have a working backup of both the site’s files and its database and know how to use it.

Please report any issues here, stating the beta version that you are using. Further beta releases may be required prior to 4.8.0 stable release, depending on issues reported.

Make sure that if you deploy this beta release, you also update to the final 4.8.0 version when it is released. We are aiming to release Textpattern 4.8.0 in Q1 2020, pending feedback on this and any subsequent pre-4.8.0 releases.

Thank you for your interest in Textpattern.