Team Textpattern is pleased to announce the release of Textpattern CMS 4.8.1, available for immediate download.

We have been busy improving, fixing, adding and extending our beloved content management system to make it better than ever. It was less than three months ago that Textpattern 4.8.0 arrived to a positive reception, and we are confident you will appreciate the finesse and fine-tuning that has gone into this follow-up release.

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 code, documentation and the wealth of information in the Textpattern ecosystem. We’re grateful to everyone who contributes with their expertise, time, attention, words, signal boosting, evangelism and other activities.

A simple ‘hello’ or ‘thanks’ helps us to gauge how far Textpattern reaches. There is no spyware, tracking, adware, or junk in Textpattern. We work hard to keep it wicked-fast, simple-to-use and ready for pretty much anything you can throw at it. Start your engines, and let us know how the driving feels!

Textpattern’s infrastructure and continued development is kindly supported by DigitalOcean, 1Password and BrowserStack. We are grateful for your continued involvement, assistance & support for Textpattern and our community. Thank you.

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.

To take full 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 4.8.1 test drives in complete safety. The demo sites are rebuilt every few hours using the Textpattern auto-installer. Even the most heinous, mad scientist experiments will be wiped clean.

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 servers have this built in already so you should be good to go with your host’s PHP.

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.

What’s new in this release?

As always, the Textpattern 4.8.1 HISTORY.txt outlines changes for this and previous Textpattern releases. We recommend you read the list of changes to understand how this may affect your current site, especially if you’re upgrading from older versions.

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 baked into Textpattern 4.8.1 include, in no particular order:

UI and UX

• Changed: Improved pophelp for update check status on Diagnostics panel.
• Changed: Tag builder includes new 4.8.x attributes where possible.
• Changed: Lazy load images within Images list on supported browsers.

Themes

• Changed: Dedicated ‘*’ option when altering theme/page/style to leave assets as they are.
• Fixed: Development and live assets are kept in sync when renamed.
• Fixed: When setting development assets/themes, link to both live and dev assets even if they share a name.

Scaffolding

• Changed: Multi-assign pageless (live) sections.
• Changed: Improved handling of yyyy/mm/dd article permlinks. Single-digit months and days permitted, and /section/yyyy/mm/dd will limit articles to the given section.
• Changed: Use noopener on target=”_blank” links.
• Fixed: Default value of permlink_format on new installs. Thanks, cara-tm.
• Fixed: Multi-site index.php correctly included in multi-site css.php.

Tags

• Changed: Support <txp:else /> in shortcodes.
• Added: showalways attribute for <txp:pages /> tag.

Language support

• Added: Latest translations. Thank you to all translators for your hard work.

Libraries and internal workings

• Changed: Optimised language loading.
• Added: Support for InnoDB database engine.
• Fixed: RPC errors when altering content from remote editors.
• Fixed: Fall back on partial language identifier if code is not found.
• Fixed: Strings loaded from plugin cache no longer break those already loaded. Thanks, David.
• jQuery 3.5.1.
• PrismJS 1.20.0.
• jQuery File Upload 10.29.0.

Further notes

If you find anything not working correctly or wish to propose enhancements, please report them on GitHub, stating the affected version(s) and any salient information. There are templates for feature requests and bug reports.

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