As promised, our development cycle has delivered the next evolution of Textpattern CMS for you to try out prior to its official release. This release massively benefits from the distributed nature of git. It’s the culmination of a lot of hard work by community members who have worked on patches, features, documentation and good old fashioned graft.

It is presented in memory of Dean Allen, founder of Textpattern.

Download

You can either download from the links below, or from the GitHub project repository directly (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 kindly hosted by Pete Cooper. It’s using the new automated installer in 4.7.0 for lightning-quick rebuilds every few hours, not only of the beta itself, but also an environment to play with the bleeding edge development version.

System requirements

Please note that Textpattern 4.7 requires PHP 5.4 or newer. PHP 7 is highly recommended.

What’s new?

Please see HISTORY.txt for a full list of changes that will appear in the 4.7.0 stable release. Before listing the changes, we would like to extend our gratitude to those community members outside the official devs who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to help bring this version to life.

In no particular order:

• Nicolas Morand (NicolasGraph) for extensive work on bringing Theme capabilities to Textpattern based on the pioneering work of the rah_flat/oui_flat plugins, and also automatic TOC generation for plugin help files.
• makss for the auto-installer, complete revamp of the upgrade process to sync prefs between setup/updates, improved plugin Textpack handling, and paving the way for importing content from flat files in future.
• jools-r for massively improving and streamlining the multi-site feature, and for some excellent work on what is shaping up to be a complete rewrite of glz_custom_fields for Textpattern CMS 4.7.0.
• Pete Cooper for hosting and refining the demo site, as well as keeping us on track with feature enhancements, pull requests and detailed bug squashing.
• Philippe whose willingness to weather and report our (many) mistakes on the bleeding edge, with clarity and a cool head, results in Textpattern being orders of magnitude better and more stable than it would otherwise.
• Our army of translators and documentation wizards.

Some of the headline changes in 4.7.0 are:

• Support for website themes, stored within the database and available as flat file templates for easier versioning, portability and installation.
• Support for Nginx web servers and for automated installation from the command line.
• Smoother and simpler integration for running multiple sites from one code base.
• Interface revamps including:
  • AJAX behaviour in more places for a snappier admin side.
  • User-selectable column list options in tables to replace the outdated ‘Show more detail’ checkboxes.
  • Ctrl+S/Cmd+S keyboard shortcuts for Submit buttons on any admin panel. Sticky Save on Write panel.
  • Multiple files upload with progress meter.
  • Automatic TOC generation for well-structured plugin help text.
  • Usability and accessibility improvements throughout.
  • More languages added, with greater support for RTL languages.
• Complete overhaul of language management. No more reliance on the RPC server: languages and help contents are installed from file only. And the UI language can be set per user, independently of the public site language.
• Massive tag and parser improvements:
  • Valueless attributes.
  • Optional short tags.
  • Global attributes: ‘breakby’, ‘breakclass’, ‘class’, ‘escape’, ‘html_id’, ‘not’ and ‘wraptag’.
  • New tags <txp:evaluate />, <txp:header />, and <txp:if_logged_in />.
  • Ability to use <txp:output_form> and <txp:yield> to process forms via user-definable attributes.
  • <txp:article_custom /> can count pages as well as extract content via a richer set of date- and time-based criteria.
  • More than ten other tags tweaked and improved.
• There are many other changes in 4.7.0 too, please see HISTORY.txt for an exhaustive list!

Beta notes

Make sure that if you use this beta release, you also update to the final 4.7.0 version when it is released.

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 4.7.0 stable release, depending on issues reported.

Above all, enjoy!