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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

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Textpattern 4.0

15 August 2005

I’ve been running this site on Textpattern from the day I launched back in March 2003. It was a few weeks prior to the first public release of the Textpattern beta, due to my contacting Dean at a point where he happened to be looking for a few extra people to start testing what he had. This site was launched for the purpose of giving Textpattern a whirl, and shucks, here we still are.

Well today is an exciting day if you happen to be the sort of person who gets excited about software updates, cold days in hell or suggestively shaped vegetables. After a long beta cycle, a gap, an immensely long gamma cycle, a wash cycle, a rinse cycle and a brief cycling holiday in the South of France, our beloved Textpattern has finally been released.

Due to the extensive process of the many iterations that have got us to this point, the team have gone straight in with Version 4, to more accurately reflect the development process and heritage thus far. TXP is here and it’s a stable and mature product.

I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance to upgrade, but I’ll surely have to do it soon. This build has a fair few hacks that I wove into the fabric to side step some issues with very early versions of of the codebase. I’ll need to spend some time working out exactly what those were and how they’ve been addressed in the latest version. That aside, congrats to the team, and here’s to the next two and a half years of Textpattern development.

- Drew McLellan

Comments

  1. § Gerard McGarry: Drew: You forgot the spin cycle, although that made me dizzy anyhow!

    I’ve always been a WordPress fanatic. Have played with TextPattern in the past, but might revisit it now!

    With regard to the upgrade, Jon Hicks says it’s a breeze…
  2. § Nathan Pitman: I went for it with 4.0 but then there was a nasty textile bug, 4.0.1 seems a goodun.
  3. § nick fox: wow, ive just integrated TXP into my site as a blog add-on after seeing a few well known sites like yours using it. its brilliant! i love it! sites not live yet but will be soon.

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.