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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

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Upgraded to Textpattern 4.0.1

11 September 2005

I’ve been running a fairly ancient build of Textpattern on this site since I relaunched with this design back in August last year. Since then, TXP has undergone massive changes, and some important security fixes have been made. Although none of the potential security problems are known to have been exploited, I was getting pretty itchy about it and thought I’d better update.

The main reason I’d hadn’t upgraded sooner was that I’d hacked around with my install quite a bit to get the markup how I wanted it. There were some quirks with TXP a year ago, and some of the markup was still hard-coded into the files and not exposed to the templating system.

So I thought that upgrading to v4.0.1 would be a major nightmare, and had pretty much resigned myself to biting the bullet and getting on with somehow, anyhow getting my site upgraded.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had to do absolutely nothing. I checked out the latest stable build from svn, pointed it at a local backup of my live database and wham! – Textpattern 4.0.1! The nasty bits I’d hacked out of the markup last year are no longer in the release version, and my other customisations were quickly reimplemented by updating just a couple of templates. That’s a good user experience. Well done TXP team.

Do let me know if you spot anything wonky around the place – it’s possible that there’s the odd rough corner (on top of the old rough corners that have always been there). I’m afraid my feeds may well have marked themselves as all unread – so apologies for that. The Atom feed is now v1.0, so you’ll need Atom 1.0 support in your feed reader (it was 0.3 before, I think). I had to update NetNewsWire before it would work for me.

The really positive thing from my point of view is that I’m now running a completely out-of-the-box install of TXP, which will really make my life easier in keeping the site up-to-date in future. So huzzah for that.

- Drew McLellan

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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.