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Comment by isopod | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know Textpattern was still around, much less widely used. I'd used it in college to set up my first blog ages ago and it was a great introduction in the then-new notion of 'content management systems'. Is it still a thing? Wordpress seems to be the first, last, and everything in-between in this space now, it seems.

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It's funny how these things linger on, quietly being used because they mostly just work and don't cause the people using them any real problems. I think Daring Fireball and Kottke.org both still use Movable Type, which, having just checked on their web site, does definitely still exist and appears to have been quite regularly updated until at least 2014 (the releases for the last few years appear mostly to be bugfixes and security updates). Movable Type was the hot thing in self-hosted blogging circles in the early 2000s and predates WordPress by a good few years.

There's an added mystique around TextPattern because it was initially written by Dean Allen of Textism/Textile/TextDrive fame, and he has subsequently disappeared from the Internet, taking with him his blog, Textile lost to Markdown, and of course TextDrive famously got co-opted by greedy tech douchebags, eventually turning into Joyent and getting acquired by Samsung. So it's quite remarkable that of all Dean Allen's works, TextPattern is the one that keeps on chugging along with its open-source essence intact.

I think it's not used much nowadays, but I'm thinking about using it again.

But what happened to Txp5, with several blog posts years ago? Is that effort dead? Rolled back into 4.x?

>But what happened to Txp5, with several blog posts years ago? Is that effort dead? Rolled back into 4.x?

My understanding is the big plans for Textpattern 5 were reined in following discussions with the plugin developer base, among others.

There are significant changes within the 4.x releases, but there's currently still a single-jump upgrade path from the earliest releases to the latest. My understanding is that _very_ old versions (early 4.0.x releases) will no longer be supported in this one-step upgrade, but anecdotally a large majority of sites run 4.6.x or 4.5.x, so it's not a huge concern.

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