Today is a historic day and a landmark in the evolution of Content Management Systems (CMS).

Today sees the public release of Textpattern 4.0.

Get down on your knees and bow to the elegance and simplicity of the finest and most flexible CMS on this or any other planet. Shield your childrens’ eyes against it’s brightness. Buy lots of cheese and celebrate this day in style.

OK then. What does it have that you don’t already know about. Mmmm. Let’s see now.

  1. The ability to place the comments list and/or comment entry form on any article, on any page, in any section.
  2. There is a Thank You message when a comment has been submitted.
  3. Most of the hard-coding relating to comments has also been removed.
  4. There is no longer any need to edit the /lib/admin_config.php file as these options and custom fields have been brought into admin as an advanced preferences page.
  5. Language installation and update is in admin as well.
  6. There is a new drop-down menu at both the top and bottom of all admin pages to enable quick navigation between sections.
  7. There is a new thumbnail generator built into the images tab.
  8. You can now specify your own page template and CSS style to use for the default section (front-page).
  9. You can check from within admin whether you have the latest deanload.
  10. You can put your install into debugging, testing or live mode to help find any glitches.
  11. The revision number of your install is logged in Diagnostics.
  12. Numerous new tags have been added including if_category, if_article_category, if_section and if_article_section.
  13. There are some added options in .htaccess for possible use on servers other than apache.
  14. Atom 1.0 has been added.
  15. A lot of other stuff I can’t remember at the moment as well as the usual numerous bug fixes.

Now why are you still reading this? Go and get it.