A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs.

• Dean Allen: Creator of Textpattern and Textile
• Mary Fredborg: Head of Making Stuff Work
• Pedro Palazón: Head of Inventing New Things
• Alex Shiels: Head of Releases Future
• Sencer Yurdagül: Head of Releases Past and Present
• Reid Stott: Head of Commercial Initiatives

When it comes to publishing on the internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to do a pretty good job of managing text and images on a personal computer, but to make these available to the worldwide web - a seemingly similar environment of documents and destinations - ease of use vanishes behind sudden requirements for multilingual programming skills, proficiency in computer-based graphic design, and, ultimately, the patience of a saint.

Those who soldier on anyway may find themselves further held back by the web's purported inflexibility with written language, with its reluctance to cope with all but the plainest of text, or by the unpredictable results brought about by using WYSIWYG web editors.

Textpattern is a web application designed to help overcome these and other hurdles to publishing online, and to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages.

View the TXP Sites Collection By Country or By Category, graciously maintained by Alex over at TXP Magazine.

Textpattern 4.0 Stable was released on 2005-08-14.

I always thought the most important thing for writers was to write, and not think about the tools they're using. Textpattern was intended as a web writing tool, that would give little resistance to someone who simply wanted to publish regularly on the Internet. Its flowering as a “content management system” came as a secondary by-product, though I'm very happy with how that's turned out as well.

Dean Allen