WordPress Theme Development Fall 2025

https://textpattern.com/

History

Textpattern was created by the late Dean Allen, a Canadian web developer and blogger, in 2001. Created as a way to publish his personal site Textism, Textpattern grew into a full-fledged CMS by January of 2003, and on February 24 of the next year was released to the public. Textpattern’s focus is on user-friendliness and ease of use, and has introduced many plugins, themes, and code enhancements in the 21 years since its release.

Requirements

Textpattern is recommended to be hosted on a server running Apache 1.3 version 2.4, or Nginx 1.13 version 1.21 or greater; PHP 5.5.0 version 8.0 or 8.1; MySQL 5.0.3 version 8.0; PHP extensions mysqli, XML with simpleXML, and JSON; a valid “date.timezone” setting in PHP; minimum grant privileges in MySQL; a valid mail transport agent; and a Unix or Linux server OS with locale support.

Hosted/Self-Hosted

Textpattern is designed to be easily self-hosted, and any hosting company that supports PHP and MySQL can host a Textpattern site. Textpattern.com provides in-depth documentation on configuring a web server using Apache, Nginx, Hiawatha, or LiteSpeed with PHP to get your site up and running.

Cost

Textpattern is free and open-source, so any costs associated with hosting a Textpattern site will come from your web host and site maintenance.

User Base

Textpattern makes up a very small market share of content management systems, with less than 0.1% of websites using Textpattern as their CMS. They do maintain a dedicated GitHub page and a robust forum for announcements, development news, ideas, and assistance.