which had been one of the noted deficiencies of the platform compared to other software. This release was dedicated in honor of creator Dean Allen who died in January 2018. The 4.8.0 release () in February 2020 contained over 800 changes to Textpattern's code to add new functionality, enhance existing features, resolve some issues from previous Textpattern releases and lay more foundations for extending the capabilities of Textpattern in future. Developers All of the original developers have departed the project: Allen and Palazón in 2006, Shiels in 2007, and Yurdagül in 2009. As of March 2022, the current developers are Stef Dawson, Phil Wareham, Pete Cooper, and Oleg Loukianov. Features Textpattern offers a number of features and conveniences to designers, users, site administrators and developers, including: Ease of publishing using Textile, a text-to-HTML converter which permits users to publish content without learning HTML. Preview of both the final "look" of content and of its HTML. Theme templates that permit both live and in-development layouts to operate side-by-side using the same live data. Development templates can be previewed and made live instantly without need for a staging environment. A tag-based template system which allows the creation of reusable blocks of content and code, referred to as "forms", and a built-in "tag builder" to automate their creation. Tags can be used as values of other tags' attributes ("tags in tags"). Tags can be used to set up variables in order to verify whether certain conditions are met. A privilege-based user hierarchy, allowing for an organized structure of writers, editors and publishers to aid collaboration and content publishing workflows. A commenting system, including measures to combat spam. Syndication of site content via RSS and Atom. A robust plugin architecture which allows the addition of features to any part of the system, including the administrative backend. An integrated link management system. An integrated image management system which allows the association of images with particular pieces of content. An integrated file management system which allows files to be offered for download. Separation of content from presentation with a concept of "sections" defined for presentation and "categories" for content organization. An arbitrary number of custom data fields per article. UTF-8 publishing and support for many languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Czech, Japanese, Estonian, Latvian, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Catalan, Polish, Slovenian, Indonesian, Swedish, Icelandic, Russian, Arabic, Persian, and Greek (including support for polytonic). See also