A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs. Built into Textpattern is Textile, a simple syntax for nudging plain text into structurally sound and stylistically rich web content. Ordinarily fussy text amendments such as headers, hyperlinks, image tags and tables are created with one or two simple markers. Compared to navigating the tag soup of markup, writing and revising with Textile is much more intuitive, being closer to working with ordinary text. Once you’re ready to publish, copy marked up with Textile is automatically converted to valid XHTML, and because Textpattern stores both versions of each article, revising and updating is a snap. When composing or readying articles for publication in Textpattern, you can switch between three views of the article:plain text, XHTML (the code with which a web browser renders the article), and a rendered preview.

Sites published with Textpattern can employ unlimited registered contributors, each of whom may be assigned privileges by the publisher of the site. Five levels of privileges (publisher, managing editor, copy editor, writer and designer) are provided, and each reflects different access to article creation, approval, editing and deletion, and to image uploads, page design and CSS, and of course adding more contributors.

Installing and managing plugins that extend Textpattern's abilities is straightforward. Once installed, plugins can be turned on and off from within the Textpattern interface, where detailed help and access to parameters used by plugins is also available