Textpattern is another one of those great blogging scripts that often gets forgotten about with the surge of popularity that WordPress has had over the past few years.  It is a elegant, flexible and easy to use content management system that is both open source and free to use.

The requirements are pretty basic to get it up and running, so any Linux-based shared hosting environment should do.  The install is just as simple too, with your basic download, configure, setup database, and upload.

It can handle just about any blogging task you throw it’s way.  From content publishing, multiple contributors, link management and the inclusion of Textile, a simple syntax for nudging plain text into structurally sound and stylistically rich web content, it is not lacking in features.

If you want to give it a test drive, there is both a front end and admin demo up on OpenSourceCMS.com.

It comes ready for themes and plugins too.  Your best resource to pick those up would be the Textpattern Resources web site.  TextGarden.org also has a number of Textpattern themes to use.

All in all, I think Textpattern is a simple, yet effective blogging script that is well worth trying out.