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Textpattern grew out of the system used to publish Textism - the personal site of Dean Allen - and was made available to testers in alpha versions as early as 2001. The early alpha versions were followed by a series of beta releases which saw more widespread use, and which were themselves superseded by a series of “gamma” releases which expanded and refined Textpattern’s capabilities.

In September of 2004, Release Candidate 1 for Textpattern 1.0 was released. In a somewhat unorthodox move, Textpattern continued to accumulate features as the second, third, fourth and fifth release candidates were made public.

The fifth release candidate, however, included a notice that no new features would be added before the 1.0 release, and two weeks later, on August 14, 2005, the first officially stable version of Textpattern was released. Due to the extended development process - many of the previous releases, even before the 1.0 candidates, were widely considered stable and mature enough for production use - this release was named Textpattern 4.0 rather than Textpattern 1.0.

This history of Textpattern comes from Wikipedia. Textpattern is a PHP - MySQL application, and is distributed under the GNU GPL (General Public License).