PHP Programming Language - Cultural View

Textpattern 319
Textpattern
Developer(s) Team Textpattern [1]
Stable release 4.2.0 / August 28, 2009
Operating
system
Cross-platform
Type CMS/Blog software
License GPL
Website Textpattern.com [2]
Textpattern is an open source content management system originally developed by Dean Allen. While it is often
listed among weblogging tools, its aim is to be a general-purpose content management system suitable for
deployment in many contexts. Textpattern is written in PHP using a MySQL database backend. The current stable
version is Textpattern 4.2.0 [3]
History
Textpattern grew out of the system used to publish Textism [4] — 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releases which saw more widespread use, and which were themselves superseded by a series of "gamma" releases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. Originally some concern existed regarding licensing, but
since the gamma version numbered 1.19 (released June 7, 2004), Textpattern has been distributed under the GNU
General Public License.
In addition to being the first GPL version of Textpattern, gamma 1.19 was the final gamma release; the next version,
in September 2004, was Release Candidate 1 for Textpattern 1.0. In a somewhat unorthodox move, Textpattern
continued to accumulate features as the second, third, fourth and fifth release candidates were made public. During
this time the official development team, originally consisting solely of Dean Allen, expanded to include several
talented contributors from the nascent Textpattern community: with Release Candidate 3 Alex Shiels [5] and Pedro
Palazón [6] joined the development team, and Sencer Yurdagül [7] was brought into the fold as Textpattern's release
manager with Release Candidate 4.
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".
Shortly after the release of 4.0, Dean Allen seemingly disappeared from Textpattern and no longer contributed to its
development.
The stable of developers has changed as some have joined the team (Mary Fredborg, Ruud van Melick and Robert
Wetzlmayr), while Alex Shiels has moved on, now employed by Automattic [8].
On January 24, 2008 xPattern [9] emerged [10] as a software fork of the main Textpattern 4.0* codebase — due to
perceived and unresolved communication issues [11] between select plugin writers and the Textpattern developers —