Textpattern grew out of the system used to publish Textism, Allen's personal site, and an unnamed version was announced as available to alpha testers in 2001.

[7] In a somewhat unorthodox move, Textpattern continued to accumulate features as the second, third, fourth and fifth release candidates were made public.

Due to a development process that extended much longer than originally envisioned, the first stable release of Textpattern was version 4.0[8] on August 14, 2005.

in November 2010 introduced new features and improvements, notably more advanced image handling, and administrative updates in preparation for modernising and streamlining the core code.

in August 2012 brought many improvements, including a new HTML5 public theme and extensive modernisation of the administration area of the system.

Textpattern offers a number of features and conveniences to designers, users, site administrators and developers, including: