Textism preparing to release Textpattern

Dean Allen announces that he is almost ready to release Textpattern, his long-promised web writing tool (or, if you prefer, CMS).
While I’m afraid it will not enable me to write as well as he does (his predictions for 2003 are microstorytelling at its finest), Textpattern offers a feature set that has me drooling, and I’m the last person on the planet who should be installing yet another blog tool / CMS these days.
While clearly blog oriented, Textpattern offers link-categorization features that seem designed to enable the web reader/writer to get a grip on her personal knowledge management.
It also includes some enhancements to the standard blogging experience, such as the very smart Textile HTML converter that takes much of the pain out of HTML tagging while delivering optimal typographical elegance, a master page for viewing and responding to comments, built-in referer tracking, and many of the other subtle features exhibited at Textism.
I suspect that the choices of stylesheet bundled with the tool will help even the design-challenged, like myself, generate blocks of type pleasing to the eye.
I’ve been meaning to try out the Refer tool that Textism had previously made available to the public but like so many things still have not got around to that. Now I’m going to see if I can get in on the final testing of Textpattern.