In February of this year, a small army of rather influencial people in the world of Web design got together under the leadership of Phil Sherry and wrote a book called Blog Design Solutions.

At its core, the book takes the approach of looking at several leading Web publishing systems on the free market, and allots a single chapter to each system.

Chapter 6 of this book, written by the imfamous straight-talker, John Oxton, is devoted to Textpattern, and John does a rather good job. What is surprising is that little mention of this book, particularly this chapter, has been made around the Textpattern community. My guess is not many people knew the chapter was there, as there is no clue based on the book’s title that Textpattern would be addressed at all (or any of the other systems discussed, for that matter). The book’s title is pretty generic, while in fact the chapters are very specific. I can see where a challenge would have existed to keep a more expressive title short, but this is nevertheless a bad call on the title; it’s a classic case of losing meaning for the sake of simplicity (yes, there is a point where being too simple has negative effects).

A couple of folks from our own community, Cody Lindley and Nathan Smith, have given their opinions on the book as a whole. You can see their reviews at Amazon via the link above.

I think while this book provides a good start at laying some ground work on how to do something with Textpattern, it’s only a broad stroke on just one type of Textpattern site model. Two or three more in-depth books solely on Textpattern could potentially be written without conflict, taking a variety of tacks with focus and scope. In fact, rumor has it that two such books are potentially in the works. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen, as book publishing is a whimsical thing. Time will tell.

At any rate, in case you missed it the first time around, and particularly if you’re new to Textpattern and aim for a personal Weblog, you might give Blog Design Solutions a look. Just go straight to chapter 6. A local development spot for your site is always a capital idea too, but in that case I would recommend you see TextBook’s documentation rather than rely on Blog Design Solution’s chapter on similar material.

Product Details

Paperback: 376 pages
Publisher: friends of ED (February 20, 2006)
ISBN: 1590595815

Links
3 more shots of the book