What happens when you sign up a bunch of (great) bloggers for a book? You get a bunch of printed blog posts.

Blog Design Solutions is a book that explores different blogging platforms and other aspects of building your own weblog. Among the covered systems is my beloved Textpattern although there are chapters dedicated to a variety of other Content Management Systems including Wordpress, ExpressionEngine, and Movable Type.

Readers will be comfortable with the language which contains the endearing interjections and style we are accustomed to seeing in blog posts. The chapters are well illustrated and are generally quite good at covering the basics from installation to customization.

I will focus on the Textpattern chapter written by the outstanding John Oxton. The book in general seems to be trying to do too much. For example, the Textpattern chapter spends a considerable amount explaining how to make the ”.htaccess” file appear in OS X and covering installation information that is either easily found in the “official” documentation or is not particular to the CMS (phpMyAdmin basics). The chapter also takes a jarring turn to explain the <div> tag and general semantics.

I would have liked it if the book had separated some of the more general information on design and coding to let the experts focus on their CMS without having to digress so awkwardly to cover vital information. However, if you’re willing to stick with it (and maybe read it over), you’ll learn a lot about the top systems in use today.