Blog Design Solutions finally arrives

My author’s copies of Blog Design Solutions finally arrived this morning, and very nice it looks, too. I wrote only one chapter, so I’m looking forward to what my fellow partners in crime have to say about the world of blogging. I must admit that when I was first asked to contribute the chapter on setting up a local PHP and Perl testing environment, I wondered what the rest of the book would contain.

Well, now I know. I feel quite honoured to be with such a celebrated galaxy of web illuminati. My chapter follows a nice round-up of the blog scene by Phil Sherry. Then Andy Budd introduces Movable Type, Simon Collison waxes lyrical about ExpressionEngine, Chris J Davis and Michael Heilemann deconstruct WordPress, and John Oxton shows you how to get to grips with TextPattern. As if all that weren’t enough Richard Rutter has contributed a step-by-step tutorial on how to build your own blog tool from scratch with PHP and MySQL.

Although I’ve developed database-driven sites for several years, I’ve never bothered with a blog of my own, and the hype has always been that blogs are so easy to set up, a child could do it. Surely there couldn’t be enough to fill a whole book? How wrong I was.

Since I knew there was going to be a chapter on WordPress, I decided that was what I would use as the basis for the screenshots in my section. The Famous 5-minute Install really lived up to its name. Creating the database and setting everything up was ridiculously simple. Nor did it take me very long to work out how to change the design by downloading and installing one of the themes. How simple does it get?

I needed to get my chapter written, and then it was back to the grindstone finishing Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. Once that was out of the door, I was rushed off my feet again with Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8. Consequently, I set the blog aside for several months.

When I finally got round to creating this site, I quickly realized that the 5-minute install is only the beginning of the story. Of course, if you’re happy with one of the pre-packaged themes, you can just get on with the blather. But if you want to incorporate something like WordPress into a website and making it look an integral part, there’s a huge amount of work to be done, and for me, that’s just as much fun as the blogging.

I’ve already dipped into the WordPress chapter, and only wished it had been to hand before I started digging into the all the code. The beauty of WordPress is that it’s highly configurable. But you need a good knowledge of CSS, as well as feeling comfortable crawling around inside PHP code. Fortunately, you don’t need a degree in computer science to do it, and I certainly found out more about WordPress from skimming through their chapter than I did from trying to read the online documentation.

Add comment February 23rd, 2006