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Wordpress Complete
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Apr 25, 2007 01:51 PM
from the blog-this dept.
from the blog-this dept.
Ravi writes "In recent times, blogs have empowered numerous individuals and groups by allowing them a platform to air their thoughts. This has been made possible because of the development of numerous blogging tools. One which has gained mass appeal in the blogging community is Wordpress. What is exciting about this tool or blog engine is that even a lay person can easily master its use and get his or her blog up and running in no time."
Wordpress Complete authored by Hasin Hayder and published by Packt Publishing is a book ideal for any beginning blogger who intends to set up his/her own Wordpress blog. The book is divided into 10 distinct chapters with each chapter describing a particular feature of the Wordpress blog.
I found the book unique in that instead of jumping right into installing and configuring Wordpress, the author takes time to explain the concept of a blog and the different ways in which you can blog. All the blogs irrespective of the blogging engine being used share some common terminology. This is explained in the very first chapter. In the same chapter, the readers are given a bird's eye view of the different blogging engines — both the free ones and those which cost money. The readers are made aware of the pros and cons of each of them.
Installing Wordpress is easy. It is a two step install process. However when you intend to host a Wordpress blog on a remote host, a few factors come into play depending upon what is offered by your web hosting provider. There is more than one way of installing a Wordpress blog on a remote host. This is dealt with clearly in the second chapter.
The third chapter covers choosing and installing themes, the different types of themes and their file composition.
The fourth chapter titled "Blogging your heart out", embarks on an extensive trip explaining the concept of posts and different ways of adding posts in Wordpress such as posting via email. Apart from that, this chapter contains an exhaustive introduction to the rich text editing interface which is the default editor. One also gets to know more about the features common to all blogs such as trackbacks, pinging as well as some Wordpress specific features.
You might wonder why you should buy a Wordpress book when the bulk of the documentation is freely available online. You will find this book to be a very good asset for beginner Wordpress bloggers because the author introduces a wealth of information which will require a lot of digging online to find. For example, the author explains how to put together an image gallery in Wordpress which I was not aware of before I read the book.
Chapter 6 deals with the all important topic of Feeds and Podcasts. There are four different feed formats and Wordpress supports all of them. Feeds are an easy way for the visitors of a site to keep track of the most recent changes in the content of a website.
While the first 6 chapters are targeted at Wordpress users, the remaining 4 chapters are more useful for Wordpress developers. On that note, developing themes form the basis of the 7th chapter. Here the author demonstrates how to build a theme by starting from scratch. Wordpress is essentially an amalgamation of PHP code, CSS and standards compliant HTML and this chapter has a fair sprinkling of code snippets with explanation. After going through the chapter, I was able to get a very good idea of the different files and their content which form the heart of Wordpress.
The next chapter titled "Community Blogging" provides a brief outline of a parallel project of Wordpress which is the Multi-user Wordpress and goes by the name Wordpress MU.
Chapter 9 titled "Developing plug-ins and widgets" is a very interesting chapter with the author explaining the process of creating widgets which are small bits of code incorporating third party functionality.
There is also an exclusive chapter which acts as an administrative reference where a number of problems that Wordpress administrators might face and their possible solutions are listed.
The book takes a reader from the installation to the configuration of every aspect of Wordpress to eventually give some troubleshooting tips. There is no dearth of relevant screenshots. The language used is clear and to the point. The author also provides Web references in many places. In short, I found this book to be an ideal resource for bloggers who wish to host their blog on Wordpress.
Ravi Kumar likes to share his thoughts on all things related to GNU/Linux, Open Source and Free Software on his blog linuxhelp.blogspot.com.
You can purchase Wordpress Complete from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Well (Score:2, Funny)
No offense... (Score:5, Informative)
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By `works', I mean it doesn't cause my browser to crawl to a halt, and the CPU fan to speed up. It's not the speed of my computer (3.06Ghz P4), and besides the site works fine in the Mozilla suite browser. There's something about Firefox that makes it extremely slow and unstable on certain websites. I found out that Blogger is one but another is The Weather Network [theweathernetwork.com], the most popular weathe
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Ever been to Digg.com? I browse with a 3.2ghz Pentium D, and that site is horribly slow.
Re:No offense... (Score:5, Interesting)
I imagine most templating systems would be difficult for people unfamiliar with PHP.
Parent
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I also use their free online blogs too, and they're the best there is in my opinion (doesn't run Adsense of course - but I see that as an advantage, cos Adsense is responsible for more blackhat SEO crap than anything else.). I was a bit puzzled when Blogger came out of Beta, because it feels less stable and has less features than Wordpress - Blogger seems more like a beta than anything else Google has out the
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The only php bits I use are includes (which lets my entry lists update without rebuilding the entire entry database, and also makes it possible to change the look and feel of my whole danged site by changing only a couple of files), and a count function for page totals.
MT rocks. None of the othe
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And TXP is not really a package you can use by just throwing some CSS on the default templates, either.
(I want to love TXP, really - it's got a lot of things it does right, and its back end is gorgeous - but it's just a huge pain to build a template for
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maybe I can seriously consider using txp for the back-end of the next version of my own site, instead of my personal fork of Singapore and including LJ in one page.
I second that (Score:2)
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I started using WP around v1.1 it was ok... and once it was up and running and I spent hours integrating the style into the rest of my page (without breaking anything) I really wasn't up to trying to move to a different
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phpBB (Score:2, Interesting)
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Simple question (Score:2)
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From my (brief) searchings, the consensus does appear to be in favour for flat files if you're only dealing with text, which would be all I'm looking for anyway. Once you you start questing for a more broad/deep CMS solution, apparently a db is the way to go.
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The goat shaver, however, is hard-coded into the loop and cannot be disabled.
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There are also spinnoffs like PHPosxom.
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http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7392 [linuxjournal.com]
Re:Simple question (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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I'm surprised how often I use Wordpress's integrated goat shaver.
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done already? (Score:5, Funny)
That's great news! This should free up a lot of developers to work on other projects.
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Stating "book review" on the title would just help out to figure what the post means!
corrected blurbage: (Score:2)
What is [disheartening] about this tool or blog engine is that even a lay person can easily master its use and get his or her blog up and running in no time.
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dim view (Score:2)
The first thing an author learns is how little she has to say. For any writer, amateur or professional, the proverbial guidance is *less is more*. Blogging is the systematic violation of this truth of human communication.
I applaud the distribution efficiencies and the rise of an amateur press, but I sigh for the wasted electrons and the deterioration of the signal-to-noise ratio of our cultural life.
One man's peeve (Score:2)
is another woman's pleasure, apparently. I find the indifferent substitution of he or she for usage number two to be perfectly satisfactory. My pet peeve is the scholiast's insistence that grammar and usage are not perfectly conventional systems susceptible of development. It's not political correctness makes me do; my desire is shakeup the hidebound English grammar.
I feel it is a stylistic matter; a piece with my habit of mashups with semi-colon or my resistance to certain aspects of preposition and
Out of date? Incomplete? (Score:3, Interesting)
And I wonder how well the book does in discussing plugins, of which there are many for Wordpress, and the many themes that expand on Wordpress.
As much as I dislike trolling user forums for answers and ideas, I think that for Wordpress it's probably still the best option.
This review didn't really give me an idea about the utility of this book, it just listed the table of contents.
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I have gone from being a complete novice (I had never touched PHP before either) to writing themes and plugins, and I have never had the slightest difficulty finding what I want online.
My plugins are not brilliant, but they are useful and a fair number of people use them - especially Slug Trimmer, which produces short automatically generated urls instead of ones-that-go-on-and-on-like-th
Great piece of software (Score:4, Insightful)
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Is this needed? (Score:3, Insightful)
And oh yes.. I am a Wordpress user.
Right.... (Score:2)
Right.. so I guess this is why it needed a whole book about it? You can't claim both now, can you.
WordPress is one of those things that are easy to copy/paste and bang, you have a blog. But you better not want to customize or extend it, since like most open source PHP projects, it has no signs that it had any architecture to begin with. Just random individial
Plug-ins for Wordpress that should be mandatory (Score:3, Informative)
Bad behavior [homelandstupidity.us]: kills 99% of all spam on contact
Spam Karma [unknowngenius.com]: kills the other 1%
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I know! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Elitism, with a touch of "We were doing it before it was cool," thrown in.
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You, Sir, have missed the point. Blogs aren't about writing new and interesting ideas, they're about linking to and excerpting from other blogs, thereby getting a higher ranking at Technorati. [technorati.com]
That, or posting pictures of your cat.
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Ah, if only that was not sooo true. Of course this isn't the fault of (most) Bloggers, nor of Technorati - fundamentally this is a Google flavored problem. In the days before Google it was meta-tag spamming. Now that we have Web 2.0 (whatever that may be) we have link spam, and tag spam.
For my own blog I try to a
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There are so many tools out there for communication it is just a shame to see that the quality of the ideas communicated seems to be decreasing. How many times have we noticed with cell phones, and now blogs, that people are talking and communicating just to hear their own voice and don't contribute anything by their communication.
I found it was that way before cell phones also. I'd imagine that the quality of the average printed work decreased after the printing press too. It's bound to happen, because once you remove the cost of doing something, people won't put as much thought into doing it.
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Case in point.
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What error? (Score:2)
Were you talking about something else, or are you as clueless as your use of "their" suggests?
WordPress in two easy steps (Score:3, Funny)