A comprehensive, step-by-step guide on how to set up, customize, and market your blog using WordPress - Clear practical coverage of all aspects of WordPress
- Concise, clear, and easy to follow, rich with examples
- In-depth coverage of installation, themes, syndication, and podcasting
In Detail WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versality and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users. If you want to create powerful, fully-featured blogs in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore WordPress showing you what it offers and how to go about building your blog with the system. You will be introduced to the main aspects of a blog - users, communities, posts, comments, news feeds - and learn how to manage them using WordPress. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content, be it text or images, on your blog, and also understand how users interact with the blog. In working through the book you'll be inspired as well as informed, and have the capability and the ideas to make your blog cutting edge and exciting to maximize its impact. What you will learn from this book? - Installing and configuring WordPress on a local development machine or a web hosting service
- Managing posts and comments
- Working with Image galleries, calendars, etc.
- Organizing users and Communities
- Creating and Installing themes to control the page layout
- Linking to the outside world - Feeds, Syndication, and Podcasting
- Customizing Widgets and Plug-ins
- Using WordPress as a regular CMS
Approach Written in a clear, easy-to-read style, the book takes you through the essential tasks required to create a feature-rich blog as quickly as possible. From initial setup to customizing modules, each task is explained in a clear, practical way using an example blog developed through the book. Who this book is written for? This book is a beginner's guide to WordPress, for people who are new to blogging and want to create their own blogs in a simple and straightforward manner. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT-confident user will be able to use the book to produce an impressive blog. |
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 Create and manage your own blog or website with WordPress |
| Review Date: January 20, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Diane Cipollo, Editor at BellaOnline.com |
WordPress is one of the most popular open-source (free) blog and content management system programs. It is written in PHP and uses the MySQL database. Most people use it to create and manage a personal or commercial blog. However, you can also use it to create a website. This book, by Hasin Hayder, will teach you what you need to know to create and manage your own blog or content-based website with WordPress.
For the novice, Hayder begins by talking about what a blog is, the main parts of a blog and what they do. Then he introduces you to WordPress and discusses the options you have for hosting your blog such as the website dedicated to WordPress, WordPress.com, or on your own server. He goes into detail about these startup decisions and others such as security, setting permissions and working with the MySQL database.
Now that you have the framework for your blog, it is time to have some fun. WordPress is a theme-based program which means that it is easy to create a special look for your blog. One of the most creative tasks when creating a blog is customizing the look for your blog. The author discusses how to do this in several ways, the easiest and fastest way being to modify an existing template. Hayder shows you where to find the best user created templates on the web and how to customize them to your heart's content. He also covers how to use an online theme builder application to generate a theme for your blog. Hayder then shows you how to create your own themes from scratch by writing your own code and how you can add some nice features. This is a fun way to get some practice or a short introduction to the PHP and CSS web languages.
Next, Hayder covers how to use some of the fun WordPress features to make your blogging easier such as posting to your blog remotely. Once your blog or website is ready, it is time to "market" or publicize your new blog. Hayder covers the most popular ways to get the word out such as creating RSS feeds, pod casting and audio blogs. The main purpose of a blog is to communicate with others within a community setting. As the creator and manager of your own blog, there are a few simple tasks necessary to manage your blog. Hayder discusses these tasks. He also covers how to troubleshoot some of the most common problems you might encounter and how to upgrade, backup and restore your blog.
Hasin Hayder has worked in the field of web application for many years. He has developed several themes and plug-ins for WordPress and runs the WordPress4SQLite project. |
Very Complete WordPress Book
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| Review Date: April 12, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Frank Stepanski, PA |
WordPress is one of them any blogging tools out there today, but has gained steady popularity the past year or so and has lots of flexibility in terms of customizing it. You can use existing ¡§skins¡¨ that are available on the WordPress.org website or even create your own with a little XHTML and CSS experience. You can also use the existing PHP based functions to also customize the information that you want to display in different sections of your blog. But how do you figure out how to do all of this cool stuff???
This book by Hasin Hayder will tell you!
Actually, this is only the second WordPress book on the market today and the only one with technical details on how to truly customize your WordPress blog. (the WordPress 2 Visual QuickStart Guide is not technical at all). This book is great if you have some level of coding background (XHTML or CSS) since Hasin steps you through example projects that show you in great detail how to make your own custom templates.
The book first starts out giving the reader a great explanation of the history of blogging and how it has developed into what it is today. He discusses how to install WordPress on your own server (hosted or your own), what files to install, setting up the configuration, creating privileges, setting up file permissions on your web host, installing existing themes, how to upgrade from older versions if needed and how to use the interface itself. That alone (chapters 1-4) will save you hours of time looking through endless articles online.
The meat and potatoes sections of the book start with Chapter 5. The author explains how to use WordPress as a full fledged CMS (Content Management System) with more that just one section for your web posts. You can add additional pages for other parts of your website for static or other types of content. Because it can be used for more than displaying endless posts, it makes it an invaluable tool for web designers to create beautiful looking websites without having to know any server-side language or database technologies. Of course knowing a little PHP and or MySQL would help and/or speed up your development time, it really is not truly not required. Hasin continues to talk about how to easily modify your existing template pages (index.php, sidebar.php) to display what content you want. Even though WordPress is based on PHP, it provides you with functions that you just use to display the information you need. So technically you are coding in PHP, but in reality you are just using custom functions provided within the WordPres framework. Doing it this way, your level of experience needed can be kept at a minimum. After you create some new pages and categories to your site, the author shows you how to put them all together and looks seamless going from one page to the other. The objective is to make your website that uses WordPress seem like a regular site that just happens to have a section with posts on it. Making you look like a real web developer! º
The book (chapter 6) also goes into the types of podcasting (audio and video) and feeds (RSS and Atom) that you can use with WordPress and what websites will give you the ability to integrate that with your blog.
The final two chapters (7 and 8) go into more detail in developing your own themes with the author going over an example template he created and the changes he had to make. Of course your own themes will look different and may use some different WordPress functions to display specific blog information; you have a great understanding after reading these two chapters of how to do it yourself. There is lots of information on the WordPress.org site that talks about this but is very unorganized and still leaves you in the dark on some issues. Which is why this book is so great. Everything you need to modify and customize your WordPress site is right here, no need to go anywhere else.
A must buy for anybody using WordPress or curious on learning about it. |
Wordpress complete
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| Review Date: April 18, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Jochen Reichel, München Bogenhausen |
Hello,
i run several projects on the web.
Allthough i am not a programmer i always have to look about the
trends in programming and what is possible to reach and what is not.
Haydins book even let me make helpful changes in wordpress. Its a great guideline.
Higly recommended
Thank you for that. Jochen |
A Practical, Hands-on Book!
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| Review Date: June 26, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Elizabeth H. Hamilton, Miami, FL, USA |
| This practical, hands-on book takes you from the basics of WordPress to how to modify important WordPress elements such as the sidebar. I have learned more from this book than I have from a year of culling through the online WordPress documentation. |
Got me up and running in a couple of days
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| Review Date: June 1, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Preston Nevins, |
A very good introduction to getting WordPress functioning, and more importantly, installed in my mind so it actually makes sense to me.
The book started off with an introduction to WordPress, showed how to install it and set things up, and soon even walked me through making a custom "theme" from scratch that while primitive, is perfectly functional as a usable blog. If nothing else, all this helped me to understand that preconceptions aside, WordPress is not all that difficult to administer.
Starting from zero knowledge of WordPress, between the core knowledge that this book gave me, and a few quick web searches to solve specific problems I bumped into, I successfully got my very own installation of WordPress running on my OS X desktop machine. (Comes with an Apache web server as standard equipment, dont'cha know!) I wanted a sandbox to play and mess around with for a while before moving out into the real world on a real server -- normally that wouldn't be necessary if you have a webhost somewhere. This entailed such additional complexities (not covered in this book) as installing the mySQL database that WordPress relies upon (i.e. follow instructions on a web page), and activating the PHP scripting language that WordPress uses (installed in OS X, but deactivated by default). Not being a "command-line" kind of person, it was actually a fair bit easier than I'd have anticipated, but I never would have dared poke around with such things without the toehold of core WordPress knowledge that I got from this book.
There are a handful of minor English problems in the book, like there should be an "a" here, and a "the" there (and "iTune" should have an "s" at the end, spellcheck kind of stuff), but the explanations are nevertheless completely clear, so not even a full star off for that.
A second half-star off for the tendency to occasionally leap into rather frightening PHP code listings, that lack sufficient comments within the code to make them easily comprehensible to beginners. A bit more hand-holding here would have been appreciated. That said, although I've never touched PHP before, by actually taking the time to walk through the code shown (not understanding everything), I nevertheless soon had a pretty solid feel for what made things tick in WordPress. And the beginnings of the confidence that comes with actually knowing a little bit about what happens "under the hood."
...which is what I wanted this book for. |
Excellent, much-needed book
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| Review Date: February 19, 2007 |
| Reviewer: George Beinhorn, Mountain View, CA USA |
| WordPress is wonderful. The online documentation available at codex.wordpress.org is less than stellar - it's disorganized and, although some articles are very good, others omit to explain material that would help a beginner. Even if you know HTML/CSS, it can be very confusing to customize WP if you aren't PHP-savvy. This book is an excellent guide for new users: it's carefully sequential, and it doesn't assume knowledge of PHP. Instead, it gives you the required PHP code for a wide range of customizations, and tells you where to insert it. Mr. Hayder is very sincere and service-oriented. The book was well worth the price, both as a tutorial and an ongoing reference. |
Incomplete in many areas, poorly laid out
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| Review Date: June 15, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Tim D., Northern VA, USA |
This book reads more like a hardcopy of a bloggers notes to another blogger on how to install and customize WordPress. It spends more time glossing over descriptions and screenshots of other blog software and discussing the perceived shortcomings of WordPress mu (multi-user) than in discussing how to actually customizing a WordPress installation.
The screenshots often are on different pages than the text they go with, and most examples where the user might include more than a line or two of text simply copy and paste a single line over and over, usually extolling the virtues of the book's publisher (which joins several others on my list to avoid in the future.)
Several pages are spent covering how to use several FTP clients, yet none is spent on the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), one of the core needs for any meaningful customization of a WordPress site.
Very little of the WordPress API is discussed.
The author "explains" creating your own "widget" with very little description of what they are, and virtually none of why you would do so. He then follows with a sample of a "plug-in", yet a widget is in fact a specialized plug-in, so why are they presented in the reverse order? Very little is also done in terms of explaining how to customize a theme to allow the use of widgets, outside of providing a complete sidebar code page without showing which line(s) of code are the actual widget-enabling ones.
I realize that this is not a book about CSS or PHP, but neither is it a book about ftp software, which is after all a lot easier to use, yet more time is spent on how to use FTP than is spent on how to customize an existing theme.
Appears to be the better of the two books currently on the market that detail installing WordPress, but far from complete. Definitely needs a better editing job at the least. Certainly not worth $39.99. |
Good for beginning Wordpress developers, bad for the rest of the world.
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| Review Date: October 6, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Adrian Casillas, London United Kingdom |
This book is over-priced, padded with useless screenshots and poorly edited. The first 100 pages - and some of the back hundred for that matter - are filled with distracting explanations of topics irrelevant to properly using and building bloggy websites with Wordpress. The English is a mishmash of South Asian/British/American that reads like it was written by a tired programmer at 3 in the morning, and edited by someone with their eye on the clock rather than on the text.
That said, while end-users should just say no - the online Wordpress documentation is better and more to the point, and there are some good third-party websites as well - for a beginning Wordpress developer the chapters on theming and coding plug-ins are quite helpful. Well, at least I did found them so while doing a quick WP project. If only there had been 2 or 3 more chapters extending those lessons!
In short: this book is definitely over-priced. End-users should avoid this book; beginning WP developers will definitely find two or three chapters excellent how-tos on theming and coding plug-ins. |
Not bad, but didn't inspire me
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| Review Date: January 27, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Sammy Sumer, Australia |
Wordpress Complete book is full of promise but doesn't quite live up to my expectations.
Still, it's not bad.This book helped me to install and configure all the tools needed to get a development Wordpress site running at home.
This book really does a fine job of explaining what the out of the box tools can do and how the plug-in modules can further improve your online blog. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in building an online blog since WordPress and all the tools required are open source (free) and in many ways better than the costly competition.
My only criticism is that the author doesn't explain how the plug-in actually works. he just provide the plug-in and doesn't explain the logic of code. For example most of the plug-in that he introduce begin with add_filter() function but he doesn't tell what add_filter() does and how the plug-in integrate into your WordPress system. However the online community was a tremendous help when I ran into a problem. |
Nightmare In Progress
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| Review Date: April 17, 2008 |
| Reviewer: The Talker, Chicago |
The two books :
WordPress Complete by Hasin Hayder
and
WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
are worthwhile sources for the individual that lacks the expertise to setup the WordPress program. Now don't misunderstand what I say next. If you are a complete novice, get the books. Be fully aware that both books will NOT be sufficient to reach normal insanity while getting WordPress setup, if you're requirements go beyond the norm. Am familiar to Blogging and a bit aware of WordPress usage, but it became a total nightmare to reach the results that I was looking for. Seriously lacking are examples of "how and where" to actually insert / place what was being expounded upon. Seemed that every set of "how to" was chopped off at the most critical point and leaves one floundering and frustrated, Both books and even the official sites lack the explicit "where to insert" the talked on code. Many so called experts suffer from the "I know it so well" syndrome" that they overlook the "critical" aspect from a novices point of view. To have elaborated on a specific subject, without giving the most crucial bit of information "showing an example of where" is, to me a cardinal offense. It is recognized that it is near impossible to cover every detail required for total success with an installation, but what is covered, SHOULD be presented with clear and full details. There is no middle ground here. You are either sailing along smoothly, or you are floundering from lack of crucial details. I was in the latter group. WordPress by the way is a neat program, and for most users, will be relatively easy to master. If you have certain specific needs, be prepared to sweat it through, along with much aggravation. |
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