Wordpress Complete

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
author	Hasin Hayder
pages	290
publisher	Packt Publishing
rating	8
reviewer	Ravi
ISBN	1904811892
summary	A very good book to learn to use Wordpress to ones advantage

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.

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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.

Well

I'm waiting for the bloggerati to blog throughout the blogosphere for this latest develblogment in blogging. Is there a wikipedia blog article about this yet? Blog.

No offense...

...but the way that Wordpress mashes together PHP and HTML is horrendous. Every time I have to help someone out with their Wordpress installation because they tried to change a subtle detail in their template and ended up breaking the whole thing, I'm wishing I could find and strangle its designers. Why they didn't make it a tag-replacement system like Movable Type or Textpattern is beyond me.

Re:No offense...

I haven't used either Movable Type or Textpattern. But after using Mambo/Joomla/PHPbb/PHPNuke and a few other CMS type apps I think when you get used to Wordpress's template system it's really pretty remarkable. It's probably simply a matter of preference, I like being able to take real HTML and make that part of my header or footer. I find it much easier and straight forward then other solutions I've seen, then if I want to dig down into the loop its all right there (and well documented to boot).

I imagine most templating systems would be difficult for people unfamiliar with PHP.

Simple question

While it's on the topic, can anybody recommend any "slimmed-down" blog software? I wouldn't mind a tool that lets me post quickly and easily, but without all the frigging cruft like trackbacks, pingbacks, Flickr plugin, and goat shaver. Or at least some blog software that gives you way more fine-grained control. Wordpress is nice, but not everybody who blogs necessarily wants to be hooked in like a deer tick to the rest of the internet. Also, not having to deal with metric tons worth of php would be nice too.

Re:Simple question

Have you tried Thingamablog [sourceforge.net]? I love it. Easy, small, quick, works great whether you're hosting your blog locally or remotely.

done already?

Wordpress Complete

That's great news! This should free up a lot of developers to work on other projects.

corrected blurbage:

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.

Grammar...

It still doesn't mean that people will cease to infuriate me with their improper use of "it's" and "its." The next big step is correcting that error. It's like their freakin' INTERCHANGEABLE now. Sheesh.

I don't have a blog

Sometimes I think that I am the only one left on earth that doesn't have a blog. I often think about starting one but then I realized that all I do in a day is go to work then come home, smoke up, and read shit on the internet so I don't think many people would want to read about that. On the other hand, most blogs I've seen aren't much more exciting so...

Out of date? Incomplete?

I wonder about the point of a book that discusses something that changes more or less monthly or weekly, with things coming and going on regular basis. How long will it be current or useful?

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.

Great piece of software

Since I've moved out of state I setup a blog to keep my family/friends up to date on life and as a personal diary. This is a wonderful piece of software. I didnt want to go the route of using a service like Livejournal because I wanted complete control of the software and run it on my own server. With wordpress I had a nice blog up and running in about 30minutes. Another nice feature is that it's protocol is open, so as a Linux user I just apt-get install drivel, and voila posting to my blog via a nice local program without having to login to the site itself. A+ :)

Now if it could only...

...promote insightful, comprehensible thoughts it would be perfect. 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.

That aside, I am glad that it is finally complete. Yes, there are many worthless blogs posted but it makes it all worth it when you get that one gem.

Is this needed?

This isn't intended to be rude or necessarily dissuade people from buying this book, but doesn't this quote say it all:

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.

So why exactly would I need to buy a book again? Not to mention this amazing little URL: http://wordpress.org/support/ [wordpress.org]

And oh yes.. I am a Wordpress user. :)

Right....

"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"

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 individials slapped pieces of PHP and HTML randomly in the codebase until it seemed to do what they want.

Hey McFly

If even a lay person can easily master its use and get his or her blog up and running in no time then why we need this book for?

I liked WordPress so much that I...

...eventually turned it into a business. Since I had to upgrade three blogs simultaneously all the time, while maintaining tons of enhancements, I started using Subversion for it. Not too long after that, I started to sell a bundle of plugins and themes for WordPress which was the same exact copy of what I used for my sites. It turned into a business: http://turbochargedcms.com/ [turbochargedcms.com] powers several high-profile blogs today.

I guess I have shoulders of giants to thank :-)

Plug-ins for Wordpress that should be mandatory

Hopefully they mention this in the book, but just in case:

Bad behavior [homelandstupidity.us]: kills 99% of all spam on contact
Spam Karma [unknowngenius.com]: kills the other 1%

Great

Its great to Know that SlashDot Rank " Wordpress Complete" as 8/10....my heartiest congratulation for the author Hasin Hayder. wishes, samiha esha

Re:Just what we need

Sadly, the same could be said for breeding....

Re:So Slashdot advertises for Wordpress?

Wordpress is a platform, you student.

Hey man, give him a break. He's Canadian...

I know!

If you feel the urge to blog, you should be kicked in the nuts or ovaries. If you are still standing afterwards, you get your blogger's license.

WordPress in two easy steps

WordPress in two easy steps:

1. Install Apache, PHP, and MySQL, then create a MySQL database and a default user and grant that user full privileges to the database.
2. Install WordPress!