WordPress 4.x Complete will take you through the complete process of building a fully functional WordPress site from scratch. The journey goes all the way from teaching you how to install WordPress to the most advanced topics, such as creating your own themes, writing plugins, and even building non-blog websites. The best part is that you can do all of this without losing your shirt along the way. Moreover, once you get some practice, you will be able to launch new WordPress sites within minutes (not a metaphor, by the way; this is completely true).
This book guides you along the way in a step-by-step manner to explain everything there is to know about WordPress. We'll start by downloading and installing the core of WordPress, where you will learn how to choose the correct settings in order to guarantee a smooth experience for yourself and your visitors. After that, this book will teach you all about content management functionalities for your site, from posts and pages to categories and tags, all the way to links, media, menus, images, galleries, administration, user profiles, and more. Next, you will find out what plugins and themes are and how to use them effectively. Finally, you'll learn how to create your own themes and plugins to enhance the overall functionality of your website. Once you're done with WordPress 4.x Complete, you'll have all the knowledge required to build a professional WordPress site from scratch.
Chapter 1, Introducing WordPress, explains what makes WordPress an excellent software that can run your website (blog or not). WordPress is packed with excellent features and is so flexible that it can really do anything you want. It has a wealth of online resources. Additionally, it's super easy to use, and you need no special skills or prior experience to use it. Last but not least, it is free!
Chapter 2, Getting Started with WordPress, describes how to install WordPress on a remote server, change the basic default settings of your blog, write posts, and comment on those posts. This chapter also shows you how to work with sites hosted on WordPress.com, which is one of the branches of the WordPress world.
Chapter 3, Creating Blog Content, teaches you everything you need to know to add content to your blog and then manage that content, be it posts, categories, and comments, or tags, spam, and excerpts.
Chapter 4, Pages, Menus, Media Library, and More, explores all of the content WordPress can manage that's not directly about blogging. You also get to learn about static pages, menus, headers and backgrounds, the media library, image galleries, and more.
Chapter 5, Plugins and Widgets, discusses everything there is to know about finding the best plugins for WordPress and then using them effectively. Plugins are an integral part of every WordPress site's lifespan, so it's hard to find a successful site that isn't using any of them.
Chapter 6, Choosing and Installing Themes, describes how to manage the basic look of your WordPress website. You also get to learn where to find themes, why they are useful, and how to implement new themes in your WordPress website.
Chapter 7, Developing Your Own Theme, explains how to create your own theme. With just the most basic HTML and CSS abilities, you can create a design and turn it into a fully functional WordPress theme.
Chapter 8, Feeds, Podcasting, and Social Media Integration, explains what an RSS feed is and how to make feeds available for your WordPress blog. This chapter also explores how to syndicate an entire blog or just posts within a certain category, and how to create your own podcast with the help of plugins. Finally, it goes on to discuss social media integration and how it can help you build a popular website.
Chapter 9, Developing Plugins and Widgets, teaches you everything you need to know about creating basic plugins and widgets: how to structure the PHP files, where to put your functions, and how to use hooks. This chapter also teaches you to add management pages and a widget that is related to a plugin.
Chapter 10, Community Blogging, explains how to manage a group of users working with a single blog, which is a community of users. Community blogging can play an important role in a user group or a news website. This chapter also explains how to manage the different levels of privileges for users in the community.
Chapter 11, Creating a Non-blog Website Part 1 – The Basics, explores the endless possibilities of WordPress when it comes to using it to launch various types of websites. This chapter presents the first batch of our non-blog websites and explains in detail how to build them on top of a standard WordPress installation.
Chapter 12, Creating a Non-blog Website Part 2 – Community Websites and Custom Content Elements, goes through some additional types of non-blog websites and also presents some technical aspects of building them (caution—code talk inside!).
Chapter 13, Administrating WordPress, covers many of the common administrative tasks you may face when managing a WordPress website. This includes backing up your database and files, moving your WordPress installation from one server or folder to another, and doing general problem-solving and troubleshooting.
A computer
A web browser
A plain text editor
FTP software
You may consider a text editor that highlights code (such as Coda, TextMate, HTMLKit, and so on), but a simple plain text editor is all that's required. You may like to run a local copy of WordPress on your computer, in which case you may need a server such as Apache and MySQL installed (though WAMP and MAMP can take care of all that for you). But even this is not necessary, as you could do the entire thing remotely.
This book is a guide to WordPress for both beginners and those who have slightly more advanced knowledge of WordPress. If you are new to blogging and want to create your own blog or website in a simple and straightforward manner, then this book is for you. It is also for people who want to learn to customize and expand the capabilities of a WordPress website. You do not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT-confident user will be able to use this book to produce an impressive website.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The wp-config.php file allows us to set this, too."
A block of code is set as follows:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<title>Blog title</title>
<style type="text/css">@import url("style.css");</style>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
function ahs_doctypes_regex($text) {
$types = get_option('ahs_supportedtypes');
$types = ereg_replace(',[ ]*','|',$types);
$text = Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
chmod –R wp-admin 744
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "To add a new page, go to your wp-admin and navigate to Pages | Add New."
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