Book Image

WordPress 5 Complete - Seventh Edition

Book Image

WordPress 5 Complete - Seventh Edition

Overview of this book

Back in the day, when you wanted to launch a new website, you either had to learn web programming yourself or hire a professional who would take care of the whole process for you. Nowadays, with WordPress, anyone can build an optimized site with the least amount of effort possible and then make it available to the world in no time. Here, in the seventh edition of the book, we are going to show you how to build great looking and functional websites using WordPress. The new version of WordPress – 5.0 – comes with a few important changes, and we tell you all about how to use them effectively. From crafting content pages using the block editor, and customizing the design of your site, through to making sure it's secure, we go through it all. The book starts by introducing WordPress and teaching you how to set it up. You are then shown how to create a blog site, start writing content, and even use plugins and themes to customize the design of the site and add some unique elements to set it apart. If you want to get more in-depth, we also show you how to get started creating your own themes and plugins. Finally, we teach you how to use WordPress for building non-blog websites. By the end of the book, you will be sufficiently skilled to design high-quality websites and will be fully familiar with the ins and outs of WordPress.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: WordPress
6
Section 2: Customizing WordPress
14
Section 3: Non-Blog Websites

Widgets

Widgets are one of the native mechanisms in WordPress. Their main purpose is to provide us with an easy-to-use way of customizing the sidebars, footers, and headers of our sites, with the addition of extra content. Even though the most common placement of widgets is indeed the sidebar, the only actual rule is that a widget must be displayed inside a widget area, and a widget area can be anywhere a theme developer wants it to be. Common widgets contain the following:

  • A monthly archive of blog posts
  • A clickable list of pages
  • A clickable list of recent posts
  • A metadata box (containing logon/logutout links, RSS feed links, and other WordPress links)
  • Recent comments posted on the blog
  • A clickable list of categories
  • A tag cloud
  • A block of text and HTML
  • A search box

These days, nearly all themes are widget-enabled, with one or more widget areas available for use. If I were...