Using WordPress, you can easily create dynamic blogs and websites 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 for a regular website with very little effort. You can customize the features, incorporate your own design, and even write your own plugins with ease. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users. Although it is easy to get started with WordPress, its full power is not immediately obvious.
If you want to create a powerful, fully featured blog or non-blog website in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you learn everything WordPress has to offer from the ground up, so you can build your complete website. You will see many of WordPress's hidden powers that will help you build a fully functioning website.
Chapter 1—Introduction to WordPress introduces everything about blogging, including what a blog is, the common terms used in blogging and what they mean, what WordPress has to offer to a blogger, and why to choose it.
Chapter 2—Getting Started explains the choices of where you can build your WordPress website, upgrading from an older version of WordPress, and getting familiar with the WordPress Administration Panel.
Chapter 3—Blogging Your Heart Out covers the complete process of creating new posts for your blog, including applying categories and tags to your post, using the rich text editor, and controlling the timestamp. It also includes more advanced options such as including excerpt and trackbacks. This chapter also covers controlling commenting and discussion on your blog, as well as keeping out comment spam.
Chapter 4—Pages, Images, Plugins and More... explains that blog posts aren't the only content in your blog. You also can control pages of static information, upload and manage images on your site, keep a list of bookmarked links, and add plugins.
Chapter 5—Choosing and Installing Themes covers how to find and use existing themes from a variety of reliable websites, how to choose which theme is right for your website or blog, and the process of installing and using your new theme. This chapter also covers enabling and using widgets in your theme.
Chapter 6—Developing Your Own Theme covers the process of creating your own theme from soup to nuts. This includes setting up your design to accommodate your blogging goals, converting your initial build into an authentic WordPress theme, creating templates within your theme to serve different purposes for your blog, making your theme widget-friendly, and sharing your theme with the WordPress community.
Chapter 7—Feeds and Podcasting explains what feeds are and how to add them to your WordPress website, tracking subscribers to your blog, and aggregating feeds from other sources on your blog. This chapter also covers using your WordPress website to create a podcast. (It's easy!)
Chapter 8—Developing Plugins and Widgets is for the more advanced user. This chapter shows you how to create plugins and widgets that will work with any installation of WordPress. It includes step-by-step instructions so you don't get lost along the way.
Chapter 9—Community Blogging covers managing and handling a multiuser blog, including a detailed outline of the roles and capabilities included in WordPress.
Chapter 10—WordPress as a CMS covers from start to finish how to use WordPress to create a non-blog website. This chapter includes explanations of designing your theme, setting it up, creating custom pages that display post content in non-blog ways, customizing the home page to contain dynamic content, and creating a news page.
Chapter11—Administrator's Reference covers all of the basic things a WordPress administrator needs to know from system requirements to detailed step-by-step instructions on installing WordPress, moving your WordPress website from one place to another, backing up, common template tags, and basic troubleshooting.
The minimum system requirement for WordPress is a web server with the following software installed:
PHP Version 4.3 or greater
MySQL Version 4.0 or greater
This book is a guide to WordPress for both beginners and progressive learners. It's for people who are new to blogging and want to create their own blogs in a simple and straightforward manner, and it's also for those who want to learn how to customize and expand the capabilities of a WordPress website.
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.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "...you can add the above text anywhere in single.php so long as it is inside the if and while loops of the loop."
A block of code will be set as follows:
function modify_menu_for_supportedtypes() {
add_management_page(
'Document Types', // Page <title>
'Document Types', // Menu title
7, // What level of user
__FILE__, //File to open
'supportedtypes_options' //Function to call
);
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be shown in bold:
<h1> <a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a> </h1> <div id="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
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, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "To register your free blog, click on the loud blue-and-white Sign Up Now! button."
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