Book Image

WordPress 3 Complete

By : April Hodge Silver
Book Image

WordPress 3 Complete

By: April Hodge Silver

Overview of this book

<p>Using the WordPress Content Management System, you can create a beautiful, dynamic, and amazing website. WordPress is a flexible and powerful tool that's ideal for creating both blog and non-blog websites. You can customize the features, incorporate your own design, and even write your own plugins with ease. Its versatility and ease of use have attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.</p> <p><em>Wordpress 3 Complete</em> will teach you everything you need to know both to get started with WordPress and also to unlock its massive hidden powers. This book will give you a rapid and straightforward introduction to the rich and powerful features of WordPress and will also get you up and running with WordPress quickly and painlessly. It will help you learn everything WordPress has to offer, from the ground up, so that you can build your own complete website.</p> <p><em>WordPress 3 Complete</em> begins from scratch, starting with how to install WordPress, all the way to the most advanced topics such as creating your own themes, writing plugins, and including custom post types in your website.</p> <p>Starting with downloading and installing the core WordPress software, you will take a detailed look at WordPress settings and also choose the settings that will work best for your website or blog. After that, the book will teach you all about content management functionality for your site – from posts and pages to categories and tags, all the way to links, media, menus, images, galleries, and more. Finally, you'll learn how to create your own themes and plugins to enhance the overall functionality of your website.</p> <p>Once you're done with <em>WordPress 3 Complete</em>, you'll be an expert in everything WordPress, from content management through technical steps such as backing up your site.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
WordPress 3 Complete
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Preface

WordPress 3 Complete begins from scratch, starting with how to install WordPress, all the way to the most advanced topics such as creating your own themes, writing plugins, and including custom post types in your website. Starting with downloading and installing the core WordPress software, you will take a detailed look at WordPress settings and also choose the settings that will work best for your website or blog. After that, the book will teach you all about content management functionality for your site from posts and pages to categories and tags, all the way to links, media, menus, images, galleries and more. 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 3 Complete, you'll be an expert in everything WordPress, from content management through technical steps such as backing up your site.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to WordPress, explains how WordPress is an excellent software that can run your website (blog or not). It's packed with excellent features, and is so flexible that it can really do anything you want, and 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, explains how to install WordPress on a remote server, change the basic default settings of your blog, write posts, and comment on those posts.

Chapter 3, Creating Blog Content, teaches everything you need to know to add content to your blog and manage that content, be it about posts, categories and comments, or tags, spam, and excerpts.

Chapter 4, Pages, Plugins, Image Galleries Menus, and More, explores all of the content WordPress can manage that's not directly about blogging. You can also learn about static pages, menus, bookmark links, the media library, image galleries, plugins, and more.

Chapter 5, Choosing and Installing Themes, describes how to manage the basic look of your WordPress website. You also learn where to find themes, why they are useful, and how to implement new themes on your WordPress website.

Chapter 6, Developing Your Own Theme, explains how to make 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 7, Feeds and Podcasting, explains what an RSS feed is and how to make feeds available for our WordPress blog. It also explores how to syndicate a whole blog or just posts within a certain category, and how to create your own podcast with or without the help of plugins.

Chapter 8, Developing Plugins and Widgets, teaches everything you need to know about creating basic plugins and widgets, how to structure the PHP file, where to put your functions, and how to use hooks. It also teaches about adding management pages and adding a widget that is related to a plugin.

Chapter 9, 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. It also explains how to manage the different levels of privileges for users in a community.

Chapter 10, Creating a Non-Blog Website, explores designing and building a basic theme that focuses primarily on non-blog content. It also creates multiple widget areas, multiple menu areas, and a smooth slider to the homepage.

Chapter 11, Administrator's Reference, covers many of the common administrative tasks you may face when you're managing a WordPress-driven 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.

What you need for this book

  • A Computer

  • A Web browser

  • A text editor

  • FTP software

Users may like a text editor that highlights code (such as Coda, TextMate, HTMLKit, and so on), but a simple text editor is all that's required.

Users may like to run a local copy of WordPress on their computer, in which case they need a server like Apache and MySQL installed (though WAMP and MAMP would take care of all that for them), but it's also not necessary as they could do the entire thing remotely.

Who this book is for

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 the book to produce an impressive website.

Conventions

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: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

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 =

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 the text like this: " To add a new page, go to your WP Admin and navigate to Pages | Add New".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Note

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