As the title of the book might reveal — this Word Press handbook authored by Hasin Hayder tries to go beyond the scope of using WordPress as merely a blogging tool. More about that later on.

Book Info

• WordPress Complete

• Written by Hassin hayder, published by PACKT
  ISBN 1-904811-89-2. 280 pages

Buy? Amazon UK | Amazon US

• Official book site

Summary

In the Preface we head off with blogging history, more than a dozen of blogging engines are compared, what sorts of blogs exist, what we can do to market our blogs to reach the public.

Next to the default WP blog engine, the author tells about WMU.
In the last chapters you will find some guidance on how to install it.
We learn how to register a free hosted wordpress.com blog and further how-to install WP manually on a hosted webspace of our own.

The author shows us a step-by-step guide of using cpanel (a webhost admin panel) to install WP as well! Also we see coverage of upgrading from older installations, troubleshooting and finally: we are going full gear inside the admin interface of WP, the Dashboard. We are ready to post!

The author begins in Chapter 3 Choosing and installing themes with saying that installing themes are a necessary feature to let users change the look and feel of their blog without any experience of HTML and CSS.

In a later chapter we will develop a entire 2-column theme from the ground up. Hayder shows us where to find some interesting themes to start with and why we should choose one theme over another theme. Links are provided where to get other themes besides the central themes listed at WP Codex as well.

We get started with all detailed features when dealing with posts and a closer view on the build-in rich text editor. A good tip is the WP hot keys to alleviate the strain of clicking each time on the Bold button to make anything bold that is. We learn more about trackbacks and pings. And the author takes the time to learn us some basics about ping services and other ways of posting (other blogger APIs, XML-RPC).

We get more into detail about making comments, moderating comments and fighting comment spam. And more about the gravatar, or better known as the image alternative to a commenter’s name.

Many bloggers wander how can I turn my blog into a full fledged CMS. In Chapter 5 Non Blog Content we will build a CMS in WP. The author uses a book store website as the example we are going to use. Step-by-step we will create a general purpose website that contains also non-blog content, or pages. Many of you might know that you can write posts in WP, but also add pages. We get our hands dirty again with modifying chunks of PHP within the WP template pages.

This time we need to adapt our pages to fit to our needs. We also see some custom plug-ins which will come in-handy for our book store site. The author explains shortly what the modified coded is intended for, and the explanation here is easy to follow. Again, you have many possibilities to customize your WP blog but you need both advanced knowledge about PHP and programming. I do believe it was a good choice to introduce us with some PHP programming techniques. WP uses a loop to display posts and comments, but we see here some ideas to go further. A good introduction, yes indeed! The WP Codex offers more ideas as well.

Most of you have read a feed and watched a podcast! In this chapter 6 Feeds and podcasting we learn first in detail what feeds are all about (history, RSS formats, RSS readers). We will develop a RSS aggregator plugin to process a feed and display it in our WP blog. As you see, we are again working with PHP in this chapter.

As I mentioned earlier on, this chapter 7 Developing themes deals with building themes from scratch. This means we start with a blank page named index.php …

We will build gradually our pages and add chunks of PHP to add our content step by step. We also learn some CSS too whilst building a 2 column WP theme including eg header, sidebar and footer! This method of building themes brings us the ultimate flexibility to create any WP theme we have in mind!

On many occasions a WP blog is not only about a single author. In this chapter 8 Community Blogging we learn how to add more users and how-to manage users in WP.

Like the heading says, in this chapter 9 we learn how to create plug-ins and widgets. We see how to add multiple instances of a widget.

In this last chapter we learn some extra tricks to install and manage our WP blog. And a custom install named WMU, a not officialy supported product of WP aimed at advanced users.

About the book

The authors tells us a basic understanding of PHP, variables and loops is more than enough to build strong templates in WP. Of course, a good understanding of building webpages with HTML and CSS is needed as well.

Again we see a lot screenshots of examples, highlighted code and dissected chunks of code. The author also explains what hooks are - essentially they are filters or actions. Interesting stuff to learn here!

• Useful links are formated with a different type for easier recognition. We see links about PHP, the WP Codex, and other useful stuff.
• large screenshots and important sidenotes are formatted between brackets and with a notebook icon for easier recognition.
• At the end of each chapter we get a short summary of what the current chapter is about.

Like I said in the intro of this book review, Hasin Hayder is a certified PHP programmer — it’s time to get our hands dirty with PHP. We actually learn basic actions to enable and disable parts of the WP template engine. This approach is a playful way to get familiar with the core template parts of WP. We also see references to themes where similar modifications have been done.

Criticism

The author recommends WordPress because of two major reasons: it is open-source and its vast pool of resources and user-support.

Just like Shaun Inman’s Mint stats have peppers to extend the basic functionality of the mint stats app, WP has a lot of active enthusiasts that build WP plugins to let you do more with your WP blog engine! Hasin Hayder is a certified Zend Engineer which simply means he knows a good share of PHP programming — and what do you know, in this book you see actual examples of plug-ins created by the author as well.

The book unfortunately is not a full guide to getting the most of your WordPress install. The topics explained in the book look advanced but there is of course a lot more to WP than what is said in this book.

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