Beginning WordPress 3 (Expert's Voice in Web Development) [Paperback]

Stephanie Leary (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 29, 2010 | Series: Expert's Voice in Web Development

Other WordPress books on the market discuss WordPress only in the context of blogging: how to set up a blog, how to write a blog, how to optimize a business blog. A few books offer detailed technical instructions on a specific aspect of the software, such as plugin or theme development.

Beginning WordPress is the first to discuss WordPress as a general content management system that can compete with other popular open source projects like Joomla or Drupal. This book also aims to be one of the first if not the first to cover the new WordPress 3.0.

Lastly, WordPress remains one if not the top blogging and content management platform, besides Joomla and Drupal. See http://wordpress.org/download/counter/ for just version 2.8.x. As of September 2009, Wordpress is used by 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stephanie Leary has been working with WordPress since 2004. She has presented an introduction to WordPress at the HighEdWeb conference for the last three years, and will teach a half-day workshop on using WordPress as a CMS at this year's conference in early October.

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (June 29, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430228954
• ISBN-13: 978-1430228950
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #342,911 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 stars, but not for beginners, September 20, 2010

By 

Sallie R. Goetsch "WordPress Fangirl" (East San Franciso Bay Area, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning WordPress 3 (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

The title of this book is deceptive, enough so that I handed it to a friend who was making the move from [...] to self-hosted WordPress because I thought she might find it helpful. She didn't, and when I actually sat down to read it myself, I understood why.

This is not a book for beginners, if by "beginners" you mean the people for whom WordPress for Dummies was written. It's a book for web developers who haven't used WordPress before.

To be fair to the author, the back cover copy says exactly that, but the publisher describes it as "User level: Beginner." I'm not sure how Apress would describe books for people who don't have any technical knowledge. "User level: Hopeless N00b"?

But the book itself is fantastic. It may be the best book I've ever read about WordPress. I don't consider myself a developer, but I know enough not to get completely lost in the code examples. This is a great book for those who are experienced users of WordPress but not PHP wizards and who want to go deeper and understand more.

I had a number of revelatory moments while reading this book. You can turn off or limit post revisions with one line of code in your wp-config.php file? So why was I bothering to use a plugin for it? (I know, some people don't have access to their wp-config.php file...or shouldn't be allowed access to it. But other people need to reduce the number of plugins they have installed, and I'm one of them.) There are RSS feeds for pages? Wish I'd known that when someone was asking about it on LinkedIn a few weeks back. You can show custom taxonomies, custom post types, and tags in your menu management page by clicking on Screen Options? (I beat my head against this for ages because I'd forgotten I'd read it, and I even marked the page.) There's a way to import content from Joomla? Bring it on. (Please. I'm desperately hoping to convince a client to change platforms.)

Then there's the great discussion of things you can do with the Loop, like create a page that displays excerpts from all its child pages. Most magazine themes make you pick two or three featured categories, but you could actually feature all your categories if you wanted to. (That's assuming you have a reasonable number of categories, unless you want a really long home page.)

I admit I got a bit lost in the chapters on creating widgets and plugins--I don't think I'm anywhere near ready to start developing plugins, and I'm not sure I ever will be. But I understand a little better what's involved in the process and how to look at the code.

There's a solid chapter on performance and security that covers all the usual suspects except the define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '96M'); trick (another single line in wp-config.php that can make a big difference) and then a highly valuable chapter on custom post types and custom taxonomies. Stephanie Leary walks you through how to do this the hard way, which gave me a chance to see what the plugins that help with these two WordPress features actually do, and helped me follow the demonstrations at the September WordPress Meetup.

The final chapter is on WordPress Multi-site, with a brief mention of BuddyPress. While this is a fraction of the information found in BuddyPress for Dummies, it has the advantage of referring to WordPress 3.0 and not the old WordPress MU, so it was good to get an overview of what had stayed the same and what had changed.

The author refers to useful plugins throughout the book, and also has a plugin index (Appendix A) and a collection of "plugin recipes" (Appendix C). The recipes are combinations of plugins you can use to build things with WordPress, like a wiki (I thought there was already a wiki plugin for WP) or a document sharing site. Again, I had a couple of surprises. There are plugins to sort your posts alphabetically? And I spent time creating special category page templates to do that for a client. (The other surprise was that Stephanie Leary doesn't seem to have heard of Blubrry's PowerPress plugin for podcasting, or that PodPress had been revived.)

If you have no web background at all and you're completely new to WordPress, this isn't the book for you. But if you're somewhere in between the complete novice and the hard-core developer, you're going to find this book unbelievably useful. The fact that it's clearly written in a non-technical style, tidily laid out, and has abundant screenshots is just a bonus. And you can download all the code samples from the Apress website.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clearing up what i believe to be some misconceptions., August 22, 2010

By 

Cosmic rain - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beginning WordPress 3 (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

I think having read it thoroughly, the author by saying "beginner's guide to WordPress" is saying beginner to the WordPress platform and not to web design/development.

Let me explain my level of understanding before I started reading. I'm 19 and web design/dev has been a hobby of mine for about one year now. I've a reasonable grasp on HTML/CSS JavaScript having spent hours watching free video tutorials and reading two books. I'm able to build a basic website from scratch with the help of past examples and some developing tools like notepad++. I understand JavaScript and because the concepts of PHP are similar to JavaScript, I can make educated guesses on what code does what. These prerequisites and time are enough to get through this book.

Honestly installing WordPress was the hardest part, your first time is confusing for about 15mins. The simple answer to getting through the first chapter is signing up for a basic Dreamhost hosting plan as Dreamhost has a one click install button for WordPress in their web panel. Once you've installed WordPress the rest of the book is a walk in the park.

The first 6 chapters are concerned with working through the layout of the platform, explaining what everything does, and the book does a great job at that. After the 6th knowing HTML, CSS is essential for continuing, moving onto the Chapter 7 it helps to have dabbled in PHP. The book does a great job explaining [HTML,CSS] to WordPress conversion, Which Online blogs I've read could not comprehensively do. If you've got this far you'll be able to go to the end without many problems.

TLDR; to get the most out of this book prerequisites are HTML, CSS, & some PHP, & a dreamhost account.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Might need a title change, but please check out if you're new to creating your own themes and plug-ins, September 10, 2010

By 

timreadsbooks - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beginning WordPress 3 (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

Firstly, I believe the bad reviews to this book are are somewhat unjust. When the author says beginner, she is not referring to the user who is creating blogs using Wordpress for the first time. This book is geared towards the budding web developer/designer who is new to using Wordpress as a tool to build custom websites, not just blogs. The author even mentions on the back cover of this book that this book was meant to between the "how do I setup Wordpress to be a blog" and the more advanced books on Wordpress. Ironically, she does spend the first few chapters explain how to install Wordpress from scratch--which I still found helpful.


If you're anything like me and know "just enough" HTML, CSS, Javascript & maybe some PHP, then you'll be able to follow this book. The author provided exactly what I was looking for, which is easy to grasp instructions on how to build your own Wordpress themes and plugins. This book essentially shows you how to use Wordpress to build your own custom websites.


If this relates to you, please don't let the negative reviews discourage you from checking out this book. If you're new at creating your own Wordpress themes and plugins, I would recommend this book. As long as you know just enough" HTML, CSS, Javascript & little PHP, this book will be a resourceful additional to your library.


Note to the author/publisher -- maybe the title should be teak somewhat to attract the right audience. Personally, I think the book is aimed at the right audience, but I can see how someone new to Wordpress and blogging would buy this book (especially if they didn't see it in a store first)