Customer Reviews

WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

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So I'd dived into wordpress, and had all the basics covered...installation, theme selection, etc. What I didn't have was the know-how to make the tweaks and changes to turn the basics into something I was happy to have my name on. Ideas were not a problem -- just the "how". I opened this book to a random page and found the solution to one of the 50 little tweaks I had in mind. It wasn't the easy way out either, as Mr. Author-Guy began by noting that the simplest solution was the worst because it was detrimental to "search engine optimization." So I took the smarter route that Mr. Author-Guy proposed and learned a lot in the process. One tweak down, 49 to go!

I'd say this is a book for the "intermediate beginner" or "advanced amateur". If you've bought Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read, as I did (and recommend for beginners!), then you could do WAY worse than to make this book #2.

It was *exactly* what I needed.

I would recommend this book for anyone who already understands what PHP, XTML and CSS is. You don't have to be skilled in those areas to follow the recipes in this book though. A third of it may cover very basic ground if you're already a novice but you're bound to find at least a few very handy ideas in this book that any Wordpress project would need. I'd like to see more Wordpress Cookbooks.

I've been managing my WordPress blog for a few years now. It's nothing fancy, but I'm always looking for ways to tweak and improve it, not so much for visual-appeal side as for functionality. This books offers lots of great tips - things I didn't know and that I would not likely find elsewhere unless I spent a lot of time on WP discussion forums. The author does a nice job of providing tips and explaining how to put them to use. "Cookbook" is an accurate term for the title. If you're just getting started, the book might make a great tool to help you see the possibilities as you develop your blog. But it's not a "how-to" for the total novice. This one's a keeper. The book could use some editing - many expressions are awkward and the writing style is often distracting. Why do tech publishers skimp on good editing? It seems to be a trend. I can't count the number of tech books I've put back on the store shelf after reading brief sections - they're frankly embarrassing. And I don't blame the authors, who are smart techies. I blame the publishers for failing to do their part to produce a book properly. If you do your own work on your WP blog, get this book - it'll pay off quickly. Kudos to the author.

UPDATE Sept 2011: A year after getting this book, I've found that among all my WordPress books, this is the one I turn to most often. I wish Jung would do a new edition for WordPress 3.x. No other book teaches the "recipes" that Jung's does, in an easy-to-follow manner. There are lots of "how to use WP" books. There are no other "how to make WP do great stuff" books. I came back to this review because I was hoping to find a new edition! If you do your own tweaks to your WP installation, you'll love this book.

Packt Publishing's WordPress 2.7 Cookbook has been out for while now, but I still thought I'd pick up a copy and give it the once-over. Rather than being a reference guide, Jean-Baptiste Jung's book is very much like his very own [...] website.

The book is organised into 11 Chapters:

1. Getting Ready to Cook with WordPress
2. Finding and Installing Themes
3. Get the most out of your WordPress Theme
4. Doing anything with Plugins and Widgets
5. Displaying Posts
6. Managing and Enhancing Multi-Author Blogs
7. Securing your WordPress Blog
8. SEO Tips and Tricks to Get More Visits
9. Making Money with WordPress
10. Enhancing User Experience
11. Make your Blog stand out

Some of the recipes include integrating twitter on your theme using the Twitter Tools plugin, accessing post data outside the WordPress loop and securing your plugins directory. The recipes are generally between 1 and 4 pages in length, and there is lots of useful information in the book's 280 or so pages of content, but it's just the sort of thing that's freely available on the [...] website and other popular sites such as Smashing Magazine.

If you are after a large collection of recipes in a single package, this is the book for you, but if you're happy reading WordPress blogs about WordPress such as [...] website, you may feel a little short-changed.