WordPress 2 [Paperback]

Maria Langer (Author), Miraz Jordan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321450191 | ISBN-13: 978-0321450197 | Publication Date: July 9, 2006 | Edition: 1

WordPress is an open-source personal publishing platform that is easy to use, flexible, and highly customizable. Although used primarily for publishing blogs, WordPress can easily be used to create and maintain complete Web sites.

Taking the average blogger further than blogspot can, WordPress allows bloggers to create more complicated sites with their open-source technology, rather than blogger which is limited by HTML changes to their templates.

This easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide shows you how to install, use, and customize WordPress to get the most from the software. Includes tips that explain why certain techniques are better than others, how to watch for potential problems, and where readers can find more information.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Maria Langer has written dozens of computer books, including best-selling Visual QuickStart Guides for Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, Word for Macintosh, and Excel for Macintosh. Her current bestseller is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: Visual QuickStart Guide. Miraz Jordan is a New Zealand-based writer and consultant who focuses on plain-language writing, for websites and print, and the design and maintenance of standards-based websites. She is one of the organizers of Webstock 2006, a conference featuring world-class speakers on best practice in Web design. Her site, MacTips.info, contains a wealth of tips, articles, reviews, and tutorials for using the Mac.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press; 1 edition (July 9, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321450191
• ISBN-13: 978-0321450197
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,094,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

77 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not Much Help in Getting WordPress Up & Running, September 22, 2006

By 

Matt Rowe (Indianapolis, Indiana USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: WordPress 2 (Paperback)

I generally don't complain about someone else's hard work and I've stumbled across some bad books in the past. This is the only negative review of a book that I've felt compelled to write.

Although this book may be fine for taking care of basic tasks, it doesn't offer much help in terms of getting the program installed and running on your server so that you can actually use the functionality. If you want that kind of support, the authors pretty much refer you to the WordPress support online or the documents that came with your various software programs. If you've never been to the WordPress support forums and you are a beginner, it can be very confusing. They do go into detail on some pretty simple tasks like logging in, which anyone who uses the web for anything ought to know already.

The book calls itself a "visual quick start guide," but be warned...the graphical diagrams (figures) are predominantly only 2" x 2.5" and they are entire screenshots. The ink used to produce them is more grey than black, so even if you don't have any eye trouble you'll find them almost useless (even with the diagrams that are slightly bigger). For example, the authors tell you to look at the figures to understand how your directories should appear in more detail than the written steps in the book, but the font is so small in the figures that it is unreadable.

Sadly, this book has proved of absolutely no use to me so far.

47 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad from the get-go, October 5, 2006

By 

Biff Bechenschnifter (College Park, MD United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: WordPress 2 (Paperback)

I've had reasonable luck with the Visual Quickstart series (the PHP/MySQL books are very helpful, in my opinion) but this volume has proven confusing right from the start, and that seems pretty odd for a how-to book on software that's basically self-explanatory. I got as far as the discussion on how use sidebar widgets, which precedes by 5 chapters the discussion of how to install a theme that utilizes sidebar widgets. Pretty crazy. Buy a different book (or just use the WordPress documents on-line).

34 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Useless even for a novice, September 27, 2006

By 

K. Mahbub - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: WordPress 2 (Paperback)

I have just started building my website using WordPress and bought this book to help me understand the intricacies of WordPress. The book falls way short of providing any sort of help. It is supposed to be a 'QuickStart Guide' which means that it should help in getting up and running quickly. It fails miserably in this task. Too thin on substance. No clear instructions on even the simplest of tasks e.g., it shows you to create a new page but doesn't say anything about how to make that page availble on the homepage via a link.