Customer Reviews

WordPress Complete: A comprehensive, step-by-step guide on how to set up, customize, and market your blog using WordPress

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Complete" in no way describes this book. I have yet to find any mention of tagging, sessions, pages, or many other important aspects of WP. Part of the problem is that the book's index is almost non-existent. In all fairness, the author says that the book is for beginners; that said, the author spends far too much time reiterating the easy stuff (installation, how to create a basic blog entry, etc) that is explained for free on the WP web site (and dare I say in a much clearer way). Also, the figures look like they were printed-on-demand on a laser printer; this is not acceptable for a price tag like this (cf. O'Reilly's production values). I returned it right away.

This book reads more like a hardcopy of a bloggers notes to another blogger on how to install and customize WordPress. It spends more time glossing over descriptions and screenshots of other blog software and discussing the perceived shortcomings of WordPress mu (multi-user) than in discussing how to actually customizing a WordPress installation.

The screenshots often are on different pages than the text they go with, and most examples where the user might include more than a line or two of text simply copy and paste a single line over and over, usually extolling the virtues of the book's publisher (which joins several others on my list to avoid in the future.)

Several pages are spent covering how to use several FTP clients, yet none is spent on the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), one of the core needs for any meaningful customization of a WordPress site.

Very little of the WordPress API is discussed.

The author "explains" creating your own "widget" with very little description of what they are, and virtually none of why you would do so. He then follows with a sample of a "plug-in", yet a widget is in fact a specialized plug-in, so why are they presented in the reverse order? Very little is also done in terms of explaining how to customize a theme to allow the use of widgets, outside of providing a complete sidebar code page without showing which line(s) of code are the actual widget-enabling ones.

I realize that this is not a book about CSS or PHP, but neither is it a book about ftp software, which is after all a lot easier to use, yet more time is spent on how to use FTP than is spent on how to customize an existing theme.

Appears to be the better of the two books currently on the market that detail installing WordPress, but far from complete. Definitely needs a better editing job at the least. Certainly not worth $39.99.

The reason for me to buy this book was for the information on how to develop your own themes. But that information isn't presented well. The coding example starts off relatively easy and well explained, but before long, it doesn't really teach anything as much as it just tells you to plug in chunks of code into your files and then see what happens. And the book changes coding conventions to an abbreviated form somewhere along the way, just when it starts to get a bit complicated for a non-coder like me.

The rest of the book is all filler. Did you know that blog mean Web-Log? And that a person who blogs is a blogger? Well, if you didn't, then the book might be worth its high price tag. But I just told you, so now you do.

I'm just grumpy because I lost my receipt and can't return it now (bought mine offline).

Want to Develop your own wordpress theme?
Urban Giraffe's article, tho old, has way better and more relevant information than this book. And it's free.

[...]

It's true that this book does have some useful information for those who are just starting out with WordPress; however, the writing is so bad that it's almost painful to read.

I understand the author is from Bangladesh, but didn't this publishing house have an editor on staff? How did a $40 book make it to the bookshelves of highly respected bookstores with writing that reads like a term paper from junior high?

Normally I wouldn't bother to come to Amazon and criticize a book that was generally helpful, but I just can't understand how this kind of writing managed to find its way into book form. This is why editors exist.

A very good introduction to getting WordPress functioning, and more importantly, installed in my mind so it actually makes sense to me.

The book started off with an introduction to WordPress, showed how to install it and set things up, and soon even walked me through making a custom "theme" from scratch that while primitive, is perfectly functional as a usable blog. If nothing else, all this helped me to understand that preconceptions aside, WordPress is not all that difficult to administer.

Starting from zero knowledge of WordPress, between the core knowledge that this book gave me, and a few quick web searches to solve specific problems I bumped into, I successfully got my very own installation of WordPress running on my OS X desktop machine. (Comes with an Apache web server as standard equipment, dont'cha know!) I wanted a sandbox to play and mess around with for a while before moving out into the real world on a real server -- normally that wouldn't be necessary if you have a webhost somewhere. This entailed such additional complexities (not covered in this book) as installing the mySQL database that WordPress relies upon (i.e. follow instructions on a web page), and activating the PHP scripting language that WordPress uses (installed in OS X, but deactivated by default). Not being a "command-line" kind of person, it was actually a fair bit easier than I'd have anticipated, but I never would have dared poke around with such things without the toehold of core WordPress knowledge that I got from this book.


There are a handful of minor English problems in the book, like there should be an "a" here, and a "the" there (and "iTune" should have an "s" at the end, spellcheck kind of stuff), but the explanations are nevertheless completely clear, so not even a full star off for that.

A second half-star off for the tendency to occasionally leap into rather frightening PHP code listings, that lack sufficient comments within the code to make them easily comprehensible to beginners. A bit more hand-holding here would have been appreciated. That said, although I've never touched PHP before, by actually taking the time to walk through the code shown (not understanding everything), I nevertheless soon had a pretty solid feel for what made things tick in WordPress. And the beginnings of the confidence that comes with actually knowing a little bit about what happens "under the hood."

...which is what I wanted this book for.

The author may have mastered WordPress, but he has not mastered the English language. The book often reads like a grade school book report. For $40 dollars, I expected more substance and quality. There is a lot of filler material and the layout is poorly done. I suggest looking elsewhere.

WordPress is wonderful. The online documentation available at codex.wordpress.org is less than stellar - it's disorganized and, although some articles are very good, others omit to explain material that would help a beginner. Even if you know HTML/CSS, it can be very confusing to customize WP if you aren't PHP-savvy. This book is an excellent guide for new users: it's carefully sequential, and it doesn't assume knowledge of PHP. Instead, it gives you the required PHP code for a wide range of customizations, and tells you where to insert it. Mr. Hayder is very sincere and service-oriented. The book was well worth the price, both as a tutorial and an ongoing reference.

WordPress is one of the most popular open-source (free) blog and content management system programs. It is written in PHP and uses the MySQL database. Most people use it to create and manage a personal or commercial blog. However, you can also use it to create a website. This book, by Hasin Hayder, will teach you what you need to know to create and manage your own blog or content-based website with WordPress.

For the novice, Hayder begins by talking about what a blog is, the main parts of a blog and what they do. Then he introduces you to WordPress and discusses the options you have for hosting your blog such as the website dedicated to WordPress, WordPress.com, or on your own server. He goes into detail about these startup decisions and others such as security, setting permissions and working with the MySQL database.

Now that you have the framework for your blog, it is time to have some fun. WordPress is a theme-based program which means that it is easy to create a special look for your blog. One of the most creative tasks when creating a blog is customizing the look for your blog. The author discusses how to do this in several ways, the easiest and fastest way being to modify an existing template. Hayder shows you where to find the best user created templates on the web and how to customize them to your heart's content. He also covers how to use an online theme builder application to generate a theme for your blog. Hayder then shows you how to create your own themes from scratch by writing your own code and how you can add some nice features. This is a fun way to get some practice or a short introduction to the PHP and CSS web languages.

Next, Hayder covers how to use some of the fun WordPress features to make your blogging easier such as posting to your blog remotely. Once your blog or website is ready, it is time to "market" or publicize your new blog. Hayder covers the most popular ways to get the word out such as creating RSS feeds, pod casting and audio blogs. The main purpose of a blog is to communicate with others within a community setting. As the creator and manager of your own blog, there are a few simple tasks necessary to manage your blog. Hayder discusses these tasks. He also covers how to troubleshoot some of the most common problems you might encounter and how to upgrade, backup and restore your blog.

Hasin Hayder has worked in the field of web application for many years. He has developed several themes and plug-ins for WordPress and runs the WordPress4SQLite project.

WordPress is one of them any blogging tools out there today, but has gained steady popularity the past year or so and has lots of flexibility in terms of customizing it. You can use existing ¡§skins¡¨ that are available on the WordPress.org website or even create your own with a little XHTML and CSS experience. You can also use the existing PHP based functions to also customize the information that you want to display in different sections of your blog. But how do you figure out how to do all of this cool stuff???

This book by Hasin Hayder will tell you!

Actually, this is only the second WordPress book on the market today and the only one with technical details on how to truly customize your WordPress blog. (the WordPress 2 Visual QuickStart Guide is not technical at all). This book is great if you have some level of coding background (XHTML or CSS) since Hasin steps you through example projects that show you in great detail how to make your own custom templates.

The book first starts out giving the reader a great explanation of the history of blogging and how it has developed into what it is today. He discusses how to install WordPress on your own server (hosted or your own), what files to install, setting up the configuration, creating privileges, setting up file permissions on your web host, installing existing themes, how to upgrade from older versions if needed and how to use the interface itself. That alone (chapters 1-4) will save you hours of time looking through endless articles online.

The meat and potatoes sections of the book start with Chapter 5. The author explains how to use WordPress as a full fledged CMS (Content Management System) with more that just one section for your web posts. You can add additional pages for other parts of your website for static or other types of content. Because it can be used for more than displaying endless posts, it makes it an invaluable tool for web designers to create beautiful looking websites without having to know any server-side language or database technologies. Of course knowing a little PHP and or MySQL would help and/or speed up your development time, it really is not truly not required. Hasin continues to talk about how to easily modify your existing template pages (index.php, sidebar.php) to display what content you want. Even though WordPress is based on PHP, it provides you with functions that you just use to display the information you need. So technically you are coding in PHP, but in reality you are just using custom functions provided within the WordPres framework. Doing it this way, your level of experience needed can be kept at a minimum. After you create some new pages and categories to your site, the author shows you how to put them all together and looks seamless going from one page to the other. The objective is to make your website that uses WordPress seem like a regular site that just happens to have a section with posts on it. Making you look like a real web developer! º

The book (chapter 6) also goes into the types of podcasting (audio and video) and feeds (RSS and Atom) that you can use with WordPress and what websites will give you the ability to integrate that with your blog.

The final two chapters (7 and 8) go into more detail in developing your own themes with the author going over an example template he created and the changes he had to make. Of course your own themes will look different and may use some different WordPress functions to display specific blog information; you have a great understanding after reading these two chapters of how to do it yourself. There is lots of information on the WordPress.org site that talks about this but is very unorganized and still leaves you in the dark on some issues. Which is why this book is so great. Everything you need to modify and customize your WordPress site is right here, no need to go anywhere else.

A must buy for anybody using WordPress or curious on learning about it.

This book is written by an author with English as a second language, and it's not difficult to tell English is not his native language, as the book is poorly written. I'm an author and I've never posted a negative review of another author's work, but I was appalled at the poor value I received for $39.99.

This was the only book available on customizing CSS within WordPress, and I was sorely disappointed. The book is thin, doesn't cover even the simplest of tasks such as changing colors of an existing theme, and has a paltry index. The author even laughingly claims that "WordPress has some of the best documentation ever written." Are you kidding? The documentation is better than other blogging software, but to claim it's the "best ever written" defies credibility.

Don't waste your money and wait for the "WordPress for Dummies" to come out in October. I wish I had.