Customer Reviews

WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner's Guide

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WordPress MU, especially with the BuddyPress set of plug-ins, is a powerful and flexible framework that power a company blog or social networking site. WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner's Guide overall is a good introduction to these tools, and even for an experienced WordPress person I found some useful tips and valuable additions to my WordPress `tool belt'. But the book is also not without its flaws.

Where the author gets technical, with step-by-step instructions, it suffers. In part because plug-ins or features describes are not quite correct, or things have changed. In part because the focus on the technical is at the expense of an overall viewpoint -- classic forest vs. trees types of views. For instance in the second chapter she details how to get your WordPress MU installation set up in a locally run web server utilizing WAMP server. But most local web servers installed on a personal computer don't play well with the subdomain-style blog naming she recommends. To her defense if you follow her instructions to the letter it works as she describes, but if you choose to add blogs or alter the names she uses you'll get lost fast.

The chapters that really shine are later in the book, where she gives an overview of a subject -- security, increasing traffic, making it 'sticky', and monetizing it -- walks through the issue, and then provides a couple of sample methods or plug-ins. If this book is truly for the beginner, this type of overview with not just hows, but whys, is really what is needed. A real beginner needs to understand how to plan and use the site -- technical details such as editing their .htaccess file seems like more than they need to know. That kind of stuff can easily be found on-line - or maybe on wiki tied to the book that allows reader contributions and supplemental material.

I am happy I read the book, and it will be a valued resource on my bookshelf. If you have been running your own WordPress site, or are an experienced web developer looking to explorer the many exciting possibilities that WordPress MU/BuddyPress has to offer, this is a good resource to start with. If you are really a beginner, you might want to start smaller, or find an experienced friend to help you get started.

This isn't much of an introduction to WordPress MU, but more so a guide on how to build your own blog network, social network, or community using WordPress MU. There are also chapters with good techniques that can also be used on any other platforms (in other words, non-WordPress-MU-specific tips).

The book walks you step-by-step through how to create a mythical community site called "SlayerCafe". During the process, it shows you everything from finding the right host, installing/customizing WordPress MU to driving traffic to your site and monetizing your site.

If you are at all interested in building a community site, you should definitely get a copy of WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner's Guide. The step-by-step nature of this book has me convinced that anybody can build a community site using WordPress MU and this book. Also after reading this book you will have a pretty good idea if WordPress MU is the right platform for your community site or not. I wouldn't recommend this book if you are more advanced and want to learn about the nuts and bolts of WordPress MU. The book is just what it was written to be, a beginner's guide [to building a community site].

This book offers a good guide to creating an online WordPress community from scratch. Among the topics covered are descriptions of WordPress MU and BuddyPress, installing it, increasing traffic to it and what to do when things go wrong. I felt the step by step directions explained various topics well. Of course WordPress is very dynamic and changes versions often. Consequently, some screens shown in the book may appear differently when you first try to set up a multi-user blog.

While this book is a book for novice users, the author assumes you already know something about WordPress. BuddyPress contains plugins that help set up your multi user blog and customize it to suit your needs. One point the author makes here that's good to remember, which is to plan your site before building it. Building a MY site requires setting up a database and server which is explained in some detail. Another chapter touches on letting your users manage their own blogs, with suggestions on avoiding issues and setting up different levels of priveleges for your users. Spam is always an issue for any blogger and the author offers some tips to make it harder for spammers to "invade" your site (making it invite-only or moderating site registration).

There's also information about adding forums, social networking and optimizing your site. All in all, I felt this book contains some good information, some that may be similar to other blogs but important information nonetheless. It's well worth getting if you're thinking about building a multi-user blog.