Customer Reviews

Wordpress for Dummies

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I bought this book because it was the only comprehensive beginner's guide to WordPress that I could find, and it was also up to date (important in this rapidly changing field). This was my first "Dummies" purchase; I've always hated that title and the implicit putdown it conveys.

I was pleasantly surprised. Lisa Sabin-Wilson knows her stuff, she writes well, and the advice is practical and easy to follow. The book uses a logical progression, teaching us step-by-step what WordPress is, what it can do, and where you can go to find further resources. Sections address important topics such as plugins, self-hosting, theme selection and development, migrating your blog from another site, and much more.

I was mostly looking for a guide on using WordPress as a website content management system (CMS), and although one chapter does address this, I wish the book had covered this in more depth. Also, I would have liked to read more about design and style issues. However, no one book can do it all, and at almost 400 pages this book was long enough. (Although it's a very quick read; it took me only one morning to get through it, and not all chapters will be relevant to every reader.)

I recommend it to anyone wanting to gain basic familiarity with WordPress (and related technical jargon), see whether it's the thing for you and, if so, get started using it.

This is actually the book I wish I had been there when I first started out with blogs and especially WordPress. A lot of time is spent addressing what blogs are and what they can do and then going through how to set up a WordPress.com account or how to install the WordPress.org software on your own site. Most of the book is really set up and functionality. While most of this information can be found on the web, having this book beside you would make the task so much easier. If you already have your blog all set up and in use, most of the book is of far less use to you. I find myself in that category since I run a number of person blogs, a couple of corporate WordPress sites, and have installed the software a number of times. The two parts then that I could really get my teeth into are the section on theme customization with an explanation of many of the variables, and the second detailing the author's top ten plug-ins. I found some items there that I had somehow overlooked before and are coming in quite handy.

So, why the 4 star rating? If you are just starting out, you really need this book. Pick it up before you start. And for you it will stay with you for a while and be a 5 star. If you have been doing this for a while, there will only be a couple of chapters of real value to you, so it will most likely be a 3 star. Average them together and what do you have? 4 stars!

Prior to Wordpress for Dummies being published, the other Wordpress books out there were very limited or not extensively covered. For those of you who have tried to use Wordpress before, I know the Wordpress Codex or documentation may seem overwhelming due to its extensive coverage. This book does a great job of really giving you the ins and outs of Wordpress. The author tries to cover the most important features of Wordpress without trying to overwhelm the readers and does a very good job of it. I really liked the part about the author covering the MU feature of Wordpress as well as covering the common used template tags in addition making the templates, 'the loop' and template files easy to understand for beginners. If you are already proficient with CSS/XHTML and want to take your blog/sites to the next level, this book is for you. However, this book does NOT teach you CSS/XHTML (does provide other resources in the book) so I would suggest you pick up another book for that. If you want to know about WP and blogging in general, this book is for you.

The two books :
WordPress Complete by Hasin Hayder
and
WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
are worthwhile sources for the individual that lacks the expertise to setup the WordPress program. Now don't misunderstand what I say next. If you are a complete novice, get the books. Be fully aware that both books will NOT be sufficient to reach normal insanity while getting WordPress setup, if you're requirements go beyond the norm. Am familiar to Blogging and a bit aware of WordPress usage, but it became a total nightmare to reach the results that I was looking for. Seriously lacking are examples of "how and where" to actually insert / place what was being expounded upon. Seemed that every set of "how to" was chopped off at the most critical point and leaves one floundering and frustrated, Both books and even the official sites lack the explicit "where to insert" the talked on code. Many so called experts suffer from the "I know it so well" syndrome" that they overlook the "critical" aspect from a novices point of view. To have elaborated on a specific subject, without giving the most crucial bit of information "showing an example of where" is, to me a cardinal offense. It is recognized that it is near impossible to cover every detail required for total success with an installation, but what is covered, SHOULD be presented with clear and full details. There is no middle ground here. You are either sailing along smoothly, or you are floundering from lack of crucial details. I was in the latter group. WordPress by the way is a neat program, and for most users, will be relatively easy to master. If you have certain specific needs, be prepared to sweat it through, along with much aggravation.

I've found that the Dummies book run the gamut from very, very bad to very, very good. I am pleased to report that "WordPress for Dummies" by Lisa Sabin-Wilson is very, very good.

This book will be useful to novice WordPress users (like myself) through, I suspect, intermediate users.

The first part is a tad on the slow side as Sabin-Wilson reviews the true basics. But she is trying to cover a good part of the waterfront here, helping truly inexperienced users as well as those who may have used Blogger, MovableType or other blogging platforms.

By Chapter 3, though, Sabin-Wilson begins to hit her stride, delving deeper into the hosted version of WordPress, examining its details.

With Chapter 6, she begins transitioning into a surprisingly comprehensive exploration of WordPress. Chapter 9, about altering PHP templates, is a model of clarity that all technical writers could benefit from studying. It is concise and clear, while handling some very sophisticated subjects.

By the time Sabin-Wilson gets to Chapter 16 ("Beyond Blogging: WordPress as a Content Management System"), the reader is comfortable with this advanced subject.

Overall, she does a truly fine job of introducing the reader to WordPress, how it operates, how it can be modified and expanded. Her language is always remarkably clear and her focus intense. This is one of those essentially technical books that is actually a pleasure to read. Keep it at your side while you explore WordPress, either hosted on your own or the WordPress site, and you'll become highly proficient in a surprisingly short time.

Jerry

This is a great introduction to WordPress. I've set over a dozen clients up with WordPress in the last three years and as simple as WordPress is to administer, they still need hand holding. Before this there has not been a book on WordPress that I could comfortably recommend.

WordPress for Dummies assumes no blogging or technical background and does a good job of explaining the basics. It is not a developer's manual so if you need detailed instructions on writing your own modules or hacking WP, look elsewhere. But that's what I expect from Dummies books.

I appreciated that Sabin-Wilson covered the three versions of WordPress in order of increasing complexity. For the non-technical the hosted version of WordPress is a great place to begin. For those needing more there are the install-it-yourself versions. I didn't notice any mention of hosting companies that offer 1 click installs of the regular version WordPress, which is pretty common. That's about the only quibble I have with the book. I even learned about the multi-user version of WP, something I had only a fuzzy awareness of.

I'd easily recommend WordPress for Dummies to anybody who needs to run blog or to budding web designers who would like to expend their toolkit.

I'm currently in a small business class, and I wanted to expand my offerings to the public.

I had a 5 page website that I spent good money on, and my instructor recommended using wordpress and blogging. It is simple to use, and enables you to get online and edit your stuff yourself.

Cool, so I went to amazon, and typed in wordpress, seen the for dummies book and bought it.

3 days after it arrived, I had devoured a good part of the book, but did not have my website up. The more I read the more confused I got.

I think this book can be a wonderful reference guide, it covers more stuff than the other book I got, but it is too technical for me.

The other book (which I also reviewed) actually got me online.

Was this book a waste? No! I can still use this book. Now that I have been online for a couple of days, and I'm learning the interface, I can read some of this stuff, and begin to understand it. But this just is not the book for me. I'm still giving it 4 stars, but only because it covers a lot of stuff. The other book I got is less than half this size, and actually got me online very easily.

I see there is a new one that will be for sale soon, and I recommend skipping this version and picking that one up. The difference between the interfaces is huge and can be quite confusing.

I'm hoping that by the time that version comes out, I will understand enough to be able to actually use it.

Having previously obtained a domain and WordPress installation, and having blogged for a month before buying this book, some of the material was rendered to remedial reading. Still, WordPress is sufficiently rich and flexible that there was considerable material left to learn, and this book called my attention to details I'd glossed over in exploring on my own. In the end I picked up some valuable tips and shortcuts, but didn't greatly expand upon what I was able to teach myself. Tech-savvy users can teach themselves WordPress from the product, its documentation and a variety of advisory sites, but many will find this book form to be a comforting and convenient format for introductory information.

Personally, I like to have manuals, guides or documentation in physical form to read away from the computer. I like to mark a document with post-its as I read, and I find a professionally edited book to be helpful. On the other hand, keeping a book up-to-date with rapidly changing software like WordPress is a difficult task. A few weeks after I purchased this book, WordPress.org released version 2.7 with a revamped user interface. The result is that many of the pictures and directions in the book no longer directly matched the latest version of WordPress. This didn't invalidate the information in the book, but it meant that I had to be a bit more resourceful in connecting the text and pictures to my installation. A new edition of the book is due in February, and assumedly it will catch up to WordPress 2.7.

* What vs. Why

My main disappointment with this book is that it features a great deal more "what" than "why." The text and pictures provide an extensive tour through the details of the user interface, but insufficient conceptual context. For example, on pages 126-127 is an explanation of how to get your blog indexed, but no discussion of why you might opt-in or out. Similarly, on page 127 the book explains that you can have uploads organized in month/year folders, but doesn't explain why you might or might not choose this option. Page 130 provides an explanation of how categories can be organized as parent-child, but not why this is of value. Are both parent and child served up as links? Does a parent category link return both its posts and the posts of all child categories? Can the child-parent hierarchy be arbitrarily deep? There is a pattern of explaining how to perform a particular function without explaining why you might choose to do so.

* Questionable Practices

The text itself is generally well written, but some of the recommended practices could be more thoroughly vetted. For example, page 90 recommends testing the availability of a domain by checking it at the domain registrar of your choice. This simple instruction does not account for unscrupulous domain registrars who will put a temporary lock on every domain that is tested for availability, so as to funnel your business to them. This is fine if you're planning to register with the chosen registrar, but if you're just looking around, you need to be careful where you express your interest. Page 103 explains that the WordPress installation scripts e-mail you the administrative login for your blog, but don't warn that once your password has traveled the Internet by e-mail you should log in and change it immediately.

Pages 158-160 explain how to mark comments as spam, but don't mention that such comments are retained in your SQL database. This is problematic since WordPress doesn't offer an interface to delete these comments once they've been branded as spam -- you have to delete them using a direct connection to your database. Page 163 explains how to edit the files underlying a WordPress theme, but doesn't suggest you should first create a backup, nor does the book explain how to recover from a fatal editing mistake. Page 201 suggests googling "wordpress plugins" but doesn't advise you to carefully vet the source of plugins that you install.

* Conceptual Issues

A few of the book's explanations seem misleading. For example, the discussion on choosing a webhost on page 93 likens bandwidth to the size of a pipe, and defines it as "the amount of data that is carried from point A to point B within a specific period of time." While this is a reasonable definition, it neither matches the examples, nor is it relevant to most readers. First, the examples, 50MB, 100MB, and 10-50GB, are denominated in bytes, rather than bytes/second, and thus are not examples of bandwidth. Second, and more importantly, when webhosts speak of bandwidth, they're not describing the size of the pipe (that is, maximum throughput), they're typically describing aggregate monthly data transfer, or how much data you're allowed to transfer through the pipe per month.

Page 214 discusses editing plugin files and states that "if you make an edit that could potentially cause a malfunction with the plugin, WordPress rejects your edits." It's hard to imagine that WordPress makes a complete semantic analysis of your edits and rejects every possible problematic change. The notion that editing plugin files is "dummy proof" may be true for syntactic mistakes, but not likely against programming mistakes. Chapter 16's suggestions for stretching WordPress into a content management system are useful, but need to be weighed against the offerings of true CMSs such as Joomla, Drupal or Django; those who need full CMS functionality will find WordPress difficult to extend or simply ineffective.

* Typos

Every book has typos, particularly a first edition, but given the mistakes I was able to spot in a casual reading, it's not clear this text was given a final copy edit. Some examples include: the second gray box on page 143 includes the text "yourdomain/com" in place of "yourdomain.com." On page 145 the phrase "the root of your directory" should be "the root directory." Page 147 has the wrong PHP URL for the RSS 1.0 feed. Page 149 has a reference to "Step 4" that should actually be a reference to "Step 5." Page 183 is missing the underscores in the template tag "previous_posts_link." Page 184 incorrectly puts "" in bold. On pages 328-329 a file is variously called "about.php" and "about-page.php." There are several places where cross-references are inexact, and from a physical perspective, many of the WordPress panels and pages are reproduced too small for the text to be easily read.

* WordPress in the World

Where the book really helps the novice blogger is in providing context for WordPress in the larger world. The explanations of trackbacks, spam, podcasting, photoblogging, vblogging and other interactions a blogger will have with the web and its users are very helpful, as are the references to recommended themes and plugins, and methods for migrating blogs from other sources (such as Google's blogger.com) to WordPress. The section describing the mechanics of WordPress themes provides a good introduction - enough to let you decide whether you'd profit from learning details of the technologies, PHP and CSS, upon which WordPress is built. A chapter on blog design offers valuable information to those who seek to hire professionals to help them with their blog layout.

* Conclusion

This book is a good bet for someone who wants to learn a bit about WordPress before or alongside actually playing with the software - either the hosted version on wordpress.com or the self-hosted version from wordpress.org. This is a good add-on to the product documentation for someone who likes to have more than one explanation of something, and it provides useful tips on how your WordPress blog will get along in the bigger world of blogging and the Internet. With a new version of the book expected in February 2009, assumedly synchronized to the latest version of the WordPress interface (and shorn of the typos in this first edition), you're probably best off waiting a month for the next book release. 3-1/2 stars, if allowed fractional ratings. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

I waited so long for WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and it was well worth the wait. I had been wanting to learn Wordpress and had been a fan of Lisa's blog so it was just what I needed as a motivator.

It's a "Dummies" book so it's got that easy to use format. And it's a reference book so most of it is not meant to be read linearly. If you've always wanted to set up a blog or switch to WordPress this is the way to go. It explains it from the basics up to the advanced. It's step by step and it'll get you running on your own host or at [...] with ease.

It covers Migrating to WP, 10 Great Free Themes, Ten Great Plugins, Using WP as a Content Management System, Understanding Templates and Plug-ins. It covers pretty much everything you need to know but those are the chapters I've read the most and use for reference. If you don't know anything about PHP you'll painlessly learn the bits that you do need to know for modifying templates (this is optional) and you'll have picked up enough for when you want to use PHP for other "web stuff".

As I'm writing this post, I'm flipping through the book seeing if there is anything I've missed mentioning. There are so many areas of WP that I haven't explored yet, I've read about them in the book and I can't wait to try out some of the other features!

Just about everything I've needed to know was in there, the only thing that I couldn't find was detailed info on custom-fields which was (probably) considered too advanced for a Dummies book.

There are 3 different flavors of WordPress (they host, you host, and multi-user) and they all share multiple features so just pay attention to which flavor she's talking about and you'll be fine.

It's an awesome book! If you want to set up your own blog, self-hosted or not, WordPress is easy to use and WordPress For Dummies is the book to use. And since WP just significantly increased the amount of free-space for the "they host" option free just got better!

I received my copy of WordPress for Dummies recently, and I sat right down to devour it. I wish I'd had it when I decided to take the plunge and begin the WordPress self-hosted blog that is now iPentimento, but this book is going to be my blogging bible from now on.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson has put together an excellent book that targets both the WordPress.com community as well as those of us in the WordPress.org category. The first page in the book is a very handy cheat sheet that includes the WordPress.org Administration panel, where to find Community Support for WP multi-users, the self-hosted users, multiple users implementing WordPress MU, and the WordPress repository for overall use of the program in the codex. This cheat sheet also includes where to find blog designers, free themes and plugins.

Just a quick glance at the contents will show the following:

* An introduction to WordPress - What it can do for you

* Using the WordPress Hosted Service - Getting started, writing and managing your blog, as well as enhancing your blog with Themes, Widgets and Upgrades.

* Hosting your blog using WordPress.org - Design and implementation

* Implementing a multi-user blog with WordPress MU - Managing your community

* How migrate your current blog to WordPress - Typepad, WordPress.com, etc.

As the front cover tells us, this book is "A reference for the rest of us". It truly is! I have already marked several sections so I can go back and explore them further. Just because you have a WordPress blog doesn't mean you immediately know how to make it work. Lisa explains how to make sure the search engines can find your posts, how to manage your categories, which plugins to use to eliminate spam, and more. Much more.WordPress For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

[...]