Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category
Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress
Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress
Product Description
Content management, blogs, and online forums are among the most significant online trends today, and Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress are three of the most popular open source applications facilitating these trends.
Drupal is a full content management system that allows you to create any type of website you desire, from an e-commerce to a community-based site. phpBB enables you to set up a bulletin board or forum. And WordPress is the software of choice for the exploding blog community. All three technologies are based on PHP and MySQL.
Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress is authored by a team of experts. Robert T. Douglass recently created the Drupal-powered blog site NowPublic.com. Mike Little is a founder and contributing developer of the WordPress project. And Jared W. Smith has been a longtime support team member of phpBBHacks.com and has been building sites with phpBB since the first beta releases.
Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress
WordPress Complete: A comprehensive, step-by-step guide on how to set up, customize, and market your blog using WordPress
Product Description
A comprehensive, step-by-step guide on how to set up, customize, and market your blog using WordPress
- Clear practical coverage of all aspects of WordPress
- Concise, clear, and easy to follow, rich with examples
- In-depth coverage of installation, themes, syndication, and podcasting
In Detail
WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versality and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.
If you want to create powerful, fully-featured blogs in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore WordPress showing you what it offers and how to go about building your blog with the system.
You will be introduced to the main aspects of a blog – users, communities, posts, comments, news feeds – and learn how to manage them using WordPress. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content, be it text or images, on your blog, and also understand how users interact with the blog. In working through the book you’ll be inspired as well as informed, and have the capability and the ideas to make your blog cutting edge and exciting to maximize its impact.
What you will learn from this book?
- Installing and configuring WordPress on a local development machine or a web hosting service
- Managing posts and comments
- Working with Image galleries, calendars, etc.
- Organizing users and Communities
- Creating and Installing themes to control the page layout
- Linking to the outside world – Feeds, Syndication, and Podcasting
- Customizing Widgets and Plug-ins
- Using WordPress as a regular CMS
Approach
Written in a clear, easy-to-read style, the book takes you through the essential tasks required to create a feature-rich blog as quickly as possible. From initial setup to customizing modules, each task is explained in a clear, practical way using an example blog developed through the book.
Who this book is written for?
This book is a beginner’s guide to WordPress, for people who are new to blogging and want to create their own blogs in a simple and straightforward manner. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT-confident user will be able to use the book to produce an impressive blog.
WordPress 2
Product Description
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.
WordPress Entrepreneur: How To Setup, Customize & Use A WordPress Website
WordPress Entrepreneur: How To Setup, Customize & Use A WordPress Website
Product Description
This book focuses on the nuts and bolts of the initial setup of your WordPress website. It is a clear and comprehensive approach with color screen shots of the entire setup process. Using WordPress version 2.6, you will learn how to install and use WordPress, add themes, plugins, import and export files and how to uninstall WordPress. This book includes full instructions on how to choose a WordPress template and create your own website quickly and easily.
WordPress Entrepreneur: How To Setup, Customize & Use A WordPress Website
Make your blog pay
Monetize your blog!
I have to say that this plugin seriously impressed me. Yes, it’s a commercial plugin, but for the measly $47 they ask, they’re offering a whole lot of functionality that can help you monetize (ye gods, I hate that word) your blog. Yeah, yeah, there’s Adsense and CPA offers and all sorts of other things you can supposedly do to make your blogging worth the effort, but this particular little gem helps in a much more direct way. Set up ad zones on your blog, do a bit of judicious cut ‘n paste, and voila, you run your own little ad manager on your own blog. Awesome!!!
If you want to buy, tell ‘em Will Dee sent you (by entering TERRA-KIWI in the discount field) and you get $10 off the purchase price for the month of September only. Come back next month for another code!
New project in the works
I’ve recently started working on a new little application that’s basically a custom configuration tool for WordPress. The idea came to me when I started working more intensively with WordPress, setting up multiple blogs, and doing the same damned thing time after time after time afte…well, you get the idea…
If you use the latest build, as you should, to stay secure, you invariably end up doing the copy/paste thing with themes and plugins you want to include when you upload the package. Problem is, even if you do include the plugins and themes in the package you ftp to your server, you still have to go in and select the theme, activate the plugins and so on.
Trust me, after you’ve done the 75th blog, it becomes real old real fast.
So, what I’ve got now is a little app that allows me to take the latest package from WordPress, as a freshly downloaded zip file, and from my desktop, add themes and plugins. Better yet, it modifies the install.php to set the new default theme, activate the selected plugins, set the first post (don’t you just hate that “Hello world” first post and “just another wordpress blog” tagline?) to whatever you want, and tweak the install file in a few other ways. It then zips the lot back up and voila, I have a custom WordPress installation package I can upload immediately, with all my default tweaks, ready to run.
Over the next week or two I’m planning to make it look pretty (I’m a geek, not a designer, so the UI’s truly hideous) and add some basic ftp functionality so I can upload the custom package direct to my server.
A 4 hour job cut down to 15 minutes! w00t!
WordPress 2.7 Cookbook
Product Description
100 simple but incredibly useful recipes to take control of your WordPress blog layout, themes, widgets, plug-ins, security, and SEO
- Take your WordPress blog to the next level with solutions to common WordPress problems that make your blog better, smarter, faster, and more secure
- Enhance your SEO and make more money online by applying simple hacks
- Fully tested and compatible with WordPress 2.7
- Part of Packt’s Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible
In Detail
About 120,000 blogs are created every day. Most of them quickly die, but a few stay, grow up, and then become well known and respected places on the Web. If you are seriously interested in being in the top league, you will need to learn all the tricks of the trade. WordPress 2.7 Cookbook focuses on providing solutions to common WordPress problems, to make sure that your blog will be one of the ones that stay.
The author’s experience with WordPress enables him to share insights on using WordPress effectively, in a clear and friendly way, giving practical hands-on solutions to WordPress problems, questions, and common tasks – from themes to widgets and from SEO to security.
Are you feeling limited with WordPress, or are you wondering how popular blogs do a certain kind of thing that you can’t? With this cookbook, you will learn many WordPress secrets and techniques, with step-by-step, useful recipes dedicated to achieving a particular goal or solve a particular problem. You’ll learn the secret of expensive premium themes, how to optimize your blog for SEO and online profits, and how to supercharge WordPress with killer functions used by the most popular blogs over the Internet.
What you will learn from this book?
- Use filters to add more features to WordPress without editing any core files
- Easily transform a personal blog to a complete, multi-author online magazine
- Turn any free WordPress theme into a powerful and polished premium theme by changing colors and fonts, inserting your custom logo, and more
- Transform a classic theme into a captivating Photoblog
- Learn how plug-ins and widgets work, and how you can create your own
- Integrate popular services into your blog including Twitter, FeedBurner, Digg, del.icio.us, and many more
- Learn proven techniques to attract more readers and comments
- Incorporate advertisements into your RSS feed
- Tips and tricks to secure your blog and optimize it for SEO
Approach
This is a Packt Cookbook, which means it contains step-by-step instructions to achieve a particular goal or solve a particular problem. The book can be read chapter by chapter, or you can look at the table of contents and read the recipes in no particular order.
Who this book is written for?
This book is for anyone who wants to enhance their WordPress blog to make it engaging and feature-rich. It is not specifically for developers or programmers; rather it can be used by anyone who wants to get more out of their WordPress blog by following step-by-step instructions. A basic knowledge of PHP/XHTML/CSS/WordPress is desirable but not necessary.
WordPress Plugin Development
Product Description
Build powerful, interactive plug-ins for your blog and to share online
- Everything you need to create and distribute your own plug-ins following WordPress coding standards
- Walk through the development of six complete, feature-rich, real-world plug-ins that are being used by thousands of WP users
- Written by Vladimir Prelovac, WordPress expert and developer of WordPress plug-ins such as Smart YouTube and Plugin Central
- Part of Packt’s Beginners Guide series: expect step-by-step instructions with an emphasis on experimentation and tweaking code
In Detail
If you can write WordPress plug-ins, you can make WordPress do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to adding the odd tweak or new feature, to completely changing the way your blog works, plug-ins are the method WordPress offers to customize and extend its functionality. This book will show you how to build all sorts of WordPress plug-ins: admin plug-ins, Widgets, plug-ins that alter your post output, present custom “views” of your blog, and more.
WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner’s Guide) focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plug-ins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches, in a series of carefully picked, easy-to-follow tutorials. You will discover how to use the WordPress API in all typical situations, from displaying output on the site in the beginning to turning WordPress into a CMS in the last chapter. In Chapters 2 to 7 you will develop six concrete plug-ins and conquer all aspects of WordPress development.
Each new chapter and each new plug-in introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. This book is written as a guide to take your WordPress skills from the very beginning to the level where you are able to completely understand how WordPress works and how you can use it to your advantage.
What you will learn from this book?
- Get to know the WordPress code base, WordPress’s plug-in architecture, and the plug-in application programming interface (API) and learn how to hack it
- Master the WordPress database and the API – access and manipulate data, handle user roles and permissions, posts, and so on
- Hook into the rest of WordPress using actions and filters
- Change the way your WordPress backend looks by customizing menus, submenus, and the plug-in admin panel
- Integrate AJAX and jQuery into your plug-ins to dynamically generate content
- Hook directly to WordPress edit pages and use AJAX to generate fast searches
- Integrate your plug-in with WordPress panels and the tinyMCE editor
- Access and work with third-party APIs like Flickr
- Implement localization support for users of other languages
- Maintain and manage your plug-in using SVN and publish it to the WordPress Plugin Repository
- Handle security issues and make your plug-ins safer to use
We cover the development of six plug-ins from start to finish:
- Digg-this: Adds a Digg This button to each post.
- Live Blogroll: Adds a recent posts popup for each blog in your blogroll.
- The Wall widget: Displays comments on the sidebar without reloading the page.
- Snazzy Archives: Presents your site archives in a unique visual way.
- Insights: Access your articles and Flickr images from within the WordPress edit page.
- Post Types: Provides pre-defined post templates to quickly add a photo or a link to your blog.
Approach
This is a Packt Beginners Guide, which means it focuses on practical examples and has a fast-paced but friendly approach, with the opportunity to learn by experiment and play. Each chapter builds a practical plug-in from the ground up using step-by-step instructions. Individual sections show you how to code some functionality into your plug-in and follow up with a discussion of concepts.
Who this book is written for?
This book is for programmers working with WordPress, who want to develop custom plug-ins and to hack the code base. You need to be familiar with the basics of WordPress and PHP programming and believe that code is poetry; this book will handle the rest.
A Step by Step WordPress Tutorial For Beginners
A Step by Step WordPress Tutorial For Beginners
Product Description
A Step by Step WordPress Tutorial for Beginners is written for people who want to create a blog with as little technical mumbo jumbo as possible. This book explains WHAT you need to do, WHY you need to do it, and exactly HOW to do it in a thorough, step by step tutorial written in simple English. In this easy to read book, you’ll learn how to create a self-hosted blog, how to install WordPress with just a few clicks of your mouse and how to change the themes and personalize your blog. It demystifies concepts like pinging, trackbacks, widgets and plugins, gravatars and wavatars, RSS and email subscriptions, and it also tells you how to get people to discover your blog, what to do about spam, and more. By using this simple tutorial to create a self-hosted blog with WordPress, you’ll be able to set up your blog in almost no time, with ease and accuracy, and your final result will be a professional looking blog that people will be able to find just minutes after you write your first post!
WordPress for Business Bloggers: Promote and grow your WordPress blog with advanced plug-ins, analytics, advertising, and SEO
Product Description
In Detail
Blogging has been part of the web landscape for over a decade and has matured into a ubiquitous mode of live communication. The power of blogging has been recognized by the business community, and canny marketers view it as a powerful weapon in their digital arsenal. Done well, blogging can bring myriad benefits to businesses of any size. Done badly, it can cause more harm than good. Central to the success of any business blog is a thorough understanding of the technology. This book will give you a competitive advantage by helping you to create an engaging, effective, and well polished business blog.
WordPress allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with many outstanding features. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users, who have created a large and diverse collection of plug-ins. It has various features that can help business bloggers to boost their business strategy.
This book will take you beyond the basics of WordPress, helping you take full advantage of its rich and powerful features to transform your basic blog into a more advanced and professional blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. You will learn everything you need to know to extend and grow your business blog. You will learn to mange the content including images and videos, which will make your blog more appealing. You’ll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools. So, if want to transform your business blog to give a kick start to your business this book is for you.
This book deals with using WordPress and third-party tools to manage and optimize your blog, focusing on the business aspects of blogging. It is not an introduction to WordPress and does not cover the basics such as installation or how to post. Most readers will already have an established WordPress blog or will at least be in the advanced stages of planning one.
What you will learn from this book?
- Develop a `blogging business plan’: clarify your blogging goals and sketch out a process for achieving them in WordPress
- Build a custom theme: so that the look of your blog immediately communicates your brand to visitors
- Engage with the blogosphere: create beneficial relationships with other bloggers, making the most of each other’s traffic and customers
- Optimize your site for search: incorporate good SEO practices into your blog posting and planning
- Use social media marketing such as Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and Del.icio.us to drive traffic to your blog
- Monitor visitors and analyze their activity using WordPress.com stats, Feedburner for your RSS feeds, and Google Analytics
- Manage adverts and implement revenue-generating features using Google AdSense with the Adsense Manager plugin
- Incorporate multimedia on your blog, including video and image galleries
Approach
This is a practical, hands-on book based around a fictitious case study blog, which you will build on a development server using WordPress. The case study grows chapter by chapter, from installing your local development server, right up to the finished blog.
The book starts by looking at the important features that make a successful business blog: adding value to your products and services, providing proper customer service and support, driving traffic to your website, and so on. It then shows how to implement these features in WordPress. It provides clear instructions and detailed screenshots, so you can see exactly what to do at each step of the build. You will install and configure a selection of WordPress plug-ins to improve the functionality of the case-study blog.
When you have completed the case study, you will have the knowledge and confidence to apply all the techniques you have learned to your own WordPress business blog.
Who this book is written for?
This book is for anybody running or starting a business blog using WordPress. Whether you plan to use your blog for PR and marketing, or want to profit directly from blogging, this book offers you everything you need.
As we want to get into the specifics of business blogging as quickly as possible, we don’t cover the WordPress basics. So it’s best to have some experience with WordPress before you start with this book.
The book mainly focuses on a self-hosted WordPress installation, but most of the advice also applies to blogs hosted on WordPress.com.