WordPress Online

Just released (July, 2006) and seemingly the only book dealing exclusively with WordPress as a blogging tool.

Extremely useful for someone who is new to WordPress and has little or no blogging and/or code experience; very useful for someone who has some blogging and/or code experience, but not very useful for an experienced blogger/coder/user (remember: it’s a “Visual Quick Start Guide”).

If you are fairly comfortable with the above, you can certainly set up your WordPress blog without buying anything (just consult the WordPress documentation and Codex online). I set up my WordPress blog, altered the theme (header, sidebar, etc.), added the plugins I wanted, etc. PRIOR to reading this book, but I was already familiar with ftp and html (setting up websites). Even though I did not really need the book by the time it arrived, I am happy to have it as a reference book and I was able to glean some very useful tips from it.

The BIG advantage of this book is that you don’t have to sift through the mountain of Wordpress online documentation (a time-consuming task and not all articles are as a relevant as you’d like them to be when you are trying to perform specific task). Also, you can have the book next to you while you work on your blog (rather than jumping back and forth from blog to documentation all the time) – this is a HUGE timesaver.

All the basics are covered, from initial setup to changing the appearance to using ftp to activating plugins, to mobile blogging, etc. There is an “advanced” section at the end that covers podcasting, using “custom fields”, importing from other blogs, etc.). As I said, however, an experienced and/or advanced user would not really need this book.

The book layout is GREAT: screenshots are included on almost every page (both windows and mac examples), and any differences in server based WordPress vs. WordPress.com are mentioned whenever relevant.

If you are floundering in WordPress documentation or feeling frustrated about a lack of centralised information to take you through all the setup and customization stages, but you want to advance beyond the limitations of eblogger, this book is definitely for you. If you are looking to crack and master PHP and/or develop your own WordPress themes, this book is not for you.
Rating: 4 / 5

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.
Rating: 1 / 5

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).
Rating: 1 / 5

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.
Rating: 1 / 5

Although I’m not a novice with Wordpress, I read this book a few times and picked up some great tips. I think it’s worth the price for a beginning to intermediate Wordpress blogger.

That said, Wordpress has awesome, voluminous online documentation in their Codex and forums, so there’s not a lot of new info in this book that can’t be found online, but it’s presented in an easy, logical, and very portable way.

Also, since the publishing, WP has upgraded to version 2.1 which has slightly changed the admin interface, but not enough to make the book confusing.
Rating: 3 / 5