Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction to WordPress
Chapter 2: Getting Started
Chapter 3: Blogging Your Heart Out
Chapter 4: Pages, Images, Plugins, and More
Chapter 5: Choosing and Installing Themes
Chapter 6: Developing Your Own Theme
Chapter 7: Feeds and Podcasting
Chapter 8: Developing Plugins and Widgets
Chapter 9: Community Blogging
Chapter 10: WordPress as a CMS
Chapter 11: Administrator's Reference
Index
- Chapter 1: Introduction to WordPress
- What is a blog?
- Common terms
- Post
- Categories and tags
- Comments
- Permalinks
- Theme
- RSS
- Page
- What is WordPress?
- Why choose WordPress?
- A long time in refining
- Active in development
- Large community of contributors
- Amazingly extendable
- Detailed feature list
- Online WordPress resources
- WordPress news
- The Codex
- Theme and plugin directories
- WordPress.com
- Summary
- Chapter 2: Getting Started
- Where to build your WordPress website
- Building on WordPress.com
- Installing WordPress manually
- Preparing the environment
- Downloading WordPress
- Uploading the files
- Installing WordPress
- Upgrading WordPress from older installations
- The WP Admin panel
- Changing the password
- Changing general blog information
- Your first post
- Your first comment
- Retrieving a lost password
- Summary
- Where to build your WordPress website
- Chapter 3: Blogging Your Heart Out
- Posting on your blog
- Adding a simple post
- Common post options
- Categories and tags
- Adding an image to a post
- Using the Visual editor versus the HTML editor
- Drafts, timestamps, and managing posts
- Advanced post options
- Excerpt
- Trackbacks
- Discussion
- Custom Fields
- Password and private protection
- Post slug
- Additional writing options
- Press This
- Posting via email
- Discussion on your blog—comments
- Adding a comment
- Discussion settings
- Submission, notification, and moderation settings
- When to moderate or blacklist a comment
- Avatar display settings
- Moderating comments
- How to eliminate comment spam
- Getting a WordPress.com API key
- Activating Akismet
- Adding and managing categories
- Summary
- Posting on your blog
- Chapter 4: Pages, Images, Plugins, and More
- Pages
- Adding a page
- Managing pages
- Links
- Adding a new link
- Managing links and categories
- Media library
- Adding an image gallery
- Choosing a post or page
- Uploading images
- Tweaking your gallery
- Adding plugins
- Finding your plugin
- Downloading the plugin
- Uploading and activating the plugin
- Configuring and/or implementing—if necessary
- Auto-installation
- Summary
- Pages
- Chapter 5: Choosing and Installing Themes
- Finding themes
- WordPress Theme Directory
- Top WP themes
- Template Monster
- Finding more themes
- Factors to consider when choosing a theme
- Installing and changing themes
- What makes a theme?
- Downloading and extracting
- Uploading the theme
- Previewing and activating
- Using widgets
- Enabling basic widgets
- Multiple sidebars
- Adding new widgets
- Summary
- Finding themes
- Chapter 6: Developing Your Own Theme
- Setting up your design
- Designing your theme to be WordPress-friendly
- Converting your design to code
- Examining the HTML structure
- Examining the CSS
- Converting your build into a theme
- Creating the theme folder
- Adding WordPress content
- The <head> tag
- The header and footer
- The sidebar
- Main column—the loop
- Creating templates within your theme
- Understanding the WordPress theme
- Breaking it up
- header.php
- footer.php
- sidebar.php
- Your four template files
- Archive template
- Single template
- Page template
- Other WordPress templates
- Creating and using a custom template
- Making your theme widget-friendly
- Making sure your sidebar is one big <ul> tag
- Adding functions.php
- Adding conditional code to sidebar
- Adding some widgets
- Further widgetizing options
- Sharing your theme
- Summary
- Setting up your design
- Chapter 7: Feeds and Podcasting
- Feed basics
- Feed readers
- Your built-in WordPress feeds
- Adding feed links
- Feeds for the whole website
- Feeds for categories
- Feeds for post comments
- Tracking subscribers with FeedBurner
- Create FeedBurner account
- FeedSmith plugin
- Aggregating feeds
- Displaying an external feed in the sidebar
- Displaying an external feed in a page
- Other useful plugins for syndication
- Podcasting
- How to podcast?
- Record yourself
- Make a post
- Dedicated podcasting
- Podcasting plugins
- PodPress
- Podcasting
- iPodCatter
- Using archive.org to host audio files for free
- How to podcast?
- Summary
- Feed basics
- Chapter 8: Developing Plugins and Widgets
- Plugins
- Plugin code requirements
- Basic plugin—adding link icons
- Naming and organizing the plugin files
- Writing the plugin's core functions
- Adding hooks to the plugin
- Trying out the plugin
- Adding an admin page
- Adding management page functions
- Modifying the regex() function
- Adding hooks
- Trying out the plugin
- A plugin with DB access
- Getting the plugin to talk to the database
- Adding management page functions
- Adding hooks
- Trying out the plugin
- Widgets
- Top searched words widget
- Naming the widget
- Initializing the widget
- Adding the widget's functions
- Adding the widget hook
- Trying out the widget
- Top searched words widget
- Combining the widget and the plugin
- Summary
- Plugins
- Chapter 9: Community Blogging
- Concerns for a multiuser blog
- Users roles and abilities
- Administrator
- Editor
- Author
- Contributor
- Subscriber
- Managing users
- Useful plugins
- Role Manager
- Summary
- Chapter 10: WordPress as a CMS
- Designing your theme
- Approach—the flexible WP Post
- Getting ready
- Using a simple version of the theme
- Inputting all content
- Product pages
- Main products page template
- Product category page template
- Single product page template
- Adding custom variables to the products
- Add a custom field to a post
- Displaying a custom field in the template
- The home page
- Setting up the home page
- Inserting the news items
- Inserting the two blurbs
- Using posts—again!
- Using the Text Snippets plugin
- Customizing the news blog
- News category page
- Single news item page
- Summary
- Chapter 11: Administrator's Reference
- System requirements
- The importance of backing up
- Easy, quick, frequent content backups
- Backing up everything
- Verifying your backups
- A closer look at upgrading WordPress
- Backing up your WordPress files
- Deactivating all your plugins
- Downloading and extracting WordPress
- Deleting old files
- Uploading the new files
- Running the WordPress upgrade program
- Updating permalinks and .htaccess
- Installing updated plugins and themes
- Migrating or restoring a WordPress site
- Setting file permissions
- What are file permissions?
- How to set permissions
- Troubleshooting
- Troubleshooting during installation
- Headers already sent
- Page comes with only PHP code
- Cannot connect to MySQL database
- Basic troubleshooting
- Cannot see posts
- Making a blog totally private
- I don't receive the emailed passwords
- Troubleshooting during installation
- Tips for theme development
- Template tags
- Class styles generated by WordPress
- Summary
