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WordPress 3.7 Complete: Third Edition
WordPress 3.7 Complete: Third Edition

WordPress 3.7 Complete: Third Edition: Nothing has simplified website production quite as effectively as WordPress, and this book makes it easier still to build a fully featured site of your own. Packed with screenshots and clear instructions, it covers everything you need for success. , Fourth Edition

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WordPress 3.7 Complete: Third Edition

Chapter 2. Getting Started

This chapter will guide you through the process of setting up WordPress and customizing its basic features. You can choose between a couple of options regarding where your WordPress installation will be located. Keep in mind that WordPress is relatively small (under 10 MB), easy to install, and easy to administer.

WordPress is available in easily downloadable formats from its website, http://wordpress.org/download/. WordPress is a free, open source application, and is released under GNU General Public License (GPL). This means that anyone who produces a modified version of the software released under the GPL is required to keep those same freedoms, that people buying or using the software may also modify and redistribute, attached to his or her modified version. This way, WordPress and other software released under GPL are kept open source. In this chapter, you will learn how to:

  • Create a free blog on WordPress.com
  • Install WordPress manually on your web...

Building your WordPress website – start here

The first decision you have to make is where your blog is going to live. You have two basic options for the location where you will create your site. You can

Let's look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these two choices.

The advantage of using WordPress.com is that they take care of all of the technical details for you. The software is already installed; they'll upgrade it for you whenever there's an upgrade, and you're not responsible for anything else. Just manage your content. The big disadvantage is that you lose almost all of the theme and plugin control you'd have otherwise. WordPress.com will not let you upload or edit your own theme, though it will let you (for a fee) edit the CSS of any theme you use. WordPress.com will not let you upload or manage plugins at all. Some plugins are installed by default (most notably...

Using WordPress.com

WordPress.com (http://wordpress.com) is a free service provided by the WordPress developers, where you can register a blog or non-blog website easily and quickly with no hassle. However, because it is a hosted service, your control over some things will be more limited than it would be if you hosted your own WordPress website. As mentioned before, WordPress.com will not let you edit or upload your own themes or plugins. Apart from that, WordPress.com is a great place to maintain your personal site if you don't need to do anything fancy with your theme or the source code of your site in general. To get started, go to http://wordpress.com and click on the loud orange-and-white Get Started button. You will be taken to the signup page. In the following screenshot, I've entered my e-mail address (please triple-check when entering yours; it's where the confirmation e-mail will be sent), my username (this is what I'll sign in with), a password (note that...

The WP Admin panel

WordPress installs a powerful and flexible administration area where you can manage all of your website content, and do much more. Throughout the book, I'll be referring to this in shorthand as the WP Admin.

Now that you've successfully installed WordPress, it's time for our first look at the WP Admin. There are some immediate basic changes that I recommend doing right away to make sure your installation is set up properly.

You can always get to the WP Admin by going to the following URL: http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/. If it's your first time here, you'll be redirected to the login page. In the future, WordPress will check to see if you're already logged in and, if so, you'll skip the login page.

To log in, just enter the username and password you chose during the installation. Then click on Log In. Note for the future that on this page there is a link you can use to retrieve your lost password.

Whenever you log in, you'll be taken...

Getting a Gravatar

One final thing that's worth discussing in this chapter is the matter of WordPress avatars. Although WordPress provides a number of possibilities in this area, the most popular one revolves around an external service—Gravatar. Gravatar started as a tool meant to provide people with the possibility to use the same profile picture (avatar) across the whole web. The name Gravatar actually stands for Globally Recognized Avatar.

What this means in plain English is that whenever you sign up with a web service, and if the service is Gravatar-compatible, so to speak, then it will pick your profile picture from Gravatar automatically, instead of forcing you to upload it manually from your computer. Apart from the profile picture, Gravatar also gives you a personal, online profile that anyone can see whenever he or she click on your (Gravatar) profile picture. Now, what does this all have to do with WordPress, right? Well, WordPress is one of those services and tools...

Summary

You have learned a lot of things from this chapter. Now you are able to install WordPress on a remote server, change the basic default settings of your blog, write posts, and comment on those posts.

You also have a basic understanding on how WordPress.com works, and how to handle your online image/brand by using Gravatar.

In the next chapter, we will learn about all the other aspects of a blog post that you can control and additional ways to add posts, as well as the intricacies of managing and controlling commenting and discussion on your blog.

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Key benefits

  • Learn how to build a WordPress site quickly and effectively
  • Find out how to create content that's optimized to be published on the Web
  • Learn the basics of working with WordPress themes and playing with widgets

Description

Back in the day, when you wanted to launch a new website, you either had to learn web programming yourself or hire a professional who would take care of the whole process for you. Those times are long gone due to WordPress and the great opportunities it brings. With WordPress, anyone can build an optimized site with the least amount of effort possible and then make it available to the world in no time. WordPress is a flexible and powerful tool that's ideal for creating both blog and non-blog websites. You can customize the features, incorporate your own design, and even write your own plugins with ease. Its versatility and ease of use have attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users. "WordPress 3.7 Complete: Third Edition" is a practical guide for anyone who wants to start their journey as a web developer. This WordPress book takes you through a step-by-step process of planning out and then building your site. "WordPress 3.7 Complete: Third Edition" will take you through the complete process of building a fully functional WordPress site from scratch. You will learn how to create your first blog post, what the difference between posts and pages is, and how to use multimedia files to accompany your content and make it more attractive. Next, you will find out what plugins and themes are and how to use them effectively. "With WordPress 3.7 Complete: Third Edition" , you will learn all the ins and outs of WordPress and using it for publishing content on the Web. It provides easy-to-apply advice with tons of screenshots and actionable examples.

Who is this book for?

This WordPress book is a guide to WordPress for online publishers and web developers. If you are new to blogging and want to create your own blog or website from scratch, then "WordPress 3.7 Complete: Third Edition" is for you. No prior knowledge of HTML/CSS or PHP is required.

What you will learn

  • Explore what WordPress is and where to get it
  • Launch your website using quick WordPress installation
  • Publish your first content (blog post)
  • Discover what the most important sub pages of a quality website are and how to create them in WordPress
  • Create custom menus to improve the user experience of your website
  • Upload multimedia content such as images, audio, and video
  • Install and work with plugins and widgets
  • Find out where to get quality themes from and how to install them
  • Produce a non-blog website with WordPress

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Nov 25, 2013
Length: 404 pages
Edition : 4th
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782162407
Vendor :
WordPress Foundation
Concepts :
Tools :

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Product Details

Publication date : Nov 25, 2013
Length: 404 pages
Edition : 4th
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782162407
Vendor :
WordPress Foundation
Concepts :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

13 Chapters
1. Introducing WordPress Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Getting Started Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Creating Blog Content Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Pages, Menus, Media Library, and More Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Plugins and Widgets Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Choosing and Installing Themes Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Developing Your Own Theme Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Feeds, Podcasting, and Offline Blogging Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Developing Plugins and Widgets Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Community Blogging Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
11. Creating a Non-blog Website Part One – The Basics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
12. Creating a Non-blog Website Part Two – Community Websites and Custom Content Elements Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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J Prince Mar 27, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I grabbed this book just to see some of the latest capabilities and it is a good source for just that! If you want a great first-time 'how to' guide, this is the book for you!Karol provides a great flow in this book providing an introductory overview of Wordpress and the latest features published in this tool... I think I read that up to 15% of the web as we know it runs on Wordpress and it is a good way to see the power of this platform. Each chapter builds on the last, but is also a quick reference that you can jump to to answer questions.The last 70 pages of the book show you how to use Wordpress as your favorite non-blog platform... an example of how easy it is to build a simple website and add features in time when ready.Once again, Packt Publishing is delivering good content to masses! Glad to see it!
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Michael McCallister Feb 11, 2014
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The fine folks at Packt Publishing asked me to have a look at their latest WordPress book, WordPress 3.7 Complete. This is the third edition in the WordPress Complete series, by Karol Krol and Aaron Hodge Silver. I am happy to recommend it to folks looking for a good introduction to WordPress.Full disclosure: I read the edition covering WordPress 2.7, when I started getting serious about learning WordPress, but missed the edition that covered v3.0.Packt specializes in web development and open source software books, so you shouldn’t be surprised that the strongest parts of the book are in this area. But you don’t have to know code to find good, solid information here. Chapter 3, “Creating Blog Content” offers a nice introduction to blogging that will help you start thinking about the kind of content to include in your blog, along with an introduction to the WordPress admin pages.The chapter on choosing themes has some excellent questions that you may not think to ask yourself before choosing a theme from the vast collection of choices.While there’s a basic introduction to WordPress.com, most of the book’s content relates to WordPress on an independent web host. It might have been nice to note what sections (like setting up widgets and working with the Media Library) apply to both the dot-com and dot-org sites.WordPress Complete really takes off in the second half, where Krol and Silver focus on creating and manipulating themes and plugins. I don’t know about you, but when I started messing with code, the first thing that scared me was the likelihood of me breaking stuff that was already working. Krol and Silver help break down that fear by showing you how to safely remove your header, footer and sidebar from an existing theme’s index.php file (“What, you want me to break my home page!?”), customize each new template file, and reassemble the new modules so that it all works.Another big plus for the beginning developer is an extensive section about building themes from scratch. After comparing this method with constructing themes with the help of a theme framework like Genesis, Thesis or Thematic, they advise:" … create your first theme manually, just to learn the craft and get to know all the basic structures and mechanisms sitting inside WordPress. Then, as the next step in your mastery (if you’re planning to work on other themes in the future), you can pick one of the popular theme frameworks, get deeply familiar with it, and use it as the base for your future themes from that point on. Such an approach will allow you to reach maximum time efficiency and save you the effort of dealing with the core set of functionalities that every theme needs, regardless of the design or purpose."After demystifying the process of theme and plugin creation, and introducing BuddyPress and WordPress MultiSite, Krol and Silver focus the last two chapters on “Creating a Non-Blog Website” using the increasingly powerful content management features WordPress offers.You’ll learn a bit about using Pages to create corporate and e-commerce sites, membership sites and the like. Can I say that as an author, I especially appreciated introducing custom post types by way of creating distinctive ways of listing books on your site? You may see something like this on michaelmccallister.com soon.Overall, WordPress 3.7 Complete is a fine introduction to WordPress and web development. Incidentally, don’t be upset that the book misses out on WordPress 3.8. With the increasing speed of WordPress core development, all us authors are at a distinct disadvantage–we can only type so fast!
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James Foster Dec 27, 2013
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....2014, is here!What's it going to take to get started?...more book(s), more on-line guru(s), more seminar(s) and more get rich "quick" programs.STOP!Karol's message (blog), has always been concise and right to the point. You can do it, but it takes work!Now, he has a book, that shows you in clear, concise steps, how to join the on-line world.You're getting more than a book, it's a community. Check out his blog.Thank you Karol, for this book and this opportunity.
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Meowmeow Mar 02, 2015
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Very good
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gregory scurr Dec 31, 2013
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This is an awesome reference for anyone be they beginner or above. It is a well thought out easy to understand book that i have no hesitation recommending to anyone wanting to understand wordpress. Well done Kurt, who also by the way replies in an instant to any questions you may have. Cannot recommend this book enough!!!
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