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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In Detail
Using WordPress you can easily create dynamic blogs and web sites with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and although it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. You can customize the features, incorporate your own design, and even write your own plug-ins with ease. Its versatility and ease of use have attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users. While it is easy to get started with WordPress, its full power is not obvious.
If you want to create a powerful, fully-featured blog or non-blog web site in no time, this book is for you. It will give you a rapid and straightforward introduction to the rich and powerful features of WordPress and get you up and running with a state-of-the-art blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. It will help you learn everything WordPress has to offer, from the ground up, so you can build your complete web site. You will see many of WorPress's hidden powers that will help you build a fully functioning web site.
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 learn to install WordPress and customize the look-and-feel of your web site. 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. By 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.
More advanced users will also pick up tips on creating your own themes and plug-ins, and such technical steps as backing up your WordPress web site and moving it from one server to another.
A comprehensive, step-by-step guide on how to set up, customize, and enhance your blog or web site using WordPress
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 for
This book is a guide to WordPress for both beginners and those who are slightly more advanced. It's for people who are new to blogging and want to create their own blogs in a simple and straightforward manner, and it's also for people who want to learn how to customize and expand the capabilities of a WordPress web site.
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.
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Seitenzahl: 296
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009
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Table of Contents
WordPress 2.7 Complete
Hasin Hayder
April Hodge Silver
WordPress 2.7 Complete
Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: May 2009
Production Reference: 2040609
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847196-56-9
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Parag Kadam (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Authors
April Hodge Silver
Hasin Hayder
Reviewers
Lee Jordan
Narayan Bhat
Paul Thewlis
Acquisition Editor
David Barnes
Development Editor
Ved Prakash Jha
Technical Editor
Reshma Sundaresan
Copy Editor
Sneha Kulkarni
Editorial Team Leader
Abhijeet Deobhakta
Project Team Leader
Lata Basantani
Project Coordinator
Leena Purkait
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Proofreader
Sandra Hopper
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the authors
April Hodge Silver has been designing and developing new websites from scratch since 1999, just before her graduation from Columbia University. Early in her career, she worked for several web companies and startups, including DoubleClick and About.com. Since 2004, she has been self-employed through her company Springthistle Design and has worked with a staggering variety of companies, non-profits, and individuals to realize their website dreams. In her professional work, April's focus is always on usability, efficiency, flexibility, clean design, and client happiness. WordPress is the best solution for many of Springthistle's clients, though April also develops custom web applications using PHP and MySQL. You can find out more about April's professional work at http://springthistle.com.
In her free time, April enjoys developing recipes in the kitchen, bicycling, and relaxing with her daughter, dog, and darlin' wife.
Of course, I am so grateful to everyone at Packt who worked with me to make this book possible. Also, a huge bunch of thanks to my wife Tessa, who made the connection in the first place and helped me get started in this medium. Finally, thanks go to Ruth and Hazel, who provided guidance on commas.
Hasin Hayder graduated in Civil Engineering from the Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology (RUET) in Bangladesh. He is a Zend-certified Engineer and expert in developing localized applications. He is currently working as a Technical Director in Trippert Labs and managing the local branch in Bangladesh. Beside his full time job, Hasin writes his blog at http://hasin.wordpress.com, writes article in different websites and maintains his open source framework Orchid at http://orchid.phpxperts.net. Hasin lives in Bangladesh with his wife Ayesha and his son, Afif.
First of all, I would like to thank David Barnes, Patricia Weir, Abhijeet Deobhakta, and Nikhil Bangera, without whom the book would have never seen the daylight. After writing for so many sleepless nights, the book is finally over; but I want to thank all those who supported me at that time. My wife Ayesha for storytelling, Little Afif for missing his Papa, the staff of Somewhere In for receiving a sleepy developer in the morning, the staff of Pageflakes for their inspiration, and all the members of my PHP group, phpexperts. I would also like to thank all my family members for their great support during this period. Finally, I dedicate this book to the person who would have been the happiest person to see it; my father, Ali Akbar Mohammad Mohiuddin Hayder (1934-2006).
About the reviewers
Lee Jordan is a web developer with a large collection of web technology acronyms on her resume that sound like the names of laundry detergents and cause glazed expressions in school children. She designs and maintains internal and external enterprise-level websites and web-based applications as part of a project team for a privately held technical services company. Her work includes proposing, writing, and editing web content and user guides people actually read. She began her career in 1997 as a web designer after graduating from Florida State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, where she swears that she missed at least one home football game while in the computer lab. Lee later convinced Seminole Community College to give her a Web Programming degree in 2003 even though her final project was a Java-based application that actually contained a usable help file.
Web development topics or whatever she can think of at the time are posted on her blog at http://leejordan.net.
Narayan Bhat's current passion is blogging. You can meet him at his site: The Blog Doctor (http://www.blogdoctor.me).
He has reviewed Blogger Beyond the Basics and WordPress for Business Bloggers, both by Packt Publishing.
Paul Thewlis has worked as a web communications professional in the public and private sectors. He is currently E-Communications Manager for a multinational transport company headquartered in the UK. He began his web career as a Technical Editor, working on web design books for a well-known publisher. He has extensive experience of many content management systems and blogging platforms. He is an expert in the use of social media within corporate communications and blogs about that subject, as well as WordPress and the Web in general at http://blog.paulthewlis.com.
Paul is the author of WordPress For Business Bloggers, also by Packt Publishing
Preface
Using WordPress, you can easily create dynamic blogs and websites 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 for a regular website with very little effort. You can customize the features, incorporate your own design, and even write your own plugins with ease. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users. Although it is easy to get started with WordPress, its full power is not immediately obvious.
If you want to create a powerful, fully featured blog or non-blog website in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you learn everything WordPress has to offer from the ground up, so you can build your complete website. You will see many of WordPress's hidden powers that will help you build a fully functioning website.
What this book covers
Chapter 1—Introduction to WordPress introduces everything about blogging, including what a blog is, the common terms used in blogging and what they mean, what WordPress has to offer to a blogger, and why to choose it.
Chapter 2—Getting Started explains the choices of where you can build your WordPress website, upgrading from an older version of WordPress, and getting familiar with the WordPress Administration Panel.
Chapter 3—Blogging Your Heart Out covers the complete process of creating new posts for your blog, including applying categories and tags to your post, using the rich text editor, and controlling the timestamp. It also includes more advanced options such as including excerpt and trackbacks. This chapter also covers controlling commenting and discussion on your blog, as well as keeping out comment spam.
Chapter 4—Pages, Images, Plugins and More... explains that blog posts aren't the only content in your blog. You also can control pages of static information, upload and manage images on your site, keep a list of bookmarked links, and add plugins.
Chapter 5—Choosing and Installing Themes covers how to find and use existing themes from a variety of reliable websites, how to choose which theme is right for your website or blog, and the process of installing and using your new theme. This chapter also covers enabling and using widgets in your theme.
Chapter 6—Developing Your Own Theme covers the process of creating your own theme from soup to nuts. This includes setting up your design to accommodate your blogging goals, converting your initial build into an authentic WordPress theme, creating templates within your theme to serve different purposes for your blog, making your theme widget-friendly, and sharing your theme with the WordPress community.
Chapter 7—Feeds and Podcasting explains what feeds are and how to add them to your WordPress website, tracking subscribers to your blog, and aggregating feeds from other sources on your blog. This chapter also covers using your WordPress website to create a podcast. (It's easy!)
Chapter 8—Developing Plugins and Widgets is for the more advanced user. This chapter shows you how to create plugins and widgets that will work with any installation of WordPress. It includes step-by-step instructions so you don't get lost along the way.
Chapter 9—Community Blogging covers managing and handling a multiuser blog, including a detailed outline of the roles and capabilities included in WordPress.
Chapter 10—WordPress as a CMS covers from start to finish how to use WordPress to create a non-blog website. This chapter includes explanations of designing your theme, setting it up, creating custom pages that display post content in non-blog ways, customizing the home page to contain dynamic content, and creating a news page.
Chapter11—Administrator's Reference covers all of the basic things a WordPress administrator needs to know from system requirements to detailed step-by-step instructions on installing WordPress, moving your WordPress website from one place to another, backing up, common template tags, and basic troubleshooting.
What you need for this book
The minimum system requirement for WordPress is a web server with the following software installed:
Who this book is for
This book is a guide to WordPress for both beginners and progressive learners. It's for people who are new to blogging and want to create their own blogs in a simple and straightforward manner, and it's also for those who want to learn how to customize and expand the capabilities of a WordPress website.
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.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "...you can add the above text anywhere in single.php so long as it is inside the if and while loops of the loop."
A block of code will be set as follows:
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be shown in bold:
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "To register your free blog, click on the loud blue-and-white Sign Up Now! button."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Downloading the example code for the book
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Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our contents, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in text or code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us to improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the let us know link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata added to any list of existing errata. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
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We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Introduction to WordPress
These days, everyone can find a reason for having a website. It's not just the large companies who have a website. Even individuals, families, and small or independent businesses need to have one. Some individuals and small businesses do not have the financial resources to hire a website development company to create a website for them. This is where WordPress comes in. WordPress is a web application that you can use to create and maintain an online website, even if you have a minimum of technical expertise.
Because it is a web application, WordPress does not need to be installed on your home computer. It can live on the computer that belongs to your website hosting company. It is also free, easy to use, and packed with excellent features. Originally, WordPress was an application meant to run a blog website, but it has now evolved into a fully-featured ContentManagementSystem (CMS).
In this chapter, we'll explore the characteristics of a blog, the most essential terminologies used in blogging, the greatest advantages of WordPress (that is, why you should choose it), and online resources for WordPress.
What is a blog?
A blog, which is short for weblog, is a website that usually contains regular entries like any other kind of log. These entries can be of various types such as commentary, descriptions of events, photos, videos, personal remarks, or political ideas. They are usually displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent additions on the top. These entries can be organized in a variety of ways—by date, by topic, by subject, and so on.
A blog is a special type of website that gets updated regularly. Unlike a site where the content is static, a blog behaves more like an online diary wherein the blogger posts regular updates. Hence, blogs are dynamic with ever-changing content. A blog can be updated with new content and the old content can be changed or deleted at any time.
Most blogs focus their content on a particular subject—for example current events, hobbies, technical expertise—or else they are more like personal online diaries.
According to Wikipedia, the term weblog was first used in 1997 and people started using blogs globally in 1999. The terms weblog, weblogging, and weblogger were added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2003, though these days most people leave off the "we" part at the front.
Common terms
If you are new to the world of blogging, you may want to familiarize yourself with these common terminologies.
Post
Each entry in the blog is called a post. Every post usually has a number of different parts. Of course, the two most obvious parts are title and content. The content is text, images, links, and so on. Posts can even contain multimedia. Every post also has a publication timestamp, and most also have one or more categories, tags, comments, and so on. It is these posts, or entries, that are displayed in a reverse chronological order on the main page of the blog. The latest post is displayed first in order to give the viewer the latest news on the subject.
Categories and tags
Categories and tags are ways to organize and find posts within a blog and even across blogs. Categories are like topics, whereas tags are more like keywords. For example, for a blog about food and cooking, there might be a category called Recipes, but every post in that category would have different tags (for example, soup, baked, vegetarian, dairy-free, and so on).
Comments
Most blogs allow visitors to post comments about the posts. This gives readers the opportunity to interact with the writer of the blog, thus making the whole enterprise interactive. Often, the writer of the blog will respond to comments by posting comments, which makes for a continuous public online conversation or dialogue.
Permalinks
A blog has dozens or hundreds of posts, each of which has a unique ID, and so, many blog engines provide a way to link directly to each post. A permalink is a nicely-formatted link that usually has some form of the post title in the link. For example, a post with the title Everything You Wanted To Know About Eggplant might have the permalink http://myblog.com/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-eggplant. Permalinks are often more search-engine-friendly, especially if the blogger keeps search engines in mind when creating titles.
Permalinks is WordPress's fancy word for what used to be called SEO-friendly URLs. SEO stands for SearchEngineOptimization because sensible URLs, like permalinks, are easier for search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) to catalog. These days, they are often known as pretty or user-friendly URLs. These URLs tell a story about the page they represent, and don't have a lot of confusing punctuations in them. For example, if you are looking at a blog archive for the month of April 2008 in WordPress, the regular URL would look like this: http://yoursite.com/index.php?m=200804. If you enable permalinks, the URL will look like this instead: http://yoursite.com/2008/04/post_title/. An even bigger contrast shows up if you're looking at pages. Let's say you have a page with information about you, the author of your blog. The regular URL would look like this: http://yoursite.com/index.php?page_id=23. If you enable permalinks, the URL will look like this: http://yoursite.com/about.
Theme
The theme for a blog is the design and layout that you choose for your blog. In most blogs, the content (for example, posts) is separate from the visual layout. This means you can change the visual layout of your blog at any time without having to worry about the content being affected.
RSS
RSS is an acronym for ReallySimpleSyndication, and Chapter 7 addresses the topic of feeds in detail. For now, understand that RSS and feeds are a way to syndicate the content of your blog so that people can subscribe to it. This means people do not actually have to visit your blog regularly to see what you've added. They can subscribe and have new content delivered to them via email or through a feed reader.
Page
It's important to understand the difference between a page and a post. Unlike posts, pages do not depend on having timestamps and are not displayed in chronological order. They also do not have categories or tags. A page is a piece of content with only a title and content (an example would be AboutMe or ContactUs). It is likely that the number of pages on your site remains relatively static, whereas new posts are added every day or so. Thus pages have static content, while posts have dynamic content.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source blog engine. Open source means that nobody owns it, everybody works on it, and anyone can contribute to it. Blog engine means a software that can run a blog. It's a piece of software that lives on the web server and makes it easy for you to add and edit posts, themes, comments, and all of your other content. More expansively, WordPress can be called a publishing platform because it is by no means restricted to blogging.
WordPress was originally a fork of an older piece of software called b2/cafelog. WordPress was developed by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, but is now maintained and developed by a team of developers that includes Mullenweg.
Why choose WordPress?
WordPress is not the only publishing platform out there, but it has an awful lot to recommend it. In the following sections, I've called attention to WordPress's most outstanding features.
A long time in refining
In web years, WordPress has been around for quite a while and was in development the whole time, getting better constantly. WordPress's very first release, Version 0.70, was released in May 2003. Since then, it has had nine major releases, with a number of minor ones in between. Each release came with more features and better security.
Active in development
WordPress is a constantly evolving application. It's never left alone to stagnate. The developers are working continually to keep it ahead of spammers and hackers, and also to evolve the application based on the evolving needs of its users.
Large community of contributors
WordPress is not being developed by a lonely programmer in a dark basement room. On the contrary, there is a large community of people working on it by developing, troubleshooting, making suggestions, and testing the application. With such a large group of people involved, the application is most likely to have continued well-being.
Amazingly extendable
In addition to having an extremely strong core, WordPress is also quite extendable. This means that once you get started with it, the possibilities are nearly limitless. Any additional functionality that you can dream of can be added by way of a plugin that you or your programmer friends can write.
Detailed feature list
Here is a detailed list of many features of WordPress:
Learning more
You can read a fully explained feature list at http://wordpress.org/about/features/.
Online WordPress resources
One very useful characteristic of WordPress is that it has a large, active online community. Everything you will ever need for your WordPress website can be found online, and probably for free.
WordPress news
As WordPress is always actively developed, it's important to keep yourself up-to-date with the software community about their latest activities. The most important spot to visit or subscribe to is WordPress Releases: http://wordpress.org/development/category/releases/. Whenever there is a new release—be it a major release, or an interim bug fix, or an upgrade—it will be here.
Learning more
Also, be sure to stay tuned to the main WordPress blog at http://wordpress.org/development/.
The Codex
The WordPress Codex is the central repository of all the information the official WordPress team has published to help people work with WordPress.
The Codex has some basic tutorials for getting started with WordPress such as a detailed step-by-step discussion of installation, lists of every template tag and hook, and a lot more. Throughout this book, I'll be providing links to specific pages within the Codex, which will provide more or advanced information on the topics in this book.
Theme and plugin directories
There are official directories for themes and for plugins on wordpress.org. Though not every theme and plugin is available here, the ones that are here have been vetted by the community to some extent. Anything you download from these directories is likely to be relatively bug-free. You can also see what the community thinks of these downloads by looking at ratings, comments, and popularity.
Additionally, plugins in the PluginDirectory are automatically upgradable from within your WordPress Administration Panel, whereas other plugins have to be upgraded manually.
Theme Directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
Plugin Directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
WordPress.com
You'll notice that all of the URLs above belong to wordpress.org. There is another website, wordpress.com, which is actually a free blog-hosting service. Anyone can open an account on WordPress.com and instantly have his or her own WordPress-driven blog. According to WordPress.com, there were over 6 million blogs on WordPress.com and over 9 million active installations of the WordPress.org software as of December 2008.
In Chapter 2, we will discuss all of the differences between having your blog on WordPress.com versus downloading the software from wordpress.org and hosting it yourself, but the basic difference is the level of control. If your blog is on WordPress.com, you have less control over plugins, themes, and other details of the blog because everything is managed and made worry-free by the WordPress.com service.
Summary
Blogging is a wonderful pastime for just about anyone who has something interesting to say, and WordPress is excellent software that can run your blog (or non-blog) website. It's packed with excellent features and is so flexible that it can really do anything you want. Additionally, it's super easy to use, and you need no special skills or prior experience to use it. Last but not the least, it is free!
In this chapter, we learned about blogging and common blog terms. We also looked into the reasons to choose WordPress for blogging and the online resources available for WordPress users. In the next chapter, we will explore the choices and steps involved in installing WordPress.
Chapter 2. Getting Started
This chapter will guide you through the process of setting up WordPress and customizing its basic features. WordPress is relatively smaller (only 1.2 MB), easier to install, and easier to administer. This chapter will show you the different options for installing WordPress and setting it up.
WordPress is available in easily downloadable formats from its website at http://wordpress.org/download/. Currently, WordPress Version 2.7.1 is available for download. WordPress is a free, open source application, and is released under the GNU GeneralPublicLicense (GPL). Anyone who produces a modified version of software released under the GPL is required to keep those same freedoms attached to his or her modified version. This way, WordPress and other software released under GPL are kept free and open source.
There is a slightly different version of WordPress that is capable of supporting multiuser blogging. This means several users can maintain separate blogs within a single installation of WordPress. They can log into and maintain their blogs independently of one another. This version of WordPress is known as WordPress MU or WordPressMulti-User. In this book, we will only cover the installation and use of WordPress.
In this chapter, you will learn how to:
Where to build your WordPress website
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 can create (or build) your site. They are:
