Review: Beginning WordPress 3 by Stephanie Leary

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Beginning WordPress 3 cover By Stephanie Leary
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2895-0
ISBN10: 1-4302-2895-4
432 pp.
Published Jun 2010
Print Book Price: $39.99
eBook Price: $27.99

Amazon Price $28.79 (affiliate link)

The title of this book is deceptive, enough so that I handed it to a friend who was making the move from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress because I thought she might find it helpful. She didn’t, and when I actually sat down to read it myself, I understood why.

This is not a book for beginners, if by “beginners” you mean the people for whom WordPress for Dummies was written. It’s a book for web developers who haven’t used WordPress before.

To be fair to the author, the back cover copy says exactly that, but the publisher describes it as “User level: Beginner.” I’m not sure how Apress would describe books for people who don’t have any technical knowledge. “User level: Hopeless N00b”?

But the book itself is fantastic. It may be the best book I’ve ever read about WordPress. I don’t consider myself a developer, but I know enough not to get completely lost in the code examples. This is a great book for those who are experienced users of WordPress but not PHP wizards and who want to go deeper and understand more.

I had a number of revelatory moments while reading this book. You can turn off or limit post revisions with one line of code in your wp-config.php file? So why was I bothering to use a plugin for it? (I know, some people don’t have access to their wp-config.php file…or shouldn’t be allowed access to it. But other people need to reduce  the number of plugins they have installed, and I’m one of them.) There are RSS feeds for pages? Wish I’d known that when someone was asking about it on LinkedIn a few weeks back. You can show custom taxonomies, custom post types, and tags in your menu management page by clicking on Screen Options? (I beat my head against this for ages because I’d forgotten I’d read it, and I even marked the page.) There’s a way to import content from Joomla? Bring it on. (Please. I’m desperately hoping to convince a client to change platforms.)

Then there’s the great discussion of things you can do with the Loop, like create a page that displays excerpts from all its child pages. Most magazine themes make you pick two or three featured categories, but you could actually feature all your categories if you wanted to. (That’s assuming you have a reasonable number of categories, unless you want a really long home page.)

I admit I got a bit lost in the chapters on creating widgets and plugins—I don’t think I’m anywhere near ready to start developing plugins, and I’m not sure I ever will be. But I understand a little better what’s involved in the process and how to look at the code.

There’s a solid chapter on performance and security that covers all the usual suspects except the define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '96M'); trick (another single line in wp-config.php that can make a big difference) and then a highly valuable chapter on custom post types and custom taxonomies. Stephanie Leary walks you through how to do this the hard way, which gave me a chance to see what the

plugins that help with these two WordPress features actually do, and helped me follow the demonstrations at the September WordPress Meetup.

The final chapter is on WordPress Multi-site, with a brief mention of BuddyPress. While this is a fraction of the information found in BuddyPress for Dummies, it has the advantage of referring to WordPress 3.0 and not the old WordPress MU, so it was good to get an overview of what had stayed the same and what had changed.

The author refers to useful plugins throughout the book, and also has a plugin index (Appendix A) and a collection of “plugin recipes” (Appendix C). The recipes are combinations of plugins you can use to build things with WordPress, like a wiki (I thought there was already a wiki plugin for WP) or a document sharing site. Again, I had a couple of surprises. There are plugins to sort your posts alphabetically? And I spent time creating special category page templates to do that for a client. (The other surprise was that Stephanie Leary doesn’t seem to have heard of Blubrry’s PowerPress plugin for podcasting, or that PodPress had been revived.)

If you have no web background at all and you’re completely new to WordPress, this isn’t the book for you. But if you’re somewhere in between the complete novice and the hard-core developer, you’re going to find this book unbelievably useful. The fact that it’s clearly written in a non-technical style, tidily laid out, and has abundant screenshots is just a bonus. And you can download all the code samples from the Apress website.

Review: Create Your Own Blog by Tris Hussey

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Book Cover | Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro

By Tris Hussey

Published Dec 31, 2009 by Sams. Part of the Create Your Own series.

Copyright 2010
Dimensions: 7-3/8 X 9-1/8
Pages: 288
Edition: 1st

Book

ISBN-10: 0-672-33065-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33065-0

eBook

ISBN-10: 0-672-33160-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33160-2

MSRP: $19.79
Amazon Price $14.95 (affiliate link)

When I first discovered blogging and podcasting in 2005, Tris Hussey was one of the first bloggers I learned about, so I knew he had the chops to write a book on the subject of blogging. (No, I don’t know Tris personally; my only disclosure in writing this review is the usual one, that Pearson Education sent me two free copies, one to review myself and one to give away at the East Bay WordPress Meetup.)

Even so, I was honestly surprised by just how useful I found this book. After all, I’ve been blogging for a while now, so I mostly expected to be evaluating the book in terms of its usefulness for newbies. But even experienced bloggers have rarely done as much blogging as Tris has, since he does it for a living, on many different blogs. Not that many of us have set up a personal blog, a business blog, a podcast blog, a video blog, a portfolio blog, and a lifestreaming blog just for ourselves, but Tris has.

Those, in case you’re wondering, are the 6 easy projects. I don’t think Tris picked the title, because nowhere in his text or his table of contents does he refer to these as the six projects, even though he has a chapter for each one—and also a chapter, which he mercifully leaves for last, on making money with your blog. I say “mercifully” because there has been far too much written on the topic of how to get rich quick by blogging. Tris knows that if you want to quit your day job in order to blog, it’s going to take both time and hard work, and probably luck, too.

In any case, the “6 Easy Projects” are not what get you started: they form the second half of the book. The first half covers important basics of blogging, including domain names, hosting, and different blogging platforms—though like any sensible person, Tris uses self-hosted WordPress for most of his examples.

The book is nicely designed, with new terms defined in callout boxes and bright blue sidebars addressing topics ranging from the worst domain names of all time to the Paste from Word button to reasons not to have comments on your blog. Tris’ style is friendly and accessible, and he explains things well. He would, however, have benefited from a more eagle-eyed proofreader, as there are a number of word substitutions of the sort that spelling checkers rarely catch. The funniest comes on page 121, under the heading “Writing.”

You don’t want a perspective client saying to themselves, ‘Jeez, they couldn’t even spell check their posts. How will they handle my business?’

That should be a prospective client, though people in a few fields do have clients for whom they do perspective work.

The six projects overlap quite a bit. Tris actually covers all forms of multimedia in the personal blog chapter, but doesn’t go into detail about them. Likewise, any business blog might use photos, audio, or video, but in this case Tris introduces some new elements, like screencasting, as well as discussing comment policies and corporate blogging policies. He also tells you how to get Google Analytics to e-mail reports to you.

The podcasting chapter is a good capsule treatment of that subject. Tris describes some basic audio editing techniques, introduces the concept of podsafe music, enjoins readers to make sure they use correct ID3 tags, laments the shortage of hosting options for audio, and shows you how to submit your podcast to iTunes and use the Blubrry PowerPress plugin. If you’re serious about podcasting, there are more books to read, but all this advice is sound and will get you off to a good start.

The video blogging section introduces us to the rule of thirds and the importance of good audio quality for video, as well as providing more important reminders about copyright. The surprise takeaway for me was the reminder that Windows Movie Maker does more than create slideshows from still images. I don’t record much video myself and haven’t bothered to learn how to use Adobe Premiere; the little video editing I’ve done has been in Camtasia. The idea that I might be able to do something useful with Movie Maker is encouraging.

Tris also addresses the vexed issue of video formats and makes a good argument for taking YouTube’s guidelines as a useful set of standards. As in the podcasting chapter, he covers hosting and iTunes. (The basics of embedding a video into a WordPress post are back in the chapter on setting up a personal blog.)

The chapter on portfolio blogs spends a little time on themes, and a little time on plugins (note that Featured Content Gallery, which he mentions on page 194, is getting a bit long in the tooth; I just tried SlideDeck for WordPress and like its ease of use and versatility), but also addresses issues like shopping carts and photo-sharing sites. On the whole, Tris appears to be of the belief that you should host your media files somewhere other than your own server if you possibly can, and not just to avoid storage and bandwidth charges.

Tris moves away from WordPress in the lifestreaming chapter, pointing out, rightly, that this is primarily the realm of a variety of hosted services that aggregate your content from other sources. He covers Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, Tumblr, and Cliqset—the last of which I hadn’t heard of until reading this book. But he also tells you how to create a DIY lifestreaming blog in WordPress, then wraps up with a quick look at the comment-aggregating services Disqus and Intense Debate.

The final chapter is, as I said, “Making Money Through Your Blog.” It’s a refreshingly sensible and straightforward approach to the topic. My only quibble is with his division of methods into “direct” and “indirect,” because I would consider all of them “direct” methods. Indirectly earning income from your blog is getting hired as a consultant or speaker because someone is impressed with your blogging. But there’s advertising revenue and then there’s fee-for-service revenue, the kind that comes when you are a blogger for hire or when you produce sponsored posts on your own blog.

I highly recommend this book, and believe it will be almost as valuable a year from now as it is today, because most of the guidance it provides isn’t about the state of the technology.

How to Configure Your WordPress Site for Mobile Devices (in One Minute)

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George Smyth asked me to do another segment on his One Minute How-To podcast, and I picked this as a topic.

First, log into your dashboard and go to “Plugins.” Select “Add New” from the menu.

search for plugins within WordPress

Type “WordPress Mobile Pack” into the search box and click the button that says “Search Plugins.”

WordPress Mobile Pack listing

Click “Install Now.” When the dialog box pops up and asks “Are you sure you want to install this plugin?” click “OK.”

Activate the plugin.

“Once the plugin is activated, you can modify settings under “Appearance.”

WordPress Mobile Pack settings

The plugin detects mobile browsers automatically. You can decide whether to include a link in your footer so mobile users can choose to see your regular theme instead of the mobile theme, and which mobile theme to use. (There are screenshots in your Themes directory.)

Instill-Leadership-New-Theme  WordPress MobilePack screenshot

The mobile theme isn’t as pretty, but it makes it possible to read the text on a narrow screen without having to scroll around.

There’s another popular mobile plugin, WPTouch, that people really like, but it’s just gone pro and costs $29. If most of your mobile visitors use touch-screen phones, it might be worth it.

July 2010 Meetup Notes: Choosing a Canon of Plugins

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Questions & Answers
Marquee?

Susan started off by asking about putting a marquee (scrolling text) on her WP site as a placeholder for forthcoming content. Though none of us had used such a plugin, we found a few in the plugin repository and tested Marquee Plus on Sallie’s test blog.

Marquee Plus input

marquee plus options

The initial result was pretty bland, but what I didn’t notice during the test was that you can include HTML tags and style your text that way—or make links.

Marquee Plus first test

Enclosing the words in <h1> tags produced the following result:

Marquee Plus test 2

How do I keep a post on the top of the home page?

To keep a post at the top of your blog’s index page (index.php) even after you have posted more recent items, check the “make post sticky” option in publish. (You can also set this in the “Quick Edit” section.) This only works on the main index page, not on the archive or category pages.

Sticky Post in edit window

sticky post in quick edit

Image gallery that links to posts?

Mari asked how to create a gallery of images that linked to posts like the one at No Recipes.

post thumbnail gallery from no recipe

It appears to be a Random Posts widget of some kind. We took a look at the Advanced Random Posts plugin, which has an option to show post thumbnails, but no obvious way to leave out the titles. It’s probably worth doing some further searching and testing. Prizes for anyone who locates the best plugin.

Do you need a development server/test installation of WP?

It’s always a good idea to have a test site of some sort, either installed locally or online, where you can experiment with plugins and themes, particularly if the plugins are older and you don’t know whether they’ll work with your version of WordPress. But you can test them on a live site, too. The worst thing that’s likely to happen is that you’ll have to go into the plugin directory by FTP and delete the plugin if it breaks your site completely.

What’s the difference between WordPress.com widgets and WordPress.org Plugins?

WordPress.com gives you a set number of available widgets to add to your sidebar, and that’s it. On the plus side, they’re all guaranteed to work, and to work together. When you install a plugin on your WordPress.org site, there are many ways it can extend the site’s function. Sometimes that will be through a widget, but not always. The plugin could do something like back up the site, create a sitemap, add elements to posts and pages, etc.

Note that there are more than 10,000 plugins in the repository right now, and they don’t all play well together. No developer can test his/her plugin against all the others, never mind all the combinations.

Do widgets always have to be in the sidebar?

It’s up to your theme designer. Some themes also have widgetized footers or headers. If you’re designing a theme, you can put a widgetized area almost anyplace. But if you’re not comfortable editing the code to insert a widgetized region, you’re stuck with what the designer has provided, and should look for a theme that already has widgets where you want them. Note that widgets don’t always translate from theme to theme, so if you change themes, your widgets might end up in the “Inactive Widgets” section.

Is there a cross-platform offline blog editor?

Yes! You can use ScribeFire, the Firefox (and now Chrome and Safari) plugin to edit posts offline. I have no idea whether it stores local copies of those posts the way Ecto or Windows Live Writer does.

Can you post the same information to more than one WP site simultaneously? We want to keep the information on two sites updated in tandem.

You can use RSS to populate your site with content from elsewhere (if they’re posts), but you may need to do some tweaking. Talk to Anca about this; she’s working on it for a client.

How do I back up my blog?

There are dozens of plugins. The old standby is WP-DB-Backup, which backs up your database and mails it to you. There’s also Automatic WordPress Backup, which backs up your themes, plugins, uploads, and database to Amazon S3. Or you can use the amazing commercial BackupBuddy plugin, which makes restoring/moving sites easy. (With most other options, you need to do a manual restore.) Check for host compatibility before installing.

Your webhost may back up your site, but make sure the backups aren’t stored on the same server as the site itself.

Is there a gallery besides NextGEN that allows user uploads? NextGEN’s public uploader doesn’t give users the option to include a caption.

Uh…good question. If you have an answer, post it to the meetup mailing list!

Rotating Banners

Someone asked at the end about rotating banners. There are themes designed with this feature built in, but also plugins for it. One recent one that’s 3.0 compatible is Banner Rotator FX.

Plugins

We didn’t approach the plugin list comprehensively, and if we’d covered everything, it might have taken us until 5 PM. I’ve distributed the list separately and uploaded it to the meetup site.

The summary is that Sallie thinks every site should have:

Other plugins tend to vary depending on what you’re using the site for.

You can find Sallie’s Plugin Bookmarks on Delicious. There are 257 of them as I type this.

Mobile Plugins/Themes

Note that there are times when you will want a custom mobile theme, because your blog header and footer and sidebar don’t display normally (if at all) in WPTouch or WordPress Mobile Pack. But these themes can make navigation of your site much easier for users of smartphones. You should give users the options to choose to use the mobile theme or not through a theme switcher link.

WPTouch switcher link

WordPress Mobile Pack Switcher Link

You’ll need to create custom icons for your different pages in WPTouch. You can generate them using the Flavor Studios iPhone Icon Generator. Note that these may be overwritten if you update the plugin!

Announcements

Graham Bird won a copy of Beginning WordPress 3 by Stephanie Leary, donated by Apress. We look forward to reading Graham’s review. There’s another copy in the WordPress Meetup Lending Library at TechLiminal. If you leave a $10 deposit and sign the book out, you can take it home for a while.

New Sponsor

The Meetup has a new sponsor, WP Questions. If you’re a WP expert, you can make a few bucks answering questions. If you’re a WordPress newbie, you can get help for just a few bucks.

Future Meetups

We’ll hold our next meetup on August 22nd. The topic is BuddyPress. If you have a topic you’d like to present on, submit an idea or send me an e-mail.

Review: Blogging to Drive Business

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Blogging to Drive Business Book Cover

Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections

By Eric Butow, Rebecca Bollwitt

Published Jan 7, 2010 by Que. Part of the Que Biz-Tech series.
Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 inches

ISBN-10: 0-7897-4256-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-4256-8

MSRP: $19.79
Amazon Price: $16.49 (affiliate link)

Overall, the advice in this book is good, but it suffers occasionally from not being quite sure who its audience is.

Most of the time, the authors seem to be speaking to medium or large companies, as when, in Chapter 6 (“Who Will Write the Blog?”), they advise hiring (or promoting) someone to be the social media director, or hiring a full-time blogger who has established a following in the same industry. Likewise, they use examples and case studies taken from corporate blogs: My Starbucks Idea, the Huffington Post, Rubbermaid, Intel Inside Story, BusinessWeek, Whole Foods, Molson Coors.

But Chapter 3, “Creating a Blogging Strategy,” focuses primarily on consumer-level tools. It’s as if this chapter were actually written for an entirely different book, one aimed at hobbyist bloggers or a more general reader. The authors list WordPress.com without mentioning that the free blogs hosted there are supposed to be for personal, non-commercial purposes, and mention LiveJournal, a tool used almost exclusively for sharing personal stories with select groups of friends. The closest they come to mentioning an enterprise content management system is a brief entry for Drupal.

And they almost never actually tell the readers which of these platforms, if any, the blogs in their examples are running on.

Likewise  the analytics and marketing tools they mentioned are primarily lower-end, small-business kinds of tools. While even a large corporation might benefit from Google Analytics  and Google Alerts, most of them are also in a position to take advantage of paid services that offer more detailed, human-filtered analyses of the company’s online reputation or website visitors. And most will also need, and quite possibly already use, higher-end e-mail service providers of the sort that integrate with Salesforce.com, not a basic Constant Contact account.

Chapter 9, “An Overview of Web 3.0 Technologies,” should have been left out altogether, or at least retitled—its main purpose seems to be buzzword value. The authors themselves admit on pages 152-153 that even those on the forefront of developing web technologies don’t agree on a definition of Web 3.0, and most of the actual tools mentioned in the rest of the chapter are really Web 2.0 tools. The space would have been better spent addressing the mobile web and the importance of making your blog accessible to those using mobile devices to read it.

While the broad strokes of the book’s guidance about such things as comments, blog authorship, tone, etc. are sound enough, the details are dubious. Most of the statistics seem to come from Technorati, and there are some erroneous statements, like the claim on page 45 that Blogspot blogs rank higher than others because Google owns Blogger. There’s actually almost nothing you can do to improve the SEO on a Blogger blog, and they don’t come up at the top of search results or appear in lists of top blogs all that often. Google would, in fact, lose its credibility as a search engine if it gave automatic priority to any blogspot.com sites, regardless of their content.

The book would have benefited considerably from thorough fact-checking and from evaluation by someone who was checking every chapter against the question “Who is this book for?” and “Does this chapter actually address the subject of blogging to drive business?” It wouldn’t have hurt to have a few more concrete examples of the ways blogs had actually increased sales, preferably with some hard numbers.

So while there’s some worthwhile material here, in the final analysis, I can’t recommend the book, because I think it might mislead or confuse those who are totally new to blogging, and annoy rather than enlighten those who are more familiar with it.

June 2010 Handout: WordPress Security Basics

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Sources for the Presentation

Sallie’s Security Bookmarks (updated regularly)

Protecting WordPress from the Inside Out (a brilliant presentation by Syed Balkhi)

Hardening WordPress (the original Codex article)

WordPress Security Presentation by Brad Williams (from WordCamp Montreal 2009)

Top 5 WordPress Security Tips You Probably Don’t Follow (WordPress Tavern Guest Post)

Keeping Your Self-Hosted WordPress Blog Secure (by Marcelo Lewin)

How to Improve Basic Security on a Fresh WordPress Install (Weblog Tools Collection)

More Plugins for Securing Your WordPress Install (Weblog Tools Collection)

WordPress Security Monitoring and Diagnosis (Weblog Tools Collection)

Latest WordPress Hacks: It’s Your Responsibility (Mark.Watero.us)

Security Plugins

AntiVirus (An A-V program just for WordPress)

Automatic WordPress Backup (Backs your WP files and DB to Amazon S3)

Secure WordPress (Conflicts with WordPress Firewall)

ServerBuddy by PluginBuddy (Checks for security flaws and plugin compatibility)

Theme Authenticity Checker (Checks for spam links in your themes)

WordPress Database Backup (Scheduled or manual backups of your WP database)

WordPress Exploit Scanner (Checks for signs that you’ve been hacked. Results can be confusing to non-geeks)

WordPress File Monitor (E-mails you every time a file has been changed)

WordPress Firewall (Blocks suspected attacks; conflicts with Secure WordPress)

WordPress Security Scan (Scans for file permissions; lets you change WP table prefix)

April 2010 Meetup Notes: WordPress Q & A

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Anet wants to carpool from the North Bay to WordCamp on May 1st. If you’re planning to drive down from that area, contact her at anetdunne [at] gmail [dot] com.

Sepehr wants to work on Hybrid theme framework – Linda Shum has experience with this and offers to talk to him after the meetup.

Darren asks about child themes. There’s a nice updated article in the Codex (http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes), but basically a child theme is a way to customize a theme without changing the original theme files, so when the theme is updated, you don’t lose your customizations. Lori’s presentation shows us a child theme of twentyten, the new default theme for WordPress 3.0.

Linda wants to know about using jQuery in WordPress; she’s had some trouble with it. Anca does too—Bill has a link from Digging into WordPress: http://digwp.com/2009/06/including-jquery-in-wordpress-the-right-way/, and adds that you should read the comments.

We talk a bit about security and about hosting, which are related topics right now because of the so-called Pharma Hack that’s going around. Sallie has a collection of bookmarks on WordPress security at http://delicious.com/authorizer/wordpress+security. Regarding this particular hack, you should check your file permissions. There’s a plugin to help you do this called ServerBuddy by PluginBuddy.com (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/serverbuddy-by-pluginbuddy/). It will check your file and folder permissions and will also (as a bonus) tell you whether the fabulous BackupBuddy plugin will run on your site. (You have to pay for that one, but if you’re a developer who has to migrate sites a lot, you’ll find it’s worth it.)

Speaking of hosts, good choices for WordPress hosting are Bluehost, HostGator, and Liquid Web. (Anca and Lori are both Liquid Web resellers.) There’s also a new service called Page.ly that will handle your backups and updates in addition to hosting your WP site, for $14.99/month.

We will hold a future meetup on the topic of security, and if we don’t find an expert to speak on the subject, Anca and Sallie (the backup expert) and Lou Anne will do it together. Meanwhile, if you want to know more about backup plugins for WordPress, see http://www.fileslinger.com/tags/wordpress/).

Sepehr asks about plugins for making your archives more interesting. Sallie suggests the Snazzy Archives plugin, which puts all of your archives on one page.

clip_image002

Darren asks about improvements to the Custom Fields interface; Trish says she knows of a good plugin, Custom Field Template.

The winner of this month’s book drawing (for Sams Teach Yourself WordPress in 10 Minutes) was Valerie Fahs-Thatcher. We’ll be keeping an eye out for your Amazon review, Valerie, and I hope the book is helpful.

Announcements

Anca’s WordPress class at TechLiminal starts Monday, April 19th. If you want to learn more about WordPress, sign up at http://techliminal.com/learn-2-wordpress/.

The WordPress Bay Area Foothills (that’s the South Bay) Meetup, run by Lou Anne McKeefery and Ann Zerega, meets this Wednesday evening at the Milpitas Library. The speaker is Alex King from the WP Help Center. RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/Wordpress-Bay-Area-CA-Foothills/. (This month you can attend by telephone.)

The Bay Area (meaning San Francisco) WordPress Meetup, in a fit of bad planning, also scheduled its meeting for Wednesday, April 21. They’re talking about “totally awesome plugins and themes.” You can RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/wordpress-sf/.