WordPress Bible Reviews

By 

Rev. Gareth Saunders “garethjmsaunders” (Anstruther, Scotland, UK) –

  

The last time I did any major development work on my WordPress blog was version 1.5. The reason being that until recently my Web host didn’t support the latest technical requirements for anything newer than 1.5. But a couple of months ago I moved to a new host and upgraded my installation to 2.9.

A lot of things have changed since WordPress 1.5: widgets, navigation menus, tags, functions.php file in themes, etc. and while I originally used the WordPress Codex to get up to speed with how WordPress is pieced together this time I wanted a book that would do the same but quicker (and offline).

The WordPress Bible is definitely that book. I’ve read quite a few books on WordPress — WordPress QuickStart Guide (Peachpit), Digging Into WordPress (digwp.com), WordPress Complete (Packt), Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress (Apress) — this has been by far the most thorough book I’ve read so far.

The first part of the book, as you might expect, introduces you to what WordPress can do, how to install it, the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) and where to get help beyond the confines of this book. The author then takes you head first into the area of WordPress plugins, widgets, the database schema and the WordPress Loop.

This is a brave move, as most other tutorials or authors would leave these more advanced issues until much later on their books, but one that I think works. By the end of part two I had a much better understanding of how WordPress works in the background and felt much more confident when reading about working with themes and template tags. Hey! By that point I’d already written my own plugin and I wouldn’t class myself as a very accomplished PHP programmer.

The book is quite comprehensive covering important maintenance and upgrade issues, alternative uses for WordPress and how to extend WordPress using the bbPress forum software or BuddyPress to turn it into a social networking site, WordPress Multi-User edition or incorporating the BackPress framework into your own PHP applications. However, the one area that I would have loved to have seen covered in some depth is how the main WordPress application works: what does it do, in what order, when a user visits your WordPress site and pulls in that root index.php file.

That said, if you’re looking for a book that will explain WordPress beyond simply how to install it and what each screen in the WordPress admin does then this is definitely the book for you; particularly if you want to understand how plugins and widgets work and how to incorporate these into your own custom themes.

WordPress Bible Reviews