Hedengren - Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog,

This edition first published 2012

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-119-94271-9 (paperback); ISBN 978-1-119-94366-2 (epdf);
978-1-119-94368-6 (emobi); 978-1-119-94367-9 (epub)

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Dedication

Who do you dedicate a book on WordPress development to? Your parents? Your pets? Your lovers? Your slightly mentally deficient alter ego who wears tights and that weird interpretation of the WordPress W ?

None of the above. What do they know about this stuff anyway? Except that weird W guy, of course. Hes a genius, in his own sense.

Id like to dedicate this book to the WordPress community, the core team, and all developers out there who are contributing to the ecosystem with themes, plugins, and blog and forum posts. Youre all doing something to keep this platform of ours yes, ours propelling forward, and this is important. What were part of here isnt just some web publishing platform thingy to help the major corporations save money. It isnt about creating new blogs, sites, or startups on a budget. Its not even about the accessibility of modern web technology.

This is about being able to express yourself and giving your fellow man the same opportunity. WordPress and open source are as much about free speech and power to the people as anything else. This is what keeps me going, keeps me invested, and keeps me interested in this platform.

So there. This book is dedicated to the possibilities a platform such as WordPress offers for everybody. Use it; speak your mind; make a difference. And have fun while youre at it!

Thord Daniel Hedengren

Introduction

Writing a book about WordPress isnt the easiest endeavor that you could tackle. When my editor and I first started discussing this project, the idea was to create something that not only acts as an introduction to web developers and professionals who want to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, but also sparks the minds to create things beyond the obvious.

Or go beyond the blog, as it were, which is also the subtitle of this book. That subtitle still stands, as this book reaches its third edition.

The whole point is really to prove that WordPress is so much more than a blog-publishing platform. You can build just about anything with it, and you should as well if you like fast deployments and great flexibility. It is not always the perfect choice, but it should definitely be considered at all times. The ease with which you can both build and use this platform is a selling point, just as is the living community that can back you up when you run into problems and the fact that this is open source at its finest.

Although I think that anyone with some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and PHP can learn WordPress from this book, it is important to remember that this is not a beginners book. I start at a pretty high pace to make sure that even professionals get the fundamentals right. It is so easy to stick to familiar territory and do things the way theyve always been done, instead of learning to do them right. And although having the basics in here will help anyone get started with WordPress, you really should know some HTML and CSS and have at least a grasp of what PHP is and does. If those are alien concepts to you, I urge you to read up on them first.