About the Author
Hasin Hayder graduated in Civil Engineering from the Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology (RUET) in Bangladesh. He is a Zend-certified Engineer and an expert in localization. Hasin is currently working in one of the leading Ajax startpage company Pageflakes Ltd ( when you are free.
First of all, I would like to thank David Barnes, Patricia Weir, Abhijeet Deobhakta, Nanda Padmanabhan, Nikhil Bangera, and Priyanka Baruah, without whom the book would have never seen the daylight. I would also like to thank Mohan Rapheal and Jimmy Karumalil for their efforts. 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 Reviewer
Nikhil Bangera graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Mumbai University and currently works as an Editor. His academic interests lie in Databases and Computer Security and he feels passionately about anything open source. This made him choose WordPress while looking for a platform to profess his obeisance to The Beatles.
I would like to thank my Mom and Dad for all their love and for keeping me with them for so long. To all my friends who love me, though I still show no promise of ever doing anything useful.
Preface
WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs 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 with very little effort. Its versality and ease of use have attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.
If you want to create powerful, fully featured blogs in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore WordPress showing you what it offers and how to go about building your blog with the system.
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 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. In 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.
What This Book Covers
will take you to the world of blogging by introducing different blog engines available on the Internet. This chapter will also introduce you to the types of blog and the core parts of a blog. You will find this chapter very helpful to find out what the major blog engines are and why we choose WordPress among them.
In or set up in your own web host. You will learn how to install WordPress using FTP, how to manage permissions in the MySQL database, how to install it from cPanel, and how you can upgrade your old WordPress blog to a newer one. This chapter also shows the basic operations to kick start your blog.
One of the main attractive features of WordPress is the availability of thousands of themes. will guide you to where you can get best themes for your blog and how to choose from them. You will also learn basic modification of themes for a quick change in your blod's appearance.
will guide you through the details of administering articles and comments in your blog. It will introduce you to all exciting features that may come handy while writing articles. This chapter also shows you how you can post remotely via using the MetaWeblog API and XML RPC interfaces.
guides you through converting a WordPress blog into full fledged website by using its content management features. With a minimal level of coding you can use WordPress as an awesome content engine for any general purpose website. In this chapter we discuss this process step by step that you can understand it easily.
Delivering feeds and podcasts are what you will learn from . Using all these tricks you can use WordPress as a great tool for audio blogging. You can increase the traffic and quality of your blog by delivering RSS feeds. This chapter will guide you through all these features in a nice and readable way so that you can grasp it quickly.
is one of the most exciting chapter in this book, which will teach you to develop awesome themes for WordPress. You dont need to be a PHP pro to write themes at all. This chapter will show you how you can add cool features to your WordPress theme with a minimal level of coding. This chapter will also introduce you to online theme generators, which will ease your life.
Blogging is for community and that is what you will learn from . How to turn your blog into a community blogging site and how to manager privileges among users is covered in this chapter.
will introduce you to the world of plug-ins and widgets. You can extend the WordPress engine by using these plug-ins and widgets, add awesome features to your blog, and release them to community. This chapter will guide you through the detailed lifecycle of WordPress plug-ins, developing them and working with then cleverly with automated installations. This is one of the coolest chapter from this book.