I still remember the first blogs I made with WordPress. I chose WordPress because it’s so easy to use. But I also remember I spent lots of hours to find out which plugins I wanted to install and how to configure them. A couple of weeks ago, Packt Publishing released WordPress 3 Cookbook, that solves that problem. I read the book and here’s my opinion!
WordPress 3 Cookbook differs a lot from other WordPress books. Most books are written to read from the first page to the last page. This book offers answers to particular questions, called recipes. For example, if you want to include an image gallery in your blog, this book tells you which plugin to use and how to use it in a couple of pages.
Who This Book Is For
In the first place, WordPress 3 Cookbook aims for WordPress users who just started with WordPress. If you’re blog is running and you know how to write post, but you still have a lot of questions about which plugins are best to install, this book is perfect for you.
But also experienced users who are comfortable with WordPress can learn new things, or how to do things better. Especially the manual code changes (for example) could be very interesting. If you’re an experienced user, just take a look at the table of contents to see if WordPress 3 Cookbook for you.
WordPress 3 Cookbook Content
WordPress 3 Cookbook is devided in 9 chapters:
- Chapter 1: The WordPress Cook’s Tools
- Chapter 2: Installing and Customizing Themes
- Chapter 3: Working with Plugins and Widgets
- Chapter 4: Customizing Content Display
- Chapter 5: Building Interactivity and Community
- Chapter 6: Implementing Online Sales and Advertising
- Chapter 7: Making an SEO Friendly Site
- Chapter 8: Enhancing Usability and Accessibility
- Chapter 9: Managing Maintenance and Improving Security
What You Will Learn From This Book :
- Turn any free WordPress theme into a powerful and polished premium theme by changing colors and fonts, inserting your custom logo, and more
- Learn how plugins and widgets work, and how you can create your own
- Integrate popular services into your site including Twitter, facebook, and FeedBurner
- Learn proven techniques to attract more readers and comments
- Incorporate advertisements into your RSS feed and add a shopping cart to your site
- Tips and tricks to secure your site and optimize it for SEO
What I like about this book
This “hands on” book is written in clear language and is very accessible. The idea of recepis is great: they always start with a problem and then a solution is offered. Step by step you’ll learn how to implement the solution and most recipes end with related recipes or more information.
In most cases the solution is a plugin. So after reading this book you’ll know which plugins to use. Some solutions also offer code changes. If you have some php knowledge, you’ll see this is very easy to do.
You can read the book from beginning till the end and it won’t bore you. Thanks to the recipes, there’s a lot of variation. But you can also choose to read the recipes you’re interested in.
Conclusion
WordPress 3 Cookbook reads very easy and fast. In short, this is the book I needed 2 years ago when I just started with WordPress. I spent hours and hours searching for information about which plugins I should install. This book handles most of them. I can only highly recommend WordPress 3 Cookbook to anyone who wants to get more out of WordPress.