Bud Smith and Michael McCallister. Word Press in Depth. Indianapolis: Que, 2010. 410 pages.
If you haven’t noticed, this blog is in WordPress. I’ve been using the software for about five years, and I’ve never felt that I’ve unlocked its full potential. So I was eager to read WORDPRESS IN DEPTH to get some insight into how to improve it.
Most of the book is geared towards those who host their blogs on wordpress.com, who are generally less invested in blogging than those who install WP themselves and run a blog on their own server space. So there’s a great deal of information about getting started with a blog–all of it useful–including whether to stake out your own domain name and what upgrades to consider on top of the standard, free WP hosting. I’m sure that much of the material walking new users through themes and widgets will be very helpful for…new users.
It’s not until page 229 that we get to wordpress.org-specific stuff, and again much of it is a walk-through. There’s a lengthy section on creating your own theme from scratch, something I’m most interested in, that looks comprehensive, though I haven’t put it into practice yet.
All in all, this looks like a solid guide for someone who hasn’t used WordPress before and doesn’t want to slog through the wordpress.org support forums for hours trying to figure things out. If you’re just getting started, this is probably a good investment, just from the time and frustration you’ll save. More experienced users might not get as much out of it, though they may find that it helps them extend their abilities a bit.