WordPress: the missing manual

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WordPress: the missing manual
MacDonald, Matthew
O’Reilly Media Inc., www.oreillycom
$29.99, 545p,  978-1-449-30984-8,  2013
Interest Level:  personal & business users,   Excellent

This book is a recipe book for success as a blogger or website designer. The author, Matthew MacDonald, has created a soup-to-nuts book (how to create, manage, maintain, and extend a WordPress site) with the dessert course in the appendices (migrating WordPress and useful sites). Each chapter introduces and fully explains the concept in clear and concise wordings and illustrations to enable the reader to follow along successfully. There are no hardware requirements for WordPress except a web browser and an Internet connection because WordPress loses its magic when it exists anywhere but on the web.

The book is flexible in the way a reader can utilize the information. It makes a great how-to book for everyone from a beginner to an advanced user. It explains that there are two ways you can create a site (hosted by WordPress or self-hosting/ auto installer or manually). It then goes on to clearly describe the steps necessary for both procedures.

For myself, the first thing I browsed through was the appendix and the Table of Contents. Then I read Part 1 so I could decide whether to host a site on WordPress.com or self-host on my site. In Part 2 I learned the important tools needed to create, post, pick an appropriate theme, and manage comments. If one only wants a simple blog then Part 3 and 4 can be ignored or saved for future endeavors. However, in these chapters the author explains how to customize your site, how to protect yourself by creating a child theme, and how to add e-commerce to you site with PayPal and shopping carts. The tips and tricks and cautions that the author mentions will help readers avoid pitfalls.

The book will make a good reference tool to have handy for when you want to customize or enhance a site. The best thing is that owners of the book  (remember to register) have access to a website where all corrections and updates are posted.

The only change I would suggest is to make the index in the ebook the same as the paperback. The words indexed in the paperback are in bold type so they stand out to the eye. In the ebook they are in plain type. The words need to be in bold so that they stand out against the active blue links that can be clicked on to navigate to the appropriate place in the book.

     Both the ebook and the paperback contain the same material. They are both well suited to either format. By saying this, I mean the pages and chapters in the paperback are clearly readable. The size of the text and crispness of the diagrams that are appropriately placed on the two-page spread make this a very useful reference tool for a very powerful application.

The choice of ebook versus paperback is definitely a personal one. Some people think the paperback is a doorstop. But I must admit that the ebook is easy to use and very portable.

This ebook or paperback is very informative, clearly organized, and very thoroughly indexed for retrieval of information. There is something for the reader at every level. Beginners should refer to Parts 1 and 2. Advanced users will find Parts 3 and 4 will describe how to create an outstanding site. Readers will find that Appendix B has links for downloadable plug-ins while the book itself has a website available for updates and corrections.

As you skim some chapters and digest others you will find that WordPress has evolved into a “flexible, easy-to-use tool for creating virtually any sort of website”. The sites themselves are dynamic presenting the information to readers on the fly.        Reviewed by Linda McNeil