Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog

This is not a beginner's book on WordPress. If you are a beginner or slightly experienced WordPress user, get "WordPress For Dummies", 3rd Edition, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. If you know you r WordPress basics and want to go further, you want and need this book. (It is, in my opinion, far superior to "WordPress Bible" by Aaron Brazell.) It is clear that Hedengren knows the internals of WordPress. He is not the best writer on the planet and his editor is no prizewinner either, but if you want to know more about developing for WordPress and deploying WordPress more effectively, this is the book you want, even though it can be tough to follow at times. You'd best have a more than basic understanding of XHTML, CSS and PHP. Hedengren covers in detail what he describes as the "WordPress essentials", those being the WordPress syntax and the WordPress loop. The chapter on the loop is easily worth the price of the book. Next he moves on to designing and developing WordPress themes. While you may never design a theme, the information given about themes in this 85 page section will vastly increase your understanding of how themes work and what you can do with themes you are using. Plug-ins are next. It took me a little bit to recognize the usefulness of plug-ins, which extend the functionality of WordPress without bloating the code of theme itself. But Hedengren does a good job of walking the user through plug-ins, their utility and how to create and implement them. The chapter on using WordPress as a Content Management System is the most thorough treatment of this subject I have seen anywhere. It left me wanting still more information, which means just sitting down with WordPress and experimenting with it - a lot of experimenting. The value of this chapter is that Hedengren answers a lot of questions about WordPress as a CMS and provides the keys for moving forward. The last section is bits and pieces covering "design trickery", adding extra functionality to stock and custom WordPress themes, having "fun with images" and "integrating the social web". Good tips overall. Great book - except for its own design. Poor graphic design always calls attention to itself, sometimes to the exclusion of content. Think Wired Magazine as an example of incredibly poor graphic design - and you also identified what appears to be the primary influence on the designer of this book. From page numbers incongruously located on the center outside edge of each page to the narrow margins, this book stands out as being designed by someone who doesn't read and certainly doesn't use books. Spot color is used throughout the book, except in the code examples where it could have been used to great effect. Oh well, you can't have everything. For the WordPress user who wants to really get into the nuts and bolts of WordPress, this is the book. Jerry