style="font-size:15px;"> Nothing beats watching how something is done, and that's why I've provided several hours' worth of video about how you can use WordPress. Most lessons in the book have an accompanying video which not only illustrates several of the examples in the lesson, but goes well beyond what can be covered in print. You'll also gain more insight into the creation of the sample website discussed in the book: Island Travel.
If you have an existing WordPress site – a self-hosted version or a blog on WordPress.com– I encourage you to work along in the admin screen. If you don't have a site, you could install WordPress if you have a web hosting account (see Lesson 3) or you could open an account with WordPress.com. The main thing is that you be able to practice what's covered in the book and on these videos, which can be viewed at www.wrox.com/go/wp24vids.
Also online you'll find a PDF with links to each of the more than 400 plugins mentioned in the book. You can find the plugins under the lesson where they were mentioned. Click on a link and you'll be taken to the listing in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.
Conventions
To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what's happening, we've used a number of conventions throughout the book.
WARNING Boxes like this one hold important, not-to-be-forgotten information that is directly relevant to the surrounding text.
NOTE Notes, tips, hints, tricks, and asides to the current discussion are presented in boxes like this.
PLUGINS
At the end of virtually all the lessons, you'll find a box like this with a list of plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory related to the topics of that lesson. Commercial plugins are not covered here, with the occasional exception.
REFERENCE Reference References like this one point you to the website at www.wrox .com/go/wp24vids to watch the instructional video that accompanies a given lesson.
As for styles in the text:
● We highlight new terms and important words when we introduce them.
● We show URLs and code within the text like so: persistence.properties.
Errata
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To find the errata page for this book, go to www.wrox.com and locate the title using the Search box or one of the title lists. Then, on the Book Search Results page, click the Errata link. On this page, you can view all errata that has been submitted for this book and posted by Wrox editors.
NOTE Note A complete book list, including links to errata, is also available at www.wrox.com/misc-pages/booklist.shtml.
If you don't spot “your” error on the Errata page, click the Errata Form link and complete the form to send us the error you have found. We'll check the information and, if appropriate, post a message to the book's errata page and fix the problem in subsequent editions of the book.
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Section I
Before You Start
Lesson 1
Thinking Like WordPress
WordPress provides you with the tools to create, organize, and update your website content. Those tools function in specific ways, just as one type of word processing software has its specific buttons for creating, say, lists. But there's a difference between knowing which button to press to create a list and thinking about ways to use lists in your documents. That's what this lesson is about: learning to think like WordPress so that you can build or rebuild your website in an efficient and flexible manner from the start, and to use it in new and useful ways.
The driving principle behind this way of thinking is: Store everything in the smallest possible piece; then assemble as needed. It's the way of the digital world – photographs assembled out of pixels, data stored in database fields, or video recorded in bytes. WordPress operates with this kind of thinking, and you can make better use of its power if you think of your website and its content in this way.
Static Versus Dynamic Web Pages
If you right-click while viewing a page in your web browser, you'll see a tool called View Source, which displays the HTML of the page you're currently viewing. If you try this tool, it appears as though you're viewing a single file, but for most websites today, that's an illusion. In most cases there is no corresponding file sitting on a web server. Instead, the server has combined dozens and dozens of files in a split second to create what you're seeing with View Source.
That
