Lisa Sabin-Wilson

It was mid-2015, and I'd been offered work doing web-content editing for a church whose new website would soon "go live" via the WordPress platform. Serendipitously, this book arrived as a present for my birthday. The giver had not been told of my new job; she'd found the book on my wish list, but ah, such fortuitous timing! Since then, I've often had occasion to refer to this book. It's greatly enhanced my ability to keep the website up-to-date.

I first started with the authors book on Wordpress and was led astray by the glowing reviews of those who had said they had read her book. After reading this, I am left to think that no one really reads Sabin-Wilson unless they have no clue about using a computer and web software. Further in this book, it is very clear that it should never have been published.

The author even knows she should have delayed her efforts. A dozen times throughout she cites how the software, Buddypress is due for show more an update that will integrate with Wordpress much more seamlessly and change everything that she is showing how to do. It would have cut or changed 1/3rd of the book. And she knew it was just a few months away from when she was writing. It is in effect now, and probably was before the book was published.

An editor or the author could have done a lot to make this a useful tool. Instead all the use of the book can be found on the official Buddypress site. I tried to use examples of plugins that the author shows, and found that she leaves off before showing how they in fact work. Thus when they did not work for me, and forced me to search elsewhere for solutions, again i saw that the author is actually making us more dumb by using her book, instead of making us better users, which is what the Dummy series has always been about.

Stay away from this book. It is an outdated resource. It has broken links for her examples are not followed through. You can do better for free at the Buddypress site. Lisa Sabin Wilson, I shall not read your books again. show less

WordPress For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) is a fairly big book and the 8th edition of all things WordPress. Now I've used WordPress for a short while after spending years over at Blogger (yep, it was a difficult decision, but one I'm glad I made). WordPress has got a lot of extra, really cool features for bloggers, although I would not say it's a blogging site for everyone as I think the UI is not as easy, and some technical ability is required, hence this book.

I'm no expert, but show more you'll be surprised at just how much technical ability to learn just by blogging for years, so the
change my not be that difficult for you.

So what if you're already there? Well, if you are new to WordPress this is an invaluable tool, as it covers all the basics including how to customise the default templates, Twenty- (seventeen, or eighteen etc) and it really does give you a good grounding of where to start if you are a complete novice. There's also information about widgets, plugins, themes and customisation.

The latter can get a little more complicated and this is where I enjoyed this book even more, as it also teaches you a little bit of code required, covering tag values, PHP functions, style sheets, query string parameters and CSS basics. Some of this goes way over my head, but there are bits here and there I've picked up and I'm currently using, that I wasn't before.

Good clean technical fun. Only three stars because "I liked it" - not anything necessarily wrong with it, it's just this sort of book doesn't get me over excited! show less

Why could this book not have been more helpful then it turned out to be...

The author had moments when it should have been. The entire point of this book is to make our use of WordPress.Org something that if we don't master after reading the book and can make a website as well as the authors, at least start the process of making our own websites. A dummies book for just Wordpress.com and blogging would take all of 50 pages and Dummies can't charge you $25 for that.

What goes wrong, oh so much. show more One is that there is not enough dummy humor. Always useful to break up the monotony of computer learning. But that is a minor point. The major problem of Sabin-Wilson is that she thinks to start telling the readers how to master their use of the software. A good thing, except that she fails miserably at telling us how to use the items.

She will have endless tables throughout the book that will tell us the name of a parameter, the information the programming tag. Such as charset, Character settings set in Settings/General, and then does not tell us how to use that, or any of the other long lists and wasted pages of text she devotes to such lists. Even the programming code she took us through in her putting a theme together does not work, and has inconsistencies from her step by step instruction to the code she copied and pasted at the end of it.

Those are the features that should have made this book a powerful tool. Instead it becomes fluff letting you know that Wordpress is powerful but you need to spend money again to find a teacher who actually covers the material in how you can use it. Not who give you lists of the nouns and verbs you can use, but without the rules of what a noun or a verb is in the context of comparing grammar to Wordpress programming.

I have been programming in a lot of languages long enough to know that I can push it and get something out of this book. I can use the list of tens, but this book is not worth $25. If it is worth $10, that is a stretch. show less