WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

 

Preface

About 120,000 blogs are created every day. Most of them quickly die, but a few stay, grow up, and then become well known and respected places on the Web. If you are seriously interested in being in the top league, you will need to learn all the tricks of the trade. WordPress 2.7 Cookbook focuses on providing solutions to common WordPress problems, to help make sure that your blog will be one of the ones that stay. 

The author's experience with WordPress enables him to share insights on using WordPress effectively, in a clear and friendly way, giving practical hands-on solutions  to WordPress problems, questions, and common tasks—from themes to widgets and  from SEO to security. 

Are you feeling limited with WordPress, or are you wondering how popular blogs do a certain kind of thing that you can't? With this cookbook, you will learn many WordPress secrets and techniques with step-by-step, useful recipes dedicated to achieving a particular goal or solving a particular problem. You'll learn the secret of expensive  premium themes, how to optimize your blog for SEO and online profits, and how to supercharge WordPress with killer functions used by the most popular blogs over  the Internet.

What this book covers 

Chapter 1 introduces you to WordPress. It introduces you to some basic—but often forgotten—built-in tools to make your blogger life easier. 

Chapter 2 discusses the various WordPress themes and provides you with the location where to find professional—but free—themes. It also teaches you how to install and customize these themes. Chapter 3 teaches you how to customize any existing WordPress theme and make it fit your taste and need.

Chapter 4 describes an easy procedure to install plugins. It shows what different plugins can do for you in particular situations. It also teaches you how to download and install widgets and how to make a WordPress theme widget-ready. 

Chapter 5 describes the procedure to display posts and to retrieve post information  from WordPress. Chapter 6 teaches you to manage a multi-author blog and integrate powerful functions for creating an author page template. 

Chapter 7 educates you about hacks, plugins, and tips and tricks to secure your database and your WordPress blog. Chapter 8 teaches you—by providing you with tips and tricks—the art of getting traffic from search engines to your blog. 

Chapter 9 discusses the monetization solution that can be used in a WordPress blog.  It will also provide you with many tips and tricks to make money while blogging. 

Chapter 10 helps you make your blog easy and functional for your visitors. 

Chapter 11 provides you with tips and hacks to make your blog better than your competitor's blog.

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Learn JAVA For Web Development

Introduction

This book is for a large cross section of modern Java web developers, with various levels of experience.

Learning the Java programming language is a noble cause, but learning merely the Java language  is not enough in the real world. Java developers have to learn Java EE, a collection of related  server-side technologies, to put their Java skills to any real use.

But learning Java EE is not enough either. The Java language along with Java EE may suffice to develop web applications for projects in the same organization, as a means to reusability, but the diverse landscape of Java on the Web is permeated with several web frameworks, such as Spring Web MVC, that make development much easier; thus, a Java web developer has to have the knowledge of these web frameworks.

But this is not enough still. In the very first line of this introduction, I mentioned that this book is for a modern Java web developer. Modern Java is more than just a language; it is now a fully optimized platform because several other languages such as Groovy and Scala, called the JVM languages, now run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). All such JVM languages, especially Groovy, have a close association with Java, and you will come across web applications before long where Java and these other JVM languages work in tandem. The most ambitious projects will require you to build web applications using these JVM languages.

This book addresses all the needs of a modern Java web developer. It is designed for beginners up to intermediate developers and explains the specifics of Java on the Web. For example, this book is perfect for developers who are aware of technologies like MVC but do not yet understand how and why they have changed the way web applications are built.

This book is also for developers who want to learn frameworks other than JSF 2 (which is bundled with Java EE). This book covers four types of web frameworks: request based, component based, rapid, and reactive. Among these four types, the book covers five proven web frameworks: Struts 2, Spring Web MVC, JSF 2, Grails 2, and Play 2.

In addition, this book is for developers who have no experience in the Java, Groovy, and Scala programming languages but who yearn to create web applications. This book provides the essentials of these three languages in the appendixes.

Instead of simply pronouncing one web framework the best, Learn Java for Web Development shows the strengths of the most popular web frameworks by means of a real-world bookstore application. Developing a complete real application necessitates a seamless collaboration of dynamic functionalities, and the code for building such components is contrived and too involved. Instead of focusing on developing such moving parts, this book confines its attention on leveraging the strengths of each web framework.

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Essential GWT

The trend toward Cloud Computing has even spawned a new concept: the “Death of the Desktop.” This presents rather starkly the problem of going overboard, to the limit: From the appearance of mini netbooks (with flash-based disks, slow processors, not much RAM) and iPhone-look-alike cell phones, some have reached the conclusion that desktop applications (and even desktop computers!) are on their way out. If this were true, it could be great for GWT developers, but things are a bit different.

Despite several impressive opinions and pronouncements from people all over the industry, the trend toward more powerful machines, with CPUs, memory, and I/O facilities that put to shame the supercomputers of just a few years ago, doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Even if you are enamored with the latest netbooks or high-powered cellphones, you should accept that working all the time with minimal screens isn’t the way that things can get done at a company. (And for gaming or graphic-intense usages, small machines aren’t so hot either; they may do, however, for business-oriented applications.) In any case, GWT can help you because you can use its layout facilities and CSS styling to produce applications for just about any device out there.

Also, remove the rosy glasses for an instant. Cloud computing offers several advantages (and GWT applications can be considered to be right in the middle of that concept) but also presents problems, so you need to plan accordingly. Aside from the obvious difficulty of dealing with possibly flaky web connections, security and compatibility can be stumbling blocks. (On the other hand, scalability is well handled; there are plenty of large sites, with hundreds or thousands of servers, proving that web applications can scale well.) The important point is, with or without desktops, GWT provides some ways around these kind of problems, and we’ll study this in upcoming chapters.6
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Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is another expression that has been bandied about a lot since its invention in 2004. Though there are way too many definitions for it, most seem to agree on the idea of using the “Web as Platform,” where all applications run in a browser instead of being preinstalled on your desktop. Furthermore, the idea of allowing users to produce their own contents (à la Wikipedia) is also included, highlighting the collaborative aspect of work, and thus bringing into the fold all kind of community and social networking sites (think Facebook or YouTube). Finally (and that’s what actually works for us) the concept of mashing together different data sources (probably from many web services) is also included.

Designing Web Interfaces

In architecture, parti refers to the underlying concept of a building.* Will it be an academic structure aimed at increasing cross-disciplinary collaboration or a theater flexible enough to support quick set changes? To bring a specific parti to life, architects must not only define its essence but also know how to manage the huge number of considerations that ultimately impact its construction.

Design principles are the guiding light for any architect’s parti. They define and communicate the key characteristics of a building to a wide variety of stakeholders, including clients, builders, city planners, and engineers. Design principles articulate the fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against and thereby keep the pieces of a project moving toward an integrated whole. But design principles are not enough.

Every aspect of a building from an attic to a Zen garden has a set of opportunities and limitations that can either add to or detract from the main concept or parti. These include standard dimensions, spacing requirements, aesthetics, physical limitations, and more. Architects who want to bring coherent visions to life need to learn the detailed ins and outs of these design considerations so they can select the best solutions from the options available. 

This combination of design principles at the top and design considerations at the bottom is what allows architects to fill in the middle with meaningful buildings that enable people and organizations to interact, communicate, and get things done.

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Those of us whose parti is bringing rich web applications to life can also benefit from a framework of design principles and considerations to guide us. In these pages, Bill Scott and Theresa Neil give us just that. Through 30 years of designing and developing software, Bill and Theresa have been the consummate taxonomists—naming, documenting, and sharing in loving detail what makes rich interactions succeed and fail.

The breadth of solutions they have encountered has given them a unique perspective on the design principles behind the most successful rich interactions on the Web. From “make it direct” to “react immediately,” the principles he outlines in this book are your yardstick for measuring the value that rich interactions bring to your web application. Through in-depth descriptions of context and trade-offs, Bill and Theresa support each principle with the design considerations and best practices you need to make informed decisions. Engineers, product managers, marketers, and designers can rally around and continually return to these principles and considerations to ensure that everyone is evaluating the impact of design decisions the same way.

This combination of rich web interaction design principles at the top and design considerations at the bottom allows web designers to fill in the middle with meaningful structures that enable people and organizations to interact, communicate, and get things done. Just like our friends, the architects.

So, dive in and immerse yourself in the direction and details you need to bring your rich web application partis to life!

Acknowledgments

It was not love at first sight with me and JavaScript. Yet today, it’s one of my two favorite programming languages. The other? Its little brother, CoffeeScript. The story of how I learned to stop worrying and love JavaScripting is a story shared by tens of thousands of programmers. I’d like to thank those who took JavaScript seriously from the start, shaping the rich development ecosystem the language enjoys today: John Resig, for creating the browser’s de facto standard library, jQuery; Jeremy Ashkenas, for producing CoffeeScript and the rich yet minimalistic Backbone.js framework; Ryan Dahl, for giving the language a robust server environment; and all the other programmers who’ve proven through their work that JavaScript is a first-class language after all. Of course, love alone didn’t write this book. I’d like to thank the Pragmatic Bookshelf team for helping me thoroughly renovate my original KickStarted manuscript and raise it to the standard of quality that PragProg is famous for. Particular thanks go to managing editor Susannah Pfalzer, head honchos Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, and most of all my editor, Jackie Carter. Their savvy and motivation have been invaluable. Download

Thanks also to my technical reviewers for this edition: Julien Biezemans, Christophe Porteneuve, Michael Ficarra, Travis Swicegood, and Lon Ingram. Special thanks to Karl Stolley for going above and beyond in multiple reviews. I’d also like to thank Stan Angeloff and Roly Fentanes for reviewing the original manuscript. Any remaining errors are entirely my fault. Thanks, finally, to my employer, HubSpot, for supporting me as I brought this book to completion. After years of nomadic freelancing, I’ve finally found a home.

Trevor Burnham 

trevorburnham@gmail.com 

November 2012