WordPress 5 Complete

Build beautiful and feature-rich websites from scratch, 7th Edition

Karol Król

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789538533
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Content-Management-Systeme

An in-depth and comprehensive take on WordPress, covering everything about the platform such as WordPress posts, pages, themes, plugins, and more.

Key Features

• Get up to date with the latest WordPress 5.0 (Bebo) and all its new features
• Beginner-friendly layout and advice you can apply from day one with loads of screenshots and examples
• Enrich your development experience with the new block-based editor Gutenberg

Book Description

Back in the day, when you wanted to launch a new website, you either had to learn web programming yourself or hire a professional who would take care of the whole process for you. Nowadays, with WordPress, anyone can build an optimized site with the least amount of effort possible and then make it available to the world in no time.

Here, in the seventh edition of the book, we are going to show you how to build great looking and functional websites using WordPress. The new version of WordPress – 5.0 – comes with a few important changes, and we tell you all about how to use them effectively. From crafting content pages using the block editor, and customizing the design of your site, through to making sure it's secure, we go through it all.

The book starts by introducing WordPress and teaching you how to set it up. You are then shown how to create a blog site, start writing content, and even use plugins and themes to customize the design of the site and add some unique elements to set it apart. If you want to get more in-depth, we also show you how to get started creating your own themes and plugins. Finally, we teach you how to use WordPress for building non-blog websites.

By the end of the book, you will be sufficiently skilled to design high-quality websites and will be fully familiar with the ins and outs of WordPress.

What you will learn

• Learn to adapt your plugin with the Gutenberg editor
• Create content that is optimized for publication on the web
• Craft great looking pages and posts with the use of block editor
• Structure your web pages in an accessible and clear way
• Install and work with plugins and themes
• Customize the design of your website
• Upload multimedia content, such as images, audio, and video easily and effectively
• Develop your own WordPress plugins and themes
• Use WordPress to build websites that serve purposes other than blogs

Who this book is for

The ideal target audience for this book would be PHP developers who have some basic knowledge of working with WordPress and who want to get a comprehensive practical understanding of working with WordPress and create production-ready websites with it.

Section 1: WordPress

This section covers everything that you must know about WordPress as a newcomer to the platform. This is your WordPress 101.

This section will cover the follow chapters:

• Chapter 1, Introducing WordPress
• Chapter 2, Getting Started with WordPress
• Chapter 3, Creating Blog Content
• Chapter 4, Pages, Media, and Importing/Exporting Content

Introducing WordPress

How do I make a website? is a question that a lot of people ask in this day and age. Actually, it's probably one of the main questions you ask if you're a business owner in the 21st century. But website making is not only about business.

These days, dare I say, everybody should at least consider getting a website of their own. In the past, this was an intimidating concept. The only way you could get a website was to either hire a professional who would build one for you, or learn web technologies and development yourself and then build one on your own. Nowadays, there are more options, and particularly if you want to build a website really quickly while making sure that it is top quality at the same time.

The best option of them all is WordPress—which is the topic of this book. Under the hood, WordPress is an open source web software application that you can use to create and maintain a modern website. At the time of writing, more than 30% of all websites run on WordPress, and the number is only expected to increase in the coming years. In simple terms, with WordPress, anyone can build a beautiful website with minimal effort involved and then make it available to the world in no time. Let's take a look at some of the perks of using WordPress:

• You don't need to hire a team of developers and/or designers
• You don't need to learn advanced PHP
• You don't need to be a pro with computers
• Nevertheless, you can still end up with a high-quality website with almost unlimited extension possibilities

These days, everyone has a good reason to have a website. It's not just large companies anymore. Individuals, families, freelancers, or small/independent businesses can all benefit from a website. However, at the same time, most people don't have the financial resources to hire a web development company or a freelance web developer to create a website for them. This is where WordPress comes into play. WordPress is free, easy to use, and packed with excellent features. Since WordPress is a web application, it does not need to be installed on your home PC or Mac, or any other machine under your control. It can live on a server (kind of a computer) that belongs to a website-hosting company. Originally, WordPress was an application meant to run a blog website. However, it has evolved into a fully featured content management system (CMS). If you don't know what a blog is, don't worry, we explain everything later in this chapter.

In this book, we'll be going through each important step on your way to understanding how WordPress works and what can be done with it. We'll learn about the basic usage of WordPress, configuration, extending your site with themes and plugins, and much more. But before we can get to all that, we need to start at square one! In this chapter, we'll explore:

• The reasons that will make you choose WordPress to run your website
• The greatest advantages of WordPress
• Online resources for WordPress
• Some of the most useful features in the newest versions of WordPress

Getting into WordPress

WordPress is an open source CMS. Open source means that the source code of the system is made available with a license whereby the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose (as Wikipedia defines it). CMS means a software application that can run a website (for example, a blog) and allows you to publish, edit, and modify the content. It's a piece of software that lives on the web server (more on what a web server is later on) and makes it easy for you to add and edit posts, themes, comments, and all of your other content. The following is the logo of WordPress:

Even though WordPress was originally a blog engine—used primarily to run blogs—it's now a popular solution among some of the biggest brands on the web and runs their entire websites. Brands such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Reuters, WIRED.com, Sony, Toyota, plus some of the most prominent artists (such as Beyoncé or the Rolling Stones) all use WordPress as the base of their web platforms and outlets.

Undoubtedly, WordPress has evolved a lot over the years, and even though a large number of new functionalities have been introduced, WordPress remains one of the easiest-to-use web publishing platforms out there. Originally, it was a fork of an older piece of software named b2/cafelog.

WordPress was developed by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, but is now maintained and developed by a team of developers that includes Mullenweg.

What WordPress is good for

There are generally three popular types of website for which WordPress is meant to be used:

• A typical website with relatively static content, pages, subpages, and so on
• A blog website, chronologically organized, and frequently updated, categorized, tagged, and archived
• An e-commerce website: a fully functional online store that allows people to buy goods or services, and the website owner to manage orders and fulfill them

However, as experience shows, WordPress is also successfully used to run a wide variety of other sites, such as:

• Corporate business sites
• One-page profile sites
• Portfolio sites
• Membership sites
• Video blogs
• Photo blogs
• Product sites
• Education sites (e-courses) and more

For those of you unfamiliar with blog websites and blogging terminology, let's take a look at the basics.

Starting the journey – what is a blog?

Originally, blog was short for weblog. According to Wikipedia, the term weblog was first used in 1997, and people started using blogs globally in 1999. The terms weblog, web blogging, and weblogger were added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003, though these days most people leave off the we part.

Just to give you a more plain-English explanation, a blog is a website that usually contains regular entries made by an author. These entries can be of various types, such as commentary, descriptions of events, photos, videos, personal remarks, tutorials, case studies, long opinion pieces, political ideas, or whatever else you can imagine. They are usually displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent additions at the top. Those entries can be organized in a variety of ways, by date, topic, subject, and so on.

One of the main characteristics of a blog is that it's meant to be updated regularly. Unlike a website where the content is static, a blog behaves more like an online diary, wherein the blogger posts regular updates. Hence, blogs are dynamic with ever-changing content. A blog can be updated with new content and the old content can be changed or deleted at any time (although deleting content is not a common practice).

Most blogs focus their content on a particular subject, for example, current events, hobbies, niche topics, and technical expertise. This doesn't mean that blogs are meant to be published only by individuals sharing their personal opinions on given matters. On the contrary, these days, blogs have become a significant part in the online presence for many businesses and even corporations. The modern practice of content marketing is now one of the most widely accepted web marketing methods, and its core is based on publishing quality content, often in blog form.

Understanding the common terms

If you are new to the world of blogging (sometimes called the blogo...