Anyway, we are in the process of converting our existing Joomla! website to WordPress, as who wouldn’t. This is partly to make it easier for people other than me to add and update content, and partly because I am the board geek and I think WordPress suits BACN’s needs better. The problem with the site right now isn’t so much Joomla as the fact that it’s very hard for people to find what they’re looking for. (Well, that and terrible SEO, which has something to do with the type of content we usually post and something to do with the not-at-all-search-engine-friendly-URLs.)

BACN Home Page January 2012 (Joomla! 1.5)

Joomla! 1.5 article manager

Then go into your WordPress install to your SoftWarp | WP Importer settings. (You will need an activation key, which you get by submitting your e-mail address. This did not work from my LAMP server. Apparently the program requires cURL. I set it up on a dev server here on WP Webhost instead.)

The problem for someone developing a new site is that we have content going back to 2002, and importing from Joomla! to WordPress is not common enough for the WordPress foundation to build its own importer. I had tested the Joomla 1.5 Importer a while back, and it worked fine, though it was a bit slow as it required you to import one category at a time. That plugin has only been tested up to WordPress 3.0.5, however, and not updated since January 2011. (Yes, it has taken us a long time to get going on this project. Non-profit. Volunteer. Committee. Need I say more?)

So I did a little searching to see whether there was anything more recent and came across a plugin called WP Importer from SoftWarp. This plugin is not in the WordPress Plugin Repository, I presume for the very good reason that it’s marketed with decidedly black hat overtones. (The copy and samples are hilarious, though.)

The plugin’s documentation assumes that you’re importing a CSV file, and also that you’re using it in conjunction with another of the developer’s plugins, so using it to import Joomla! databases took a bit of figuring out. Since I can’t be the only person on the planet who will ever need to do this, I figured I would document the process here.

First, go into phpMyAdmin and open your Joomla! databases. If you are used to WordPress databases, you will be amazed at how many tables there are in a Joomla! database. Possibly because these tables don’t remotely match up, you can’t use the WP Importer plugin to import a complete Joomla database. Instead, you need to locate the database with the content in it.

mos_content, the database table containing Joomla! 1.0 content

In Joomla! 1.0, this table is called mos_content. In Joomla! 1.5, it’s called jos_content. (I haven’t worked with more recent versions of Joomla!, so I don’t know whether they’ve changed the name, but I bet it’s still nnn_content.)

Export this table as an SQL file and save it to your computer.

Exporting the Joomla! 1.5 jos_content table as an SQL file

Log into your WordPress installation and go to SoftWarp | WP Importer. If you have not done so already, you will need to activate the plugin. The plugin is free, but you need to provide a valid e-mail address to receive the activation key. This did not work on my LAMP server; something to do with the need for cURL, which is also required to make the plugin work. I set up a dev install here at WPWebhost instead, and it worked fine.

First you import the table. In this case, you need to select SQL as the format of the file.

Step 1: Import Table

Once the table has been imported (which may take a while depending on the number of entries), you will be automatically transferred to the next screen. Here you get to drag the different database field tokens into the correct positions. This involves a little bit of guesswork if you don’t know Joomla! databases intimately, but it’s not that hard to figure out. The main thing to know in this case was that [[introtext]] had actually been used as the main body of the post on this site, with [[fulltext]] for additions on some pages, so both of those belonged in the “Post Body” field.

Mapping database field tags on the post config screen

For some reason, which Joomla! experts will probably know, no section or category name info was saved in this table, only the category ID numbers, which weren’t very helpful to me, so I just let everything come in as “Uncategorized” and updated it later.

Joomla! content imported as WordPress posts, manually categorized

WP Importer imports all content as posts. Eventually, most of  these items will be converted to custom post types based on the categories I assigned them, but I’m still building those out.

This doesn’t remove all the labor from the import process, but it’s certainly easier than copying and pasting, and it ought to work on any flavor of Joomla! database—and probably databases from any other content management system, as long as you can isolate the table with  the content in it.

There’s just one little problem with the way that Genesis creates its home page layouts: widgets. A Genesis magazine layout is made up entirely of dynamic content, with the different areas populated by the Genesis Featured Page and Genesis Featured Post widgets. They are marvelously flexible things (and there’s even a Genesis Featured Widget Amplified plugin that displays custom post types and custom taxonomies), and once you’ve mastered adding widgetized areas to a home.php file, you can save yourself hours of coding custom loops by using them.

Here’s an example, using the Lifestyle Theme, from the client site that inspired me to write this post:

From the back end, the main content area looks like:

The sidebar and the footer are also full of widgets.

The Lifestyle theme is easy to set up and rearrange, and even more flexible thanks to the Dynamic Widgets plugin. Widgets are a great feature of WordPress and using them to build home page designs makes Genesis more user-friendly.

But it turns out that widgets don’t play nicely with mobile plugins, and therefore mobile plugins don’t like Genesis.

I hadn’t realized this at first, because I myself am a dumbphone user. I’d asked the client to check on the appearance of the site on a mobile device, but it turns out my main contact there didn’t have a smartphone either, so she had to ask a third person, and the response wasn’t entirely clear. Another visitor to the site actually asked “Why do I see a calendar?” Only when I borrowed my husband’s iPhone did I understand what this person had seen, and only after a lot of hunting around did I realize why.

This is what WP Mobile Detector was showing to those with iPhones (and iPads: it wasn’t making a distinction):

This is not the site’s home page: it’s the blog index. This was confusing enough for me to find; I can completely understand why the typically non-technical member of Congregation Beth Israel Connecticut might think it was an event calendar. (There is one of those on the site, but this is not it.)

I went looking at other mobile plugins. StudioPress mentions the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress on their FAQ page, but while that at least displays the regular site to iPads (which really don’t need any special design concessions), it still couldn’t recognize the home page content, though I was able to customize the menu. (It supposedly displays a sidebar and lets you choose widgets, but that feature did not work properly.)

I also looked at MobStac WordPress Mobile, which did both the best and worst jobs of displaying content comprehensively, since it completely ignored the category exclusion rules set up to keep the events listings and newsletters off the main blog page. And I tried WPtouch, but to configure that properly you need to spend a lot of time creating custom icons, and it still wouldn’t create the  home page I needed. I took a look at OnSwipe, but that says  in its FAQ that it doesn’t display widgets, so that wasn’t going to be of any use to me. I even started looking at premium plugins like PluginBuddy’s Mobile, but wasn’t convinced—and not authorized by the client to spend money, either.

Trolling around in the StudioPress support forums was not terribly satisfactory. There were a couple of recommendations (from the same person) for the pro version of WPtouch. And then, finally, a link to a tutorial from Smashing Magazine called “How to Use CSS3 Media Queries to Create a Mobile Version of Your Website.”

Now, CBI was not paying me to design a mobile theme, which is why I didn’t just develop one in the first place. (That, and I’m fairly new to responsive design: see the previous post.) They’re a non-profit on a tight budget, and if a free mobile plugin had worked, it would have been good enough for their purposes. Based on my experience with other sites, I assumed (very, very dangerous thing to do), that a mobile plugin  would work for them. It wouldn’t, and I’d promised them a mobile-ready site.

Besides, the instructions seemed so simple. I suggest you read the entire article, but here’s the short form for converting your old stylesheet for mobile devices.

1. Save a copy of your style.css file as small-device.css. Remember to rename the file within the comments.
2. Open the file in a text editor. Search for the word “float.” If it applies to a div, replace “left” or “right” with “none.”
3. Look for a “width” property on those divs. Set it to “auto.”
4. Set the base font size to 100% and convert the remaining font sizes to ems or %. You will probably want to increase font sizes, particularly in menus and search box. You could skip this step and still have something more usable than the plugins are giving you, though.
5. Upload the small-device.css file to your child theme directory (in my case this was wp-content/themes/lifestyle)
6. Open your functions.php file and add the following lines at the end:

   add_action('wp_head','mobile_styles');
   /**
    * Add mobile stylesheet
    *
    */
   function mobile_styles() { ?>
   	<link href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory');?>/small-device.css" media="only screen and (max-width: 480px), only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
   
   <?php }
   

Doing this took me about an hour, including reading the tutorial and figuring out how to put the stylesheet link into the functions.php file. (That info comes from a StudioPress tutorial on adding a print stylesheet.) I spent another hour or so today mucking about with the menu and the header and the fonts. The site has a fairly long menu, and I didn’t like the way it looked stacked. I’m not completely happy with my current solution of dividing it into three columns, since the drop-down menus now also divide up that way, but I think it’s an improvement. I created a new, taller subnav background image and increased the menu font size and line height to make it easier to use. I also set the description display to “none” in order to have the site name displayed more readably. (I had tried to use a different header image, but couldn’t figure out how to override the custom header choice in the theme options.)

The result is not pixel-perfect, but every single element of the original home page is there and working, from the image slider to the featured video.

You can visit http://bethisraelwesthartford.org on any device with a screen 480 pixels or smaller to check it out for yourself.

Those of you who have more experience than I do with responsive design can doubtless make suggestions for improvement.

Meanwhile, anyone using a Genesis theme can quickly create a mobile-friendly version of the site. Given that, I would expect StudioPress to be able to release a spiffier version of this small-device.css file for each child theme, quite easily, at the next update, if not to start making all the new themes responsive out of the box. Unlike me, their designers know their themes, and their framework, backwards and forwards, and wouldn’t have to spend as much time tinkering while adjusting things.

Using a plugin was (and is) appealing mainly because it’s easy and most of the mobile plugins are free. The experience you give your mobile visitors may not be ideal, but at least your site is accessible to the increasing numbers of people using their phones—or rather, those handheld computers that happen to also make cellular calls—to surf the Web. Naturally, however, anyone who could get a mobile site that looked like the desktop site without having to pay extra for it would want to do so.

That’s where responsive design comes in. With a little CSS magic, you (or your theme designer) can create a website that rearranges its columns and resizes its images to suit any screen its being viewed on. (The design “responds” to the device viewing  it.) The first theme I remember seeing that could do this was the Yoko theme. Then WordPress 3.2 came out and with it the new responsive default theme, Twenty Eleven. Shortly thereafter I attended Sara Cannon’s session on responsive design at WordCamp SF 2011.

In principle, responsive design seemed pretty straightforward, but I didn’t figure I’d be ready to go from listening to one lecture to creating a theme from scratch. There was no need for that, though, thanks to the magic of child themes: I could just create a child theme of Twenty Eleven and have the responsiveness taken care of, and that’s what I did, very shortly thereafter. Since I was simultaneously working on a project for a client where I was using a mobile plugin, I had an immediate opportunity to take some comparison screenshots.

The examples above come from a Genesis site using the Lifestyle (blue) child theme, rendered with the WP Mobile Detector plugin. The mobile theme color happens to be close to the blue of the desktop theme, but the display doesn’t look much like the site, and instead of showing the home page content, the mobile site defaults to the blog page.

These are screenshots of a site created as a child theme of Twenty Eleven. I should probably have spent some time tinkering with the way the menu behaved in the iPhone layout, but otherwise, you can see that the header image and site colors are preserved, the text is a good readable size, and the search box is usable. (The sidebar appears below the main content column in the iPhone layout, and also in the iPad layout, which otherwise looks more like the desktop version.)

We’ll have more on the function problems with the mobile plugin and the Genesis site in the next post, but for now it’s enough to say that the visual difference between the two sites is obvious. Also, of course, you get to run one less plugin.

There are trade-offs with responsive design that might make you consider creating a completely separate stylesheet for smaller screens. For one thing, the on-the-fly resizing of images means that the site eats up just as much bandwidth (those expensive data plans!) as the desktop site would. For another, designing elements to stretch and stack means that you can’t engage in pixel-perfect positioning of your elements. That’s going to make certain really dramatic designs impossible.

In many cases, however, the trade-offs will be worth it, and new responsive themes for WordPress (both free and premium) appear every day.

This 7-minute video walks you through how to add a text widget containing HTML code to your WordPress site, how to move widgets from one widgetized area to another, and through a quick overview of the options provided with the Dynamic Widgets plugin.

Dynamic Widgets lets you decide which pages, posts, categories, etc. you want to show your widget on–including date ranges, in case it’s a widget showing a special offer. You can customize the look of your sidebar, footer, and other widgetized areas without having to create special template files the way you did in the old days.

Screenshots of the WordPress dashboard are of the 3.2 beta, not my client’s live site.

Gallery Basics

Inserting one photo at a time when writing a WordPress post is pretty straightforward, but what if you want to add a whole collection of photos? Suppose you’re taking a trip around the world and you’ve set up your blog to chronicle your travels, and in each post you want to include a dozen shots of the city you visited that day?

The good news is that WordPress has gallery features built in, so you don’t even need a plugin to add a basic photo gallery to a post or page.

The bad news is that it requires more steps than adding a single photo. In fact, if you’re not used to WordPress, the latest features to help you display galleries might just make things more confusing for you. (The WordPress development team knows it needs to work on media, but hasn’t had a chance to tackle that yet. Improvements are in the pipeline.)

Meanwhile, WordPress galleries aren’t really that difficult once you get used to them, and there are some great plugins and themes to allow you to add some spectacular effects. Here are the steps to insert a no-frills photo gallery without adding any plugins.

1. Open the edit screen for the post or page where you want to insert the gallery. You can create a new post, or add the gallery to an existing post.

2. Position your cursor where you want the gallery to appear. Moving galleries after you insert them is more trouble than putting them in the right place to start with.

3. Click the Insert Image button at the top left of the post/page editing area, shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The four icons at the top of the editing window let you insert images, video, audio, and media, but for self-hosted WordPress installations, there are better ways to add everything but images.

4. Click the From Computer tab to upload the images for your gallery.

Figure 2: This method of creating galleries only works with images you upload from your computer and attach to this post. See the Gallery Shortcodes section for a way to create galleries using other images in your Media Library. The built-in gallery feature in WordPress does not work with images hosted elsewhere on the Web.

5. Select and upload multiple images at once. Click Open when you’ve finished selecting images.

Figure 3: Windows users can select non-consecutive images by holding down the CTRL key while clicking the icons; Mac users can do the same with the CMD key. To select consecutive images, hold down the SHIFT key.

Tip: If you really are traveling around the world, uploading photos from your camera in an Internet café anywhere but Japan or South Korea can be pretty time-consuming. These days, even point-and-shoot cameras boast resolutions of 12 megapixels or more. That’s a 4000 x 3000 pixel image: each JPG file will be 2.5 MB. A set of them will take forever to upload over patchy hotel wi-fi or the satellite connection in that Mexican café.

If you don’t plan to print the photos when you get home, go into your camera settings and set your photo size and quality below the maximum. An image size of 1600 or even 1200 pixels on the longest edge is plenty for a website.

6. After WordPress has finished “crunching” the files, click the Save All Changes button at the bottom of the list of images.

Figure 4: When creating a gallery, it’s important to click “Save all changes” rather than “Insert into post,” even if you upload images one at a time. This command tells WordPress to activate the gallery feature.

For bonus points, after you click “Save all changes”, click “Show” next to each image and fill in each image’s title, alternate text, caption, and description. Then Save all changes again. Giving the images titles that mean something to you helps the search engines find you and it helps screen readers for the visually impaired. And it will help you, too, when you’re going through your media library trying to find a particular photo.

Figure 5: The image title pops up on the screen when you hover your mouse pointer over the image; the ALT text is the description visually impaired people hear. The caption appears below the gallery thumbnail.

7. After you click “Save all changes”, the Gallery tab appears at the top of the Add an Image dialog box. From now on, whenever you click the Add an Image button for that post, you’ll see the Gallery tab between From URL and Media Library.

Figure 6: The Gallery tab only appears in posts that have had galleries inserted. The number in parentheses after the word “Gallery” shows how many images are in the gallery.

8. Choose your Gallery Settings from the options below the list of images in the gallery. This is where you decide what order to put the pictures in and how many columns your gallery should have.

If your gallery is going to appear on a page with a sidebar and you use the standard 150 x 150 pixel thumbnail size, you won’t be able to fit more than three images across. But if you use a full-width page for your galleries, or a smaller thumbnail size, you can have five or six columns of photos.

Note: to change the size of your image thumbnails, go to Settings –> Media. Changing the settings there will affect all new images you upload. To change the sizes of images that are already in your Media Library, install the AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ajax-thumbnail-rebuild/.

In addition to the built-in options to sort the images by Menu Order, Date/Time, Title, and Random, you can manually order your images by numbering them in the boxes in the Actions column (see Figure 6) and clicking “Save all changes” again.

The final option is whether to link the thumbnails to the original image file or to the attachment page. If you’ve filled in an image description or want people to be able to submit comments on a particular image, then it’s best to link to the attachment page. Lightbox and slideshow plugins tend to override this option, but some will display the descriptions from the attachment page.

9. When you’re happy with your settings, click the Insert gallery button.

Figure 7: This time, click “Insert Gallery” instead of “Save all changes.”

Once you click the button, a gallery placeholder appears in your post editor window. If you’re using the visual editor, the gallery placeholder looks like this:

Figure 8: You can edit your gallery settings by clicking on this placeholder, or delete the gallery entirely. Just select one of the icons that pops up in the top left corner of the placeholder. The mini gallery icon will take you back to the insert gallery options; the red circle with a line through it will delete the gallery.

If you’re using the HTML editor, the gallery placeholder looks like this:

Figure 9: What you’re looking at is called a gallery shortcode. (A “shortcode” is a command in square brackets that substitutes for HTML or PHP.) If you need to move your gallery around in your post, the easiest way is to switch to the HTML editor and cut and paste that shortcode.

10. If your theme supports post formats, toggle the “Gallery” radio button on. That way your gallery can take advantage of any special design features your theme has for galleries.

Figure 10: If you see a box like this with a list of post formats, select the one that says “gallery” to help WordPress display your gallery better. If you don’t see a box like this, then either your theme doesn’t support post formats or you are using an outdated version of WordPress and need to upgrade.

Note: WordPress introduced post formats in 2011 with WordPress 3.1. They’re designed to help display certain kinds of content in special ways, much the way Tumblr does.

Older themes may not support post formats, or may support them in a different way. The Coraline theme from Automattic supports Gallery and Aside post formats, but you have to designate categories in the theme options in order to use them. If you’re inserting a gallery in the Coraline theme, be sure to choose the right category.

Figure 11: To activate the gallery post format in the Coraline theme, you have to assign a category to it. Before you can assign the category, you need to go to Posts –> Categories and create it.

Figure 12: Once you’ve set up the gallery category, remember to select it when creating your post.

If your theme doesn’t support post formats, don’t worry. The gallery itself will display just fine. The main difference will be in the way the post excerpt appears on the blog index page.

11. And now for the last crucial step: publish the post or page.

Figure 13: Click Publish (or Update) to share your gallery with your readers.

Your gallery appears as a grid of neatly arranged thumbnails in the single post display.

Figure 14: Three-column gallery of 150 x 150 pixel thumbnails in the Coraline theme, designed in 2010.

WordPress galleries appear much the same from theme to theme, unless the designer has included special CSS (styling instructions) for galleries. A gallery inserted into a post in Coraline (Figure 14, above) looks much like a gallery inserted into a post in Twenty Eleven (Figure 15, below). Well—except for the fact that the photos have different subjects.

Figure 15: Another three-column gallery of 150 x 150 pixel thumbnail images, this time in the Twenty Eleven theme designed for WordPress 3.2 in—you guessed it—2011.

And, in fact, a WordPress gallery looks just the same in a theme designed long before post formats were even imagined. The basic gallery display has been the same since 2005. Fancying it up has been the job of plugin designers and sometimes theme designers.

Gallery Post Formats Change the Post, Not the Gallery

If WordPress galleries themselves look the same in themes that support the gallery post format and those that don’t, what does the gallery post format actually do?

First, it gives the designer the opportunity to make the rest of the post look different from other kinds of posts—making it a full-width post where a standard post has a sidebar, for instance, or giving it a particular background color.

Second, it changes the way the post appears in the blog index (the home page). The themes used for the screenshots above both show post excerpts in the blog index. For a standard post, the excerpt is just a few lines of unformatted text. That’s not very helpful for a gallery, so a gallery post excerpt is set up to work a little differently. Even when a theme doesn’t show thumbnail images with excerpts of standard posts, gallery posts use thumbnails for excerpts, then tell you how many images are in the gallery.

Figure 16: Coraline puts a box (like the caption box) around the thumbnail image it uses in its post excerpt, and includes a link to “more galleries.”

Figure 17: The Twenty Eleven excerpt has a label above it saying “Gallery.” There’s no box around the thumbnail and no link to other galleries. These differences are style choices made by the theme designers.

If galleries are important to you, check out the way a theme handles the gallery post format in the demo before you decide to use it. Sure, you can hack the theme or install a plugin to change it, but the better it works in the first place, the better off you are.

For the Experts: Gallery Shortcodes

In earlier versions of WordPress, the only way to insert a gallery was with the shortcode

[gallery]

Used by itself (you can type it into either the visual editor or the HTML editor), the “gallery” shortcode will display a gallery of all images attached to that post or page.

But you can do more, because shortcodes come with options. In fact, the “gallery”shortcode comes with more options than you have when you insert a gallery through the file upload screen. The options associated with the “gallery” shortcode are:

• columns: number of columns in the gallery.
• id: ID of the post whose images you want to display. It does not have to be the post you’re putting the gallery into. You can find the post ID by hovering over the post title in the All Posts list and looking down into the lower left corner. You’ll see a small popup that says something like

  "http://your.domain.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=ID&action=edit,"

  except there will be a number after the “post=” instead of the word “ID”. That’s the post ID number.

• size: the image size to use for the thumbnail grid: thumbnail, medium, large, or full. The default is “thumbnail.”
• orderby: the criterion for ordering images. The choices are menu_order, date, title, ID, and RAND.
• order: ASC (ascending) or DESC (descending).
• link: determines whether the thumbnails link to full-size images (file) or attachment pages (attachment).
• include: tells the gallery to include specific attachment (image) IDs. You find these by going into the WordPress Media Library and hovering over the image title. A popup appears in the lower left corner of the browser, the same way it did to show you the post ID.
• exclude: tells the gallery to exclude specific attachment (image) IDs. You can use either the “include” or the “exclude” option in one shortcode, but not both.

So if you wanted to insert a gallery that used a single column of large images, ordered by ID, and including attachments 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 34, 35, 36 (from three different posts), the shortcode would look like this:

[gallery columns="1" size="large" orderby="ID" order="ASC" link="attachment" include="17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 34, 35, 36"]

And then there are the really geeky options that probably won’t be of interest to anyone but theme designers:

• itemtag: the type of (X)HTML tag used to enclose each item in the gallery. The default is “dl”, which is “definition list.”
• icontag: the tag used to enclose each thumbnail image. The default is “dt”, or “definition term.”
• captiontag: the tag used to enclose the caption for each thumbnail. The default is “dd” or “definition definition.”

A designer might want to change these if definition lists are going to be important in the theme, but ordinary people can safely ignore them.

(All this shortcode info comes from the WordPress Codex.)

Some of the plugins mentioned in this presentation have already been superseded by others.

Listen to the recording of the presentation.

By Stephanie Leary
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2895-0
ISBN10: 1-4302-2895-4
432 pp.
Published Jun 2010
Print Book Price: $39.99
eBook Price: $27.99

Amazon Price $28.79 (affiliate link)

The title of this book is deceptive, enough so that I handed it to a friend who was making the move from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress because I thought she might find it helpful. She didn’t, and when I actually sat down to read it myself, I understood why.

This is not a book for beginners, if by “beginners” you mean the people for whom WordPress for Dummies was written. It’s a book for web developers who haven’t used WordPress before.

To be fair to the author, the back cover copy says exactly that, but the publisher describes it as “User level: Beginner.” I’m not sure how Apress would describe books for people who don’t have any technical knowledge. “User level: Hopeless N00b”?

But the book itself is fantastic. It may be the best book I’ve ever read about WordPress. I don’t consider myself a developer, but I know enough not to get completely lost in the code examples. This is a great book for those who are experienced users of WordPress but not PHP wizards and who want to go deeper and understand more.

I had a number of revelatory moments while reading this book. You can turn off or limit post revisions with one line of code in your wp-config.php file? So why was I bothering to use a plugin for it? (I know, some people don’t have access to their wp-config.php file…or shouldn’t be allowed access to it. But other people need to reduce  the number of plugins they have installed, and I’m one of them.) There are RSS feeds for pages? Wish I’d known that when someone was asking about it on LinkedIn a few weeks back. You can show custom taxonomies, custom post types, and tags in your menu management page by clicking on Screen Options? (I beat my head against this for ages because I’d forgotten I’d read it, and I even marked the page.) There’s a way to import content from Joomla? Bring it on. (Please. I’m desperately hoping to convince a client to change platforms.)

Then there’s the great discussion of things you can do with the Loop, like create a page that displays excerpts from all its child pages. Most magazine themes make you pick two or three featured categories, but you could actually feature all your categories if you wanted to. (That’s assuming you have a reasonable number of categories, unless you want a really long home page.)

I admit I got a bit lost in the chapters on creating widgets and plugins—I don’t think I’m anywhere near ready to start developing plugins, and I’m not sure I ever will be. But I understand a little better what’s involved in the process and how to look at the code.

There’s a solid chapter on performance and security that covers all the usual suspects except the define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '96M'); trick (another single line in wp-config.php that can make a big difference) and then a highly valuable chapter on custom post types and custom taxonomies. Stephanie Leary walks you through how to do this the hard way, which gave me a chance to see what the

plugins that help with these two WordPress features actually do, and helped me follow the demonstrations at the September WordPress Meetup.

The final chapter is on WordPress Multi-site, with a brief mention of BuddyPress. While this is a fraction of the information found in BuddyPress for Dummies, it has the advantage of referring to WordPress 3.0 and not the old WordPress MU, so it was good to get an overview of what had stayed the same and what had changed.

The author refers to useful plugins throughout the book, and also has a plugin index (Appendix A) and a collection of “plugin recipes” (Appendix C). The recipes are combinations of plugins you can use to build things with WordPress, like a wiki (I thought there was already a wiki plugin for WP) or a document sharing site. Again, I had a couple of surprises. There are plugins to sort your posts alphabetically? And I spent time creating special category page templates to do that for a client. (The other surprise was that Stephanie Leary doesn’t seem to have heard of Blubrry’s PowerPress plugin for podcasting, or that PodPress had been revived.)

If you have no web background at all and you’re completely new to WordPress, this isn’t the book for you. But if you’re somewhere in between the complete novice and the hard-core developer, you’re going to find this book unbelievably useful. The fact that it’s clearly written in a non-technical style, tidily laid out, and has abundant screenshots is just a bonus. And you can download all the code samples from the Apress website.

Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro

By Tris Hussey

Published Dec 31, 2009 by Sams. Part of the Create Your Own series.

Copyright 2010
Dimensions: 7-3/8 X 9-1/8
Pages: 288
Edition: 1st

Book

ISBN-10: 0-672-33065-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33065-0

eBook

ISBN-10: 0-672-33160-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33160-2

MSRP: $19.79
Amazon Price $14.95 (affiliate link)

When I first discovered blogging and podcasting in 2005, Tris Hussey was one of the first bloggers I learned about, so I knew he had the chops to write a book on the subject of blogging. (No, I don’t know Tris personally; my only disclosure in writing this review is the usual one, that Pearson Education sent me two free copies, one to review myself and one to give away at the East Bay WordPress Meetup.)

Even so, I was honestly surprised by just how useful I found this book. After all, I’ve been blogging for a while now, so I mostly expected to be evaluating the book in terms of its usefulness for newbies. But even experienced bloggers have rarely done as much blogging as Tris has, since he does it for a living, on many different blogs. Not that many of us have set up a personal blog, a business blog, a podcast blog, a video blog, a portfolio blog, and a lifestreaming blog just for ourselves, but Tris has.

Those, in case you’re wondering, are the 6 easy projects. I don’t think Tris picked the title, because nowhere in his text or his table of contents does he refer to these as the six projects, even though he has a chapter for each one—and also a chapter, which he mercifully leaves for last, on making money with your blog. I say “mercifully” because there has been far too much written on the topic of how to get rich quick by blogging. Tris knows that if you want to quit your day job in order to blog, it’s going to take both time and hard work, and probably luck, too.

In any case, the “6 Easy Projects” are not what get you started: they form the second half of the book. The first half covers important basics of blogging, including domain names, hosting, and different blogging platforms—though like any sensible person, Tris uses self-hosted WordPress for most of his examples.

The book is nicely designed, with new terms defined in callout boxes and bright blue sidebars addressing topics ranging from the worst domain names of all time to the Paste from Word button to reasons not to have comments on your blog. Tris’ style is friendly and accessible, and he explains things well. He would, however, have benefited from a more eagle-eyed proofreader, as there are a number of word substitutions of the sort that spelling checkers rarely catch. The funniest comes on page 121, under the heading “Writing.”

You don’t want a perspective client saying to themselves, ‘Jeez, they couldn’t even spell check their posts. How will they handle my business?’

That should be a prospective client, though people in a few fields do have clients for whom they do perspective work.

The six projects overlap quite a bit. Tris actually covers all forms of multimedia in the personal blog chapter, but doesn’t go into detail about them. Likewise, any business blog might use photos, audio, or video, but in this case Tris introduces some new elements, like screencasting, as well as discussing comment policies and corporate blogging policies. He also tells you how to get Google Analytics to e-mail reports to you.

The podcasting chapter is a good capsule treatment of that subject. Tris describes some basic audio editing techniques, introduces the concept of podsafe music, enjoins readers to make sure they use correct ID3 tags, laments the shortage of hosting options for audio, and shows you how to submit your podcast to iTunes and use the Blubrry PowerPress plugin. If you’re serious about podcasting, there are more books to read, but all this advice is sound and will get you off to a good start.

The video blogging section introduces us to the rule of thirds and the importance of good audio quality for video, as well as providing more important reminders about copyright. The surprise takeaway for me was the reminder that Windows Movie Maker does more than create slideshows from still images. I don’t record much video myself and haven’t bothered to learn how to use Adobe Premiere; the little video editing I’ve done has been in Camtasia. The idea that I might be able to do something useful with Movie Maker is encouraging.

Tris also addresses the vexed issue of video formats and makes a good argument for taking YouTube’s guidelines as a useful set of standards. As in the podcasting chapter, he covers hosting and iTunes. (The basics of embedding a video into a WordPress post are back in the chapter on setting up a personal blog.)

The chapter on portfolio blogs spends a little time on themes, and a little time on plugins (note that Featured Content Gallery, which he mentions on page 194, is getting a bit long in the tooth; I just tried SlideDeck for WordPress and like its ease of use and versatility), but also addresses issues like shopping carts and photo-sharing sites. On the whole, Tris appears to be of the belief that you should host your media files somewhere other than your own server if you possibly can, and not just to avoid storage and bandwidth charges.

Tris moves away from WordPress in the lifestreaming chapter, pointing out, rightly, that this is primarily the realm of a variety of hosted services that aggregate your content from other sources. He covers Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, Tumblr, and Cliqset—the last of which I hadn’t heard of until reading this book. But he also tells you how to create a DIY lifestreaming blog in WordPress, then wraps up with a quick look at the comment-aggregating services Disqus and Intense Debate.

The final chapter is, as I said, “Making Money Through Your Blog.” It’s a refreshingly sensible and straightforward approach to the topic. My only quibble is with his division of methods into “direct” and “indirect,” because I would consider all of them “direct” methods. Indirectly earning income from your blog is get
ting hired as a consultant or speaker because someone is impressed with your blogging. But there’s advertising revenue and then there’s fee-for-service revenue, the kind that comes when you are a blogger for hire or when you produce sponsored posts on your own blog.

I highly recommend this book, and believe it will be almost as valuable a year from now as it is today, because most of the guidance it provides isn’t about the state of the technology.

George Smyth asked me to do another segment on his One Minute How-To podcast, and I picked this as a topic.

First, log into your dashboard and go to “Plugins.” Select “Add New” from the menu.

Type “WordPress Mobile Pack” into the search box and click the button that says “Search Plugins.”

Click “Install Now.” When the dialog box pops up and asks “Are you sure you want to install this plugin?” click “OK.”

Activate the plugin.

“Once the plugin is activated, you can modify settings under “Appearance.”

The plugin detects mobile browsers automatically. You can decide whether to include a link in your footer so mobile users can choose to see your regular theme instead of the mobile theme, and which mobile theme to use. (There are screenshots in your Themes directory.)

The mobile theme isn’t as pretty, but it makes it possible to read the text on a narrow screen without having to scroll around.

There’s another popular mobile plugin, WPTouch, that people really like, but it’s just gone pro and costs $29. If most of your mobile visitors use touch-screen phones, it might be worth it.

Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections

By Eric Butow, Rebecca Bollwitt

Published Jan 7, 2010 by Que. Part of the Que Biz-Tech series.
Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 inches

ISBN-10: 0-7897-4256-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-4256-8

MSRP: $19.79
Amazon Price: $16.49 (affiliate link)

Overall, the advice in this book is good, but it suffers occasionally from not being quite sure who its audience is.

Most of the time, the authors seem to be speaking to medium or large companies, as when, in Chapter 6 (“Who Will Write the Blog?”), they advise hiring (or promoting) someone to be the social media director, or hiring a full-time blogger who has established a following in the same industry. Likewise, they use examples and case studies taken from corporate blogs: My Starbucks Idea, the Huffington Post, Rubbermaid, Intel Inside Story, BusinessWeek, Whole Foods, Molson Coors.

But Chapter 3, “Creating a Blogging Strategy,” focuses primarily on consumer-level tools. It’s as if this chapter were actually written for an entirely different book, one aimed at hobbyist bloggers or a more general reader. The authors list WordPress.com without mentioning that the free blogs hosted there are supposed to be for personal, non-commercial purposes, and mention LiveJournal, a tool used almost exclusively for sharing personal stories with select groups of friends. The closest they come to mentioning an enterprise content management system is a brief entry for Drupal.

And they almost never actually tell the readers which of these platforms, if any, the blogs in their examples are running on.

Likewise  the analytics and marketing tools they mentioned are primarily lower-end, small-business kinds of tools. While even a large corporation might benefit from Google Analytics  and Google Alerts, most of them are also in a position to take advantage of paid services that offer more detailed, human-filtered analyses of the company’s online reputation or website visitors. And most will also need, and quite possibly already use, higher-end e-mail service providers of the sort that integrate with Salesforce.com, not a basic Constant Contact account.

Chapter 9, “An Overview of Web 3.0 Technologies,” should have been left out altogether, or at least retitled—its main purpose seems to be buzzword value. The authors themselves admit on pages 152-153 that even those on the forefront of developing web technologies don’t agree on a definition of Web 3.0, and most of the actual tools mentioned in the rest of the chapter are really Web 2.0 tools. The space would have been better spent addressing the mobile web and the importance of making your blog accessible to those using mobile devices to read it.

While the broad strokes of the book’s guidance about such things as comments, blog authorship, tone, etc. are sound enough, the details are dubious. Most of the statistics seem to come from Technorati, and there are some erroneous statements, like the claim on page 45 that Blogspot blogs rank higher than others because Google owns Blogger. There’s actually almost nothing you can do to improve the SEO on a Blogger blog, and they don’t come up at the top of search results or appear in lists of top blogs all that often. Google would, in fact, lose its credibility as a search engine if it gave automatic priority to any blogspot.com sites, regardless of their content.

The book would have benefited considerably from thorough fact-checking and from evaluation by someone who was checking every chapter against the question “Who is this book for?” and “Does this chapter actually address the subject of blogging to drive business?” It wouldn’t have hurt to have a few more concrete examples of the ways blogs had actually increased sales, preferably with some hard numbers.

So while there’s some worthwhile material here, in the final analysis, I can’t recommend the book, because I think it might mislead or confuse those who are totally new to blogging, and annoy rather than enlighten those who are more familiar with it.