If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, you need Digging Into WordPress. It’s 400+ pages filled with useful info for bloggers and developers. I’ll be using what I’m learning here to set up CMS sites for clients as well as customize this blog. It’s really put the final pieces of the WordPress puzzle together for me. Thanks to this book, things that baffled me are now quite understandable. Like, how do magazine-style home pages in WordPress do a dozen articles in multiple columns? They clearly explain how to do it, with understandable cut-and-paste code snippets too.
Even if you don’t want to get up close and personal with the code, there’s plenty of tips and best practices for any WordPress blogger here.
Best of all, the PDF version is just $27 while and the book / PDF combo is $67. You can free updates forever on the PDF. (And the book is in spiral notebook format so the pages lie flat, a fine feature indeed, and the page numbers match the PDF.)
Full disclosure: last night at 11pm, Bob said “I may be up *all* night with this book!” Why so enthusiastic, I wondered. A new politico-hiss-and-tell? An edgy cyber-apocalyptic-mega-novel? A rockabilly-retro-punk retrospective?
But No. He was deep into ‘Digging Into WordPress.’
Be still my heart.
And when he finally came to bed, he babbled on and on and on and on and on, in the dark, about “htaccess codes” and “caching plugins” and “page-parents” and so forth, until I pinched his lips shut.
Now You Know.
“PHP!, MySQL!, custom taxonomies!, the_loop()!, squawk!”