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Published:
July 28, 2017

WordPress For Dummies, 8th Edition

Overview

Updated to capture all the changes expected to come with the latest release of WordPress, the brand-new edition of this bestselling guide gives you an all-access pass to using this powerful publishing platform to get your very own blog or website up and runningin no time. In WordPress For Dummies, you'll find out how to choose and customize a theme, pick the perfect web host, manage multiple websites with multiple authors, and tons more. Due in large part to its state-of-the-art features, WordPress has become the go-to platform for website owners and bloggers who want to be noticed.

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About The Author

Lisa Sabin-Wilson is cofounder of WebDevStudios, one of the largest WordPress design and development agencies in the world. She is a regular public speaker at national events on topics such as WordPress, development, design, CSS, and social media.

Sample Chapters

wordpress for dummies, 8th edition

CHEAT SHEET

With WordPress, you can truly tailor a website to your own tastes and needs. All the publishing tools you need are readily available: Some are packaged with the WordPress software; others are third-party plugins and add-ons created by members of the WordPress user community. With a little research, knowledge, and time, you can create a WordPress website that suits your needs and gives your readers an exciting experience that keeps them coming back for more.

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Articles from
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The list of WordPress themes you find here isn’t exhaustive by any means. All the themes here meet the following criteria: They’re user-friendly. You don’t have to tinker with anything to get things to look the way you want them to. They’re compatible with widgets. In a word, widgets are wonderful. They’re free.
Using background graphics is an easy way to set your site apart from others that use the same WordPress theme. Finding a background graphic for your site is much like finding just the right desktop background for your computer. You can choose among a variety of background graphics for your site, such as photography, abstract art, and repeatable patterns.
A WordPress blog, in its basic form, has four main areas. These areas appear in the default theme that comes in every version of WordPress: Header: This area usually contains the name of the site along with the site tagline or slogan. Sometimes, the header also contains a graphic or image. Body: This area is where the main content of your website appears, such as blog posts displayed in chronological order.
Usually, for multiple users to post to one site, the default WordPress setup is sufficient. The Multi part of the WordPress Multisite feature’s name doesn’t refer to how many users were added to your WordPress website; it refers to the ability to run multiple sites in one installation of the WordPress software.
So that you can see how to enter the Custom Field code in your template file, the WordPress theme Twenty Sixteen in these instructions. If you’re using a different theme (thousands of WordPress themes are available), you need to adapt these instructions to your particular theme.Follow these steps to add the template tag to your theme, along with a little HTML code to make it look nice.
The WordPress software has become such a popular publishing tool that almost all hosting providers available today provide WordPress for you in a couple of ways: Already installed on your hosting account when you sign up A user dashboard with a utility for installing WordPress from within your account management system One of the most popular web hosts for managed WordPress hosting is a service called WP Engine.
The WordPress community has volunteers who run support forums for each version of WordPress. In these forums, you can exchange questions and answers with seasoned users. Be sure to access the right support forum for the version of WordPress you are using. If You Are . . . . . . Use This Forum Using the free hosted solution provided by the fine folks at WordPress.
If you use WordPress as the platform for your website, you can use any or all of the many tools that WordPress offers. The WordPress community is active and provides you with several resources you can use to help you along the way with using the WordPress platform to publish your content. With This Tool . . . .
Once you’ve added the necessary code to your template file to display your Custom Field, you should be ready to publish your WordPress site. But what if you want to publish a post in which you don’t want the mood Custom Field to appear? You can easily make WordPress check to see whether the Custom Field is added.
If you add a Custom Field to your own site, it may not appear the way you originally intended To get the data to display properly, you must open the template files and dig into the code a little bit.You can add Custom Fields to your templates in several ways to display the output of the fields you’ve set. The easiest way involves using the get_post_meta(); template tag function, which looks like this:<?
You don’t have to limit yourself to creating a static-page template for your WordPress site. You can use specific templates for the categories you’ve created on your blog and create unique sections for your site.On the Page below, Portfolio is the name of a category created on the WordPress Dashboard. Instead of using a static page for the display of the portfolio, you can use a category template to handle the display of all posts made in the Portfolio category.
After you explore WordPress Twenty Seventeen header-image settings, you may want to pick a background color or change the color of the header text. The default background color in the Twenty Seventeen theme is white, but you can change the color scheme. Here’s how: On the WordPress Dashboard, click the Customize link on the Appearance menu.
Twenty Seventeen’s Header Media options allow you to upload custom header graphics or a header video for your WordPress site. The options are called Header Media because you can configure an image or a video (or both) for the design of your site.The recommended dimensions for your customized header media are 2000 pixels wide by 1200 high.
With the WordPress import script, you can import one WordPress site into another; this is true for both the hosted and self-hosted versions of WordPress. WordPress imports all your posts, comments, custom fields, and categories into your blog.When you complete the export, follow these steps: Click the Install Now link below the WordPress title on the Import page, and install the plugin to import from WordPress.
You can create separate sidebar templates for different pages of your WordPress site by using an include statement. When you write an include statement, you’re simply telling WordPress that you want it to include a specific file on a specific page.The code that pulls the usual Sidebar template (sidebar.php) into all the other templates, such as the Main Index template (index.
Here, you find the template tags for the items that are commonly placed on the sidebar of a WordPress site. Commonly placed is used here because it’s possible to get creative with these template tags and place them in other locations (the Footer template, for example). To keep this introduction to Sidebar template tags simple, stick with the most common use, leaving the creative and uncommon uses for you to try when you’re comfortable with the basics.
WordPress can host your blog using the WordPress.com hosted service. If you are using the self-hosted WordPress.org software, you need a quality, reliable web host. Here are some WordPress–friendly web-hosting services. WPEngine Pagely Liquid Web BlueHost HostGator
The release of the Twenty Seventeen theme gave WordPress users a powerful theme with drop-down-menu navigation, header and background image uploaders, multiple-page templates, widget-ready areas, parent-child theme support, and built-in mobile and tablet support.The members of the WordPress team who worked on Twenty Seventeen describe it as follows:Twenty Seventeen brings your site to life with immersive featured images and subtle animations.
The WordPress Dashboard has main menu items that are standard across both versions — WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Submenu options may vary with the WordPress version. Menu Item Description Dashboard Find basic information and statistics for your website, as well as information from the WordPress Development Blog and other blogs run by those involved with WordPress development or resources.
With WordPress, you can truly tailor a website to your own tastes and needs. All the publishing tools you need are readily available: Some are packaged with the WordPress software; others are third-party plugins and add-ons created by members of the WordPress user community. With a little research, knowledge, and time, you can create a WordPress website that suits your needs and gives your readers an exciting experience that keeps them coming back for more.
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