Packt publishing has a new WordPress book out: WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide. WordPress MU, especially with the BuddyPress set of plug-ins, is a powerful and flexible framework that power a company blog or social networking site. Just check out SUNY’s new Academic Commons for a fantastic example of what can be done with this combination. WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide overall is a good introduction to these tools, and even for an experienced WordPress person I found some useful tips and valuable additions to my WordPress ‘tool belt’. But the book is also not without its flaws.
Now you might question why even bother with a book — after all isn’t all this information online? Well yes, call my old-fashioned, but I still enjoy the convenience of the book format. It is also helpful to get a coherent overview of a subject from one author’s vantage point. Piecing together codex references, blog posts, and forum tips from web sources works, but you get a diversity of methods and approaches that can be overwhelming, especially for the person just starting out. And in this book Lesly Harrison does a great job at providing this consistency through the book.
So what is not so good? Where the author gets technical, with step-by-step instructions, it suffers. In part because plug-ins or features describes are not quite correct, or things have changed. In part because the focus on the technical is at the expense of an overall viewpoint — classic forest vs. trees types of views. For instance in the second chapter she details how to get your WordPress MU installation set up in a locally run web server utilizing WAMP server. But most local web servers installed on a personal computer don’t play well with the subdomain-style blog naming she recommends. To her defense if you follow her instructions to the letter it works as she describes, but if you choose to add blogs or alter the names she uses you’ll get lost fast. I think it would be best not to even include the suggestion of a locally run version — there are other issues such as the email confirmation for new users that also doesn’t work. For the ‘beginner’ it will result in a lot of frustration. Better to only walk through the set up on a hosted web server and restrict access via the email address. Most hosting accounts allow email address with the domain — so if your site address is, for instance, bigbuddynetwork.com you can set up testguy1@bigbuddynetwork.com, etc. Restrict your test MU installation to accept only account from users at this domain and set the default behavior of posts to private. You can test away at will without the public getting in, and in an environment that matches how it will be hosted when launched for real.
The chapters that really shine are later in the book, where she gives an overview of a subject — security, increasing traffic, making it ‘sticky’, and monetizing it — walks through the issue, and then provides a couple of sample methods or plug-ins. If this book is truly for the beginner, this type of overview with not just hows, but whys, is really what is needed. A real beginner needs to understand how to plan and use the site — technical details such as editing their .htaccess file seems like more than they need to know. That kind of stuff can easily be found on-line – or maybe on wiki tied to the book that allows reader contributions and supplemental material.
I am happy I read the book, and it will be a valued resource on my bookshelf. If you have been running your own WordPress site, or are an experienced web developer looking to explorer the many exciting possibilities that WordPress MU/BuddyPress has to offer, this is a good resource to start with. If you are really a beginner, you might want to start smaller, or find an experienced friend to help you get started.
WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide
* Design, develop, secure, and optimize a blog network with a single installation of WordPress
* Add unlimited users and blogs, and give different permissions on different blogs
* Add social networking features to your blogs using BuddyPress
* Create a bbPress forum for your users to communicate with each other
* Part of Packt’s Beginner’s Guide Series, with step-by-step, detailed instructions for building a blog network from scratch
Comments / ONE COMMENT
Lesley Harrison added these pithy words on Dec 11 09 at 6:10 amI’m the author of this book. Thanks for taking the time to do a review!
I’m glad that you liked the book overall. Thanks for your comments on the local setup / other “technical” bits. I’d originally wanted to go a lot futher on those, but there wasn’t enough space. In hindsight, trying to squeeze in a few things I see as key points (e.g. .htaccess, alternative servers), was probably a bad idea, since they weren’t covered well enough.
I hope to write another Beginner’s Guide soon, so thanks for the feedback! I’ll remember it and stay focused on the core concepts in the future.
ADD YOUR COMMENT
Comments are moderated.
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
New articles are normally posted on Mondays and Wednesdays. Subscribe to the RSS feed or the email update to keep current on the latest posts.
Past listings from 2004 to the present
Need a home (or better home) for your website? I highly recommend HostRocket -- they are the best!
