WordPress Foundation 2.7 Review

If you have been following WP Jedi, you may have already heard I say that WordPress 2.7 is the best and greatest CMS ever made in the history of mankind. I may be biased, but there is not a lot to argue this with the new features that have been implemented in 2.7.

Many bloggers argue that WordPress has changed so much from 2.6 to 2.7 that it feels like a whole new content management system. That may be true, but WordPress’ interface has become more intuitive and the CMS has become very powerful. But if you still can’t find your way around WordPress, you can always get WordPress Foundation.

WordPress Foundation 2.7 is a comprehensive book + digital media (ebook, video, ..) course that is designed to help webmasters master the art of using WordPress 2.7. The book is designed with folks who are more into reading. But the video material is much richer in content, and it is designed to help newbies get hands on training with WordPress 2.7.

Let’s take a look and see what WordPress Foundation 2.7 has to offer:

Chapter 1: Introduction to the book. I never read these chapters. But be my guest.

Chapter 2: Blogging basics: this chapter is a must read for folks who are not familiar with the concept of blogging. Blogging is not about talking to folks about your lunch. It’s more complicated than that. You’ll learn the terminology here.

Chapter 3: Cover different versions of WordPress. Whether you want to outsource the hosting to WordPress folks or you want to go MU, you can get the info here.

Chapter 4: WordPress basics are covered here. You learn how to do all kinds of basic stuff such as setting up accounts and logging in, and more.

Chapter 5: If you are interested in finding your way through the new dashboard, this chapter is a must read too. You can learn using the new dashboard so fast.

Chapter 6: Covers more blog options. You learn how to customize your profile. You also learn how to moderate comments and all other little things that you will need to do for your WordPress blog.

Chapter 7: this chapter covers the writing panel. It’s amazing how many bloggers don’t know how to use all the awesome features that are available in the writing panel.

Chapter 8: want to create new pages on your WordPress blog? Got to read this chapter. It’s not that hard, but if you have trouble with it, this chapter will be helpful.

Chapter 9: is all about finding the right theme for your blog. Jason goes over 5 themes that you may want to use on your blog. He tells you about what it takes to make a good theme. At the end of the day, choosing a theme for your blog is very personal, but it never hurts to hear from someone who knows what he is talking about.

Chapter 10: have you heard of widgets? If you haven’t, you are going to learn how to use them on your blog.

Chapter 11: covers WordPress.com upgrades and extras. There are many options to choose from, and even folks who have hosted their own blogs sometimes need a hand here.

Chapter 12, 13: covers custom header image and how you can add a logo to your blog using this function.

Chapter 14: If you have owned a blog before, you probably know the challenges of moderating and managing comments. Managing comments shouldn’t be hard, and after this chapter, it won’t be.

Chapter 15: multimedia blogs are the way to go. Videoblogs and audioblogs are the next big things, and you are going to learn PDF, Mp3, and other multimedia files to your blog.

Chapter 16,17: this chapter is all about blogging strategies and where tags fit in the big picture. Chapter 17 covers more on tags, categories, and how you can get the best out of your blog.

Chapter 18: it’s about adding users to your website. Whether you want to add editors, admins, or authors, you can do so easily after reading this chapter.

Chapter 19: one of the more important chapters of this book. It’s all about security of your blog and content. It shows you how to implement password protection.

Chapter 20: covers blog roll. This should be a fast read.

Chapter 21: site maintenance is a big task once you get going with your WordPress blog. You will learn how to optimize your blog and how to protect your blog against spammers.

Chapter 22: self-hosted WordPress installation is covered here. You learn what you need to know to create a WordPress blog under 5 minutes. It’s so easy you wonder why you haven’t been using WordPress before.

Chapter 23: If you choose the book, this is where you are going to realize that you may want to get the video course to get everything there is about WordPress. There are more advanced topics out there that can get a bit more technical, which means you may need someone to walk you through those topics.

Video/Audio Course: the multimedia course covers more WordPress 2.7 for folks who are interested. You are going to learn how to create content fast, and you will also learn how to master the art of SEO for WordPress. Getting found by Google and other search engines means that you will have more “monetization” option. You will also get to master the art of videoblogging with this course. Nobody can teach you how to develop your online personality, but Jason does teach you how to run a video-based blog like a pro. You don’t have to get the video course to get the book, though I recommend it for beginners (you can get it here).

WordPress Foundation 2.7 is a decent course for beginners to WordPress. Don’t for a second think that things will get easier once you know more about WordPress. The truth is, once you know what you don’t know now, you are going to realize how you have not getting the best out of your powerful CMS.

Blogging To the Bank 3.0 Preview

Blogging to the bank 3.0 has finally been released by the Rob Benwell. Blogging to the bank is probably the most popular digital blogging product on the market. Now, I usually don’t recommend any digital product as most of these products disappoint. Blogging to the Bank is close to my heart as it helped me get started with blogging.

Blogging to the bank has something for everyone. If you are a beginner, blogging to the bank shows you how to set up your blog from scratch. In essence you learn how to:

• set up blogs for fun or for your business
• drive traffic to your blogs through promotion and other methods
• blog for success (how blogging works as a business).
• how to promote your side businesses with your blog.

Now if you are a super expert blogger, you probably won’t need this product, but if you have set up your WordPress blog and want to follow a decent blueprint to build your blog up, then you should consider blogging to the back 3.

WordPress On Crack WordPress Programming Training

I have been searching for a PHP course that specifically addresses the issues surrounding WordPress, writing plugin for WordPress, and the ins and outs of WordPress plugins. Most books that are out there on Amazon tell you how to create an array in PHP or how to write a function, or how to connect to a database using PHP. It’s fair to say that there are a few sites that show you a little bit of this or that, but none present you with the information that you need to start from scratch and learn not only how to work with WordPress, but how to optimize your blog for search engines, and even how to write useful plugins.

So I searched, and searched. I must have read 10 PHP books before finding WordPress on Crack. I remember I wanted to learn how to write plugins for myself. Outsourcing is one way to go, but people suggested crazy numbers to write WordPress plugins for me. They told me that WordPress programmers are rare, and you’ve got to pay a premium to get them working for you. But WordPress is a PHP system. Everything in it is written in PHP.

There is so much content in this package that I haven’t been able to finish reading the whole thing in a month. Having said that, I started with the plugin programming part. I love WordPress and love learning how to do tweaks to CSS or RSS, but at the end of the day I was interested in WordPress plugin programming. Here are my favorite plugins:

• E-Mail Announcer Plugin: Notify others (with “post-to-blog” enabled) that you have made a new blog post.
• Squeeze page for WordPress: create squeeze pages and grab your readers’ information
• Search Tracker Plugin: Find out exactly what your readers are searching for.
• Opt-In Booster Plugin: Put an opt-in form right into the middle of your blog posts

There are a few other plugins available in WordPress on Crack, but once you get a hang of writing plugins, you’d be surprised how many ideas you come up with to enhance your WordPress blog without having to pay thousands of dollars to get others to do it for you.

Keep in mind that while this whole package is designed to teach you how to learn WordPress programming, you will need to have at least some programming knowledge to take advantage of the technical training in this package. You can obviously implement the SEO recommendations without knowing much of PHP. But if you know programming or some PHP, you are golden with WordPress on Crack

Get your WordPress 6 pack Abs with WordPress.com 2.5 Essential Training

I had a chance to review Lynda.com’s WordPress 2.5 training software a couple of weeks ago, and I must say, it took a lot out of me to get to the finish line. I got to say that I am a big fan of Lynda.com DVD training series. I have learned Flash and Illustrator from Lynda.com folks, and for that I’d be always grateful. But I was skeptic about this training DVD set when it came out. It is not a very expensive DVD set, but I was wondering how they would approach WordPress through video clips when it needs so much hands on practice.

I got to admit that a lot of stuff on the DVD set were not that advanced. The trainer starts off with the most basic things about WordPress and goes on to discuss more advanced topics such as Theme customization and WordPress enhancements through plugins. Here is pretty much what you will learn from this DVD set:

* Understanding the WordPress.com Dashboard interface
* Setting basic options and choosing a theme
* Composing posts and pages
* Including and managing images, videos, audio, and other media
* Working with categories and tags
* Building link lists
* Working with comments and dealing with spam
* Managing user accounts
* Customizing themes with widgets
* Promoting a blog

As you can guess from the table of contents, the WordPress 2.5 Essential Training is not for advanced WordPress users. You don’t learn how to write a theme from scratch or how to modify the code behind plugins. But you will learn basic to intermediate WordPress techniques that help you become a better blogger. I think for $49.95, this is a great set for people who have never worked with WordPress before (or haven’t blogged before for that matter). One thing is for sure though. DVD sets sure can make you lazy. You don’t even have to read books anymore as you can just listen and watch a trainer do things in front of you. Now if you are sharp enough and are not checking ESPN news at the same time you are going through these DVDs, there is a good chance you will pick up all you need to know to get started with WordPress. But best of all, you can get it all done in about 6 hours (counting 2 30 minute breaks). That surely beats going to a conference and paying a $1000 to learn the same stuff, doesn’t it?