WordPress MU 2.8 Beginners Guide Book Review

PacktPublishing sent me a shiny new publication called WordPress MU 2.8. It’s one of their “beginners guide” series which means it takes you step by step from noob to hero on the subject. I’ve read a few of their other books and they’ve always been a good read and source of new information.

WordPress Mu or WPMu is already familiar to me after creating ComLuv.com to run using it so I was looking forward to receiving this book to see if there were some things I had missed. Oh yeah, I missed a lot!

If you’re looking to build a WordPress based site that also has the option of allowing your own readers to create their own blogs then you need to look at WPMu. Not only is it the same platform that wordpress.com uses for their millions of blogs, it’s also expandable to be a social network in it’s own right. It does this with the buddypress and bbpress plugins. This book shows you how to use them all.

In the beginning

Like all beginner books, the first part deals with the introduction and installation chapters. In other books, this is just a page or two but with PacktPub books, you get the full deal. Step by step with pictures and alternative methods. Even right down to setting up Apache to work with subdomains which is going to save you a lot of trouble hunting around forums for answers.

Expansion

After you learn how to set up your site and modify it’s appearance, you’ll want to know what plugins and features can be added. The middle section of the book takes you through different options like buddypress, bbpress (forums) and other useful additions that will make your site stand out from the rest.

As with other beginners guide books, the author works with a case study site and as you progress through the chapters adding more things, you will be able to follow on with your own local install and compare results. This makes it a lot more interactive to learn and with the pop quizzes and “what just happened” reviews, you’ll really prepare yourself for your project.

More than words..

As well as covering the technical details for installing, maintaining and optimizing your site, the author also goes into the real life way of creating and running a blog/social network hub. Things like monetizing your site or ways to increase traffic are given a whole chapter and will really help the new webmaster get to grips with their site.

thinking Mu?

If you’re just considering looking into WPMu or you run more than one wordpress blog and want to consolidate them all to one site then you should buy yourself this book. It’ll give you enough information so that you can try it out without worrying about having to bring in outside help. You can view the books contents page and read more about it here :

WordPress MU 2.8 Beginners Guide