Format

PDF gives a certain freedom in book layout that can usually be expensive for printing. It will be interesting to see how the book will look in print, but this PDF looks amazing. It’s in landscape format of 10×8 inches. Both layout and typography, use of images makes this PDF very easy to read and follow.

Page from the book

One thing I didn’t like (and I don’t like this in any book), are long sections of source code. The other thing I didn’t like is the fact that table and contents and index are not linkable. It will be great if you can click on chapter title or index term page and go to the actual content. Maybe this can be changed in some of the next revisions.

Book Contents

Book is very current, covering the latest main WordPress release (2.8). Releasing as PDF first is better when it comes to speed, because while print edition is released, content is usually outdated.

Book follows very logical steps from introducing WP, explaining the interface, security, installation, basics of plugins and themes. After first two introduction chapters, next two chapters are about theme development. This is done really great, explaining the theme structure and use of different files, basic filters and actions used by theme and more. And after all that you will learn about advanced things: customized loops, complex page structure using multiple sidebars, comments and archive templates, adding Twitter support and more.

Click to buy 'Digging into WordPress' for $27.00

Plugin chapter is orientated more to the usage of plugins, and adding some smaller functionalities into plugins. This is understandable because plugin development is very complex issue that can’t fit into chapter or two. Rest of the book cover RSS feeds including advanced setting using .htaccess rewrites, complex feeds URL’s, customizing feeds and using Feedburner. New threaded comments are explained in great details with code examples, controlling track-backs and customizing display of comments.

SEO optimization is important part of the book with some 50 pages, and that is one of the strongest parts of Digging into WordPress. This chapter will teach you everything you need to know about building solid SEO base for your blog. Last chapter is about maintenance, tracking and blog security with some great practical examples of using htaccess file and some of the WordPress filters.

Rating

Features
Writing Style
Code Examples
Value For Money
Overall
Average rating: 9.3

This book is for beginners and intermediate WordPress users. But even the experienced developers can find interesting stuff, or use the book as a handy reference.

Conclusion

This is a great book. I really enjoyed reading it, and even finding some interesting tips I didn’t know about. With excellent writing style and good choice of quotes that are used before start of each chapter, this book is a refreshing addition to currently available choice of WordPress books. Highly recommended.

Win free copy of this book

Thanks to Chris Coyier for providing full book for this review, and also providing one more copy for the giveaway. So, if you want the copy of this book you need to do follow these simple steps:

1. Tweet the following message:

Digging Into #WordPress book giveaway. If you want to win, follow @milangd and retweet http://dv4p.com/digwp

2. You can enter and retweet as many times as you like and more you retweet the more chances you have to win.
3. Wait for the Sunday noon (15.Nov 2009, 12:00 CET) for winner announcement.
4. Make sure you’re following @milangd, so I can DM the winner.

Features

Plugin requires very little interaction, and options you can use are minimal. But in most cases you will not need anything more. Widget is also very straight forward and you can choose maximal number of posts to display. Plugin admin panel shows top 10 queries and latest 35 visits from search engines. It would be good to have some more options to review the lists, and also lists have some styling problems in WP 2.7 but I expect that to be sorted out in the future versions.

Top 10 Search Queries

Plugin will use only results from page 2 of the search engine in the attempt to boost the position to the first page. This process is not very fast and it takes some time for plugin to gather enough data, and that again depends on the traffic you get from the search engines. My latest website TVScape.NET is online now for less than two weeks, and after first week plugin was already displaying results in the widget. On this site it took a bit longer. Lite version allows you to clean the database and remove all the recorded data.

Pro Edition

Pro Edition

Lars, plugin author has also provided a Pro version of the plugin for me to try. And, there are many features pro version has over Lite that will improve the plugin’s usability. Pro version allows boosting from any range of pages, not only page 2 with results. Also, you can see keyword ranking and with that you can have more control over the boosting.

Pro version has many more interesting features including export of data, displaying of trends, keywords exclusion…

Rating

Features
Integration
Usability
Administration
Support
Average rating: 8.7

Conclusion

There are some things that need to be upgraded in terms on how the interface looks. Maybe a tabbed interface will be better. Anyway, most important is that the plugin works, and you will rarely use it’s admin panel.

I recommend that you try the Lite version first to see how it works. But be patient, because results will not be instant, you need to wait for the plugin to show it’s strength. Right now I use it on all my blogs and I recommend it to everyone. But, also think about purchasing the Pro edition because it will allow you much more control over the final results.

Plugin Homepage: http://mywordpress.com/plugins/page-2-seo-booster/

Book Contents

First chapter contains explanation of basic blog and WordPress terminology, followed by the chapter covering installation of WordPress manually and setting WordPress.com hosted account. Third chapter covers the process of creating posts, tags and category management, advanced posts options, comments and moderation, working with spam and introduction to Akismet plugin.

Book Front Cover

Pages, links, media library and plugins are covered in the chapter 4, and themes are in the next chapter. Another chapter covers RSS feeds and podcasting. This chapter introduces several interesting plugins that will help you enhance podcasting experience. Another chapter is dedicated to user management and explanations of user roles. Final chapter contains useful information for blog administrators that cna help them solve some common problems.

There are three more chapters that are not really meant for beginners and they are covering creating themes and plugins, and using WordPress as standard CMS platform.

The Good

Chapter 3, covering the basics of blogging with WordPress is really excellent and you will find that information here is more useful than in the WordPress Codex documentation. Feeds and podcasting chapter 7 covers basics of feeds, use of Feedburner, adding and displaying feed in the blog and everything you need to start with podcasting blog.

Book introduces several interesting plugins that can help you with podcast, user management and other tasks.

The Bad

There are few things I really didn’t like, and that’s theme and plugins development. Both this topics are not really needed for WordPress beginners, and both require knowledge of PHP (and even MySQL) development. Both plugins and themes are much more complex topics, and here you will find only bits and pieces that will not going to help you if you need something like that. Both theme and plugin development are complex issues and each one deserves a separate book. This book would be much better without these chapters.

Unfortunately for some of the content this book is released too late. WordPress 2.8 is now main release and it’s very similar to WP 2.7, but some differences can be misleading. Such books should be written parallel with development and released as soon as the software is released.

Conclusion

Rating

Features
Writing Style
Code Examples
Value For Money
Overall
Average rating: 7.8

It’s good to see WordPress book for beginners that will introduce WordPress blogging in a easy and understanding way with many screenshots to help along. Experienced users can skip this one, because there is not much they can find here that they already didn’t know. But, I really recommend this book to beginners who are just starting to know WordPress.

CMS Layout

Features

Elegant Theme eBusiness is truly a premium theme,  rich with features and with excellent support. I will mention only few of the features, and for the rest check the official website via the link at the bottom.

• Advanced control panel for theme management.
• 9 color schemes with CSM and Blog layout. One additional page template without sidebar
• Advertisement management supporting 8 different 125×125 banners and one 468×60 banner.
• Support for new WP 2.7 model of threaded comments.
• 3 sidebars used in blog layout.
• Full PSD source files.

Options panel

Theme Options

All options are divided into several tabs. Layout is used to control how your website will look like. Homepage tab allows you to set sliders and pages for CMS layout on the front page. Blog tab allows you to set thumbnails options, page elements for blog layout.

Plugin supports two types of navigation. Pages navigation is on the top and categories navigation is visible only in blog layouts. Navigation tab controls both navigation bars. Last, manage ads tab allows you to set banners and urls for them and also, visibility of ads sections on the blog.

Blog Layout

Customization

One of the most important difference between this and many others premium themes I had a chance to work with is that this theme required very little changes to the theme code. As for the theme design, theme archive contains full PSD source files and you can use it to change colors and other elements. The only thing I have changed is logo. As for the CSS and layout, theme uses table-less layout.

Theme files and code are well organized, and easy to track what’s going on where. But there are few problems I will discuss later.

Further Improvements

There are few things I had problem with. Each of the theme options is saved as a separate setting/record in options table. And on top of that, the names of the options are wrong. I would like to see all settings saved as the array or object as a single record. Also, even if the options panel is powerful, it still lacks one very important thing and that are instructions. It would be great to see explanations for each option either as a separate PDF file or as in line elements on the options panel itself (I prefer PDF).

Theme also needs few more page templates for standard blog features: authors, archive or site map. Than also, more than 3 sliders on the main layout would be nice also. All three sliders are set through the theme options, but in my opinion it were be better that all tree sliders were actual pages.

Conclusion

Rating

Features
Design
Customization
Administration
Support
Average rating: 8.9

This is really an excellent theme. And even with few problems I have pointed out, it’s one of the best premium themes I have worked with. Over the past few months I have tried few of the other Elegant Themes, and I had more problems with them in terms of customizations and lack of some features I needed then I cared for, so I never used one on the live website. All that problems are not gone, and this theme is really a big step forward. Looking forward for the other Elegant Themes.

Theme Homepage: http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/ebusiness/

Features

HeadSpace is much more than just a SEO plugin. It also features a number of smaller modules that can add various code into pages, modify some of the WordPress options and eliminate need for additional plugins. The total number of features is quite impressive. Without going into too many details, plugin can:

Site Modules

• Control in many details title, keywords and description for each page, for different classes of pages (archives, search…) using special tags.
• Integration on categories, posts and other WordPress editor pages allowing easier modification of each content element.
• Page related modules allowing you to change some of the WordPress features like RSS feeds, plugins, CSS and many more. With these modules you control page title format, description lenght and keywords/tags.
• Website related modules that will be added to all blog pages. This include Google Analytics, Feedburner Stats, many more hit and access counters.
• Import SEO data from other related plugins.

Meta Data

Control your SEO data

Main task for HeadSpace2 is to optimize SEO for the website. My suggestion is that after installing the plugin, on a blog that already has posts, update all relevant meta data. For this, easiest is to use Meta-Data panel in Tools menu. You can filter the list of meta elements for posts and pages and manually or automatically insert values.

After that you need to set defaults for SEO values for different types of pages like search, post, page, archive and others. This is located on main plugin panel in the Settings menu. On the same panel, you need to activate some of the site wide modules if you need.

Further Plugin Improvements

Despite all the features this plugin has, and relative ease of use, there are few things I would like to see changed. Most important is to create top level menu and place all the plugin panels under that menu. This will allow better access to plugin features. It’s better to have centralized administration for such complex plugin.

Rating

Features
Integration
Usability
Administration
Support
Average rating: 8.8

Also, it would be good to see more options for some of the modules like Google Analytics and several others. Other than that, I don’t have any more complaints about plugin.

Conclusion

This is very powerful plugin that will improve your blog SEO and allow you replace some of the plugins with a single plugin. So, download it and try it for yourself, compare it to SEO plugin you already use and you will see the real power of HeadSpace2.

Plugin Homepage: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/