If you’ve been following my Twitter feed of late you may have noticed that I’ve been to California twice in less than a month working on a secret project. Well, as of yesterday the project is no longer secret so I can now tell you that I was down in Ventura recording a course entitled WordPress 3.0 Essential Training for Lynda.com.
This course has been in the works for a long time and I am extatic to see it finally become available for you to watch. Over the years a lot of people have asked me where to go to learn how to user WordPress and I’ve always been hesistant to point them to any one book or other resource because I haven’t yet found something I can say I put my trust in. With this release I set out to produce just such a resource so people can find everything they need to know in one place. I hope you like it.
In the coming days I will be releasing some free 24 hour Lynda.com passes so you can go check out this and other great courses from the Lynda.com archives. The course is now available from Lynda.com so you can go check it out for yourself.
WordPress.com and self-hosting combined
When planning the WordPress 3.0 Essential Training course we decided to cover both cloud hosted WordPress.com sites and also self-hosted sites. The course progresses in much the same way someone just starting out would: It stars with setting up a WordPress.com account and a site, then covers all the intricacies of creating posts and pages, adding images, links and videos and so on before diving into themes, menus and other customization options. There is also a dedicated chapter on how to customize the stock Twentyten theme.
In the first half of the course the viewer learns how to push WordPress.com to the edge of what it can do. When the edge is finally reached, we move on to self-hosting starting with how to install WordPress natively on a PC or a Mac using either BitNami (cross platform), WAMP (Widows only) or MAMP (Mac only). Personally I use and recommend BitNami because I find it easier to use and maintain, but the other options are also covered. Just keep in mind you can only install one of them. They are mutually exclusive.
In the self-hosting portion more advanced topics are covered including plugins, custom themes, child themes and more. There are also several videos covering different types of system craches and how to recover from them. The last part of the course is dedicated to helping you move your site from your local computer to an external host and then how to write and produce great content so that people will find your site.
Logical progression for fast and easy results
The logical progression of the course, from cloud-hosted WordPress.com blog to full-fledged self-hosted WordPress site, was chosen for two important reasons: First off this is the common progression for WordPress users. They create a small blog or basic site on WordPress.com which works great for a while, but then they want to go further and have to move to self-hosting. Secondly, the progression from cloud to local hosting on your computer to external hosting on a web server is the best method for quickly building and deploying new sites (maybe without the WordPress.com part), and it is the method I use myself. Mastering self-hostin on your computer and on a live web host means you can do all your experimentation and building safely on your computer and then take it live only when it is complete. This is a best-practice method that I hope you will deploy simply because it will save you a lot of time.
During the recording week I took a set of photos documenting the experience. You can see the entire set here.
But enough talk! Go check out the WordPress 3.0 Essential Training course on Lynda.com for yourself and start taking control of your online presence!
9 replies on “WordPress 3.0 Essential Training from Lynda.com”
Great job on the Lynda training. I have a question though that didn’t seem to get covered. I hope you can help.
I set up the localhost and made my site to about 70% to where it is now. I then uploaded and tweeked my final site. Now I want to try out some different things on my localhost but my pages are different and my child theme is too. I can see where I change the child theme and the upload content but how do I update my localhost database?
If you are talking about importing other content from an existing WordPress site you use the Import / Export feature under Tools. If you want to do more advanced database handling like rewriting tables or do database dumps you do it through PHPMyAdmin. Under BitNami PHPMyAdmin is found here: BitNami\apps\phpmyadmin\htdocs\index.php.
Thanks,
I just wondering if there was a way to import settings such as Page settings that I modified from what WordPress default settings were. Such as Featured Image, Template, etc.
All the settings should carry over in an export / import scenario as long as the overall setup and relative URLs match. If it doesn’t you can do a full database dump and import with PHPMyAdmin. That will produce an identical situation as long as you copy over all your other files.
Hi Morten,
I’ve been following (and enjoying) your work on WordPress 3.0 with Lynda.com
Understanding html & css, php is for me totally unknown.
So when I follow you on your theme hacks, it’s with a real close eye …
And I can’t understand how to get rid of the ” rel ” appearing on the header image when you scroll on it (we can see it in the Lynda’s video as well). No “Home ” or anything else appear … which would be great for the website users (they would understand that to click on the image point them to the homepage of the website).
Thks for your answer.
Jerome
To remove the screentip you just have to remove the title attribute. I strongly advise against doing this though: the title attribute is helpful for your visitors, those with accessibility problems and search engines. It is also a required elemnt for the html code to validate to web standards.
Thks for your answer, Morten.
No title attribute in view ; just a ” cool ” display instead of the word ” rel “.
Anyway, it’s no big deal.
Thks again for your course : pleasant et efficient.
Jerome
Good pace, mate/
Howdy! Quick question that’s completely off topic. Do you know how to make your site mobile friendly? My web site looks weird when viewing from my apple iphone. I’m trying to find a template or plugin that
might be able to resolve this problem. If you have any suggestions, please share.
Many thanks!