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Ten Ton Online

Ten Ton WordPress Essentials

Ten Ton WordPress

Ten Ton WordPress Essentials, by Geoff Blake

Platform: Mac & PC

Format: DVD-ROM; Online

8 hours, 12 minutes

Level: Beginner to intermediate

Release Date: March 2010

Project Files: Included

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“Ten Ton makes killer products. The price was a little high, but totally worth every penny. With the amount of knowledge and effort packed into it, it’s actually underpriced.” —Patrick

“With your DVD, I learned more in two days than I thought possible. Your approach is no-nonsense and just plain old understandable!” —Louise

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Product Description

Learn the ins and outs of the world’s most popular blogging platform, WordPress! In this 8+ hour DVD, award-winning expert software trainer Geoff Blake teaches you how to install and set up a blog (both on a local machine and on a live site), create pages and posts, add in images and media, and how to integrate some of your favorite applications, like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Illustrator. From there, delve into blog customization and learn about widgets, blogrolls, custom sidebars, plugins, and a whole lot more. Jump into the world of blogging with Ten Ton WordPress Essentials!

Course Outline

Welcome To Ten Ton WordPress Essentials!

  1. Ready For Some WordPress?
  2. About Geoff Blake
  3. What’s On The DVD And How All This Works

Chapter 1: Understanding What WordPress Is

  1. About Blogging And WordPress
  2. The Main Areas Of A WordPress Blog
  3. A Blog’s Front End And Back End

Chapter 2: Lets Getcha Up And Running With WordPress

  1. Setting Up A Free Blog On WordPress.com
  2. Setting Up A Self-hosted WordPress Blog
  3. Installing Locally On A Mac Part One: Installing MAMP
  4. Installing Locally On A Mac Part Two: Installing WordPress
  5. Installing Locally On A PC Part One: Installing XAMPP
  6. Installing Locally On A PC Part Two: Installing WordPress

Task #1: Applications You May Use With WordPress

Chapter 3: The Sights: A Tour Of The WordPress Interface

  1. Viewing And Customizing The Dashboard
  2. Touring The Rest Of The Admin Interface
  3. The WordPress Codex And Online Forums

Chapter 4: Making Your Blog Your Own

  1. Gettin’ To Settin’ Up Your Profile
  2. Setting The Blog’s General Options
  3. Now On To Themes: Changing Your Blog’s Design
  4. Discovering Even More Themes
  5. Viewing Your Blog’s Theme Files
  6. Using The WordPress Theme Directory
  7. Manually Installing Themes
  8. Auto Installing Themes From The Theme Directory

Task #2: Ten Awesome WordPress Themes To Explore

Chapter 5: Let’s Get Creating Some Posts

  1. Touring The Edit Post Screen And Writing Posts With The Visual Editor
  2. A Quick Mention: Setting Your Post’s Discussion Options
  3. Editing Your Posts And A Look At The Quick Edit Feature
  4. Formatting And Previewing Your Posts
  5. Inserting And Editing Links To Sites And Email Addresses
  6. Super-Sweet: It’s WordPress’s Kitchen Sink Toolbar
  7. Setting Publishing Options For Your Posts
  8. Understanding Excerpts, Trackbacks, And Pingbacks

Chapter 6: Additional Posting Techniques

  1. Get Editing Your Published Posts
  2. Making Your Blog Easier To Read: Adding "More" Links
  3. Creating And Editing Posts With The HTML Editor
  4. Ready For This? Creating HTML Posts With Dreamweaver
  5. Adjusting Your Blog’s Writing Settings
  6. Password Protecting A Post

Chapter 7: Adding Media To Posts, Part One

  1. First Up, Setting Your Blog’s Media Options
  2. Droppin’ Graphics Into Posts
  3. Adding An Image From A URL
  4. Loading Images Into The Media Library
  5. Inserting Images Into Posts From The Library
  6. Editing Your Inserted Images
  7. Editing Images In The HTML Editor
  8. Dig This: Using WordPress’s Image Editor
  9. Understanding Graphics In Web Design

Technique #1: Preparing Images In Photoshop For Use On Your Blog

Technique #2: WordPress Workflow: From Illustrator To Photoshop To Your Blog

  1. And Now On To Video

Chapter 8: Adding Media To Posts, Part Two

  1. Adding In Some Video To Your A Posts
  2. Using Auto-Embed To Add In Video
  3. Droppin’ In Some Audio
  4. Linking To PDFs And Other Types Of Media
  5. Managing Your Inserted Media

Chapter 9: Working With Categories And Tags

  1. Getting Started With Categories
  2. Creating New Blog Categories
  3. Gettin’ Organized; Applying Categories To Posts
  4. Setting Your Blog’s Default Category (And A Fast Way For Creating Categories)
  5. Get Applying Tags To Posts

Chapter 10: Working With WordPress Pages

  1. Understanding Pages Versus Posts
  2. Editing And Scratch Building WordPress Pages

Technique #3: Creating An HTML Contact Page With Dreamweaver

  1. Setting Your Blog’s Front Page And Going Further With Dreamweaver Design
  2. Controlling Page Order And Hierarchy
  3. Makin’ Use Of Your Theme’s Page Templates

Chapter 11: Creating And Managing A Blogroll

  1. What The Heck Is A Blogroll? Let’s Get Started
  2. Adding Links To Your Blogroll
  3. Adding And Removing Blogroll Links
  4. Creating Custom Link Categories

Chapter 12: Viewing Comments And Adding Users

  1. Viewing A Blog’s Comments
  2. A Real-World Look At The Disqus Commenting System
  3. Moderating Comments On Your Blog
  4. Setting Up Discussion Options
  5. Allowing Others To Contribute: Adding Additional Users
  6. Understanding WordPress’s Different User Privileges

Chapter 13: Customizing Permalinks And RSS Feeds

  1. Setting Your Blog’s Permalinks
  2. So Let’s Get Creating Custom Permalinks
  3. Viewing Your Blog’s .htaccess File
  4. Blog Syndication: Understanding RSS Feeds
  5. Determining Your Blog’s RSS URL
  6. Figuring Out RSS Feeds For Your Blog’s Categories

Chapter 14: Extending Your Blog With Widgets

  1. A First Look At Widgets
  2. Diggin’ Into Sidebar Customization
  3. Getting More Comfortable With Widgets (And Setting Up An RSS Widget)
  4. A First Look At The Arbitrary Text Widget
  5. Using Dreamweaver To Creating A Custom Widget

Technique #4: Adding A Twitter Widget To Your Blog

Chapter 15: Into The World Of Plugins

  1. Now On To Plugins: A Big Toe In The Massive Pool Of WordPress Plugins
  2. Exploring The WordPress Plugin Directory
  3. Installing And Configuring Plugins
  4. Manually Installing Plugins On Your Blog

Task #3: Ten Killer WordPress Plugins To Explore

  1. Adding In Some Custom Widgets

Chapter 16: Ten Ton WordPress Wrap-up

  1. Check Out These Killer WordPress Resources
Help spread the tell the world!

  • Can you point me to the chapter/section that covers how to back up a WordPress site? Also, which chapter/section covers how to take the changes you've made on your local host dummy setup over to your live site?

    Thanks! Ten Ton is worth it's weight in gold!

  • Carmen and Carlota

    Ok, this is our revisited version of Carly Simon's classic "Nobody Does it Better" for Geoff Blake aka The King of Tutorials after following his Wordpress Essentials tutorial:

    "Geoff: Nobody does it better (teaching),

    makes me feel sad for the rest (of teachers and/or the ones who don't follow your tutorials),

    Nobody does it, half as good as you,

    baby your are the best!"

    Seriously. This planet is a better place with you on it. I feel I'd be capable of learning quantic physics if you made a tutorial. And I'm a dork in science!

    Thank you! (copy and paste "n" times)

    Carmen & Carlota

    Your students from Madrid

  • I've been struggling to figure out how to reply to this for quite a while, as it has totally blown me away!!! Thanks sooo much Carmen and Carlota...I'm at a total loss for words! Honestly, and I tell people this all the time, there's no secret formula...there's no master plan...it's just me having fun and hoping people enjoy what I do. It's exciting to me to do something you love to do (for me, teaching) and have people really respond to it as you both have done and to help people in places I've never even visited yet (Madrid!) So again, thank you ladies! You two are awesome!!!!

  • Linda van der Westhuizen

    I have a VTC CD tutorial where you explain how WordPress work. I would like to know how to add an existing html website in WordPress. (The website was made in Dreamweaver.)
    Does Ten Ton WordPress Essentials explain how to do it? If not help me thanks. 
    Linda

  • Hi Linda, thanks for your question. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) and therefore works in a very different way than a traditional, static website does, like the one you've built in Dreamweaver. The important question to ask is, why do you want to move your website over to the WordPress platform?

    About 3 years ago, I shifted tentonbooks.com over from a static site (which happened to be built in Dreamweaver too) to WordPress. There were many aspects of WordPress that I wanted to take advantage of, but it essentially meant an entire rebuild of the site. But, it wasn't a rebuild from complete scratch because I'd already built it in Dreamweaver, just like yourself. This made moving things over to WordPress much smoother. That said, there will be a few tricky spots, like customizing the WordPress template to reflect your Dreamweaver site.

    To answer your question about Ten Ton WordPress, yes there is a lesson that discusses how to create posts with Dreamweaver, which would help get you going in the right direction. As for the theme customization, that's a title that's currently in development, so it's on the way.

    Hope all this helps,

    Geoff

  • Christopher W

    So, do you have an idea when the video for creating a custom template for WordPress will be coming out? Hopefully not before I figure it out :) Seriously though, you da man! Love the new site and congrats on all your successes.

  • Hey Chris! Thanks for your awesome comment and kind words! Much appreciated! I'm looking to get to WordPress customization hopefully in March. There's been quite a bit of demand for it, so it's definitely on the way! Stay tuned...and thanks again! ~Geoff

  • Nt5ranger

    Curious, do us people that use the online training, are able to utilize that awesome interface you talk about? and or get links to some of the freebees you also speak of

  • Hi nt5ranger, not sure which interface you're referring to. Can you be more specific? As for the freebies, unfortunately at this point they're DVD-only...but that may change in the future.

    Thanks!

    Geoff

  • Liz

    Awesome videos on learning Wordpress, I am up and loving it. I do have a really noob question. How do you protect your name? Mine is really unique and I don't want anyone else to get it.

    Liz

  • Heya Liz! Great to hear you're enjoying the vids so much. That's awesome to hear. I'm not 100% sure I know what you mean by "protecting your name." Do you mean your administrator user name? If so, then if you've already created a really unique username for the Admin, then it would be very difficult for anyone else to figure out what it is.

    Does that help? If I've misunderstood your question, just let me know! Enjoy the rest of Ten Ton WordPress!

    Geoff

  • Liz

    Hi Geoff,
    Sorry, it was late and I didn't explain myself very well. I mean my WP blog name, the name of my Blog that appears on the top of my first page. Example: "The Nexus Times"

  • Hi Liz, Ahhh...no problem. Just go to Settings > General on the left. On the General screen you'll see "Site Title" right at the top. Hope this helps!

    Geoff

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