WordPress 3.0 Essential Training from Lynda.com

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.

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.

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!

Official Lynda.com Announcement

A comprehensive video and online manual WordPress plugin that developers can give to their clients. It has over 30 high quality video tutorials. An Online manual with over 100 pages. It automatically updates with each new version of WordPress.

Check it out!