Chris Dickman (bio)

I can as happily spend time in a modest husband-and-wife bistrot as one of the gastronomic temples for which France is justifiably so well known. But there is something compelling about the starred restaurant system that Michelin created and has now perpetuated for more than 80 years. Of all the many restaurant rating systems, this original one still has the most juice, with dining in a starred restaurant the promise of a memorable experience. A luxury (at least for me) confined to special events, I wound up spending quite a bit of time searching online for starred restaurants, either in my own area near Lyon or in conjunction with a trip to a different region. Michelin's own site I find impossible, so after a while the inevitable thought crept into my consciousness: why not create my own directory of the 500 or so starred restaurants?

Off I went, working my way through the list of restaurants, searching for them one at a time online and creating a spreadsheet with the results. I then set up a site using the phpMyDirectory directory application and imported the data. This site provided a simple way to quickly locate starred French restaurants in a given region or city, something I maintained for several years. Until recently, when I decided it was time to add some value to the raw restaurant listings by wrapping them in a framework that could provide both myself and (hopefully) visitors with the ability to blog about French food and restaurants, as well as interact with one another.

I've been building and managing community-driven sites for 15 years, and in that time have employed more than a few content management and blogging systems. But for some reason I had never used the insanely popular WordPress which, coupled with BuddyPress, looked like just what I needed. Starting from absolute zero I thus began gobbling up resources to quickly bring me up to speed on WordPress, the most useful of which I list below.

Digging into WordPress
I'm not usually that nuts about long, technical eBooks — I still prefer to be able to flip through a printed copy. But in the case of Digging into WordPress, which is available both in printed and PDF form, I have to admit that the eBook version works nicely. To some extent this is due to the book being very well organized and nicely designed, so it's a pleasure to scroll through. But also because it's studded with truly useful clickable links that would be a pain to type in from a printed version. I was glad I came across this as my first WordPress resource, since the authors place a lot of emphasis on thinking through the nature of a new site, followed by setting up a structure to best reflect this, via such elements as categories, tags, permalink structure and taxonomies. Another strength is the many step-by-step instructions for increasing the security of a WordPress site, many of which would never have occurred to me.

This isn't a book for those who just want to run a default install and add a few plugins. In a rare instance of a book title actually relating to its content, the authors encourage the reader to dig into the somewhat complex innards of WordPress, and it's thus designed for those with at least some understanding of PHP. I'm quite the noob in that category but I now get a sense of what's possible and have added to my list of New Year's resolutions the modest entry "learn PHP" — right after the equally attainable "achieve world peace." Hey, I can dream.

Before moving on to the next resource, let me emphasize that I was quite impressed by this book and recommend it. You can check out an extract on Graphics.com.

Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes
I had reached the point where it was time to install WordPress and begin building out my site. But what theme would I use? There are plenty of both free and commercial themes available but I wasn't able to find just the right one. So I tackled this SitePoint title to get a better sense of what would be involved in creating my own template. More developer skills than I could reasonably hope to acquire, as it turned out, but the read was useful for explaining the role of theme frameworks and especially child themes. The idea with these is that you make all the changes you want to the child theme while leaving the parent theme untouched -- important in the world of WordPress where updates to its core can require a theme to also be updated. The extract on Graphics.com focuses on how to sell your WordPress themes.

WordPress 3 Site Blueprints
While most WordPress books provide a range of general information, this title attracted my interest because it focuses on showing exactly how to create nine particular kinds of sites, such as ecommerce, local classifieds, job board and membership-based. It also provides a very handy guide to migrating a static site to WordPress, something that I would imagine would be of use to many readers. However, my interest was the chapter devoted to creating a community portal, since it provided a lot of info about configuring BuddyPress, the plugin I had decided to use to add social networking functionality to my site. The clearly-presented, step-by-step instructions came just at the right time for me, and I was able to successfully install and configure BuddyPress. The downside of this book is that each of the nine sites is based on a plugin for its functionality, which is fine in theory, but the world of WordPress moves quickly. You'll need to make sure these are still the leading plugins in their category before basing a site on them. There is also an extract from this book available on Graphics.com.

WPMU DEV
It was clear I needed a solid commercial template to start with, one that I could then tweak as I went along. It had to work with the BuddyPress plugin (most don't) and I needed to know that the developer would update the template as necessary, as well as provide responses to my inevitable questions. After much wandering about I settled on the Studio theme from WPMU DEV. These folks provide a good range of themes, plugins and support, so I went for a monthly membership, which provided me with access to everything. You can just purchase the themes or the plugins but having access to the entire offering has been a great to help to me during the initial construction phase of the site.

Yoast.com
While there's no shortage of sites providing WordPress tips and techniques, Joost de Valk is something of a superstar in the search engine optimization and WordPress domains. While sometimes overbearing in his posts, Joost knows his stuff and is well worth following. I use two of his most popular plugins, WordPress SEO and Google Analytics, both of which make managing these complex tasks easier.

So where's the link to this French food site, you ask? It's coming along quite nicely, thank you, but it's not ready to fly by itself quite yet. In fact, I'm planning to change the template and move the phpMyDirectory-based restaurant listings to the Directory plugin that WPMU DEV recently released — a tortuous process that will no doubt serve as a cautionary tale for a future post.

In the interim, what WordPress resources have made the most difference to you?

Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com
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