The updated WordPress admin dashboard. The new design features a more minimalistic and streamlined approach to the content.
WordPress 3.2 was released on July 4th, 2011, followed by the 3.2.1 release on July 12th. If you are learning WordPress, you’ll find that although the content in our current WordPress 3 courses is still relevant, the user interface may be different as new features are added to WordPress.
I asked author Morten Rand-Hendriksen to summarize the changes in WordPress 3.2 to help anyone who is working through our WordPress courses. Here’s what he had to say.
We recently received the following via our site feedback form (available at the bottom of every page):
From: Nancy White, April 7, 2011
Hi. Where can I leave feedback about a particular course? I’ve been taking the best course EVER!
I responded and let her know she could simply use the same form again, click the course feedback button at the bottom of every course page, or simply reply to my email. Here is her more detailed response, which she graciously agreed to let me share here as a blog post:
I have been singing the praises of lynda.com for many years. It’s hands-down the best learning place online.
I’ve worked in print and online publications for many years. I’ve enjoyed most of the courses I’ve taken at lynda.com, but often it’s on subjects that I am already quite familiar with, so I’ve picked up some great tips and tricks.
But I’ve known next-to-nothing about WordPress. I’ve always considered it a platform for a personal, mom-and-pop-type blog, something I had no need for. But as you know, WordPress has come a long way! As my clients are getting smarter and more tech savvy, they are demanding web sites that they can easily update themselves. So, I’ve learned the fundaments of Joomla! and WordPress, but was very limited when it came to customization.
I gained an incredible amount of knowledge from this course. I’ve been able to convert a rather complicated HTML site into a custom WordPress theme! I am ecstatic! It did not happen overnight, but it happened. I am happy, and the client is happy!
The lessons in this course are a great reference I keep coming back to. I would be happy to see more from Chris Coyier. He’s very practical and easy to follow.
Thank you again for this and all the other great content from lynda.com.
Loving it!
Nancy White
Thank you for sharing your success story with us, Nancy. It always excites us to hear how our members are applying what they learn from the Online Training Library®. In this day and age, it is so important for designers to start getting comfortable and savvy with designing for multiple mediums. Feel free to share your own stories with us via the site feedback or course feedback buttons, or add a comment below. Yes, we really do read every single one.
Thank you to those of you who have left requests for an additional course on using Dreamweaver and WordPress together since we published our Dreamweaver CS5 and WordPress 3 course last May. There are several approaches we could take for a more advanced course and I’d like to know what you would prefer. If you have a specific suggestion, please leave them in the comments. Thank you!
Video shot by lynda.com’s Taymar Pixley and Lucas Deming, and edited by Chris Chan Lee. Starring author Jen Kramer and training producer Samara Iodice.
You may be surprised to discover that behind every lynda.com author is a training producer, like me, who oversees all aspects of course production—from content development, to script review, to graphics creation, to booth and/or live action recording, and eventually publishing in the Online Training Library®. You may be even more surprised to learn that lynda.com training producers are not usually experts in the software for the courses they produce. In fact, often the first experience I have with a certain piece of software is in reviewing the early draft of a course table of contents in preparation for beginning work with an author. That doesn’t mean training producers aren’t extremely knowledgeable about the course content, but where the author must know details of how every individual feature of the software functions, the training producer is looking at something completely different—the overall educational integrity of the course and associated exercise files.
Some training producers are experts in some software programs—it’s often how our career path brought us to where we are. Some of us are experts in certain products; all of us are skilled in many products, are very technologically savvy, and learn new software quite easily. Before becoming a training producer at lynda.com, my software expertise was in the computer-aided-drafting (CAD) area, having used AutoCAD extensively in my previous career as an engineer, and also in the web design area, using Dreamweaver for the last several versions.
One area of web design I had become increasingly interested in was the use of content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla to create web sites that could be more easily maintained than the traditional static web site. So, when the opportunity arose to produce a Joomla title with the very enthusiastic author, Jen Kramer, I jumped right in. I was particularly excited to learn a CMS because I’d been doing volunteer media work for a youth-run nonprofit, Everybody Dance Now, and the teenage leaders desperately needed a new, modern web site they could learn to maintain themselves.
So, after a week of recording with Jen Kramer, I had my first real taste of Joomla, and that, in turn, stimulated my appetite to watch many of the other Joomla and CMS offerings in the lynda.com Online Training Library®. Before I knew it, I had designed a new Joomla-based national web site for the young ladies of Everybody Dance Now, and was being called upon to design other chapter web sites around the country for the same organization, in addition to providing training for those chapters to maintain their own sites. It’s been a whirlwind of volunteer activity that I wouldn’t have been able to participate in, had I not fully immersed myself in the lynda.com Online Training Library® to learn a new topic.
Click to watch the trailer for Jen's Joomla course.
With the release of Jen Kramer’s Joomla! 1.6 Beta Preview title last week, many people are wondering what Joomla and other content management systems are all about, and how they can apply this technology in their own lives. I’m hoping that sharing my experience as a training producer practicing what we, at lynda.com, teach will help inspire lynda.com members to investigate Joomla and all the various content management systems in the library, and discover these practical and highly-effective solutions for creating and maintaining a powerful web presence.
You asked for WordPress courses, and we heard you. We have three new WordPress courses coming online this week.
New in the Online Training Library® is WordPress 3.0 Essential Training with author Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Morten is a gifted teacher and WordPress expert who is eager to share his knowledge with you. The course includes a walkthrough of common tasks in WordPress, from setting up an account to launching self-hosted sites. Also included are tutorials on inserting media, installing plugins, creating custom themes, and incorporating search engine optimization.
Soon, tune in to Chris Coyier’s new course, WordPress 3.0: Creating and Editing Custom Themes. I am very excited to bring Chris Coyier’s unique voice to the lynda.com Online Training Library®.
Wrapping up our new WordPress releases this week will be WordPress: Creating Custom Widgets and Plugins with author Drew Falkman. Let us know what you think!
Many thanks to the alert members who let us know that we were missing information in our recent Dreamweaver course, Dreamweaver CS5 and WordPress. We want our titles to be helpful to all members, and really appreciate hearing when we can do better.
As soon as the title went up, we started getting feedback that the first chapter, “Setting up WordPress,” needed additional details to help Windows users install the WampServer—namely, that PC users should create their site in the c:\wamp\www\ folder. We’ve added an overlay to the last video in Chapter 1, “Establishing the Dreamweaver site,” and this short-term fix is up on the site now, thanks to your input. If you tried to use the course and had trouble, please try this extra step.
Please, continue to let us know what details you need to take advantage of this or any one of our courses. Hearing from you helps us create the ideal training with the details that you need. We look forward to hearing from you.
Published by Megan O. Read | Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
Macworld.com thinks that lynda.com would be a pretty cool holiday gift idea for the creative types in your life, and while we might have a bit of a bias, we agree.
Here are a few reasons to give the gift of lynda.com this year at the holidays:
You know someone who is getting a new digital camera this year. Check out the hours and hours of digital photography and camera RAW courses in the Online Training Library®.
You would like to build a basic photo-sharing website so that your friends and family can all see photos you took of your Christmas tree, Menorah, hand-knitted reindeer sweater, or all of the snow our friends on the East Coast have been getting. iWeb ’09 Essential Training will help get your photo site built in an afternoon.
You got married and want to explore your family trees together.Growing and Sharing Your Family Tree is an ideal course to help get started researching and organizing who you are related to.
You’d like to share the love (and sell some of the junk stuff you got for the holidays last year), while making a little pocket money for yourself. One of our latest titles, Product Photography for E-Commerce, will give you at least a fighting chance to sell off those footie-pajamas and over-sized plaid pants you got from your grandma last year.
You’d like to help your mom start a cooking blog of all her yummy holiday recipes. WordPress.com 2.7 Essential Training is five hours of everything you need to know to get her sugar cookies and brown bread recipe online and shared with the world.
So, yes, we’re a little biased, but we know from experience that there are hundreds of reasons not to want to go to the mall this time of year: The long wait in lines, not knowing your giftees’ clothing sizes, fighting traffic, catching colds from strangers. There are also a lot of reasons that a gift subscription to lynda.com is a great option for many on your gift list. Visit the lynda.com Gift Center today and give the gift of knowledge.
I am usually the reassuring one; helping others get past the “feeling dumb” part, and into the mindset of being open to learning new things. Now that I’m officially a blogger (took me long enough, eh?) I wanted to learn how to make my picture show up next to my comments.
The process was a little uncomfortable, but it worked. I logged on to the free service athttp://en.engravitar.com and followed the directions. Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. I used the same email address that I use when I post a comment to our blog. Magically, once I loaded my image there, it appeared in our blog next to my comments.
It’s weird to me that one disparate service can tie my email address to my picture off my hard drive to unrelated software that we use for blogging. We’ve apparently set up our WordPress software to acknowledge the gravatar image plugin. I hope you’ll comment on this post by uploading your pictures to gravatar and seeing the magic happen yourselves.It’s easy, fun and a little weird. And it even makes a person who is feeling dumb feel a little more cheeky.
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