WordPress in 24 hours: Say what?

More and more casual users are coming to the WordPress.org platform, a good and bad thing.

WordPress continues to evolve in user-friendly directions, but it remains an outpost of the Web's Wild West. The more you want out of WordPress, the more problems you'll have to stare down.

Let's take WordPress plugins, as just one example.

These independently developed extensions add functionality to a WP blog. They're essential to any blog's success. But WordPress' frequent updates to its core software can make plugins obsolete overnight. Plugins tend to conflict with each other, causing untold headaches ... such as the dreaded blank home page.

Plugin developers usually don't get paid, are in no way obligated to help users and tend to disappear when things go blewy. A plugin that seems a savior one day can be a pea soup-spitting demon the next.

Wordpress' users forums come to the rescue sometimes, but as often as not, reasonable requests for troubleshooting assistance are simply ignored.

You can learn a great deal whilst fighting your way out of a WordPress nightmare -- just don't expect things to be quick or easy. That's part of the price for hooking up with this free and amazing content management system.

This bring us to the new book "WordPress: 24-Hour Trainer" by George Plumley, which I've just read (and skimmed a bit). It purports to teach readers how to "create and customize WordPress sites" in a day." Say what?

While a quick-study newbie probably could launch a WordPress blog in a day -- using Fantastico for installation and a simple theme such as Kubrick -- no one can be "trained" to use WP in a day or even a week. Once you get beyond the simple write and post, WordPress development provides an ongoing adventure, not for the faint at heart.

Those coming to the platform without some knowledge of CSS, xhtml, PHP and javascript won't be doing much customizing, that's for sure.

I've coached quite a few WordPress newbies, some of whom really shouldn't be on the platform. Others dive right in and embrace the challenge.

Not sure where you'd fit in? Right here on Blogger is a good place to park those kids-and-dogs blogs.

In any case, the "24 Hours" spent reading Plumley's book would be better spent learning by doing. If that's too daunting, WordPress may not be the right platform anyway. Someone who needs a 350-page book to explain the basics of content management systems probably isn't a good candidate for the next level of WP use, where the action is.

To be fair, the author can't be blamed for the publisher's marketing hooks, and he probably would agree with most of the above.

Plumley is good at explaining how the CMS works and succeeds in keeping the book from reading like a tech manual. No doubt it would be handy to have around as a reference for newbies. (For more advanced users, there's the "WordPress Bible," which clocks in at almost 700 pages.)

Again, the best way to learn WP is hands-on. Much of the basic stuff presented here should be tackled on your own, via trial and error -- and there are always WordPress' excellent text and video tutorials. They're free, unlike the book, which goes for $45.