Hello everyone, first of all, sorry for the cross-post, but I need to reach about everyone possibile in the Zope Community. While talking with Maik Roeder this weekend, we noticed that there might be a huge urge to write another community-authored Zope Handbook. So I called Nadja Rosmann, chief editor of Linux Enterprise magazine, today and talked to her. She was very excited about it and showed great interest. The first book we (the Zope community) wrote with them was a great success and started at Linux Enterprise an entire series of pocket books. The first book, which is also known as the Yellow Book, was a set of articles by various community members about Zope. The book was published in German and an English version was available online. The book covered a wide variety of subjects and offered a great alternative for people that were not willing to spend the money for a complete book, since the price was only 12.50 Euros. The book was therefore perfect for giving it to clients and other interested people without making a big investment. So, we plan to write a book like that again! This time however, we will publish the book on paper in at least German and English. I also talked to Nadja about a French version, since France seems to have some really cool Zope development going on. I truely believe that this book will help Paul's goal of having Zope grow 10x. BTW, since we will have many authors, I propose to donate the payments to a common Zope-oriented project, such as the creation of a Zope-booth or something else (the last donations went to the EuroZope e.V. for organizing conferences). Of course every author will receive a free copy in a preferred language. The next thing I need to discuss would be the topic of the book. Nadja and I agreed that it might be a better marketing argument, if we try to concentrate on Zope's Content Management capabilities. This way, many companies should be interested in writing about their products and case studies. What do you think? Now to the organization of the project. We need about 20-24 articles most having a length around 12k-20k characters (4-6 A4 pages) and some central articles having 20k-30k characters (about 10 A4 pages). This would produce a book with around 300 pages, which would be sold for 20.00 Euros. Since this is a community effort, people need to volunteer writing articles/chapters. Therefore, please E-mail me privately (so we do not cause huge cross-post threads), if you would like to write an article and what you would like to write the article about. Once I have enough responses, I will publish the list. Here are some points that might help thinking about a subject: - Do you or your company have developed your own Content Management System in Zope? Then tell us about it. Examples: CMF, Plone, Silva, Kontentor ... - Do you or your company have a client that you want the world to tell about? Why are you not writing a Case Study? Examples: Universities, Government agancies, other companies... - Do you have a product you developed (or extensively used) for Zope that you think should receive more attention or could be useful to many people? Right, write about it! Examples: Wikis, RDB Adapters, ZEO, I18n tools, Discussion Boards... - Do you know a particular thing about Zope that you particularly liked about Zope and that caused you using it? Please, tell us about it. Examples: RDB/LDAP Integration, User management, speed of development (RAD) ... - Are you developing some cool stuff for the Zope core? Write about it... - There is also some interest in having a couple reports on the progress of Zope 3, so if you are a Zope 3 developer, you might write an article comparing the differences between the Zope 2 and Zope 3 way of doing things. Examples: RDB Integration, Caching, I18n, Components versus Multi-talented objects... - If you do not know a topic, but still would like to write an article, contact me anyway and we will find a subject together. Also, we do not need only writers, but also translators. So, if people do not feel comfortable writing an entire article, they could also volunteer as translator. Now to the time frame. I think that it will be best to write the articles during Christmas, since it is a slow time and people have some more time on their hands. My ambitious goal is to send the complete set of scripts to Nadja by January 25th (Why that day? Because it is her and my birthday. ;-). This project cannot happen without the community! Please help us making this project a success! Regards, Stephan -- Stephan Richter CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student) Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training