[Zope-dev] Writing the second Zope Community Handbook

[Stephan Richter]

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