Possible WordPress Book

Help-me-please,
Everybody is capable of making a contribution to documentation. If you had a problem, then found the documentation lacking, and eventually found a solution to your problem, then you could contribute that.

You could simply help edit by looking for typos and spelling mistakes. You could do some research and get information. So, yeah, I guess you were missing something. I don’t know anything about coding, but I still write documentation. How did I do that? I educated myself. It’s just that easy.

Also, not all plugins or themes or other hacks are necessarily open source. It’s up to the author to determine how they wish to release their work.

No they’re not. That’s a big mistake for anyone to make.

Documentation exists outside of the codex, also what about the documentation that people produce for their own work (plugins, themes, etc…)

H-M-P, there is now 1.2.2 which had significant changes and if you think a book like the one proposed takes a couple of months to produce, again you’d be mistaken….or the book wouldn’t be worth much.

i wanna know what matt thinks about this…

Is the objection that Larry might make some money off WordPress?

It would be no different that the hundreds of technical authors making money off of PHP.

There’s no objection is there? I just doubted it could be done by one person alone without collaboration. There’s a place for anybody to make money from WP if they want to use their expertise.

Perhaps I’m misreading the situation… ??

But there seems to be some underlying resentment towards Larry because he’s looking (I assume) to profit financially from an open source project. I don’t see why else people wouldn’t be more supportive.

Personally, I think his book is a good idea. I wouldn’t purchase such a book myself, but I think it would be useful for some people. Enough people that it would be worth producing a printed book? Don’t know. But in principle, it sounds good.

It can certainly be helpful to have a nice printed resource which gathers the various bits you might need to make the most of a system.

As for one person doing it alone, Larry would be perfectly free to conduct appropriate research and include appropriate references.

“it’s a real surprise to me if the documentation isn’t because I thought that was free to use by anyone.”

All my work has had a copyright notice attached to it by me.
Not a creative commons whatever, an all rights reserved notice.

If someone had copied my site, stuck a couple of googleads on every page and tried to make money out of my work that way, I would be rightly annoyed. I see this as no different at all. Not in the slightest.

My server logs also tell me who has looked at what, and when.

” Larry would be perfectly free to conduct appropriate research and include appropriate references.”
If he is violating copyright in anyway shape or form, that is not on.

Odd…. thread here recently where a member was inspired to release a theme which certain others pointed at and effectively shouted THIEF! ……. yet along walks another guy who aims to make money from others work, and we have a moral wing saying “Hey, y’know that’s cool”

Produce a book … fine. But I for one would scour that for the very slightest copyright violation. And I would act on that.

I think the book is a great idea Larry.

You may want to take a look (or talk to) the guys at subversion (https://subversion.tigris.org/). They started the documentation on their project, added to it over the versions until it was enough of a book (https://svn.red-bean.com/) that it is now available through O’Reilly’s. They also looked into the issues of who owns what copyright wise and how to deal with the miriad of contributions that were made to the book.

And, as its under O’Reilly’s banner, the whole thing is available under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Interesting discussion! I’m glad a few people think my idea of a book is worthy of pursuit.

A couple of years ago I was approached by an acquisitions editor who worked for a now-defunct tech-book publishing house. They were interested in a book about GNU Emacs and XEmacs, two versions of a complex and extensible open-source text editor. I wrote a six-hundred page book for them in about three months, did all the screenshots and produced the ISO image for an accompanying CDROM.

I was the target of some vehement criticism from certain GNU zealots and idealists, who thought that I should have contributed to the freely-available Emacs documentation rather than making money.

The fact of the matter is that I have contributed to open-source documentation in the past but the need to make a living mitigates against just sitting down and doing so for three months full-time.

Larry

If that is a dig at me, stop.
I am very simply saying that you must not steal my work.
You have looked around my site.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with both wanting and trying to make an income from WordPress. As long as the various licenses and copyright issues are addressed, then it’s fair game.

I don’t see much difference between someone putting Google AdSense ads on their WP-powered site or someone creating a complimentary WP-related product. Legitimate products will be welcomed and pirated or plagerised products will be shunned. It’s that simple.

A reply to the post above starting with “If that is a dig at me, stop.”

I don’t know what you construed as a “dig”, don’t even know who you are, and don’t know which site you refer to.

Be more explicit, identify yourself and your site (I’ve visited scores of WordPress sites), and I’ll be very careful to not remember anything I see there!

Larry

Larry,

Apart from the ideas you’ve already mentioned, it might be interesting to include chapters/sections on:

— the history of blogging/its current social significance/expected future social significance, etc.

— the different types of blogs (diary, dev, niche news, etc.)

Feel free to work with these suggestions, no payment required ??

If your aim is to make a contribution to new WordPress users, and the WP community by producing some extensive documentation, why not do it in the form of PDF’s? And let the users print out the books themselves?

You haven’t been quite clear on your aims/intentions here.