Editing a book

I have some very cool news — this fall, I’m going to be a technical editor for a book on WordPress plugin development, written by three of the best developers in the WordPress community: Ozh Richard, Justin Tadlock, and Brad Williams.

Ozh reached out to me earlier this week to see if I was interested, and this was a no-brainer. When I was first getting started with WordPress, before I was active in the community, I remember reading Ozh’s posts to get up to speed, not to mention relying on a few of his excellent plugins. Justin is my favorite WordPress tutorial writer out there. And I had the opportunity to meet Brad in WordCamp San Francisco, and I’ve been repeatedly impressed with his work for WebDevStudios, Pluginize, his WordCamp presentations, and the Sitepoint podcast.

I’ve reviewed their book outline, and I’m very impressed by its breadth and depth. Seeing entire chapters dedicated to some very advanced (and awesome) technical topics is music to my ears. (So much, that my talk at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic next week is dedicated to some of these advanced topics.)

These three are highly respected in the community and they’ve all been involved for far longer than I have. So for me to be working with them over the next few months, tasked with reviewing their work, is quite an honor and I’m looking forward to it. During the core development cycle, I review code, patches, and ideas every day, and I’m excited to translate that into the development cycle for a book. (As long as they let me submit diffs instead of track changes, of course.)

Here’s the announcement posts from Justin, Ozh, and Brad. Thanks to them for their very generous words — Justin suggested I was “actually a super-advanced robot that has been programmed to do nothing other than write awesome WordPress code” (no comment), Brad hopes I bring “endless knowledge of the internals” to the project, and Ozh described me as “more active than hyperactive kids drinking coffee on steroids, who blogs, commits, speaks, twitts and never sleeps” (also no comment). You guys are awesome.

You should probably also follow them on Twitter. (Me too.) Looks like we’ll be using the hashtag #plugindevbook to document progress.

As a sidenote, I’m also going to be the editor for the Core Contributor Handbook, which I’ll be starting this month. Lots of writing and editing about code coming up. (Good thing the 3.1 development cycle starts tomorrow to balance it all out.)