Wow! It’s hard to believe, but my first book is now a real­ity! Sev­eral cop­ies of my first book — “Build­ing Online Com­munit­ies with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress” arrived at my door this morning.

This is the book, pub­lished by Apress that I have co-authored with Robert T Dou­glass and Jared Smith over the last six months or so. It has long been my ambi­tion to be pub­lished and when the oppor­tun­ity presen­ted itself earlier this year, I had to grab it with both hands. It has been quite a hard struggle; writ­ing in a small amount of spare time is not easy, but I do think it has been worth it.

The res­ult is six chapters on using WordPress to help build an online com­munity. Although I wrote the book using ver­sion 1.5.x most of the WordPress chapters are ver­sion agnostic. This isn’t a “how to use WordPress” book (the excel­lent WordPress Codex is good for that). This is a book about how to use WordPress to help you build an online community.

You can buy the book online dir­ectly from Apress includ­ing in eBook form. You can buy from Amazon.co.uk or you can buy it from Amazon.com. I’m not sure whether it will be on the shelves of your local book store yet, but it will be over the next couple of days.

Apress have a good sum­mary of the book (my emphasis):

Con­tent man­age­ment, blogs, and online for­ums are among the most sig­ni­fic­ant online trends today, and Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress are three of the most pop­u­lar open source applic­a­tions facil­it­at­ing these trends.

Drupal is a full con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that allows you to cre­ate any type of web­site you desire, from an e-commerce to a community-based site. phpBB enables you to set up a bul­letin board or forum. And WordPress is the soft­ware of choice for the explod­ing blog com­munity. All three tech­no­lo­gies are based on PHP and MySQL.

Finally, I think Jamie is quite proud of her Dad, Jan is just glad it’s finally pub­lished! I must thank them both for put­ting up with me while I’ve struggled through this. The next one will be easier! I have to thank Matt, Ryan, and the rest of the WordPress com­munity, without whom I would have had noth­ing to write about!