Well I really got into the idea of Leveraging Drupal (re-use) as opposed to building from scratch, so… I decided to write a book!
Leveraging Drupal http://www.amazon.com/Leveraging-Drupal-Getting-Your-Right/dp/0470410876
It merges all the stuff I have been on about, how to face the Drupal learning curve in the context of an ongoing real world example that starts getting the most out of Drupal 5.x, gets upgraded to Drupal 6.x (we have a good long look at that process, with non-trivial examples involving major contributed modules), where it really takes off, and then closes with a look forward to the stability and richness that is the exciting promise of Drupal 7.x.
It shows how to base development both on staging, with development, testing and production sites, as well as on the use of a test-driven agile software development process with Drupal website application projects, including how to carry out an object-oriented analysis and design and how to map that domain model to Drupal core, module and theming architectures. And including a simple way to document your user stories, acceptance tests and other documents right on the site you are developing.
It will be published by Wrox, who have said they will donate a small percentage of each sale to the Drupal Association, which really rocks, and who are showing themselves open to a whole new approach to books as interactive projects you can roll up your sleeves and get involved in, by checking out the different milestone branches from an online SVN repository as part of the staging process, by participating in an online blog where readers can share both discoveries and difficulties.
It’s a sort of how to get the most out of Drupal for the rest of us, on the one hand it does not hide the complexity or the wide range of skill sets actually required to get a website application up and launched, while on the other it does strive to simplify that process, or at least tell you about it.
Anyway, I am very excited about it. Undertaking this objective has been a big commitment and continues to be so, but doing this has the virtue of freeing up some of my time to really provide more than just the occasional article, and to be able to go deeper and share some real world useful stuff, I hope.