I've become a little frustrated by the lack of and/or fragmented info on writing modules for XOOPS. I'm also a bit crap at reverse engineering stuff from other modules - it's time consuming and perhaps a little unfair on the people who've done it.

So, I think it's perhaps time to write a "how to create a XOOPS module" book, and I am willing to try and attempt this challenge.

I have some questions/points to put to you:

1) Does anyone know of such a project already going ahead?

2) Would *you* buy such a book, especially if it meant you got to find out about some handy API stuff?

Uhm, yeah. so. I am not the world's best PHP coder, nor do I know XOOPS inside and out as well as other people - this means that I will need help from other developers, both XOOPS core coders, main module developers and the average person out there.

I would be the main author, and will do the bulk of the writing and compiling of info, code, screen shots and so on. I am also willing to have co-authors on this project.

This will be a paper product, and so if it is accepted for publishing, will be sold in Real Life(tm) and on-line shops, etc. Royalties from this will go to me, co-authors and a percentage will be donated to the XOOPS project.

I don't know how much this book would "earn" for me, I suspect it won't be a great deal as it's a relatively small market. The real idea however, is to help try and encourage coders to take up and write more (hopefully, quality) modules for XOOPS.

If you're interested in helping, please get in touch privately - and perhaps with suggestions of people I should contact to get involved. Please let me have your name and an e-mail address if you want to go on the mailing list (which will be set up if there's enough demand).

2. yes...

Here is the book list..

There are many tutorials on how to make modules, both with and without db
Here are a few to get you started:

http://www.kaotik.biz/
http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/tutorials/sql/index.php3
https://xoops.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=68

I have developed a number of modules for our implementation of Xoops, these are not released as they are not generic, nor used online (its an intranet).

However to answer your first question, No, i would not buy a book on a project such as xoops. There is already XOOPS books but based on the fragmented and difficult to find documentation, i would expect too much from a book and i would expect it to cover many versions of xoops.

Also i am a little concerned about the XOOPS project, as not only is the docs fragmented, there seems to be alot of fragmentation in the project itself.

Although i think the code is good, i would not use XOOPS for future projects where i had a choice, purely down to the difficulty in finding useful documentation. Another book would only add to the mess.

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This isn't a dig, but I would like to try and keep XOOPS politics out of this thread. Although I can see what you mean, the XOOPS project has pulled back together recently, and is moving on again.

Now, as for versions (I meant to say about this in my original post) - depending upon when XOOPS version 3 is released, I would prefer to base it on that. If not, it will written v2.3 and later only.

This book will be fairly targeted - where it will go into DBs, templates and PHP for example, it will assume that you will know something about those topics, or have other, more specific books on them.

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I meant to say in my last reply - the point of this book is to at least get a decent reference for module developers.

The other books are general XOOPS books, based on setting it up and customising. I don't know how far any of them go into writing modules as I've not read them. They are also 2 years old now, so are getting outdated.