I’m happy this week. Last week, I spent some time and organised myself a bit more. In work, things are going smoothly – managed to get over a tricky piece of work and the rest is simply a list of small tasks.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been emailing and messaging Darshana at Packt Publishing, about writing a second book (jQuery 1.3 with PHP is going very well – list of reviews).

I initially wanted to write about file management, to explain how KFM works, and to help force me to improve on it. But there’s just not enough of an interested market in that – it’s too specialised.

So instead, I’ll be writing about CMS design using PHP and jQuery.

We (webworks.ie) have a CMS engine which we’ve written and improved for the last 6 or so years. We’ve open-sourced it a number of times, but never managed to generate much interest in it. We never had the time to spend on publicising it.

The book will not be specifically about that engine, but rather about the concepts that went into creating it – how a CMS works, how to manage plugins, administration, user management, and all the other little bits and pieces that every PHP developer needs to eventually address.

By way of explanation, I will be demonstrating various parts of our CMS, and explaining how and why it was built that way. I will be closely examining the other major CMSes as well, and giving alternative methods where good ones exist.

The proposed chapter list is:

1. Introduction
2. CMS core design
3. User management and access control
4. Page creation and Navigation
5. Template Management
6. Plugins
7. Form creation
8. Image Gallery
9. Panels
10. Search and Polls
11. RSS and News
12. Online Store
13. Products

I’m really excited about this project!