I got an “urgent” email recently from my Packt coordinator – she told me that if I kept writing my book at the rate I was writing, then it would end up being about 500 pages.

Thing is, though – it would be tricky to reduce the chapters I’ve already done, as a half explanation is as good as no explanation at all.

So, I looked over the planned chapters again, and saw that the final three could probably be dropped without affecting the core content of the book – they were just more example plugins showing how to integrate various things with the CMS.

The book itself is on how to build a CMS in PHP, that uses jQuery to make administration easier. That has been accomplished already in the existing chapters (1-7).

I suggested to Packt that I would drop the final three chapters and rework the earlier chapters so the book was more easily read (a 40-page chapter is /not/ easy to read).

Got an email back from them yesterday saying that the plan sounded good.

So the current plan is:

• Finish chapter 8, which is on panels and widgets.
• Write chapter 9, which will build a plugin demonstrating panels and widgets.
• Try to break the earlier chapters apart so that there are more chapters, with less pages per chapter.
• …
• profit

I think I’ll be finished the current chapters within three weeks, then take a week or two to rework the earlier chapters, then another month for rewrites, and finally the book will be published 2/3 weeks later.

So, the book may be out within two months.

After this, I’m taking a break from modern technology to write about baroque technology – I’ll be writing a book on how to build a cheap clavichord.