At long, long last I have finally finished the WordPress For Dummies project that I’ve been working on since January. All of the edits are in and the book went to layout this week - and I couldn’t be more thrilled or excited! There were a number of challenges to writing this book.. but getting it finished and through the editing process was the biggest. In the final hours, we were all very happy to know that Matt Mullenweg wrote a very nice forward for the book giving a nice snapshot view of the state of WordPress today, including a little history of the project. Thanks, Matt!

A priority for the publication was the big push to make sure that the content of the book was as up to date as possible, and that included making sure that the material for the WordPress.Org portion of the book covered all of the new functionalities of the yet-to-be-released 2.3 version of WordPress (due out on 9/24) - to include the new tagging feature, Plugin update notification and the return of Blogroll Categories (yay!)

WordPress.Com and WordPress MU also made quite a few revisions to their services since I first wrote those chapters last spring - - so there was a lot of text editing and artwork reshooting going on over here for the past several weeks. Since mid-July, I have been writing, re-writing faster than a speeding locomotive - - and to give credit where credit is due, my editing team at Wiley Publishing kept pace with me, even though I am probably known throughout their offices as that crazy chick who wrote the WordPress book!

My editor, Susan Christopherson, was extremely patient and maintained a cool head when I would write and say “I need Chapters X, X, X, X and X back to update them for version 2.3 of WordPress.Org - there are several replacement figures (screenshots) and a bit of content updates that need to be done.” … and then “Hi again, Susan, I need Chapters X, X, and X so I can update the figures and text for the latest WordPress Mu release, ok? Thanks!“… and then.. “Hi Susan - Chapter X, X, and X has some fine tuning so I can capture some of the latest services and features offered at WordPress.Com.. I need to reshoot some of the figures, as well.”

There is something a little schizophrenic about keeping up with up-to-the-minute development of WordPress!

Poor Susan. She’s a real trooper, that one! The good news is that the book will be as up to date as possible on WordPress, once it is published… and will give readers a very solid foundation and jumping off point, no matter which of the three versions of WordPress they are planning to use. I think writing a book on the WordPress.Org software alone is very challenging - but this book is a 3-in-one and contains great information on WordPress in all of its forms: the hosted version at WordPress.com, the self-hosted version at WordPress.Org and the multi-user version of WordPress MU.

Consider me officially WordSTRESSED™ and OverPressed!™ Ha!