It’s that time again… we’d love to hear what subjects you’d like to read about. Do you have an idea for a SitePoint book? Now’s your chance to let us know.
I’ve been spending a lot of time learning social media API’s. It’s worth the effort, because every home page deserves a collapsible chromeless youtube player and custom twitter feed, but it took me ages to figure it all out. A Sitepoint book (or even just a small pdf guide that changes as the API’s do) would save a lot of time for a lot of developers who are building applications like this.
This is a great idea, and exactly what I came to suggest.
Social network APIs, like Twitter’s OAuth and Facebook, Foursquare, Google, etc, including best practices, like ready made scripts that most people use versus recoding your own.
Drupal 7
Django 1.3, Ruby on Rails 3.1
Django and Python would make for a fantastic book, although my knowledge of both is limited it may be better to wait for when Django can use the newest version of Python.
One book I would love to see is one covering the latest version of ASP.NET MVC. There are a ton of guides out there, but there is definitely a gap in the market for a extensive book (especially as an ebook) covering everything a novice would need to know for writing a MVC application.
In addition to that idea, WordPress gets a lot of love on here, but there are plenty of other fantastic CMS’s out there that deserve some much-needed attention. Hell, in the .NET world the likes of Sitecore and Umbraco have huge communities and a book on building a full website in Umbraco would be extremely profitable.
Damn, someone beat me to it, I will go with ASP.NET MVC3. Or, a Flash and/or Silverlight book. For that matter, RIA’s in general. Coving all RIA’s.
Would love to see a book on how to make a good news site on any specific subject I want, possibly how to integrate a forum with the site too… I’m a newb though and this is probably basic… (or there is already a book, if so point me there! :p)
I always come across many threads (not just here, many places) of people wanting to code their own login/registration system in PHP too… something along those lines would be great…
Anything on Zend Framework would be cool… Especially using it to implement a RIA.
Ecommerce using Magento or something similar
full application development in Drupal, rather than the usual boring web site stuff, how to create full blown/featured apps, like hotel reservations/room bookings, building a portal to allowing individual customers to see all their previous bookings and history, embedding drupal with windows live services (you can do it with Moodle so why not Drupal). you have a list of 30 things to make the site do and you build it out
In-depth Joomla and Drupal. I’ve seen books on both at the bookstore but not impressed.
All of the above 
But I was going to say Drupal or Joomla 
Social Media APIs sounds good too.
Let me change my mind. I agree with this guy, an E-Commerce book would be sweet. I can be written for ASP.NET MVC and PHP developers with code examples in both languages. I think that book would be a hit.
I would like to see a ASP.NET MVC3 book and one around Webpages (Razor) & Sqlcompact.
Also working with and managing php on an IIS server.
Website life management, how to upgrade and not lost search engine placement, move from html to extensionless urls and all the other redesign issues in one place would need to cover url rewriting on apache & IIS.
Source code management & backup guides - maybe around git
and lasty HTML5 & CSS3 in the real world guide, what todo now and things to watch for.
Hope this list gives you a few ideas
Building your own MVC Framework with OOP in php!
Also a course on this avaliable in the courses section would be tops! :cap:
Form processing with PHP.
It might, at first glance, seem like a small topic; but judging by what I have thus far discovered in my very long-running attempts to understand PHP and properly solve this question, I am sure that it could fill a book.
I would love to read a book that could take me through everything that is directly related to form processing, including: structuring the script, creating a well-formatted e-mail, sanitising the data, dealing with security exploits, filtering spam, example regular expressions to copy (and advice about modifying them), managing errors, dealing with Unicode… It is a long list and most of it is much harder than it ought to be.
Please plug this gap in the market.
A coffee table book about coffee tables.
(sorry, couldn’t help myself)
How to Design a Website That Works
I’ve had an idea brewing in my head for a long time to write a “usability” book that deals with actual use-cases, conversion optimization, and overall site usefulness for a long time. I have a good concept for it, a good basis for the concept with real psychological research, and a good plan to write it…
I’ve also got some good real-world techniques I’ve been using that have afforded me up to 80% conversion rate on PPC traffic!!! This is an astounding figure that can be obtained by anyone with the right knowledge and tools, and I think a book is a good tool for sharing it (as it could profit me for giving away my techniques).
What I don’t have is time to write a book! Do you guys have a basic outline or plan for book writing that simplifies it for prospective authors?
I’ve been doing just that for the last few years… would love to make a book out of it!!