Could book publishing deals be the way to fund open source projects? The Joomla commuity seem to think so.

Two soon-to-be-published guides to Joomla will be the initial releases from Joomla Press, an alliance between publishers Pearson and Open Source Matters  (OSM), the not-for-profit organization that supports the Joomla project. Titles in the series will be authored by contributors in the global Joomla community and portion of the proceeds will go back to the Joomla! Project.

Both The Official Joomla! Book, scheduled to be published in December 2010; and Joomla! Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide, expected early in 2011, are designed for end-users and administrators utilizing Joomla - the free, open source content management system - to develop a web presence. 

As is often the case with Open Source software it tends to lack documentation so the publication of these two titles and the promise of more to come is very welcome. Perhaps book contracts will make open source programmers actually like creating documenation and actually get them to do the job. Better still is the idea that it could produce some revenue for the Joomla! Project. Is this a generalisable pattern?

Joomla runs 2.5 percent of the web, and is used by individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create and build a variety of websites and web-enabled applications. Since its inception in 2005, Joomla has been 100 percent community owned and operated.

Further reading:

Joomla! the future

More on Joomla!

Login-logout - changing Joomla menus according to state

Conditional Javascript Buttons

The Joomla MVC classes

Joomla Parameters

More Advanced Joomla Modules with PHP and Eclipse

A Simple Joomla Module with PHP and Eclipse

Building a Joomla component using Eclipse for PHP