CiviCRM: a comprehensive guide

We recently got fifty copies of CiviCRM: a comprehensive guide printed on demand for some training events in the UK.  Being able to hand out a 300 page book as a supplement to the training went down really well with participants: holding something in your hands in a world which is predominantly online world is quite reassuring, it seems!

Getting hold of hard copies of the book at short notice was quick and painless. Objavi (Flossmanuals new and impressive publishing engine) just worked, creating a great looking PDF that we sent to Imprint, a local printer.  Imprint were a recommendation from the Flossmanuals list and I would definitely recommend them to others that need books printed in the UK - they turned the PDF into 50 books in less than 24 hours at the price of £6 ($10) per book and were helpful, fast and professional.

Integrating the book with training was cool, and it made me want to write a little about how we got here, and our plans for the future, so ...

How we got here

The current 'second edition' of the book is the result of two book sprints and some sporadic contributions between.  As the title suggests, it covers pretty much all of CiviCRM’s functionality.  It also includes introductory sections to help non-profits decide if CiviCRM is right for them, to assist them with project management, and introduce them to the CiviCRM community.  At the back of the book is a 'developer' section for people that want to get started extending CiviCRM.

The first sprint laid a solid framework for the book, but there were definitely some rough edges and some gaps that needed filling.  At the second sprint, we filled and smoothed, completing coverage Civi’s components, revising already existing sections, adding the developer section, and finalising a section template that we can use for covering new functionality like the upcoming CiviCampaign.

The second book sprint was held at the same time and place as a code sprint. Each sprint was self contained but we met in the evening to eat and to swap in and out of different sprints.  All in all there were about 30 Civi folks gathered together. Having such a wide range of talents in the same place was quite awesome and led to some unplanned beneficial cross overs. Usability and naming improvements made their way from the book sprinters into the code sprint and book sprinters documented new functionality as it was being developed at the code sprint.

Public reactions

I proudly showed the printed second edition to people at a non profit tech conference a couple of days before the training.  While most people reacted positively, I was suprised by a couple of the reactions I got.  A couple of people, rather than being impressed with the thickness, found the book a little intimidating.  It is worth noting the difference in perspective: one person’s “wow, that is a comprehensive book!” is another’s “wow, that is complicated software!”.

Which brings us nicely on to our plans for the future...

The future

One of the aims of next years book sprint (funding permitting) will be to split the single volume into a number of smaller books.  From a content point of view, this shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.  Each section already follows a pretty well defined structure (with introduction and chapters on planning, configuring, everyday use, etc.), so the comprehensive guide can become Everyday CiviCRM, Planning with CiviCRM, etc.  From a technical point of view, the new Booki authoring engine should allow us to link the same source chapters into different books.  As well as cutting down on maintenance, this should be a good discipline for ensuring the right content is in the right place, and that we really are being comprehensive.

As the book has become more mature, we are begining to wonder about the relationship between the book and the wiki.  We are seeing more and more people link to the book from the support forums.  And this raises the questions: What belongs in the wiki and what in the book? Where should I document this new bit of information? Is the book just a more stable version of the wiki or do they cater for different audiences?  Is it OK for us to copy from the wiki to the book and visa versa?  I don’t think we have clear answers to these questions yet but we should probably come up with them soon.

Another question we are condisering is distribution.  The new version of Objavi gives us a few options that we didn’t have before. We currently host the book at http://en.flossmanuals.net/civicrm, but we could now easily export templated HTML to http://book.civicrm.org.  We could also look at including the book with the download (compressed and without pictures it is only 406kb).  And we can even click to make an ebook version.  Very cool!

So dig in and edit and improve the book! And let us know your thoughts on what you'd like to see in future versions.  Suggestions and ideas for future sprints are welcome here or in the documentation forum: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,11.0.html