Manning Publications will not be publishing Drupal in Action by Ezra Barnett Gildesgame and Greg Knaddison

I think a variety of factors ended up causing Manning to decide not to publish this book.

We had an ambitious goal of covering a lot of material including many contributed modules. As many Drupal site builders know, the changing world of contrib can wreak havoc on the best laid plans. Even though the release of Drupal 7 is likely to happen this summer, some key functionality that we wanted to cover is not yet available in D7, and came to maturity late after Drupal 6 was released. This pushed us too late into the Drupal 6 cycle for Drupal in Action to be economically viable as a traditionally published book. It's a tough balance - publishers want to be ahead of the software release, but especially in open source where there is no official schedule for the many components that make up a site, the book may get published right before all the UI changes, or before a piece of functionality is available at all. I'm not complaining about the progress on modules nor the ebb-and-flow of module development, just stating some facts of modern publishing and open source software.

I believe that Manning has provided options for people who purchased the MEAP or pre-ordered the book to move that credit over to another one of their many great books. Really, they have some awesome titles that are very worth the money.

We got a lot of great assistance from different folks at Manning during the process and are thankful to them for their support as we drafted up and released 9 great chapters in their MEAP program.

The good news is that Ezra and I have the rights for the material we wrote and are going ahead with releasing it as a series of E-books, probably through the Mastering Drupal site. We hope that this will allow us to publish faster, update them faster when their are changes to the underlying modules, and provide value to readers at a lower cost (and without all those dead trees).

If you are interested in hearing more about that, use one of the three ways to follow Mastering Drupal news:

twitter, the rss feed, or the seo newsletter which gives you access to an SEO video series *and* is used to alert people about new offers like these e-books.