Bruji

Hi,

I've just downloaded a trial of Bookpedia, and am pretty impressed. I'm strongly considering using the program for an online scholarly bibliography project I''m working on. My goal is to be able to create a well-organized annotated bibliography that can be easily updated and expanded as time goes on. I plan to use the HTML or FTP capability to export a book collection and embed it on a page of a website. In general, the embedding seems pretty straightwforward and simple.

My primary question is about ways for visitors to site to be able to sort/search the data. Looking at the templates available for Bookpedia, it appears that I can export a book collection alphabetically by letter or word depending upon which column is highlighted prior to export: i.e.: author, title, publisher, year, etc.. This is great, but I would like to give visitors to my site the ability to CHOOSE the method of sorting. Short of embedding multiple versions of my Bookpedia collection sorted by different criteria, is there a method or template that would give visitors multiple sorting options? Ideally, from one embedded Bookpedia collection, I would like visitors to be able to choose to view results by AUTHOR, YEAR, or SUBJECT.

Is there a way to do this, or will I need to maintain simultaneous HTML versions for each option?

Thanks for any advice.

You would indeed need to do several exports and use a modified template that would have links to each exported folder for users navigating your web site. Another option for serious flexibility is to use our database back end directly online. Our database is in SQL format and can be read directly as an SQLite file by PHP frameworks or exported into raw SQL that can be imported into MySQL. It does mean a lot of work in creating a website that works with that kind of database, but because you have all the data in SQL it means you can live sort and search online. Also updates would only require an upload of the SQL database. It has a lot of advantages but the disadvantages means it's technically complex and requires knowledge of other software to work (PHP, MySQL) and therefore why it's not an option we normally talk about. Since you are looking for something as flexible as Bookpedia online it might be worth investigating.

The database is located in your home folder at ~/Library/Application Support/Bookpedia/Database.pediadata. It can be dumped into SQL by sqlite3 in the Terminal using the following command:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Bookpedia/Database.pediadata .dump zentry > ~/Desktop/bookpedia.sql

The zEntry table is the only table you would be interested in as it contains most of the information and the name of the columns are quite self explanatory. There are quite a couple of users that use MySQL but I don't know if there are pre-built PHP templates out there for Bookpedia.