I only recently discovered Drupal and I'm running a private test site. My main interest is in the collaborative book writing and I would like to use it for collabrative authoring - a kind of writer's workshop. A few features are missing to make Drupal a perfect tool for this kind of work:

1. simple, but very important: "print to html" should work on every single book page and its children. Printing all books into one html page may be fine for a FAQ, but my site may easily contain 50 books (including source material for study, general discussion, quotations and so on) and it will be important that you can "publish" single books or even parts of books.

2. Reusability of book pages or any kind of content: The current book hierarchy allows only to use a book page within a certain book (hierarchy). It should be possible to create "virtual book pages" that are simply new nodes without text content but which display the content of another book page (or node). This way you can use a book page in another book project without taking it out of the orginal book project. To create such "virtual book pages" a clone function would be nice which can be applied to every node and creates a new node linked to the content of the original node (while title, weight and so on will be editable).

The following features are e bit more "far out":

3. Quotation nodes: cloned book pages that do not display the whole content of another node but only a part - a quote.

4. A function to create a whole series of virtual book pages from a taxonomy keyword. This way you could create complete monographies related to one or more taxonomy keywords as separate books (which can be edited, rearranged, published/printed to html etc.).

Thanks for this really great software!

Guenni

Comments

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented

1. simple, but very important: "print to html" should work on every single book page and its children. Printing all books into one html page may be fine for a FAQ, but my site may easily contain 50 books (including source material for study, general discussion, quotations and so on) and it will be important that you can "publish" single books or even parts of books.

I agree. would be nice. shouldn't bee too hard given our print to HTML capability ofr the entire book.

2. Reusability of book pages or any kind of content:

Content can be reused using PHP pages. It's not especially easy though. Roughly, you'll need to do this (untested).

$node = node_load(array ("nid" => x))
$theme->node($node);

3. Quotation nodes: cloned book pages that do not display the whole content of another node but only a part - a quote.

Justa thought - maybe you are interested in Annotation.module

4. A function to create a whole series of virtual book pages from a taxonomy keyword. This way you could create complete monographies related to one or more taxonomy keywords as separate books (which can be edited, rearranged, published/printed to html etc.).

that is pretty interesting too ... to be honest the whole book.module ought to be rewritten to use taxonomy IMO.

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented

on #1 - what should the text be for a link which will give you a printer frienfly version of the currnt page and all its subpages?

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented

#1 is implemented. every printer friendly link outputs its own branch, not the whole book

puregin’s picture

puregin commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

#2 is a duplicate: see http://drupal.org/node/5901

#3 seem extremely difficult to do, and not likely to be of very general applicability

#4 is probably doable in 4.7 (with some difficulty) using existing modules and features.

I'm closing this.