Do Books/Book Page work at all?
tgliedt - June 6, 2008 - 19:56
With Drupal 6.2
I've wasted a few days by now trying to create a Book. I somehow managed to create a book (however that was, it was far far from obvious), but then after 8 book pages (add child page), it refused to allow more pages to be added.
So I deleted everything related to that book and tried to start again.
Since then I've made zero progress trying to figure out how to create a book, create the first page and then add child pages. I have very few modules added and taken defaults for almost everything, but maybe it's something I configured/disabled?
Does anything wrt books work in Drupal 6? Maybe I should abandon it for 5? or another CMS? Has anyone ever managed to create a book with Drupal 6? Can you describe the sequence please?
a complete noob, but...
I'm a complete noob, but...
If you're following instructions for a v5.x book, I do remember reading that they've changed for v6.x.
As I understand it, v6.x is built around something called an 'outline', which v.5,x never really had.
I also read in a thread that 'books' never quite fitted into the rest of the drupal paradigm of content
management, so they are kind-of 'going out of fashion', replaced by Views and CCK.
I don't know though - books seemed like a cool idea to me, as long as they weren't mis-used.
Re: Do Books/Book Page work at all?
To answer my own question after several very painful days, the answer seems to be 'yes', as long as you understand that a book page has very little to do with a book. It is a particularly misleading content type and should really be called something like an outline page. Now that I understand this, what happens makes sense, It's just very poorly named.
A paper book consists of N chapters which are equal in the sense of their value, but are usually read sequentially. Being equal, an index of the chapters shows each at the same level.
A Drupal book page is a hierarchy of mother-daughter-granddaughter pages. An index of the pages is not at the same level, but more like A -> B -> C. The nice part of this content type is that next/prev navigation is generated automatically for you. That's what led me into this quagmire, thinking it was a natural for online reading a multi-chapter book.
Book pages are limited to 8 in number because MENU_MAX_DEPTH is set to 9. I forced the 'Add child page' link to show on a book I created and on adding my 10th page, the menuing got all screwed up.
Creating a book (outline) is especially non-intuitive. You start with creating the first book page. After saving the page, you click on 'Outline' where you get a chance to 'create an outline'. The menu item is taken from the book page. After creating the outline, the menu begins to reflect the titles of each 'Add child page'. Yikes, what a backward approach IMHO.
Anyway, I document this here so that perhaps some future soul will not waste nearly as much time as I did.
Thank you. It will save me
Thank you. It will save me time and effort when I experiment with them.
Just to let you know I found a couple of related modules:
E-Publish: http://drupal.org/project/epublish
Similar to the core 'book outline' this module lets you collate nodes too,
but the index that is created is a more traditional layout - less confusing IMO.
Outline: http://drupal.org/project/outline
For Drupal v6.x this module claims to enhance the core book module.
Cheers.
I think you are mistaken.
I think you are mistaken. You make it sound like the only way to add pages is in a child-parent relationship. But the D6 book functionality allows you to create a "base" page (a "cover", to use the physical book analogy) and then make as many pages DIRECTLY UNDER THAT ONE as you want. Sure, you can make pages subservient to each other (up to 8 levels deep) but if you are looking for a book model, you can create a structure like this:
Cover page
- Chapter 1
-- Section 1.1
-- Section 1.2
- Chapter 2
-- Section 2.1
-- Section 2.2
--- Section 2.2.1
--- Section 2.2.2
-- Section 2.3
- Chapter 3
etc.
The key is to make the parent of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 all be "Cover page". Then the parent of Section 1.1 and Section 1.2 is Chapter 1, etc. It sounds like you are doing the equivalent of making Chapter 1 a child of Cover page, then making Chapter 2 a child of Chapter 1, etc., which would give you the kind of hierarchy I think you are describing. I might be wrong, but hopefully that helps.
But having said that, the
But having said that, the hierarchies are generally not very navigable or intuative anyway.
Take for instance the 'getting started' book; a couple of clicks into it and you get totally lost -
http://drupal.org/getting-started/project-features
I think the way I envisage using books on my school website, is to collate nodes which
have already been written and organise them into a kind of 'project'. For instance,
a teacher may have studied ancient egypt with a class. There may be a discussion in the
forum, a poem or two in comments, a few story assignments in an organic group, and
some links to extra info and resources. So the teacher creates a book called 'egypt', and
adds all the various content to it so it can be viewed 'in one place' on the website.
Personally, after my difficulties navigating the drupal docs on this site, I'd avoid using the
hierarchies on my own site, and just have a flat 'previous next' structure wherever possible.
Book Menu
I don't know, to me the book seems easily navigable. The menu on the left gives the location of the page within the book. If I get lost, I just look to the left (or use keystrokes to get to the book menu) to see where I am within a book.
If you just want things grouped together, I think taxonomy is more what you are looking for than a book. But if your content is all created as book pages, it can easily be added later (changed from one book to another, etc.).
> I think taxonomy is more
> I think taxonomy is more what you are looking for than a book
Hmmm... for me the whole point of book-outlines is that you can collate
material manually, choosing each piece, without regard for it's content-type
or taxonomy.
Different
Your thinking on this matter seems to me to be different than most other people, or at least me. Especially since organizing something in that way seems like what taxonomy is for.
Regardless, I'd say E-Publish is what you want, not really the Book module, since you don't appear to be looking for hierarchical structure (which is what Book is for, not collating).
Thanks for your replies; I
Thanks for your replies; I am interested in your perspective & knowledge.
It may be that I am entirely wrong on the book module's potential usage.
> Especially since organizing something in that way seems like what taxonomy is for
For my school website, the teacher may use forums, blog, organic groups, etc to get
the pupils to do some work on a subject (Eg. Ancient Egypt). Using taxonomy, this
means from the outset every node containing a relevent discussion, assignment,
upload, etc has to be tagged with 'egypt'. This means I'd need a vocabulary and term
for every single 'section' of every subject in the cirriculum, for every year group. Especially
since the users can't be trusted with 'free tagging'.
It would be much neater if the teacher could co-ordinate the work to be done
on various parts or the website using various content-types, each piece simply
tagged with 'year group' and perhaps 'subject' (Eg. 'history' in this instance), and then
simply pull it altogether into a book-outline to make it a coherent 'project' for that
section of the cirriculum.
I *think* the books module would be able to do that?
Well
It sounds like what you want is taxonomy, but you don't really trust your authors to do it properly. When you enter a vocabulary, you can change the instructions for entering tags (to, e.g., "enter your "year group" and "subject" in this form . . .). Or you can create each one separately (e.g., a vocabulary with year group, and a vocabulary with subject) and they have to choose (which, honestly, sounds like what would work best).
Now, if you also want it in hierarchical form, then yes, a book can do that. It doesn't need to be a "book page" type (as far as I'm aware). But it really is only necessary if you want a hierarchy like that posted above (e.g., subjects fall under year groups which fall under the whole thing).
So, yes, I think that books can handle it.
> but you don't really trust
> but you don't really trust your authors to do it properly
lol... yes, I trust the seven year olds more than the ancient, technophobic teachers.
Thanks for the advice.