How do I tweak the bookreview module?

By CrowChick on 17 Jan 2006 at 16:20 UTC

All righty, I am using the book review module, and it is very nice. However, it doesn't quite do everything I want it to do. For instance, there is no way to search within just the book reviews (a search box for this purpose on that page would be nice), and although I can use taxonomy to fake actual categoriziation of the books (fiction, non-fiction, etc.), these categories do not show on the main page. Ideally, the reviews would have an additional column (in addition to "title, ISBN, date added) called "category".

Here's the page I'm talking about:
http://www.mangapunk.com/test/bookreview

Also, when on a book review page like this one: http://www.mangapunk.com/test/bookreview/computones1
the top bread crumb leads to a taxonomy term, and there's no way back to the module. My users are finding this confusing. Is there anyway to insert a link back to the book reviews module page?

I know it's a lot of questions, but I've poked my nose around, and nothing seems to really answer them. Taxonomy alone doesn't do enough.

Here is a brief recap of what I want to get this module to do:
Search within book reviews only
Show categories in book listing on main page
Link back to book reviews module in breadcrumbs

Thank you for your time :)

Comments

I dont have any immediate

alexmc commented 17 January 2006 at 17:26

I dont have any immediate answers for you but I am thinking of converting a large book reviews website to Drupal but am not happy with the book review module yet either.

Keep in touch - maybe we can help each other out. I expect that most problems you see, I will see too, and vice versa.

http://www.diversebooks.com/

(Almost no Manga reviews I am afraid but a few graphic novels :-)

Needs work.

CrowChick commented 17 January 2006 at 23:22

I think with some love and affection, this could be the kickingest module ever. Might need a little patchwork on the core code, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Now if only someone could point me in the right direction.

I might be on the brink of a

CrowChick commented 26 January 2006 at 01:37

I might be on the brink of a breakthrough. I don't have much to say yet. I'm going to try to snip some code from another handy module. Seperately, these two modules are blah, but together I think they would make one tight book review directory.

Got it.

CrowChick commented 2 February 2006 at 15:53

I merged it with the forums module. Now the bookreviews look like this:
http://www.mangapunk.com/test/bookreview

A great improvement. The breadcrumbs leave a real trail instead of wormholes and the categoriesare shown. The submission fields remain the same and display the same as they did before. Plus, I made it so adding an ISBN conjures an ad from Amazon at the end of the article, not a block on the side (which I couldn't get to work anyway). I plan to add an indexing feature for titles and later for authors. I am willing to share the code with you if you would like to see how it was done/use it yourself.