PressBooks Textbook (a plugin for the plugin)

[bdolor]

I'm building a PressBooks plugin that people on this list may find useful. We use PressBooks primarily to create Textbooks and have bundled together some of the customizations we had to make to hopefully make it easier for others with a similar use case. It is designed simply to extend PressBooks and can be activated/deactivated at the network level if you are running your own instance of PressBooks. 

Some of the features of the plugin, like textbook buttons and search feature, are available only after you activate the 'Open Textbook' theme that comes with it. The plugin has been submitted to wordpress.org, but for now you can get it on github. If you find it fits your use case, try it out; development is ongoing and we are open to contributions, feature requests and issue submissions on github.

It comes with the following features:

• A Textbook Theme
• Search functionality
• Prominent Admin buttons
• TinyMCE table buttons
• TinyMCE textbook buttons
• Creative Commons attribution 

Hope you find it helpful, and I hope it encourages more people to use and contribute to PressBooks. By the way, if you are a developer and can contribute to the EPUB3 fork, please jump in. Wendell and I have taken it a good chunk of the way there but there is still a ways to go. It's obviously not our only commitment at the moment, so more eyes on the project will only help get us there faster.  

thanks!

Brad. 

[markmapstone]

Hi there. Thanks for this plugin. Great to hear of someone building on pressbooks. Keep it going :) 

I have just downloaded it and uploaded it through the dashboard. On (network) activation, I get these errors: 

Warning: in_array() expects parameter 2 to be array, boolean given in /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-content/plugins/pressbooks-textbook-master/symbionts/mce-textbook-buttons/mce-textbook-buttons.php on line 89

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-content/plugins/pressbooks-textbook-master/symbionts/mce-textbook-buttons/mce-textbook-buttons.php:89) in /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-content/plugins/pressbooks/pressbooks.php on line 23

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-content/plugins/pressbooks-textbook-master/symbionts/mce-textbook-buttons/mce-textbook-buttons.php:89) in /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-includes/option.php on line 563

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-content/plugins/pressbooks-textbook-master/symbionts/mce-textbook-buttons/mce-textbook-buttons.php:89) in /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-includes/option.php on line 564

And my site currently errors to this: 

Warning: in_array() expects parameter 2 to be array, boolean given in /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-content/plugins/pressbooks-textbook-master/symbionts/mce-textbook-buttons/mce-textbook-buttons.php on line 89

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-content/plugins/pressbooks-textbook-master/symbionts/mce-textbook-buttons/mce-textbook-buttons.php:89) in /home/crediblebooks/books.credibleink.com/wp-content/plugins/pressbooks/pressbooks.php on line 23

Everything is up to date. I've two users/books on the pressbooks plugin. No other plugins are active. No file edits of any sort.

Any idea what I should do to fix it? There's no rush btw, it's just a test play ground for me :)

Mark

[markmapstone]

Oops. Forget that. I simply hadn't enabled the textbook theme :)

Mark

[bdolor]

Hi Mark,

thanks for posting the warnings you were getting, it is helpful to have more people test it out. Just so that we don't run the risk of hijacking this group with error messages related to a plugin, any bugs or issues can be posted on github https://github.com/BCcampus/pressbooks-textbook/issues?state=open

FYI, the plugin is now also in the WordPress repository: http://wordpress.org/plugins/pressbooks-textbook/

thanks,

Brad.

[Hugh McGuire]

This is great stuff Brad, we'll be looking at all this & likely incorporating in PressBooks proper ! Thanks for the awesome work you are doing. ...

Best,

Hugh. 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PressBooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pressbooks+...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pressbooks.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------
hughmcguire.net | twitter.com/hughmcguire 

skype. h.mcguire | tel. +1.514.464.2047
---------------------------------------------------------------

[bdolor]

Thanks Hugh, as you know my preference is to first submit it back to PB core and where our use cases diverge, I'll put it in the plugin. It was an assumption on my part that the features in the plugin would deviate from the PB.com use-case, but I'm happy to have been mistaken. Indeed, if that's the case let's identify shared interest and incorporate as much into PB core as we can. The road-map for the plugin is to develop, as much as we can, an 'eco-system' (apologies for the jargon) for textbooks that are licensed with a Creative Commons license. The implications of that are to make books:

• freely available
• easily 'forked' (exported/imported)
  
• searchable
  
• clearly attributed

As well, we'll be continuing to pursue the following features:

• glossary (highlight a key term to be included in an automatically generated glossary)
  
• collaborative editing tools 
• epub3 output

[cutproductions]

Hi,

Great plugin but unfortunately it breaks the permalinks of existing books and any new ones (I'm testing it on a localhost install latest dev build/3.9.1) so that when you are on the book home page clicking read brings you back to the main site home page. Resetting permalinks for the book/site has no affect.

Also the themes snapshot doesn't show.

Regards

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:25:14 UTC, bdolor wrote:

[bdolor]

Hi, 

sorry you're having trouble...let's discuss/post issues for PressBooks Textbook plugin here https://github.com/BCcampus/pressbooks-textbook/issues?state=open

If specific error messages are available, they make troubleshooting much faster. 

thanks!

[cutproductions]

Sorry I haven't really got time to go there with your plugin (or knowledgeable enough!) since I'm concentrating on the main PressBooks plugin for development of specific needs. But I think part of the problem lies in the fact you've made your theme a main one instead of a child of Luther, because Pressbooks works on Luther/pressbooks-book deriving it's main front end. I think you'd be better developing the extra functionality that the theme offers into your plugin and creating an Opentextbook child theme of Luther - if possible. Other than that I'm not sure why the serious problem of network activating the plugin breaking permalinks arises - it may be a localhost wamp thing but I'm too scared to try it out on my web install.

You also suggest in the readme that you add some extra functionality to import and PBlatex but I cannot see that.

Regards

[bdolor]

Speculating what you *think* the problem might be is not a substitute for actual errors, especially if you no idea. I cannot help you, but I will straighten a few things out:

• Ummm, it *is* a child theme of Luther.
• The readme says "Prominent admin buttons (Import, Plugins)". All of the the import functionality I've built has been submitted back to PB core. 
• PBlatex has been submitted back to PB core.

Please, in the future, do not use this group or continue this thread to discuss issues with this plugin. 

[cutproductions]

Hi,

I'm very surprised at your defensive tone and I'm quite at loss to see where you took offence! I asked some reasonable questions and I provided you with, I would think, helpful feedback. Are you the moderator for this forum? Do you decide what is discussed here? I apologise on all counts though - and don't worry I have won't be discussing your plug-in any further.

Anyway, your theme part of your plug-in is clearly a halfway substitute for Luther, since it takes over the interface, has a different footer and header php file etc., I can see now some of your reasons for this but I think it would be more elegant to avoid it, by simply incorporating it into an updated Luther theme which becomes the basis of you specilised type of PressBooks, I'm not an academic and I can't offer work for free but I am working on and interested in technical and reference collaborative workflows, so the tools you've cleverly developed were interesting to me.

I have told you twice that there is a serious issue with your plugin breaking permalinks through all the books. regardless of whether the theme is activated as well. I was looking into a solution but I thought you might like to know - I have actively developed some extras and found some bugs in the PressBooks plugin from early on and I've created a Github pull as requested - so I do try to help.

It was an innocent question: if you're behind the DOCX import and PBLatex then I congratulate you. My confusion was they were already there before I installed your plugin and I was keen to know if it added some extra functionality.

Peace

[bdolor]

Hi Steve, 

this conversation is digressing into an area I have very little patience for. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to bring up etiquette when looking for support from an open source community and to remind everyone that no one is paid to help anyone else. 

• Bring your problem to the right place. PressBooks Textbook has a place on github for issues. This PressBooks group is not the right place.
• Focus on solving the problem. Don't use your problem as an opportunity to digress into complaining. 
• Be civil. Insulting people and their work will not get you what you want, nor will it do anything to improve your reputation in the group. 
• Bring specific errors. Nothing can be more helpful to fixing your problem than meaningful error messages. 
• Unsolicited advice is just that, no one asked for it. So unless it's in the form of a Pull Request don't be surprised if your 'advice' is not well received. 

PressBooks is a great platform and this group does make it better when we agree to play by the same rules. 

I will not be responding to any more replies on this thread. 

thanks, 

Brad. 

[cutproductions]

OK Brad, I'll leave it there as you request. If I get time and I find a solution I'll do a pull request on Github. It is a great plugin and I wish you the best with your work.

Kind regards,

Steve

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:25:14 UTC, bdolor wrote: