---------------------------------------------------------------------------- BookQueue Movable Type Plugin http://jacob.hesch.cc/software/mt-plugins/BookQueue/ $Id: README,v 1.2 2004/12/06 08:11:08 jlh Exp $ Copyright (C) 2003 Jacob L Hesch ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- About ----- BookQueue is a Movable Type plugin which manages a queue or collection of books. It allows you to store the queue in a database and later retrieve the items for display in your Movable Type weblog. For each book, BookQueue keeps track of the date it was entered, the date it was last modified, its status (already read, currently reading, plan to read) and optionally associates the book with a blog entry (for book reviews, etc.). BookQueue stores each book's ISBN number internally, and uses the MTAmazon plugin and the Amazon API directly to fetch properties such as title, author and cover image from Amazon for display in the weblog and in BookQueue's administrative interface, respectively. For rapid input of new books into the queue, BookQueue automatically decodes CueCat barcode scan output and converts Bookland EAN numbers into ISBN numbers. (See the ``Resources" section below for links to more information about the CueCat and ISBN.) Requirements ------------ * Movable Type 2.6 or later * MTAmazon plugin (tested with version 2.22) MTAmazon is not strictly required; BookQueue will work without it, but would be quite boring. Installation ------------ MT-DIR refers to your Movable Type directory. 1. Unzip the BookQueue-1.X.zip archive. 2. Move or upload bookqueue.pl into MT-DIR/plugins/. 3. Move or upload mt-bookqueue.cgi into MT-DIR/. 4. Move or upload BookQueue.pm into MT-DIR/extlib/MTPlugins/. 5. Move or upload the directory bookqueue-tmpl into MT-DIR/tmpl/cms/. If you previously installed MTAmazon, the MT-DIR/extlib/MTPlugins/ and MT-DIR/plugins/ directories should already exist. Otherwise, you will probably have to create them. If you are using FTP to transfer files, make sure you transfer in ASCII mode. Make sure mt-bookqueue.cgi has permissions set to 755. Usage ----- There are two ways to interact with BookQueue. The first is through its administrative interface which allows you to manage your queue of books. The second is from within a Movable Type template in which you use BookQueue's template tags to tell MT how to include the book information in your blog's pages. To get started, point your browser to mt-bookqueue.cgi in order to access BookQueue's administrative interface. For example, if you normally access Movable Type via http://yourblog.com/mt.cgi, the administrative interface URL would be http://yourblog.com/mt-bookqueue.cgi. You will have to log in as usual if you haven't already done so. If you have multiple blogs, select the blog you want the books to be associated with at the top and click the ``change" button. Enter a book's ISBN number in the text box and hit enter. When the page reloads, you should see a new row appear with your book's thumbnail image at the left. Hint: When you are adding several new books to the queue, you can speed up the process by having BookQueue show only one entry at a time (select ``1" in the drop-down menu at the bottom of the page). This minimize the time it takes to load the resulting page since the properties of only one book must be fetched from Amazon (or loaded from MTAmazon's cache). You can now modify properties of the book entry. If you entered the wrong ISBN, you can change the number in the ISBN text box. You can set the status from the default of ``unread" to ``reading" or ``read" by clicking the appropriate radio button. To associate the book with a regular MT blog entry, type the entry's id in the ``associate entry id" field (you can leave out the leading zeros). You will later be able to link to that entry using a template tag (see examples below). The ``last modified on" field is set automatically when you enter or update a book. You can specify your own last modified date by changing the text field and checking the ``override" box. This allows you to arbitrarily control the order by which your books are sorted in the template, or to keep track of when you finished reading a book, for example. Check the ``delete" box to remove a book entry. After modifying the desired properties of a book entry, click the ``update" button at the right to save the changes. Only one book entry may be updated at a time. Whenever you add or modify a book entry, a link appears at the top of the mt-bookqueue.cgi page which gives you the opportunity to rebuild your site. This only makes sense after you have added BookQueue tags to a template. Read on... Once you have entered a few books into the queue and modified them to your liking, you can add tags to a template and rebuild to see the changes. See below for some examples of how to use BookQueue tags. For a complete reference of BookQueue template tags see: http://jacob.hesch.cc/software/mt-plugins/BookQueue/tagref.html Examples -------- The following template example displays small images of the 10 most recently entered books marked as ``reading": The next example displays, for each of the 10 most recently modified books sorted in ascending order by modified date, a small image and the title linked to the corresponding amazon.com page along with the author, status, date entered, date last modified, and a link to a review in a regular blog entry (but only if a corresponding blog entry_id was entered for the book):


by
status:
entered on
updated on
My Review of

Again, a complete tag reference for BookQueue is available here: http://jacob.hesch.cc/software/mt-plugins/BookQueue/tagref.html Follow the MTAmazon link below for more details on using MTAmazon. License ------- BookQueue is released under the GPL. Bug Reports & Suggestions ------------------------- Please post them via http://jacob.hesch.cc/contact?subject=bookqueue. Bugs ---- Does not properly handle non-ASCII output from the Amazon API. This can likely be solved with Text::Iconv which may be added in a future version. To Do ----- Add features. Perhaps the ability to sort alphabetically by author and title? Suggestions welcomed! Work is underway for a plugin similar to BookQueue which handles other types of media such as CDs and DVDs. Stay tuned. Notes ----- Amazon links displayed within the BookQueue administrative interface use my Amazon associate id by default in order to support plugin development (in the unlikely event that someone should actually make a purchase through the interface :-). Amazon links generated from BookQueue template tags for display in your blog will use the associate id specified in your ``.mtamazon.config" file. Resources --------- BookQueue: http://jacob.hesch.cc/software/mt-plugins/BookQueue/ Movable Type: http://www.movabletype.org/ MTAmazon: http://mtamazon.sourceforge.net/ Other MT plugins: http://mt-plugins.org/ CueCat: http://www.beau.lib.la.us/~jmorris/linux/cuecat/ ISBN: http://isbntools.com/