Provide a Booktype installation

Workspaces Software (General)
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As a way to write and publish future Edgeryders publications collaboratively, [Nadia] proposed to get an installation of Booktype on our own server. It would, among other things, be used for the final reports for UNDP of upcoming Spot the Future project.

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Basic installation done.

I just finished with the basic installation, so sign up and try it out at books.edgeryders.eu.

Some hints to get you started:

  • The installation is the first website on our shiny speedy Edgeryders server, which I also just finished to set up. So at first, expect Booktype to be possibly bumpy ā€“ but fast :-) ā€“ drive. Tell me here what's not yet working.
  • You can create and edit books, but not (yet) convert them to publishing formats. Tell me what publishing formats we need: is PDF enough, or do we require ODF, ePub etc. additionally?
  • User registration is public at the moment. How do we want to handle this? Do we want to confirm users who sign up, or disable signup altogether?
  • Tell me if editing books is slow at any time.

Tech background: (no need to read on, geeks will anyway)

  • Book editing uses an SQLite3 database backend, not PostgreSQL. I just think it is (at this point) too much overhead to have two  RDBMS running on the same server (we use MySQL / MariaDB for Drupal, and Booktype only supports PostgreSQL). SQLite3 is slower, but I expect this to be not even noticeable since our Booktype installation will probably not be used for massively parallel editing.
  • The installation does not yet include the Objavi component for converting books to PDF, ODF, ePub etc. formats for publishing. Because this is a messy install of a lot of hacked together components ... I just don't want LaTeX, Xvfb, QT3 GUI tools like pdfedit etc. on a freshly installed server :-< It would be great if we only need PDF output, since that would allow me to install only the (beta) Objavi Renderer, which is a clean install.
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PDF is fine for now.

Same process as for sign up to edgeryders to keep out the spambots amongst other reasons.

1 Like
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YAAAAAAAAAYYYYY!!!

going in immediately and testing. thank you!!