I’ve been working on the BookDesigner tool for a very long time. It started several years ago when I was still an active Wikibookian and I was looking to create a tool, both for myself and for others, to help with the process of creating books. I had taken a lot of feedback from other users, especially new users, and I found through everybody I talked to that creating new books was difficult. Creating them following the best practices as developed by the Wikibooks community was even harder. I created my tool to help simplify those tasks and automate some of the tedious and nuanced parts of it to help speed along new users who had content in their heads that they wanted to share, but didn’t want to waste their time putting together the structure of a complete book.
The first version of the tool was a simple form with a textbox. The user entered in a script using a custom toy language I invented for the purpose. It was little more than an outlining tool, where asterisks and other symbols were used to denote the shape of the book and the contents of individual pages. I used this tool for my own needs for a while, but the feedback I got from others was that it was arcane and difficult to use. With that in mind, I set off on the biggest JavaScript project I had ever undertaken up till that point and tried to create a user-friendly version of it instead.
The second version, which I called my “Visual Book Designer” looked very similar in many respects to the tool I have now: It used a graphical representation of an outline instead of a text-based one and was much easier to use, not to menton much better to look at. This tool was well-received and I used it to help create several books for myself and others while at Wikibooks. What it did not do well was actually automate the process of creating the individual pages. I had developed some custom AJAX routines to automate the task, but it never worked nearly as well as I would have liked.
Eventually I was asked to help do some contracting work, and decided that this was the time to convert the tool to a proper extension instead of an assortment of JavaScript files stored in the wiki itself. Instead of a long series of hackish AJAX calls, I wrote all the backend in PHP and could create pages directly in a single server request. This was version 3, and while it had a few bugs and few annoyances, it was used on several occasions to create particularly large books.
Today, I’ve added most of the big new features and am starting serious beta testing for version 4 of the tool. The interface still has not changed a whole hell of a lot since version 2, but the internals have improved pretty dramatically. Here are a list of the changes since Version 3:
- The data transmission format uses XML instead of a hackish custom markup than I was using previously.
- The extension, for the most part, is i18n compatible and most user-facing text can be translated into other languages
- Internally, the architecture is much improved, using a series of objects instead of being one big class of static methods.
- There is now a confirmation page where you can view the list of all pages to be created and their text. From the confirmation page you can select which pages are created.
- Several bits of text, including default text for generated templates, can be edited using system message pages for site-specific defaults
- The text of the outline can be saved to a page on a wiki or downloaded as a file to the user’s computer. These saved outlines can be loaded back into the tool at any time to continue work on the outline.
All told it’s been a large amount of work but well worth it. I sincerely hope that this tool will be useful for other people and that it will help many new authors to create great books on MediaWiki wikis.
There are a few things I need to tweak still, and I need to get testing done on a few versions of MediaWiki (I’ve only tested on 1.16.0 so far). When all that is done, I would like to cut the official release and submit a version of it to the MediaWiki extensions repository.