WomperScomper

Thanks for taking the time to make this detailed response, Chris. It cleared up a lot of things.

You noted that this plugin requires data input via the WP dashboard. I’m not entirely opposed to this approach, I just wonder if it’s possible to use this plugin with a free off-the-shelf theme that could make the “create review” process less “dashboard-looking,” ideally restricting the access to only one task – create the review. With that said, is it possible for this plugin to support with one of the various “form plugins” to provide a more basic user/one-task experience as opposed to a site-admin/multi-task experience?

The search issue, as you explained it, is very likely and is is something I’ll have to investigate further. Two searches would be resource intensive and laggy, hampering the user experience. Mind you, I wouldn’t limit the search to by-ISBN only, it’d be more practical if a user can search on any book facet – ISBN, author, title, publisher, subject, genre etc. I’m not sure if that would be more efficient on the back-end and for the user.

I hadn’t actually tried the OBD/OpenLibrary plugin yet as I’m still researching, but it’s interesting to hear your experience that it’s database isn’t as fleshed out as I had assumed it to be. I’ll have to look into that too.

Thanks for clarifying things. Your feedback as put things into perspective. My experience is with Drupal, thus I still have a very Drupal-centric view on things. I’m learning more and more about WP, and you’ve helped.

I think my next steps will be to investigate whether there are plugins to allow me to hack plugins to play nicely together to get the functionality I need. I’m not sure if you can help me with this, but do you have any recommendations of plugins that would support rule-based actions plugins or prepopulating-field plugins?

My mistake! I meant OpenBook Data, not OpenLibrary. You’re correct.

I come from a Drupal background which tends to have modules that integrate with other similar modules to improve and extend eachother’s functionality. I’ve still very new to WordPress. Your plugin seems like it could be very powerful if integrated with the OpenBook Data (OBD) plugin.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but your plugin was originally designed as a “custom post type” of sorts?

I understand your plugin is for reviews, I just imagined it’d be useful to piggyback off of the OBD plugin to pre-populate the book meta data – ISBN, title, author, publisher etc. The review portion would still be up to the user to complete. By prepopulating the basic book data fields, it’d make the user experience that much smoother.

This is the workflow I imagine, assuming future integration with the OBD plugin:

1. user searches for book

2. the search function, using the OBD plugin, would check the current site’s DB to see if the book exists

3. if the book does NOT exist, it’d check OpenLibrary, and if there is a match, display the book data/image in the search results

4. from the results screen, a user could click a “add a review” button which would then trigger your plugin

5. the user would be directed to the”create review” screen and all book data would be prefilled using data from OpenLibrary, the “review” section would be empty awaiting the user’s input

6. alternatively, if a user does not want to add a review at that moment, but is just checking to see if a book has been added, the website should create a “placeholder” book page/post using prefilled book data from OpenLibrary that is stored on the site’s DB.

Does this make sense? I’m happy to clarify if it’s too convoluted.

Thanks