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Voyage Of The Beagle By Darwin

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See www.plone.org/products/voyageofthebeaglebydarwin for latest releases.

Here is the book it produces.

LICENSE

  • GPL: See VoyageOfTheBeagleByDarwin.py header.

AUTHORSHIP

  • initial coding: Jeff Pittman, http://www.geojeff.org

DESCRIPTION

VoyageOfTheBeagleByDarwin is a folderish Archetypes-based Plone/Zope product that shows the full text of the book along with web links provided by the user for selected terms or phrases.

When instantiated, the original text (slightly modified, as described in the code) is read in and parsed to prepare structured text for several documents created and stored:

  • a single document containing all the original text
  • individual documents for header, preface, and 21 chapters

If the user provided a list of web links for terms or phrases, the terms or phrases are searched for and links added to the structured text documents.

The "small print" in the header, which is included in full as per what it states about "reuse", is from Project Gutenberg. No intentional changes were made to the text, except those allowed for in creating links, and other embedded code for using modern web technology to best present the book.

Some ideas for use/enhancement include:

  • The product could be used for installation on a local Plone/Zope for handing reading.
  • Add your own links for a given focus.
  • Add some code to do linguistic analysis.
  • Add code for quiz handling.
  • Add code for doing paragraph-by-paragraph comment handling, or something similar to facilitate discussion, perhaps by tying in with a forum product.

Presentation choices, as controlled by page templates, include:

  • COMPLETE, whole book on one web page
  • CHAPTERS, chapter by chapter

VoyageOfTheBeagleByDarwin takes input of the following items:

  • book_links, entered as comma-separated values on separate lines with CSV data containing (both items need to be in quotes):
    • term or phrase (as text; escape single or double quotes by putting a \ in front)
    • link (http://www.whatever.org)

REQUIREMENTS

  • Archetypes (tested with Archetypes-1.3.2-final bundle)
  • Plone (tested with Plone-2.1.1)

INSTALLATION

  1. Put VoyageOfTheBeagleByDarwin in your Zope Products directory.
  2. Restart Zope.
  3. Install VoyageOfTheBeagleByDarwin into your Plone site using CMFQuickInstaller. (In Plone, select "plone setup", click on "Add/Remove Products" and install VoyageOfTheBeagleByDarwin.) You can also use the portal_quickinstaller tool from the ZMI to install the Product.

CREDITS

  • Charles Darwin, of course.
  • Project Gutenberg, and the other online sources of public domain info.
  • PloneBook, by Raphael Ritz, which contains the package_home, etc. usage.
  • Originally this started out as new code for BookAnnotation, another Plone product, but it became apparent that much of the effort here is specific to the Voyage of the Beagle. Still, parts of this code will make it into BookAnnotation. Having a real book to work with has helped in making useful methods for preparing stx files.

TO DO

  • There is no validation. There are methods available for link checking, so use one of those.
  • Add a link set that is added in by default, but give user a choice to use their own links instead. [A student and I are working on this.]
  • Make a better main view page, with a picture of Darwin or Beagle.
  • It should be fine to scan the few illustrations in the book and add them to the text.
  • Make a better Chapter-by-chapter page template that has next and back buttons or links.
  • Styleize the links to perhaps not show the little world icon, but a more subtle shading or underlining to enhance readability.
  • An additional field could be added to the cvs data for links to take the "link type", which could be used to show a particular class of links (for a particular class of terms/phrases) in a given color or link formatting.
  • Add annotations/definitions capability, ala BookAnnotation, except here the text is available. With the new restrictions in CMFDefault/utils.py, the onmouseover tags used in javascript tooltips for definitions aren't possible without circumvention. However, perhaps something could be done with CSS for showing annotations or definitions.
  • Add background info on the book, info about other pertinent books and websites, etc. in a resources page.
  • The complete view has problems with grey boxes that appear. Perhaps this is caused by the pre block in the header, because the grey boxes don't appear in the individual chapter files.
  • Is there something fancy (ahem, useful) with CSS that could be done to control font and font size for easier reading, especially for those who need better support, if it isn't there already in Plone?
  • The quiz handling code idea is an attractive one for using this book in college courses, and so is the forum-tie-in idea.

BUGS AND FEATURE REQUESTS

Please report bugs and feature requests to Jeff Pittman, who can be reached at jeff@geojeff.org. Jeff is often on the #plone irc channel as geojeff.

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