John Miedema

Every good software design begins with a list of requirements. Here is my list.

1. Develop a utility that will allow for easy insertion of book data into blog posts. The currently targeted blog platform is WordPress. The initial form of the utility will be a WordPress plugin, using PHP as a scripting language.
2. User a vendor-neutral, open web source of book data. The source will provide standard book classification fields, i.e., title, author, publisher, etc. Open web technologies required include: open source, open APIs, open data to allow for addition of titles not currently in the source database.
3. The user of the plugin will be able to insert a simple standard tag into a blog post, with a book identifier as a parameter, and the plugin will handle the insertion of all book data.
4. The data for the first version of the plugin will include: author, book title, and publisher. The book title will link to the book entry of the source data website, where detailed book data can be viewed.
5. Ideally, the first version of the plugin will also include a book cover image, which will also link to the book entry of the source data website. Also, ideally, the publisher will link to the book entry on the publisher’s website.
6. Once the tag is inserted into the post, and the post is saved, the plugin will handle HTML formatting of the book data. In the first version, this format will be static.

There, that seems manageable enough.

Note that future versions of the plugin will allow the user to select one of multiple data sources, include any available book data fields, and customize the HTML formatting.

Updates: Additional future requirements:

• Implementation in other platforms, e.g., Blogger, HTML web pages.
• Internationalization

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