OpenBook Plugin: Graphic Design
- When You Link to a Book, Do You Link to Amazon, LibraryThing, WorldCat, or What?
- Four Big Libraries: I Pick OpenLibrary
- OpenBook Plugin: Requirements
- OpenBook Plugin: The Open Library API
- OpenBook Plugin: Coding in PHP
- OpenBook Plugin: Grabbing the Book Data
- OpenBook Plugin: Let There Be Cover Images!
- OpenBook Plugin: The Importance of Linking to Publisher Websites
- OpenBook Plugin: Graphic Design
- OpenBook Plugin: Hooking into WordPress
- OpenBook Plugin: Now Accepting Arguments, and Beta Testers
- OpenBook Beta Release!
<== this sample is the actual plugin working
This sample book cover and the book data to its left above represent the graphic design of the OpenBook plugin. Seem like a small deal? We link to Amazon because it requires little thought. With the OpenBook plugin will make it even easier to link to OpenLibrary. All you will need to do is insert a tag, 
Book cover. The book cover will always be in the upper left regardless of where you put the tag in the post. This is intended to keep formatting simple for the first release of the plugin. In the future, I may provide a settings panel in the dashboard that lets users arrange formatting just how they like. Since the source images for the covers may vary in size, I am going to use the CSS styles of max-width=150px and max-height=225px, a 2:3 ratio that I think is fairly typical for book covers. The alternate text for the image will be set to blank so that nothing shows if the image is not available.
Text. The text will float on the right of the image so that space is not wasted. The image has a padding of 15px to the right and bottom so the text won’t crunch up against it. The book title will be in italics. If there is no designated author, as in the example above, the contributors, e.g., editors, will be listed as authors.
Links. The cover image will link to the associated book page in Open Library. The title will link to the the associated book page in Open Library. The publisher will link to the publisher’s website if the user has provided this value for the PublisherLink custom field of the postas an argument. All links will open in a new window since they are external links. Go ahead, try the links.
Have you noticed the “OB” image I have been associating with many of the practical posts during development? It’s an easy visual way to distinguish the practical posts from the soapbox ones. Looks a little like the WordPress logo don’t you think? In this post, I put it at the end because I don’t want you to think it’s going in the graphic design. No branding in the graphic design.
I would be delighted to hear what you think so far, especially critical comments.
If one didn’t read out the content on the book cover then they would think it as a LAW related book..
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