Jeff White recently asked in what ways the Drupal Collaborative Book would be useful in the classroom. One good way to approach this is to imagine that the Book is similar to a wiki and use this perspective for thinking about how they are different or the same Of course, it's still problematic since many people have yet to figure out how to use a wiki effectively :)
Similarities:
- All community members can create and edit pages.
- Stored revision history.
- Easy publishing interface.
Differences:
- Collaborative Book pages are organized in a parent/child relationship
which creates a tree structure; wikis don't have a dominating primary
link structure. - Collaboarative Book uses HTML instead of wiki code (although there is a
wiki code module which I have not tried). - Collaborative Book does not show which pages link to a page except for
those within the book structure (wiki titles are links to pages showing
adjacent nodes). So you can't tell if other nodes are linking to a
Collaborative Book page. - Collaborative Book can take advantage of Drupal taxonomy to allow
categorization of pages under multiple hierarchies.
Internal links in collabooks
Charlie,
I follow the basic logic--I think this is one of those things best seen in action than read about for me. Since I installed Drupal over the summer I've not really had the collaborative book feature working in a way that got my juices flowing. However, the *idea* of a class working all semester on a collaborative book is fascinating to me. I wonder if anyone has set up a collab book and used it in a class project?
Also, given the Container and the thing contained approach of Drupal's book, what do you make of that particular difference between it and Wikis? Does it make internal links--links from page to page in the book more difficult to do? easier? any (dis)advantages?
jeffwhite
re: Internal links in collabooks
The container is just a forum approach, as a way to separate different forum sections. Not applicable to the collaborative book.
Instead, with books, just create separate books by making them the root node. You can see my class site book page). I never shared this url with the students, instead electing to just give them a direct link to each book. Click on any one of the three titles and you'll come to the book page itself. You can also apply taxonomies to book pages. And in the newest release, any node type which is linked into the book will get the book navigation page elements.
Meanwhile, I agree. As you suggested and Jim suggested by email,the collaborative book could be a good feature for building a class project. I could also imagine having group projects where small peer groups each assembled their own text over a semester.
Dave B. also suggested a documentation project for technical writers. Now we know that's how it's being used on Drupal, and in fact, was probably built for that purpose.
As for me, at some point, I want to build end-user documentation (how to register, what are teasers, etc.). It would be good to build it in a collaborative book and then export it. There's a module for Drupal I understand which will take a collaborative book and convert it to pdf.
FYI: That link is to the project page; Drupal developers just did a major revision of the project module. In fact, Dries just froze CVS and the first release candidate for 4.3 should be coming out soon. Nice new features include url aliasing, so that we can name any node page whatever we want. So instead of site x/node/view/8 (Drupal 4.2 clean urls designation), I could name a page about composing email site x/composing_email .
paths
although this functionality is available in 4.2 by installing path.module from contrib.
the project2 module is a major rewrite, and is working incredibly well.