BiblioShare Wordpress Plugin

How does the BiblioShare Wordpress plugin work?

Settings

Once you install the plugin, a BookNet Canada section will appear in your settings. There you can modify the templates, choose your currency type, and add an OpenURL Resolver to link to library records. Your user token also gets added here so you can access the data from BiblioShare.

Pulling in book data

You can use the plugin for posts, pages, and widgets. Posts and pages can use both the button that gets added to the visual editor or shortcodes. Widgets only use shortcodes.

Visual Editor

After the BiblioShare WordPress plugin is installed, a button with the BNC logo will appear on your Visual Editor toolbar.

When you click on that button it opens a form in which you enter the 13-digit ISBN, choose a template, enter a publisher URL, and preview the result.

Click Insert and the shortcode is dropped into your post or page for you.

The Result

Data Source

This plugin uses images from BNC's Image Service and data from BiblioShare via a web service we've created called BiblioSimple that was designed specifically for display.

BiblioShare is a database of publisher-supplied ONIX data. ONIX allows publishers to describe books in great detail, and we can take advantage of that detail to do things like add Canadian flags when a contributor is identified as Canadian. (See the above image for example.)

Requirements

WordPress

To install plugins you need to be using the open-source blogging software from WordPress.org — not the WordPress.com platform which uses that software. Confused? Take a look at "WordPress.com vs WordPress.org" for clarification.

User Tokens

You need to apply for a user token before you can use the WordPress plugin. The token allows us to keep an eye on our server traffic. It also helps us troubleshoot any problems that might come up.

You can request a developer/WordPress token by filling out and submitting this form.

Getting the Plugin

You can get it from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

OpenBook Wordpress Plugin

BookNet Canada collaborated with John Miedema, the creator of the OpenBook plugin. John is an Information Technology Architect with a Master of Library and Information Science degree who likes to work on open-source software such as the OpenBook Book Data WordPress plugin in his spare time.

The difference between the OpenBook plugin and the BiblioShare plugin is that the BiblioShare plugin only uses publisher-supplied data through BiblioShare and the OpenBook plugin has multiple data sources.

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