Enzymind Labs

I subscribe to a drupal development mailing list and one of the topics that came up was the cryptic nature of drupal books. They were looking for a new name for it...

Technically, books are made of...book pages...BUT, through that tab function you used to incorporate a blog into a book, I believe any kind of content can be incorporated into a book hierarchy. For example here's an image that could be made into a book page. The booktree displays all book pages as one monolithic blob -I will clarify the description. [editorial side note: this leads me to a larger issue/question i have with drupal: WHY do you (they; us) need all these separate node 'types' why not just have a generic node that can have anything in it rather than specify different nodes for different classes of content images video etc. I may try to address this with RIA form entry project by giving the user just a generic form that can create any kind of node.]

Here's the current implementation of booktree:

http://enzymind.com/drupal/booktree

The booktree module can be basically thought of as a php-filtering script which then spits out structured html. BUT HERE's the rub. It does not work in firefox...

Works OK in IE7 (I have not tried IE6 but should be fine). Try it in both to see what I mean.

I don't know why. I emailed the author of the 'booktree' module to get his thoughts on the matter. He's Italian. This is what he said:

Hi Peter,
This module was developed in firefox in the past i have some problem
with IE but IT is stange!!
I have many patch to commit but the time in this period is not enought.
The module in which Theme have problem? You Have a patch??
Thanks for your feedback.
Uccio

Not sure what he means. I chose this booktree module as a starting point because it seems to be the only existing method to show text as a hierarchy like this.

Its really crude in terms of how it represents books, but also relatively simple to understand the module code .

The two glaring issues I want to start with are 1.) make it work with firefox. 2.) its got some kind of repetition problem that makes it put duplicate copies of some of the book content at the top of the tree, I just want one representation of all book content on one page. real real simple baby-steps coding (debugging) project.

The first feature I want to ad is to be able to select the display of individual books using some kind of of menu pull-down then I want to have all the text for each book page be able to toggle open or closed (via javascript probably) so that ALL of the (book) content on the site can be perused in one fell swoop relatively quickly.