What's behind the Veg Food guide? - by Chris Chinchilla [04.01.2011]
How do you keep several different formats of a title’s content in sync with each other? How do you maintain uniformity to ensure any updates and amendments are consistent across all of the formats?
With The Australian Veg food guide we have a print book, an eBook, an iPhone app and a website, with several other versions planned in the future. We pondered for a while on how to maintain the listings and reviews and easily update all the versions with amendments as well as adding new entries. Now, I’m not claiming what we set up is perfect; it’s a collection of open source solutions strung together with some customisations. It’s not complete yet, nor fully functional , but it’s cheap and (sort of) does the job… Here’s what we did.
Initially we had a pile of word files containing all the reviews. We then had to enter them manually into an Indesign layout. This stage took a long time but it was worth the effort to know we have set something up that will be heaps easier to work with. Then we exported the indesign records as an XML file (you can see a previous post of mine on how to do that).
Alongside the indesign files we had created a Drupal website. Drupal is a Content Management System that can have a steep learning curve but is extremely customisable and extensible. It’s also a system I have experience with, so maybe I’m slightly biased. We had to write a custom module (Drupal’s term for plug-in) to then handle the import of that file into our site’s set up so things like custom fields for ratings, cuisine etc. matched up. This wasn’t quite as hard as it may sound and in the spirit of the open source mentality, I’d be happy to share the techniques with you.
The website not only allows us to offer extra bonus features to the books purchasers, such as the ability to be able to search listings in a variety of ways, notify them of amendments and a bunch of other yet to be decided features. It also allows us to manage content internally, such as flagging what’s been edited, proofread or fact checked and when.
To get the listings into the iPhone application we had to reverse the process, creating another custom piece of code to export the data from the website into the correct format that iPhone applications use. Again, after some clever thinking, it wasn’t as complicated as it may sound.
Finally, it’s now also possible to export the data from the Drupal website (as XML) and re-import it back into inDesign and update the print and eBook.
To summarise: the website is now our central and definitive set of information. We can easily export its information into our other formats so they are all equally up to date. Now if only there was a way to update books that have already been printed…
Chris Chinchilla has been a ground breaking eZine writer, indie rockstar, solo troubadour, professional geek, activist, street press writer and much more… He believes in not preaching to the converted and breaking open ideas to make them appealing and accesible to everyone. Now as the new publisher at aduki Independent press he intends to do much the same. Watch this space…
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