Extension talk:BookManager/Improve support for book structures

Initial thoughts
This looks great. It's clear you've put a lot of thought into drafting this and I'm impressed with the quality of the writing.

Related to the general idea of books (or collections of pages) is that MediaWiki has, for a long time, worked on a model of subject-space page&harr;talk page. This works decently for Wikipedia, but for other projects such as Wiktionary, with its Citations namespace, this model doesn't work as well. I'm not sure how much of the work you're doing with the BookManager extension will encounter this issue, but it's something to consider, I think.

The proposal mentions Wikisource and Wikibooks and seems geared toward Wikimedia wikis. Is the intention to have the BookManager extension eventually installed on a Wikimedia wiki (or family of wikis)? If so, I think the sooner the extension can be deployed to a test wiki (on Wikimedia Labs or even test.wikipedia.org), the better. There's also writing an extension for deployment to read and digest, of course.

Regarding the schema changes ("make any necessary changes to the core database..."), do you have an idea of what will be involved here (i.e., which tables you'll want to change or add)? This the one part of the proposal that worries me, as (proposed) schema changes can be difficult for a variety of reasons. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:35, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Aims
Hello, thanks for this interesting proposal. However, despite agreeing with its premises, I'm lost right after them and I don't quite understand what you're trying to achieve here.

How did you choose BookManager? I don't know exactly what that extension does because docs are sparse, but the features mentioned there are useless for Wikibooks and Wikisource: The two main reasons we need MediaWiki to know about a "book concept" are the following: The WMF has already worked with PediaPress on the Collection extension (ask User:Tfinc) and volunteers have invested on the Proofread Page extension (Tpt already offered his help): you should probably try and build upon them. This is just my impression and opinion, of course; please advertise your proposal widely on, other Wikisources, Wikisource-l, textbook-l and the various Wikibooks. Regards, Nemo 08:10, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
 * "Automatic navigation" is already achieved by templates or Proofread Page,
 * "Automatic print version" is done by the Collection extension.
 * one-click export of an entire book via Collection extension to PDF, ods, ZIM and ePub format (requests or  to which PediaPress preferred  or b:User:Pediapress/CollectionParser),
 * concept of license and other metadata for the entire book.