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)