New store creation

[ppetree]

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this question but this certainly seemed like a better option than the other sub-fori.

How do you create/add a new store?

For instance, if I were a major corporation and I wanted to add a store with all the e-books created by my company for internal use only (i.e. employee manuals, travel guidelines, sexual harassment policies, patent application process), how would I create a store that only my employees could access?

[aleyx]

At this point, what you need is a knowledge base (or document management), not an elibrary management. OpenKM and Kimios seem to come up first for a search on "open source document management". We use Ennov at work, but that maaaaay be a tad overkill. Maybe. Depends on the size of your structure, I guess. For a "major corporation", meaning ISO requirements for documentation procedures (among other things like version control)? Yeah, those three is where I'd start, and then go up.

But if you really, really want Calibre with authentication and/or access control, what you'll need is install it on a dedicated server (just throw a Linux VM somewhere on your network) and run it from Apache. Start as many calibre-server instances as you have libraries / virtual libraries to share ( with something like calibre-server --with-library <library-path> --port 808x --restriction <virtual library name> --daemonize).

[ppetree]

Thanks for all that... I didn't give the real business idea, just an example usage. Your solution doesn't work for my needs.

What I really need to know is how to create a store. I'm guessing there's some form of plugin that needs to be developed?

Thanks,

Pete

[eschwartz]

What do you mean by "store"? If you want a server stocked with materials that can only be accessed by employees, then aleyx's example appears to work perfectly.

If you want to attain granularity over which materials can be accessed by which people, and possibly throw payment processing in on the side, I don't think calibre is going to cut it...


I would like to humbly suggest that an example usage should correspond to actual usage, or we can't do a very good job of helping you.
We *can* continue throwing spaghetti solutions at the walls, hoping one of them will stick to your "real business idea". But it seems rather inefficient.

[ppetree]

Calibre -> Get Books -> Stores

There are about 4 dozen stores listed.

Now, logical person would conclude that these stores are plugins and not hard coded.

Where is the documentation for creating a store plugin and is there any example code out there?

I've looked and if you google "calibre create plugin store" in any combination all you get are instructions on installing a store plugin.

There are no payments to be processed, only user validation is needed.

[aleyx]

Well, the plugins dialog lists "store" plugins, and Calibre's source code has those plugins' source in /src/calibre/gui2/store/stores. Is that what you meant?

[jhowell]

I think that there is a misunderstanding here. The "store" plugins in calibre are used by the "Get Books" feature to help locate books available for purchase from e-book stores, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. They do not turn calibre into a store to sell books.

[aleyx]

Or maybe you already have an internal online repository (a "store"), and you want your users to use Calibre (with a plugin for your store) to access this repository? And you want to know how to write this plugin for your store?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by aleyx

Well, the plugins dialog lists "store" plugins, and Calibre's source code has those plugins' source in /src/calibre/gui2/store/stores. Is that what you meant?

Calibre 'Store' is to Someone else's store (via the WEB). It is a referral service.

It is NOT a shopping cart for the library contents.

[aleyx]

Originally Posted by theducks

Calibre 'Store' is to Someone else's store (via the WEB). It is a referral service.

It is NOT a shopping cart for the library contents.

Indeed, which is why I find the whole thing puzzling, to say the least. If the point is to "create a store" and run it, Calibre is not the right tool because it can't do it. If there already is a web store and its contents are to be distributed through Calibre's store plugin feature to a select but apparently relatively large amount of people (i.e. larger than a family), then I would say that Calibre still isn't the right tool for that job. Better adapt the "store" itself.

Frankly, as eschwartz said we know way too little about the whole project to be able to understand where Calibre is supposed to stand in it.

N.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ppetree

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this question but this certainly seemed like a better option than the other sub-fori.

How do you create/add a new store?

For instance, if I were a major corporation and I wanted to add a store with all the e-books created by my company for internal use only (i.e. employee manuals, travel guidelines, sexual harassment policies, patent application process), how would I create a store that only my employees could access?

@ppetree - whilst what you want to do, make corporate documents available to employees, could be done with calibre, it's Store facility is probably not the way to go. A better fit would be to use the calibre-server feature - the employees could then access the repository of documents via a web browser.

That said, I would not consider using calibre for the purpose you've outlined. I'd be looking at document management systems. IMO calibre is too restrictive, things like policy documents change over time so one needs things such as version control and workflow management baked into the product - calibre doesn't have and is never likely to have those.

I guess you could have a document management system that is used by the 'document creators' who 'publish' their documents into a calibre library that the 'document consumers' access via a web store. But I think all the DMS's I've used had a read only mode for 'document consumers'.

BR