Pressbooks Directory for Open Source Users

Hi! I’m just curious if there might be intentions to add Open Source users and materials to the Pressbooks directory? Just investigating this all now. Thanks!

Hi @erikarydberg, yes we’d love to! We have a few open source (self hosted) networks included now and I’ve been emailing with several other network managers that we know about to gauge interest and make sure that they have the necessary pieces in place on the operations level for us to be able to ingest their books. I’m sure there are some networks we’ve missed. If you send me contact info for whomever maintains the network in question, I’m happy to start that conversation to get those books added/indexed.

Thank you - this is a huge thing I think for Pressbooks. Sorry for the multiple ways of messaging I maintain the front end elrydberg(at)plymouth(dot)edu and my colleague Hyung Park hjpark(at)plymouth(dot)edu is on the backend management.

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Books available in our self-hosted Pressbooks instance (https://e-publish.uliege.be/) are not in the Pressbooks Directory yet. However, all of them have the ‘Yes’ option selected.
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Is there anything that can be done here? Thanks.

hi @frenaville we’d be happy to include your network’s books in the Directory. There are a couple of prerequisites for open source networks to be included in the directory.

  1. In order for the book cards/listings to have accurate metadata and our fetcher to work as expected, your network needs to be running Pressbooks 5.17.2 or later. I hope that’s not a problem, as that release is several years old. Please check and confirm you’re running a compatible version of Pressbooks. If you’re unsure, you should be able to check from the network diagnostics page at [Se connecter ‹ Bienvenue sur e-publish — Pressbooks).

  2. Networks that would like to keep their book listings regularly updated also need to define an environment variable for your network. If you’ve set up your Pressbooks installation using a standard WordPress deploy process, you should be able to add this line to your wp-config.php file:
    define( 'CUSTOM_DELETE_BOOK_ENDPOINT', 'https://api.pressbooks.com/book-directory-fetcher/api/books/delete' );

This value needs to be defined so that books will be removed from the directory as expected whenever a book is marked as private, deleted from Pressbooks, or flagged for removal from the directory in your Pressbooks application. If you’re running a recent version of Pressbooks, we would be able to add books to the directory and sync any metadata changes you make, but until that variable is in place, we won’t be able to remove/delete unwanted books from the directory listing.

If you’re able to take these two steps, we can add your network to our list of networks that are indexed in the Directory. Feel free to contact me via DM or email if you’d prefer to coordinate further in private.

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Thanks @SteelWagstaff! We are running Presbooks 5.27.1, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I’m contacting the IT team in charge of WP for the variable. We’ll keep you informed.

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Hello, We have a third-party hosted Pressbooks site, pressbooks.usnh.edu and are looking to have our resources listed in the directory. We are running PB 6.9.2 and our wp-config.php was updated. This is a consolidation of our University System of New Hampshire instances, press.plymouth.edu and granite.pressbooks.pub. Currently, the Plymouth State site is still active but our granite.pressbooks.pub is no longer active. Books that were on our Granite site no longer work, links are redirected to our USNH catalog, so they would need to come out of the directory.

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