Request to Add Our Self-Hosted Network’s Books to the Pressbooks Directory

Contributing to Pressbooks
1

Hello Pressbooks Team,

At Ankara University (Türkiye), we have been developing several educational and interactive open textbooks using a self-hosted Pressbooks installation (https://ekitap.ankara.edu.tr/).

We would kindly like to ask whether it is possible for our network’s public books to be included in the Pressbooks Directory.

Our content is primarily in Turkish and English. Recently, we published two new ebooks:

  • A Guide to Removable Partial Denture Planning (English)
  • Hareketli Bölümlü Protezlerde Planlama (Turkish)

We believe these open textbooks will provide valuable support to students, instructors, and practitioners by offering a clear and focused overview of removable partial denture planning.

In addition to these, we also maintain several Turkish translations and updated versions of various open textbooks.

We would be very happy and grateful if our books (or our entire network, if possible) could be considered for inclusion in the Pressbooks Directory.

Thank you very much for your time and assistance.
Please let us know if you need any additional information or technical details from our side.

Best regards,
Ankara University Digital Education Office

2

Hello! Thank you for your note. 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 https://ekitap.ankara.edu.tr/wp/wp-admin/options.php?page=pressbooks_diagnostics.

  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, let us know, and we can add your network to our list of networks that are indexed in the Directory.

All the best,

John

3

Hello John,

We are running Pressbooks 6.34.1.
I have added the suggested line to the wp-config.php file.

After that, I restarted the server.

Best wishes,
Hakan

4

Thank you for confirming, Hakan! Our tech team will add your network to our database for the Directory. In a few days, you should see your books listed there if everything is configured correctly. Welcome to the Directory!

5

Hello John,

Thank you very much. Our two books have started to appear in the Directory, which is great. However, on the search results page below, the English version of the book still displays the Turkish subject value “Prostetik” instead of the English form “Prosthetics.”

Both books have the correct language and subject settings in the Book Info pages, and their home pages show the proper values. The issue appears only in the Directory search display.

Could this be related to the fact that the English version was originally cloned from the Turkish book before we translated and updated its metadata?

Here is the search page showing the issue:
https://pressbooks.directory/?q=Ankara+University

Best wishes,
Hakan

6

Hello Hakan,

Was the change to the subject value made recently? Our fetcher runs a couple of times a day, can you check this value later today or tomorrow? I expect that it will be updated soon if you had just made that change.

John

7

Hi John,

I don’t recall making any recent changes to the subject value, but I’ll check again tomorrow. If it hasn’t updated by then, I’ll report back here.

Best wishes,
Hakan

8

Hello, Today I checked and see the issue persists. English version of the book still displays the Turkish subject value “Prostetik” instead of the English form “Prosthetics.”

9

Thank you for checking, Hakan. I’ve alerted our tech team and they will determine the issue and how it can be addressed. We’ll let you know if we have a solution or if we have questions for you.

10

Thank you, John. I appreciate your support and the tech team’s efforts.
I’ll wait for your update. Let me know if you need anything from my side.

Hakan