Book Club already have search capability but search is through menu item. And there is no visible search form to search Book Club. Also top right corner search box is not connected to book club search. 

I have connected top right corner search box to Book Club Search. Also a book cloud is added which picks few books at random in right side bar. Any suggestions on this?

As mentioned in Book Club Modifications - IV, Book Addition Mechanism is being simplified. SVTechie Book Club right now can read book data from Amazon based on ISBN number so that user does not have to type in whole information. It uses SOAP interface to achieve this.

But I wanted to add search/fetch capabilities to Library of Congress catalog as it has much bigger collection. Now, I stumbled on something called Z39.50. This information is from Z39.50 Gateway.

Z39.50 is a national and international (ISO 23950) standard defining a protocol for computer-to-computer information retrieval. Z39.50 makes it possible for a user in one system to search and retrieve information from other computer systems (that have also implemented Z39.50) without knowing the search syntax that is used by those other systems. Z39.50 was originally approved by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in 1988.

Great, only thing I need is Z39.50 client which can work with PHP. And YAZ is the great thing to achieve this. Information is available at Index Data PHP YAZ page. And letest version canbe downloaded from PECL.

I checked if Dreamhost provided PHP already has Yaz extension support and it does not! So ofcourse, I need to compile my own PHP and BTW, Dreamhost has nice support script to achieve this. I would like to provide it here but I am not sure if I can do that. link is here http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Installing_PHP4. 

Ofcourse, it did not work right away as other linux/unix scripts. First, I needed to add YAZ support into this. Another was libxml2 gave "xml.sax" related warning and script aborted (though there was no need to abort the script). So I built Yaz and libxml2 manually. Rest of the stuff was okay. I tried example fetch script from YAZ page and it worked

Oh, there is one more thing.. I tried to use sudo as mentioned on YAZ as I did not know anything about sudo.

Sudo (superuser do) allows a system administrator to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root or another user while logging the commands and arguments.

Ofcourse, sudo did not work and it could be dangerous too! Actually I need not to use sudo at all because I was installing in my home directory. Neverthless, my attempted sudo access is logged in to dreamhost system logs

Stay tuned for book club modifications! 

Latest Modification goal is to simplify book addition.

• Currently it looks like following 

There is next section to this form which looks like following and is needed when fetch information setting is "On your own". Though this form is not required in most of the cases, it is there (implemented as static form).

• Next step is to implement this form using DHTML. This unnecessary portion can be hidden and make visible only when fetch information is set to "On your own".

• Similarly, if person doesn't want to rent book, Book Location and Book Condition is optional and can be hidden in similar fashion.

• Also I would like to add text book donation option (while adding the book) indicating book is available for donation. Once there is critical mass of books available, these books will be collected and shipped to charities. 

• And ofcourse, Tag/Keyword system is also in the air.

New version of SVTechie Book Club is released with following changes

• Template change - Tables are more user friendly and nice looking too!
• Pages are compatible with both - IE and Firefox Browser.
• Manage Request - Simplified Interface. Included declined book as well in transaction history. Cleaned up significantly.
• Lend Request Form - DHTML/JavaScript based calendar to enter dates.
• Allow negative credits - Person can request books. Owner can make decision based on credits and user reviews.

• Book Addition - Compact DHTML based book addition.
• Book Tagging - Rather than creating various categories to handle the books (which complicates user interface and bulky too), book tagging is added. Person can tag the book with a single keyword and this keyword may act like sub-category too. I have copied this idea from other sites. 

New version of SVTechie Book Club is released with following changes 

• Template change - Compact Menu System and moved login/registration to prominent position
• Registration/Login - One step simplified registration process
• Book Addition - No approval required to add books. Modified book addition form to have required information at beginning of the form

• Book Addition - Compact DHTML based book addition.

Before I start writing second SVTechie Book Club modifications blog entry, some notes from book club development history are presented here.

First and foremost, I always find using and modifying existing code easier than writing from scratch. Though, existing code is always written over finally, old code provides nice anchoring plateform. (More so when I know so little about web design). So I chose com_booklibrary component of Joomla! to start with.

com_booklibrary component had lots of bugs when I started using it. But now it is little more stable. Initial modifications were little cusotmization for svtechie.com. But later on, I have added more features and have rewritten most of the code.

Few features I added (apart from bug fixes) are

• Referral based User Membership. It required separate member database in joomla! as I wanted same user management system as rest of svtechie.com
• User can add/modify/delete there own books.
• User profile management
• Credit based lend mechanism
• Simplify some of the addition.