The bava Library

I mean Chump’s getting one, right? What are they going to stock the shelves with, gold-plated nudie mags?

I’ve been thinking a bit about what I want to try and build as part of Tom Woodward‘s Form of Awesome Flex Course dedicated to building things with Gravity Forms. The first live session is this Thursday, June 9th 7th, at 3 PM, and I just spent some time creating a new WordPress instance with Gravity Forms installed at library.bavatuesdays.com. My thinking is that my project for the month will be to create a form-driven site that allows for entering data for books, VHS tapes, laser discs, DVDs, vinyl, CDs, and sundry other formats. I’ve accumulated a fair amount of junk over the years, and at the end of the month a container-full of it will be arriving on Italy’s shores.

I am trying to make my time this month learning Gravity Forms relevant, so I’m setting a goal of building a fairly simply form to record the various media and then make it discoverable according to certain categories, tags, topics, etc. I’m also wondering if I can find a way to scan and pre-propulate data with bar codes and ISBN codes like the app Libib does for Reclaim Video‘s collection, but that seems a bit advanced at the moment. Just having a site to make my kids do mindless data entry would be a perfect way to prepare them for their inevitable futures….

I know Libib already does all this and more, and I could just use that app instead, but a) it’s yet another monthly subscription fee and b) I like the simple frame of a basic cataloging system in WordPress for this project. It’s easy to conceptualize; I already know most of the metadata needed; and I can probably hook into some cool existing libraries to get quick screenshots to make the visuals fairly easy and dynamic—but that might be wishful thinking. Regardless, it will give me a framework to understand what is and isn’t possible through Gravity Forms—which is really the endgame.  So, I now have my site, Gravity Forms installed, and a bitchin’ project to work through, I am ready to go!

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4 Responses to The bava Library

  1. Tom says:

    I’ve done some scanning to look at ISBN APIs and they’re out there but it does take a bit of work with javascript to set up something like that. Archive.org has one, as do Google and Amazon.

    I think there will be a nice tiering of options as you get comfortable with Gravity Forms. So we can start off with what fields you want for various media types, then add in some conditional logic, then work on how that information is displayed and structured for the kind of searching/grouping you might want to do and then, finally, look at what API options you have to get stuff filled in automatically.

    • Reverend says:

      Yeah, I figured a real-life project will help me push the limits and get familiar. I was talking with an old ds106er from 2012, and turns out the ds106 in[SPIRE] site was built on Gravity Forms, and 10 years later it is as good as ever, how crazy is that?

  2. Tom says:

    For clarity, the date is als0 June 9th rather than 7th. That scared the hell out of me initially.

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