Using Books

Books, like every other content type, can be organized using taxonomy. However, I usually don't recommend using taxonomy to organize book pages. Books are unlike other content types in that they allow you to organize a series of web pages into a specific sequence. Books automatically create the next/previous links. More significantly, any type of content can be organized into a book. So, a book page can contain blog posts, pages, assignments, or any other content type permitted on the site.

The book module has three separate permissions:

• create book pages
• edit own book pages
• maintain books

Users who can create book pages can create a new book page. More importantly, they can insert this book page into any existing book. More on this in the last paragraph.


Edit own pages is self explanatory.


Users with maintain books rights can do several things:

• start new books -- ie, create a new top-level page
• insert any post, regardless of content type, into a book outline
• remove pages from a book outline

Books are a very useful content type because they allow posts from all content types and all vocabularies to be grouped together and organized into a specific sequence. Frequently, teachers use books to create a document containing all their course materials. The biggest weakness of books involves how access rights are structured. Because any user with the rights to create a book page can insert that page into any book, a student with the rights to create book pages could "add" pages to the course material. Whether such a contribution was intentional or accidental, it would still be disruptive.