Lets say I've written a couple of books or extremely long articles. In fact, I'm scanning these pages and running them through an OCR (it's OK, I'm clear on the copyright ). Is there a decent CMS out there that will handle these books? Like something that's got a next/previous, table of contents, and so on. I've looked in a bunch of places, I don't see anything consumer level that I can use.
Unfortunately not. I'm starting with a PDF of an image, then converting that to text via OCR. I want it searchable (pdf of an image isn't) and the ability to run some advertising.
joomla is a good you can have it set as sections/categories/pages for instance i have one set up as domainname/zippo/collections then i have a page with links to the different collection pages i listed not sure on drupal but it also seems a popular cms
Thanks folks. I really appreciate the help. This is one of those instances that Google failed me because I didn't know what to search on. 'Online books' and stuff like that is dominated by ebooks and online book publishers. I did some digging into drupal, and that led me to the drupal book module, which seems to be now superseded by drupal categories - and my initial drive by indicates that this is likely what I need. Thanks again for all your help.
The Drupal Book module does just what you described actually. And it's a core module so you know it's solid. It handles the next/previous usability perfectly, and automatically creates an index that you can add as a block. http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/book
Not sure why you can't just upload the PDFs? When a user clicks on the link they see the PDF in their browser. That's searchable and convenient for the user. You can of course organize it in categories/chapters and have sections and pages all on different web pages on your site, but most visitors are going to be extremely aggravated by all the clicking they have to do. I think that will turn off a lot of visitors and make them quickly leave in search of similar content that exists as a single page/file. Are you attempting to avoid a visitor being able to download the the PDF in one shot, and thus lose out on page hits/keeping the visitor at your site? That's understandable, but like I said above, it's a big turn off to visitors. If this is an issue, you could include a page footer (appears at the bottom of each page) in a PDF that includes your name, URL and a brief note "visit [your url here] for more information on this topic". Then any one who downloads the file has a constant reminder of where they got the file. Dan
A wiki would also be a great way to sort this information. think of wikibooks(dot)org I would recommend you going over to opensourcecms(dot)com and checking out the different content management systems like Joomla/Wordpress/Drupal versus wiki options like MediaWiki (what wikipedia uses), Dokuwiki or others. Best of luck, innovati!
The problem with pdfs is that they load and navigate slow for people with slower connections. I would recommend using Drupal and using the Book Module. It's ideal for your scenario.