I'm building a site for people who want to sell their used books. A listing will contain general information (Title, Author) stored in a "books" table as well as one or more records containing format-specific information (Hardcover, Paperback, Audio CD, etc) stored in a "book_formats" table and linked to the record in the books table. This way people can offer their books in several formats, with different prices for each, like you see on Amazon. But I'm having trouble figuring out a graceful way for users to enter this data. What I have right now strikes me as a bit of a kludge. Users enter the general details of their book, along with the information for one format. After saving they can go to a page that allows them to add additional formats if they want. But I want to make all this into one smooth process. Any suggestions?
you should just have a simple submit form that places the content in a database then let them edit the file later this will require an account as well. All sites have forms google, facebook, yahoo, youtube etc nothing is wrong with this if you want you could make it ajax but for the initial submission it should just be a form maybe do ajax for the update etc.