What is the best way to Publish a book with chapters?

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AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around finding the best way to publish a book with chapters on Discourse. oga initiates the conversation, seeking advice on how to create a book with chapters that allow readers to navigate through them. Jagster suggests treating the book as a category and chapters as topics, and mentions the undocumented Footnote plugin.

JammyDodger recommends the Discourse Doc Categories plugin to create an index for chapters, but notes its limitations for member-only sections. Heliosurge suggests the Discourse Chain Topics plugin, which oga decides to test. However, denvergeeks expresses concerns about the plugin’s functionality, and oga confirms that it doesn’t work due to a configuration issue. Jagster clarifies that the error message oga encountered is not actually an error.

1

Can anyone suggest the Theme component or recommend the best way to publish a book with Chapters?
What we want to achieve is; publish a Book that has chapter 1, 2, 3 xxx.
When a user reads chapter 1, they can then proceed to chapter x, or they can even skip chapter 1 and jump to Chapter 2 or chapter x.
We want to have the option of putting some chapters behind a Member only section.

2

Book is a category and chapters are topics. No commenting, because then the order stays.

If there is need to discuss here is a undocumented plugin named Footnote — but it lacks support for mobiles and looks bad in tablets.

3

The new Discourse Doc Categories plugin may be useful to create an index for your chapters, though I think it would only work for all topics in one category and you may need to get imaginative if you wanted to have certain chapters accessible to certain groups (as they’d need to be in a separate category to make use of the permissions)

4

If your self hosted. I believe this plugin is what your looking for.

5

Thanks. I will implement it tomorrow to do a test run. Will update soon as done.

6

@oga I look forward to hearing your experience with the Discourse Chain Topics Plugin – I could not get it to work!

7

Ok, so I installed it, but there is no way to configure it. The Settings is greyed out in my instance.
Looking through the build log, I saw this:

Plugin name is ‘discourse_chain_topics’, but plugin directory is named ‘discourse-chain-topics’

So, it does not work, I mean, it did not work for too.
It installs, but not configurable. Setting is greyed out.

8

That isn’t an error. It just tells that.