Nov 7, 2012
As you know, you can use Booktype to publish your books into different formats but you can also view them on the web. In this blog post I will try to show how that web view can be customized with simple template modification. By default Booktype comes with predefined templates but they can all be easily customized to your own needs (templates can also be multilingual).
By default, to present books on the web Booktype comes with Django application called “Reader” and we will customize templates for that application. Original templates for this application are placed in $BOOKTYPESOURCE/lib/booki/reader/templates/ directory and our customized templates will be placed in /var/www/awesomesun/templates/reader/ directory. All you have to do is either copy original template files into awesomesun project and modify them or write new templates from scratch.
What kind of modifications are we making? As you can see on the screenshots bellow we want to have very simple book view, we want our “Table of contents” to be always visible while we scroll the page and we want our header to be fixed on top with name of the book and chapter we are currently reading.
To make it work I created new base template called new_base.html and placed it in /var/www/awesomesun/templates/ directory. This is a base template which other templates for “Reader” application should include. This template just includes jQuery library and creates place holders for future content.