Library book catalog and management system

I need a library book catalog and management system and am thinking about how to do it on MODx. Are there any add ons for MODx that would help with this? The library is fairly small with only a few thousand books and the functions needed are minimal: catalog, search, and tracking. Of course, I’ll want to publish all this data to my website but that’s the easy part.

Any suggestions or tips?

There are:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,16456.0.html

And there are:
http://www.modx.wangba.fr/index.php?id=182

The second option - AjaxSearch together with eform2db:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,8111.0.html

Would make it possible for you to store your data in custom db tables and
not affecting cache problems with many 1000’s of modx documents...

But its lots of work...

Thanks. I was actually looking for something a little more focused at the problem. Your links are good but also very general.

I haven’t done much yet myself, so my suggestions here lack
experience and knowledge.

Ditto, tv’s and modx documents rocks but read this whole thread --> http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,18872.0.html
For dealing with many 1000’s of docs you’ll need caching strategy... I think.

I have something that might be modified for your needs
It is a module that has a table associated. The table can be modified to your needs.

I still need to work on deleting the items from the db.

If you want to start on your own try http://sottwell.com/create-module.html

Also please post more detailed info about your needs.

I would try to first set it up as modx documents. Use TVs, Ditto, and ajaxSearch for the functionality you need. If you are having problems with the cache file being too big, you could use the time/money you saved not having to create CRUD, search, views to work on the cache issue.

That’s what I would try first. You could setup TVs, Ditto, ajaxSearch in an hour or two.

Thank you all for your time spent to help me. Its a big step up the learning curve.

I agree with Ganesh here. Custom tables are the go.
Here’s a module that may help you with the day to day editing of data ion custom tables. It will not create tables for you but once you have that sorted out it will let your editors manage the data.

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,32720.msg199092.html#msg199092

I will be a heretic, for once, and suggest that you see what’s available in dedicated library software (unless you think you’d enjoy building your own in MODx).

There might be something here:

That said, if you can’t find what you want in a pre-made library package, MODx is definitely the platform to build yours in.

I agree with BobRay. If you’re going to be doing your own CRUD (create, read, update, delete) in the database, what’s the point of using modx?

modx gives you the ability to do the Create,Update,Delete via TVs and the manager. Read via [*content*] or Ditto.

If you need a custom table (which might be good), I would still let modx do all of the CRUD and use Quid to save the info into another table. You can set these pages as uncacheable.

Wouldnt it make more sense to use modx’ powerful manager interface for CRUD and Ditto for views, and optimize the caching mechanism rather than building your own custom-db tools?

modx advantages
- easily create new fields (via TVs)
- can aggregate rows of data (via Ditto) and its templateable
- create RSS of the library (via Ditto)
- can easily search all rows (via ajaxsearch)
- user permissions (either per document or per tv field)

why would you want to have to do this from scratch unless you want to create some db superclass to handle rows as objects, etc? If you’re going to recreate all of this, you might as well use CodeIgniter, Symfony, or another ’library app’ like BobRay pointed to.

Quid is here: http://modxcms.com/Quid-2305.html
- Quit automatically updates an external table with modx content, TVs and document contents.