I need to make a PDF directory of magazines.
January 16, 2017 7:03 AM   Subscribe

I have been given a long run of magazines to put online as PDFs. I'm currently scanning them and want to create a clean directory structure where I have the covers of the magazines as nice thumbnails, clicking on them gives you a modal with the cover and the table of contents and a download pdf button, and then you can download the individual issue if you click. Is there a free solution to this that doesn't require a larger brain than I possess?

The magazine is, of course, fascinating. I can easily do html and css, some simple jquery, and then confusion sets in.
posted by history is a weapon to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Can you feed them to the Internet Archive? I know they want whatever you have.
posted by adventureloop at 8:05 AM on January 16, 2017


Response by poster: I don't mind posting them on internet archive, but I want to host and display them on my own site. I'm not even sure what to look for at the moment.
posted by history is a weapon at 8:09 AM on January 16, 2017


This is the most barebones use-case for what software suites called Content Management Systems do.

I know for a fact you can make wordpress do this, and I would be extremely surprised if you couldn't do the same in Drupal and Joomla. Those systems have lots of other features that might get in your way though.

In looking for a recommendation for you, I googled "barebones cms," and I found something called "barebonescms" which has a demo you can play with, but to be honest I didn't find it particularly intuitive. So, even if minimal braining is your goal, I kind of think that Wordpress, with its impressive theme, plugin, and documentation libraries might be the way to go for you.

In wordpress, you'll probably want some combination of a theme that displays items in your Media Library in a way that you like, and maybe a plugin like PDF Thumbnails that iwll automagically generate thumbnails of PDFs.

For example, might look for a photo album theme that supported auto-generating links, and then using the PDF Thumbnails plugin to create images, which would be displayed by your photo album theme with an autogenerated link to the actual PDF.

You might also want to look in to the various eBook selling plugins (with the idea being that your pdfs could be $0.00 ebooks).

Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you are willing to go, this page walks you through the process of writing the code for a plugin that will do a lot of what you want.
posted by sparklemotion at 11:54 AM on January 16, 2017


Perhaps issuu could meet your needs?
posted by teststrip at 2:17 PM on January 16, 2017


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