EWTE/booknav

A simple solution is to use the book creator extension to produce a book, and then to use the saved book page as a template for navigation. This way of generating a set of pages uses the book creator extension. First, a set of pages are collected into a book, which is then saved, see OER:Books/booknav. If you examine the source of that page, a number of <noinclude> statements were added.

A simple template (Template:booknav) is then used to create the navigation:

<div style="float:right; border: 1px solid black; padding: 20px; margin: 5px">
{{: OER:Books/booknav }}
</div>

Advantages are:

• This method is quite simple to use, and builds on using the book creator. Users can use the interface provided by the book creator to create their collections.
• It also means that books cannot just be viewed (as a set of wiki pages), but also exported, using the mechanisms provided by the book creator. The pages are thus grouped on the wiki, and can be exported as such.

However, there are a number of disadvantages:

• Adding a page to a set of pages requires the book definition to be updated.
• While it's easy to edit the book (and thereby the navigation), and this may already be familiar to users, every time the book is saved the <noinclude> statements need to be added again to the book definition, for the navigation to stay properly formatted.
• The page itself does not 'know' that it's part of the book, and can 'behave' accordingly, e.g. it's not possible to add "previous" and "next" navigation to pages.