The University of Georgia Online Learning team had a pilot project for their open educational resources: the Physical Education department had written an open textbook for their courses, and it was the ideal project to see whether Pressbooks would serve their needs. If it went well, they would launch Pressbooks networks for each of their online programs.
I was delighted to work with Pressbooks again. One of my earliest projects, shortly after I began freelancing full time, was to write the two-part selective importer that lets people sort content into front matter, chapters, and back matter in the book structure. I love the Pressbooks team and it was a joy to see all the changes in the software since I’d last used it.
One of the challenges of this project was that the department wanted each textbook to include a common set of introductory chapters containing basic information about physical education. At the time, there was no good way to accomplish this in Pressbooks. However, we had a stroke of luck: 10up launched a private beta version of their fledgling Distributor plugin and allowed us to join. I was able to work out the relevant bugs and contribute some code to allow syndicated pages to preserve their hierarchy, if the parent page is also present on the receiving side.
