Quote:
Originally Posted by tarisea
No one? I thought for sure I wouldn't be the first to come up with this idea.
Kovid what do you think?
TTRS
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I can't speak for Kovid, but here's my opinion.
The idea is good, but the implementation would likely be a nightmare.
First, what you're really looking for is a place to store multiple fields of information about an author. While that can be done in a plugin, the best way to do it would be in the database itself, which would involve a full Author table, which as far as I know, currently doesn't exist.
Second, just from my own experience I believe one of the design principles of Calibre is not to hard-code site-specific information into the program or database. Any place where it deals with external websites, Calibre stores the information about those websites in settings or configuration files instead of working them into the program itself. This is likely due to the ephemeral nature of the Internet. Having the Author table have fields named after specific websites would violate the spirit of that principle.
That means that those field names would have to be arbitrary. They could be set the way you suggested in the default configuration, but there would have to be a way for users to override those settings and create their own field labels.
Of course, once you give the users that power, what we're really talking about is a full custom field system for Authors like Calibre has for books.
Don't get me wrong; I would love to have a full Author table in the database. That would solve a lot of issues that I've run into with trying to organize my libraries. But what you're asking for would best be implemented not a by plugin, but by a major rewrite of significant portions of Calibre.
That said, if Kovid does decide to add a full Author table, I will eat my words (and enjoy them immensely while I'm giddily playing around with this feature
).