I’d be happy to assist with maintaining this sort of thing. I’m looking for any and all experience I can get managing book archives, so… If you need an extra hand…
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Well if you can let me know when you think it is ready, I’ll take a look!
Got a few other things on my plate right now 
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Bumping this because now the site redesign is done, I’d like to launch the update to the Books and Comics navigation.
Is everyone happy with this?
Does anyone have any ideas what to call “Non-Doctor Who brand” books?
@captainjackenoch you kindly offered to help, any other ideas?
@ThetaSigmaEarChef thanks for organising it, any final changes before I do this?
Links again:
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Oh, I’m sure there are another 1000 series I’ve missed, but nothing I know to add/change now! I think, if you’re sticking with the larger categorisation above the publishers, then just ‘Other’ or ‘Beyond’ would work.
‘Beyond the Brand’ - oh, someone take away my laptop, I’ve started alliterating!
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I’m on a little trip, but I’ll be home today. I’ll give it a look probably on Sunday : - )
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Following on from your suggestion, how about Beyond Doctor Who or maybe Beyond the Whoniverse for that non-branded section.
Also, instead of ‘Doctor Who branded’ how about just plain old ‘Doctor Who’? I’m just not that keen on the word ‘branded’ to be honest.
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For my review catalogue I use ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Worlds of Doctor Who’, and ‘Further Afield’
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Ooh, I really like “Beyond the Whoniverse”, and just “Doctor Who” makes sense too (that’s how the site has it currently for the ranges, and it makes sense to stay consistent where possible). Seconded all around!
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I have returned and have some free time!
Organizing primarily by publishing house is a good idea. Offering alphabetized by author last name and ISBN sorting is also a good idea (I can help with those.)
It’s your website, so I’m not going to tell you NOT to sort by “universe”, but I advise against doing so. My opinion is sorting by content of the story harms organization and could spark needless debate over what goes where. If something is published as a series, then I reccomend being able to sort and filter by that series, but it gets dicey trying to put things in boxes of canon and non canon. Sorting by publishing house is a much more objective approach.
I am assuming these categories are going to be filters on the site. My suggestion is to have their primary sort be by author last name, as that is the most common and easiest.
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Which categories do you think are unwise? Do you mean as in EDA/PDA/MA/VNA etc?
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Sorting between Doctor Who branded and non branded
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As in? Sorry, being really thick here.
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You’re good. I’m talking about the primary categories being Doctor Who branded, Worlds of Doctor Who and Non Doctor Who branded. My suggestion is instead sorting by author last name, ISBN or publishing house. Including the option to sort by books in the same series is also a good idea
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This isn’t really about sorting the books, it’s about broad categories for them like how Audio is already categorised on the site
If you categorised by author last name, you’d have random torchwood books next to random short stories and that, which isn’t helpful for anyone
Publishing house is more useful, but you’d still need to categorise within publishing house because there’s way too many from different areas done by BBC Books for example
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Then I’d reccomend sorting by author or series. The audios are published as series, so it makes sense to sort them as such. Sorting broadly as what is branded vs non branded is too broad.
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Again, author is a really weird way to sort it, take Goss for example
And as for series, that’s the current intent, it’s just splitting branded vs non branded, then splitting by series within that
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I agree with Jaypea that organising by author doesn’t really work or stay in line with the rest of the site. I’m still not sure what you mean by ‘unbranded’ though. The majority of BBC books fall into EDA, PDA etc. Then there are the Puffin ‘Classics’, the Targets etc. I would think it best to organise them how people probably have them on their shelves e.g. all the 8th Doctor together, all the PDAs, all the Missing Adventures, all the Targets etc.
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I only say unbranded because that’s what’s on the document. I agree with sorting them by series, and then having an extra category for non-series novels. I bring up alphebatizing by author because that’s how pretty much every library and bookstore I’ve been in does it, but it would look kind of strange next to the rest of the site.
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Hmmm this is a difficult one.
But yeah as @JayPea said what we basically want is a mirror to the Audio Drama navigation (which does need a little work because there’s stuff missing there but that’s another subject)
Just in the dropdown I can’t simply have a list of every single series, or even every publisher. There are too many. So we need some broad categories that we can use as dropdowns. Here I used the categories Big Finish use which was super helpful:
So ideally I’d lump together everything that is official Doctor who, so there’d be one called “Doctor Who” which contains the VNA, EDA, New Series, etc etc
And there’d be one for stuff called “Worlds of Doctor Who” for things like River Song, Melody Malone, Faction Paradox
That’s the plan and is what is in that Google Doc, I just can’t think of a better way, but maybe someone else has ideas?
As for sorting by author last name - how is that useful? You can already view every book by an author, by using the filters or the author pages. I’m not sure why you’d sort them by author last name?
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I mean you could do ‘Classic Series’ Books, Modern Series Books, Torchwood etc and then it matches. Because the books do fall into those categories more or less Targets, Missing Adventures, NAs, PDAs and EDAs under classic; the BBC Books under Modern. It just gets tricky with ranges that flit around like the Puffin Classic crossover and the Targets for the modern series…
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