Investing in Editoria: Gifting several new book templates to the community

It’s no secret that our rapid authoring and editing process has relied on the open source, browser based books production system Editoria since 2018. Editoria has been developed by Coko, but is very much a community owned system in the sense that it is the community of publishers using it that determine, for example, the functional roadmap for feature development. Also, the community has responsibility for governance as well via a new advisory group.

For these reasons, we are very pleased to announce the delivery of the CSS template gallery functionality in the latest version of Editoria, and the inclusion of several beautiful ‘out-of-the-box’ templates for community wide use, as commissioned by us.

This means all publishers using Editoria are now able to upload multiple CSS templates and save changes to them via Template Gallery. In addition, because we need the ability to offer multiple CSS template options within the many Sprints we facilitate, we commissioned the addition of four new templates, not just to our own Editoria deployment, but to all organizations participating within the community to use as they wish. 

We usually make custom book designs for each Book Sprints client. We are excited to have a few templates for use by clients who don’t have a large design budget, and also to share as a starting point to give clients an idea of what is possible. The templates can be used as they are, as we will do, or can be tweaked and updated to make more custom versions based on those we created and shared. It’s very important for us to contribute back to the Editoria Community, as we believe in supporting Open Source, and this is a tool that supports us and our clients in the important work we do together.

The interface for choosing templates within Editoria:

Editoria’s new template gallery – accessible from the book dashboard.

Actions possible from within the template gallery.

Editing an existing template within the Gallery.

Further, over at Paged.design, Arthur Attwell of Electric Book Works has created some CSS templates that work with Paged.js. These do need some adaptation to pull them into the Editoria Template Gallery, but this work is planned by Coko. All of these templates will be available to organizations making books with us.