[Refdb-users] using refdb with a course website

[Matt P. <mat...@ut...>]

Hello...  

Some of you have seen similar posts from me to OpenOffice and
Pybliographer lists, so my apologies for cross-posting, but I think
refDB is the place I fhould have started anyway...

I teach a course with about 200 students ("Europe in the Nineteenth
Century"), and I'm in the process of developing a dynamic website for
it, using a PHP Content Management System (CMS) called "SPIP
(cf.http://www.uzine.net/spip).  

The main point of this project is to allow students to add links and
bibliographic reference to the site.  In this way the site should, over
the years, serve as a quasi-stable collective resource which grows not
solely as a result of my own efforts.  

Now that I have refdb up and running (thanks Markus!), I'm trying to
figure out whether it really makes sense for me to use it as a backend
for this project -- it seems so complicated!  I'm not really sure I
need all that power.  My needs are, I think, rather simple compared to
what you guys have done:  

-- I want to be able to display citations on a web page in pretty html
   -- the citation list should be generated automatically by keyword
   or by an additional field that spip calls "rubrique" and I'm
   translating as "category".

-- I want students to be able to enter citations via a simple, fast
   web interface (I've generated a simple form for entering url's
   using PHP; bibliographies are a bit more complicated, but i think I
   ought to be able to modify the form with a little more work).  It
   would be nice to take advantage of some of the metadata and helpful
   hints refdb has built in.

-- I would love to be able to generate bibliographies out of search
   results, which students could then download and take to the library
   with them.  It would be nice to have an option of putting these
   bibliographies either in html (not tooooo hard) or in a reusable
   format -- something that could be plugged back in to refdb,
   pybliographer, endnote, or OpenOffice (I see this as harder, but
   maybe I'm wrong).  

Other stuff -- like harvesting references from the library catalog or
from various online services -- would also be great, but that can
wait.  

Anyway... It seems to me that I can do #2 directly with php, acting on
the main table of a refdb database, but without using the refdb
frontend as my interface. As for the other two tasks: I'd love to
steal the labour y'all have already put into this project, rather than
try to make it work on my own.  Does this all seem like a relatively
straightforward project to y'all?  Any suggestions as to how I ought
to go about doing this?  

THanks for your help.  I'm a complete novice with programming, so even
simple scripting languages like php are a bit of a challenge;
nonetheless, I can also plug away in my pigheaded fashion long enough
to figure out my mistakes...  So anyway, looking forward to your 
guidance.  

Best,

Matt