Virtual Book Club Planner

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Virtual Book Club Planner

Stay connected with friends and family with a virtual book club

Like many others, I’ve found myself looking for creative ways to stay connected to friends and family during these times of social distancing. After seeing a surge of virtual book clubs crop up online and in my social circles, I decided to create this easy to use template so you can organize a book club of your own!

With this template, you can:

Build and customize mini web pages for each book you read

Make it easy to decide what books to read next

Check out the template in the next page and

Copy this Doc

⁠

to get started.

🛠 How I Built this Doc

Wondering how this template came together? Here is a step-by-step guide of how I built this doc:

1) Create a book club library

Start by filling in the books you've read in the

All Books Table⁠

. I've added columns for Title, Author, Status, and Meeting Date but you can add as many new fields as you like.

2) Display books in a card view

The

Our Library⁠

Section is view of the

All Books Table⁠

displayed in card view. I sorted this table in order of last meeting date so the most recent books show up first. See

here⁠

to learn more about table views.

3) Create a voting table to decide what books to read next

One of the best parts of any book club is deciding what to read next. I added a voting table in the

Upvote Books⁠

Page so everyone has a chance to add their recommendations to the list. You can quickly add voting tables to your Coda docs using our

in-doc templates⁠

4) Keep track of meetings in a calendar view

Next, I created a

Meetings⁠

Page so we can see a calendar of upcoming and past events. I used a formula to display the Title, Author, and Cover Image of the book we're currently reading at the top of the page:

⁠

Screen Shot 2020-03-27 at 5.45.34 PM.png

⁠

This page has a calendar view of the

All Books Table⁠

. See

here⁠

to build a calendar view.

5) Create a custom page for discussion questions, articles, and more

I wanted the

Currently Reading⁠

Page to feel like an interactive site where people could post discussion questions, articles, and videos with other members of the book club. Think of this as a mini web page, that can be customized for each new book in your library.

On this page, I added view of the

All Discussion Questions Table⁠

filtered by the current book title. You can ask people to add their discussion questions before the meeting, and cross them off during your discussion. Here is more info on

filtering tables⁠

and

conditional formatting⁠

6) Optional: Use buttons to optimize your doc

Buttons are a great way to automate actions in Coda, and you'll see that I use them a lot in my templates. You can manually change the status of a book in a table, or you can click on the

Screen Shot 2020-05-05 at 6.17.34 PM.png

⁠

button to change the status of the book from 'Currently Reading' to 'Read'.

I also created a view of the

Voting Table⁠

with buttons to 'Read Next'. This will add the Book to the

All Books Table⁠

and automatically change the status to 'Currently Reading.'

Here⁠

is an overview of how buttons work.

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