Hello everyone!
I just deployed two new features to beta.bookbrainz.org, developed over the summer by @anshgoyal31 and @Shubh as GSoC projects.
Congrats to both of them for these great new features ! 
Reviews and ratings
Using CritiqueBrainz, we can now review and rate entities in BookBrainz!
There are two ways to write reviews and rate entities:
-
On the CritiqueBrainz website, you can search for entities and write review right there
-
You can write reviews and rate directly from BookBrainz. In order to do that you will need to connect you CritiqueBrainz account here: https://beta.bookbrainz.org/external-service
Since this is only out in beta for now, you will need to repeat the process on the main website once it is fully deployed
Simplified “book” creation form
“Adding a book” to BookBrainz requires to create multiple entities separately and link them together, which is time consuming, “user-unfriendly” and can be quite confusing for beginners.
To remedy this, we’ve created a simplified “Book” form that takes you through three steps: information on the cover, details of the edition and contents of the book.
It drastically simplifies the process by abstracting some of the complexities: it will create the required entities for you with the proper relationships, allows you to create new entities inline in a modal, allows you to copy an Edition’s author credits to relationships between the Works it contains and the Author, and will also give you a handy recap of the entities created.
We will slowly be bringing some of these improvements back into the separate entity creation forms (such as the inline creation of entities, auto-creation of ISBNs)
Testing, testing, one two…
As always, these new features have been tested, but some bugs may have slipped through. We’re also curious about what you think about them, and if you’ve got ideas for improvements
We welcome any and all feedback and opinions 