Design Personalized Story Books: WordPress Plugin Development

Finding a gift for loved ones is something we always long for. With a slight touch of customization, the gift sharing experience can be taken to a whole new level. We call it product customization and there are businesses that offer such services for a variety of products. From Shoes to Bike, the market for customization tools won’t disappoint you.

Personalizing a book online often demands more, especially when your business provides customizations at every other page. While the effort needed at showcasing the periodic customizations is somewhat discouraging, it also helps your users to understand your services better.

The WordPress development team at The Brihaspati Infotech recently developed a similar WordPress plugin to customize books for kids and previewing them online. The user can take a glance at every page with the desired customizations before the actual purchase.

Let’s get take a dig at it’s functioning.

Need for developing a custom WordPress Book Preview Software

Just imagine, you are reading a book, imagining yourself as the hero and suddenly you find that the lead has the same name as yours. The parents of the lead character share their names with your parents. The story has a side-kick with the same name as your closest friend. Can the stories be more connecting and fulfilling than this?

Our client offers custom book printing services, where users can ask for personalized images and character names. The business is unique in several aspects, one being the excellent story-telling experience it offers to the readers.

While the client was receiving orders for the unique services they provided, they felt the business hasn’t received the attention it always deserved. Maybe because they failed to showcase their full intent.

• They offer options for hard and soft covers
• They have separate books for girls and boys
• They have customizable character names- up to 4
• They have customizable avatars for each character

And an ordinary customization tool wasn’t doing justice to their business.

That is where they sought our help.

Developing a custom WordPress Book Preview Software

As a Content Management Software, WordPress sets no limitation on the customizations the website deserves. It’s totally up to the developers to what extent they leverage the platform.

We implemented the book previewing option for everything that reduces that gap between online and offline book previewing.

In the development process, we used the Turn.JS library to provide an interactive book previewing experience. As the image above suggests,

1.The user can find the Cover page
2.The user can flip between the pages much like a real book check
3.The user can check the inside contents
4.The user can check the final customizations provided in the process.

Create your own personalized book

The best part about our custom-designed WordPress plugin is its ability to customize the entire book. If you could notice the book previewing screen closely again, you will find “Genie’s Perfect Eid” instead of a common book title like just “Perfect Eid”. It’s because the book is personalized for a reader named “Genie”.

The user can select the character’s name, avatar, and the book cover type at the time of placing order. The following media explains a step by step go through for creating a custom book online.

Customizing the lead character

We have designed the WordPress plugin to customize books for kids at every level. Adding custom characters tops the list. The lead character can be customized on the basis of:

• Name
• Avatar

The client offers separate customized books for either of the genders. We have thus designed separate options for selecting the right book.

Once done, the next step is to add the name of the reader along with a custom avatar.

P.S.: The name and the selected avatar are added in the book cover. Similar customizations can be noticed in the main story as well.

Adding more customized characters

When we imagine ourselves as the hero of the story it comes more natural, that we start replacing the rest of the characters with people close to us.

We have added custom fields for three more characters- the Father, the Mother, and the closest friend of the reader.

The user can add custom names and Avatars for all the characters as shown below:

Much like the lead character the custom names and the avatars of the other characters can be felt throughout the story. In the following picture, we can find our lead character along with her closest friend, named “Wendy”. The content is customized along with their presence in the pictures.

Customized note for the reader

The freedom to customize anything and everything makes the book a perfect fit for gifts. The buyer apart from adding the characters can add a custom note on the first page, tailored for the reader.

We have created a separate form to add the custom message. The user can add it and save the message.

The message can be previewed as follows:

Choose a cover for your personalized book

The custom WordPress site to sell personalized books allows the user to select a cover of their choice. They can either select Hardcover or the Softcover, each having a separate price.

This customization is handled by the Lulu API. We have tailored the API for adding the customization and managing the costs. Our custom WordPress plugin to create personalized books passes the data from the forms as shown above to the Lulu database.

Lulu offers a scalable platform to handle the book customizations and adding the specifications to help print the final books in a more organized way. The API eventually saves the developers from creating everything from scratch and managing a bulk by simpler options.

The admin (client) can completely manage the Personalized books. He can Add new books, edit them and Delete/Disable them. On top of that, the admin can manage the individual pages of the books and manage the characters available per book.

How scalable is our tailored solution?

The scope of our custom solution is beyond just “WordPress book preview plugin development” as it can be also used as a “custom photo book printing WordPress plugin”. The ability to add custom images and choosing the cover type makes it an ideal WordPress solution to build your own photobook.

The Lulu API can be further tailored to meet the following requirements for creating photo books online with WordPress:

• Page count numbers
• Interior colors
• Paper Type
• Binding type
• Cover finish
• Manage bulk orders and prices

With that, our custom-developed solution is ready to meet the market demands

Our experience with custom plugin development

Over the past 10+ years of experience at designing tailored solutions, the expert WordPress developers at The Brihaspati Infotech have delivered some of the best plugins the industry has always been looking for. The team is skilled with frontend and backend development that justifies the custom needs of websites.

In one of our recent WordPress blogs, we have discussed a similar WordPress plugin for Creating Custom Maps. The plugin is designed for merchants on WordPress who sell personalized maps.

Final words on WordPress book preview tool development

The demand for online customization is steeping high and so is the interest in introducing a similar experience to online stores. The ability to create a personalized book on your WordPress site not only gives your customers a unique experience but also gives you an edge over your competitors.

If you too are looking to provide custom book printing online with WordPress or an idea that seeks out of the box development, you can hire WordPress experts from us or contact us here.