In the Facebook group Spisovatelské cappuchino s Martinou Heš, which Marťa started in 2021, I meet authors who write, read, and support each other.

I was missing one simple place where I could find books by others (by genre or format, too). The group is very active — which is great — but searching for a book there is sometimes like fishing for one specific coffee spoon in the dishwasher.

That is how cappuweb was born — a virtual café where you can stop by, enjoy book covers, read author profiles, visit their websites, and get directed to e-shops to buy their books.

The Brief (so it stays more than just a nice idea)

Marťa and I met over coffee and tea and worked the idea out together. This became the brief for the website.

We agreed the website should:

• Show books and authors from the community in a clear way.
• Let visitors search by author, genre, and format.
• Send readers directly to a place where they can buy the book.
• Match the feel of the group's identity: warm, friendly, cappuccino-brown tones.

One important point: Cappuweb is not an e-shop. It is a directory and catalogue. Every book links out (to the author's website, a publisher, an e-shop…).

Adding books is intentionally human and curated: the author fills in a form, an email arrives, and then we polish the profiles and book descriptions. To keep things nice.

The Solution (how an idea becomes a place)

First, the skeleton

We started by building a non-visual, functional version of the site directly in WordPress: pages, menus, custom post types, relationships between them, and templates. Marťa used that skeleton as a starting point, wrote the copy, and based on that I did the web design. We went through a round of design revisions and from the result I built the website. Minimalist, warm, cappuccino-brown. A hero photo of coffee. A textured footer. Nothing that shouts. Rather something that takes the reader by the hand and leads them to the shelf of books.

A catalogue you can search and filter

The heart of the site is the Books page. You can narrow down what is shown by:

• text search,
• filtering by author,
• filtering by genre,
• filtering by format.

Results load without a page reload and the URL updates to match the active filters — so when you share a link with someone, you share the exact selection you have on screen.

Filters chain together — the selection gets narrower. You can filter, for example, all e-books in the fantasy genre. The filters are also dynamic: the list of authors and genres only includes what is actually on the site.

Book and author pages that are more than a catalogue card

Every book has its own page with basic information (genre, format, year of publication, publisher, number of pages) and a link to the e-shop or download page.

Below each book, other titles by the same author appear automatically.

Each author has a profile, a photo, and a list of their books. And if they have no website or social media? Those fields simply do not show.

In the screenshots below you can see author and book profiles on the website and in the WordPress admin. In the admin I prepared fields for easy profile management.

Details that create the atmosphere

The homepage has a "Random (fated?) book tip for you" — a different book pops up every time you load the page.

The footer reminds you what day it is and what that means for the Spisovatelské cappuchino group.

The Technical Side (don't worry, this is not a washing machine manual)

The site runs on WordPress with Oxygen Builder.

All functionality — filtering, relationships between authors and books, etc. — lives in a custom plugin written for cappuweb.

Filtering runs on custom JavaScript with no external libraries. I wrote about AJAX filtering for Oxygen Repeater/Easy Posts without page reload on the blog.

The Result

One month after launch, cappuweb presents 31 books by 14 authors.

Readers get one place where they can discover books. Authors get visibility beyond the feed in a Facebook group. And the community has something that makes it real outside of Zuckerberg's data.

Marťa and I plan to keep expanding the site — and to add more activities that will bring the site and its authors more visibility.

Working on something similar?

If you are building a community website, a catalogue of anything, or a project where smart filtering and a sensible "human" content management process makes sense, get in touch and we will take a look. 😉