Capacities – Creating a Reading List / Book Library with Templates, Page Properties and Queries
I have been testing out Capacities of late and thought I would do a walkthrough of creating a beautiful looking reading list / library that looks something like the below:
By working through this reading list / library, we touch on templates, page properties, queries and AI functionality which allows us to understand how Capacities works and gain an insight into its possibilities.
You can find the video of this walkthrough here:
Setting up Our Book Type
First off, we need to create a New Book Object – we can do this easily by going to the left sidebar and clicking “New Type”. Here we will be presented with a pop-up window allowing us to either create a new object type from scratch or use a pre-defined one created by the devs.
For this example, we will use the pre-made “Book” type. You do not need to worry about the predefined properties or other things, we can (and will) edit these to our liking late on.
Once this is created, you will see the new book object that we created and there should be a blank book. You can have a look at the layout and things, but I recommend going straight to edit the settings of this object so that we can make it our own and see the things we are interested in.
When on the Book object, click on the three dots in the upper righthand corner and select “Object Settings”. You should see something like the following:
Customising Our New Object Book Type
We have now created the book object and can edit this to our hearts content. You are free to leave / tweak the predefined properties, or you can delete them / create new ones. As there are quite a few that I am not interested in, I delete and great a good few of my own.
I like to have the following properties for my books:
Title (Type: Title)
Author (Type: Object)
Cover image (Type: Object, Image)
Link (Type: Text) – this is so that I can create a link to Goodreads to get the info / comments on the book
Started (Type: Date time)
Finished (Type: Date time)
Pages (Type: Number)
Year (Type: Number)
Summary (Type: Text) – This is an AI generate field which comes in handy to get a very quick synopsis
Medium (Type: Object, Tag)
Notes (Type: Blocks)
Read (Type: Checkbox) – This is a checkbox to define if we have read the book or not. Useful for querying.
Of course, you are free to choose your own and can create ones for “Rating”, “Genre”, “Recommended By” etc.
Once you are happy with the properties you have chosen, we are good to start filling our library. Don’t worry too much at this stage of perfecting your selection – you can always go back and tweak the properties later on. Although, if does help to know what information you will capture to begin with, so that you can avoid having to go back later to backfill a lot of data.
When complete and you exit out of the setting page, you should still see the book initially created and tis time if you click in it, you should see the properties / set-up you defined, like so:
Queries
With the book object set up, now comes the fun part – filling it in by adding the books we have read / want to read and seeing our library come to life.
When you are done adding books, or have a handful of books added, we can start to play around with our data to see it in different ways. First off, is the different views in the right-hand corner. We have:
List
Wall
Gallery
Table
We can also create queries (think these are only on the pro-plan) to slice and dice our data in different ways. We will create a couple of queries, one showing the books we have read in YYYY year and another showing the To Read (unread) Books.
To create a query, if you do not see the “Queries” type in the left-hand sidebar follow the same steps we did when creating the Book type (click New Type) but this time select “Query”.
From here you can create a new query. There are a lot of options available, but for the purposes of tis walkthrough let’s focus on the “Object Type Query”.
Books Read in YYYY Year
To query the books read in 2024 (although you can change this to whatever year you want), we need to select the following criteria:
The above basically returns all the books with a Year equal to the defined year inputted (in this case 2024) and then sorts them by the finished date.
You can also achieve this by using the Filtered By “Date” and then doing is Between 1-Jan-2024 to 31-Dec-2024, so it is really up to you what you prefer. I find the Year one easier as it also allows me to group things in an easier way rather than playing around with dates.
To Read Books
The other query we can easily create is to show the books we have not yet read. The reason for having a property “Read” as defined above was so that we could in essence ask a question – “is the book read?” and return TRUE or FALSE (i.e. checked vs unchecked).
To run the above, we simply need to set up a query as follows:
Nice and straightforward.
Conclusion
And there we have it, we worked through templates, properties, objects and queries to understand how Capacities works whilst at the same time creating a beautiful looking reading list / library.
We can use the same approach for a number of other things too now that we have mastered the basics.
I hope you found this useful and any questions, please let me know.