A plugin for using GCstar to catalogize your Lustige Taschenbücher

You might know that I collect Lustige Taschenbücher (LTB) since I was a little kid. I got 258 issues by now and wanted to catalogize them with GCstar to have a better overview. Unfortunately the plugins to automatically fetch all information about the books shipped with it do not cover any webpage listing LTB. That's probably because LTBs are only sold in German speaking areas and thus are only locally popular.

But there is a quite nice webpage listing a lot of them at http://www.lustige-taschenbuecher.de/. So now all I had to do is writing a plugin to grab the data from this webpage and insert it in the database. Something dozens of people already did before me and is documented.

I won't go into details here (I might at some other point in time if someone wants me to) but Perls HTML::parser comes directly out of hell! Anyway, I got it.

If you want to use it as well download the plugin and place it in your GCstar lib directory (on my Ubuntu it's /usr/share/gcstar/lib/GCPlugins/GCcomics/).

 I changed the database layout of the generic GCcomics model a little to make it work with LTBs. See this diff for the changes and apply them to yours or the plugin won't work (most likely the file GCcomics.gcm is to be found at /usr/share/gcstar/lib/GCModels/).

Now start your gcstar, create a new comicbook collection, add a new item, enter the issue number of the LTB as the volume, hit the internet search button, select to query by volume, select the LTB plugin and get happy. I just catalogized my whole collection within an hour. Be aware that some reprints are not listed on the webpage. Especially the early reprints up to about volume 120.

PS: Anyone willing to swap some LTBs with me?