Archive

Never mind, I figured it out. You two still around?

Hi Kev,
I’m wondering the result of your figuring it out. Care to share?

I needed the same results as you and resolved it by using a query on the page… I couldn’t figure out how to do it from within Totally Booked.

Now my quandry is to try to try to get a page of the author’s names (linked to their page ) along with their descriptions (bios) Oh, and just to make it interesting, order it alphabetically by the authors’ *last* name…

Turned out all the book pages I made were listed together at https://www.<yoursite>.com/books. You can change that via the archive slug to something else, if you like.

To get a page of authors, I think you’d use the gallery shortcode with the author parameter. I’ve never tried it. ??

Hey Kev!
Yes, we’re still here. Thanks again for your great comments and suggestions.

We’re juggling support of the plugin along with full time, very demanding jobs, plus my awesome co-creator Ben just had a new baby, and I just had a fairly serious spine surgery, so we’re answering requests in the most timely way we can.

And I’m so glad you found the /books output! I went back through our info text, and see that we need to spell that out more clearly, so users know this output is automatically generated.

We’ll update this in the Description and FAQs section during the next plugin update.

Have a great day:)
Kelli

Ken,
It would be fairly simple to create a normal page within WordPress, with your author names/bios, organize them alphabetically, and link them to the relevant books pages generated by TotallyBooked.

Have you tried that?

Kelli

Hi Kelli,
Congratulations to Ben and I hope your are recovery is going well!

Yes, just making a list would be relatively “simple”. However, my client has over 150 authors and is growing quickly. Many authors have a half-dozen books or more.

The author’s bio information shows in more than one place on the site and having to make update in multiple places will quickly become untenable. I’d love it if future updates could make “anything author” as robust and flexible as say, Genre.

You can take a look at the site here. Books To Go Now

While the site is “live”, it is very much still a work in progress. My client is still figuring out how to run the site and is still adding authors and books and just plain content. Apologies if you come across something not working properly.

To accomplish what I have wanted I have had to customize some of the template files (thank you *so* much for being able to keep them “away” from plugin updates!) and also some of the core files. I hate hacking the plugin core, but I wanted to have an excerpt field for each book as regular posts do. I also worked with the Ultimate TinyMCE plugin author to allow the excerpt field to have a full editor. I wanted the excerpt field because having unique content in an excerpt is good for SEO.

I also added Categories to the book editing page, as well as a field to put the author’s name in last name first, so that I could use it for sorting authors alphabetically by last name. Now… If you changed the author field to separate first and last name fields so that the “built-in” last name could be used for sorting…. <grin>.

I’ve used queries to populate some of the pages.

I’ve probably missed some of Totally Booked’s built in features and capabilities through lack of knowledge or documentation that you haven’t been able to generate yet. …If you see something that I could have done simply through TB rather than a query or the like… (like an easy author page with bios) Do let me know!

Again… Thank you for a great plugin!