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!