Bug: “Display the first line of review” not stopping at first line/sentence

Glad to hear you like it, and I’m sorry for your troubles! Could you send me a link to your blog where you are experiencing this problem, as well as to your relevant review on Goodreads?

You can see my blog here (Goodreads data is in the right column, scroll down to the “recently finished” shelf to see the problem):

https://www.steevithak.com

And my Goodreads page is here:

https://www.goodreads.com/steevithak

Ideally, I’d like to be able to limit the review text to a specific number of characters, maybe the first 60 chars followed by an ellipses “…” but it seems like at most, the first sentence should be shown. Otherwise lengthy reviews are too big to fit.

It’s displaying the first paragraph, which is exactly as intended. I’ve probably just phrased the setting poorly (in all plain-text editors, one paragraph = one line).

The “show first line …” feature is not really intended to show your review or even a small snippet of your review – it’s intended to let you write something specifically for the widget. The by far easiest way I could think of doing that was to show the first paragraph from the Goodreads review. That way, you could reserve that paragraph for what was to appear on your blog. I of course realize this is not ideal, since it puts some restrictions on how to write your Goodreads review, but other solutions not based on data from Goodreads (e.g. a local table in your WordPress database) would be significantly more work to implement and was out of the question.

Thanks for the suggestion to implement the “first X characters” feature, but that won’t be added. Simply put, it would be far from trivial to make such a feature, because that the Goodreads review can contain HTML tags which should definitely not be broken.

Sorry, and I hope you can still make use of the plugin. ??

OK, thanks for looking into it! Yes, I think a small tweak to the documentation would be the best answer then; to say it includes the first paragraph rather than the first line. And, no problem, I’ll write future goodreads reviews with that in mind and include a very short first paragraph.