[Plugin: WP Publication Archive] great concept, activates fine, but … huh?

First of all, you don’t use FTP to add your publications. Click on the filing cabinet button on the left-side of the admin screen. Then you can add publications – they’re stored in the database as a custom post type.

Next, to actually display the archive on a post or a page, type the shortcode [wp-publication-archive] in the content of the page. WordPress sees this text and replaces it automatically with the HTML markup for the archive list.

so this plugin generates a list of max 10 publications with not useful meta data and nothing? no single post view either? no custom lists or anything …

so what does this plugin actually do that could be useful?

currently, it is a waste of time

@ptroxler – This plugin is meant for managing external, downloadable resources like PDF documents, Powerpoint presentations, and the like. It’s a fork of an earlier version that was abandoned on Google Code (https://code.google.com/p/wp-publications-archive/).

The limit to 10 publications was due to development time constraints and will be lifted in the next version. Basically, it was a question of releasing a version as it stood or taking another month to short out bugs in the pagination system. I elected to release it as-is because people wanted it then.

Custom lists will also be available in the next version through filters. This was another feature request that’s just being polished.

Though I’m curious, what meta data would you want added and displayed? What would you want listed for a single post view?

If you feel this plugin is a wasted of time, please tell me what it would need to add to be useful for you.

fine with managing external resources (though adding internals would be nice, too, e.g. for self-archived publications).

regarding metadata I’d be looking for e.g. Dublin Core: https://dublincore.org/documents/dc-citation-guidelines/

@ptroxler – I think that’s a good specification to start from. I’ll work it in to version 2.2, but I’ll leave the meta list filterable so you can adjust it, add to it, remove from it, etc if needed.

Managing internal resources (like self-archived posts, pages, and other CPTs) will be something I’ll have to look into for later.

But my hope is to get version 2.2 out within a week. It will include the pagination fix so you can have more than 10 publications, allow you to filter by placing a list of category slugs in the shortcode, and hopefully support most of the Dublin Core meta.

@eric – I really appreciate your work on the plug-in, it is much needed. I was wondering if you have suggestions to resolving the issue where I put in the shortcode and on the visible site page it shows the shortcode. Not sure what I could be doing wrong, but following the process I have done for other shortcodes – and this time it doesn’t seem to work. I am using WP3.1.3

@eric – please disregard my question above – turns out I put the shortcode into WP editor in Visual mode and not HTML mode and it interpreted it incorrectly (first time it did that for me – must have been formatting of text I copied/pasted).

New question, will you next release allows for chronological/alphabetical sorting of the publications in the archive? Would be nice to be able to choose as I am trying to put publications in by Year, Month, Day but some people might like it Alpha by Title or Author.

Thanks!

@brenttward The version I’m working on now (the next release) allows you to filter by category. I’ll release it once I finish the pagination bug I’m still ironing out (the system is capable of storing more than 10 files but can only display 10 at the moment).

The next version will include some advanced meta information as requested above, and I’ll try to work in sorting as well.

If you want to stay up-to-date with development, the live, untested, unstable version can be found on GitHub.

@eric – Excellent. I am waiting with baited breath! (lol) I have worked with enough files in archive to get sense of how currently sorted and how to manipulate. Definitely need more than 10 in library. ?? Happy to give it a run and give feedback when ready. Will go ahead and upload most of the documents so I can put it through its paces.

I just updated to version 2.2. This version introduces filtering based on categories (add categories=’category-slug-1, category-slug-2, etc’ inside your shortcode to activate the filter) and pagination so you can show more than 10 publications.

Version 2.3 will add sorting and further meta data as requested.

Can we get a single post view? Specifically, when I do a search and see the results, it would be nice if the summary was displayed in the search results, then when I clicked on the result link, it would show the link to the publication like you see in a page with the shortcode.

@gwjameson – You already started a new thread to ask this question …

Yeah, sorry, I guess I’m frustrated that I don’t know how to do this and I saw another post that went unanswered to 2 months. Thanks, let me know when there is a fix or work-around. I appreciate your efforts with this – seems like a logical extension to WP.

@gwjameson – I try to respond to support requests as soon as I see them. If you need to get in contact with me more quickly, feel free to drop me an email. There’s a contact form on the same page as the Donate form all of my plugins link to. That would also speed up my response to feature requests like yours.

Hi Eric – nice work for making this. Almost exactly what I need, except that I don’t appear to be able to filter by categories, which would kinda make it spot on. I tried passing in the ‘categories’ parameter through the shortcode, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.

Any thoughts? I could probably hack the function around eventually, but didn’t know if it was something you’d got sorted in there already..

Thanks