shortcodes?

Sunny,

These are some great suggestions and we’ve added the feature requests to our feature wish list. Thank you for the feedback!

I totally agree about genre pages and the featured book listings. The nice things about these being custom post types is that you can roll your own listings page. But I can see having a few more listing options would be appealing for users who don’t want to get their hands dirty in the code.

Localization is on our long term list of things to add. Our plan is to get the plugin as good as possible and then add localization.

Feel free to check the plugin out on GitHub.

Sunny,

What kinds of short codes would you like us to add?

Here are some short codes we are are thinking about adding:

[mybooktable series=lordoftherings] (not actual shortcode)
Shows the books series Lord of the Rings.

[mybooktable genre=fantasy] (not actual shortcode)
Shows books in the Fantasy genre.

Yeah, something like that would be nice. You could also consider to provide your own “page-layouts” (e.g. 2 culumn no text, 4 coloumn with tile, etc.) where the “end-user” only has to select the pagelayout he/she prefers from the “edit page” page.

On these “layout pages” a litte js could also become handy to have kind of a book carrousel for example.

Thinking about shortcodes it would be nice to have more control of the exerpt length, which fields are shown, etc..

e.g. [mbt genre=”xyz” exerptlength=”30″ showfields=”3,4,5″ showgenre=”4″]

In this example only books of genre “xyz” are shown, the “exerptlength” is 30 words, the entry only shows the fields with the given IDs (3,4,5) and only shows “genre-outputs” with the ID of 4, if a book consists of 2 or more “genres”.

For example, if I want to feature a new book on a different page, I’ll give it the category(genre) “New Book” and, e.g., “Novel”, but I don’t want it to show “New Book” at its genre-output.

It would be nice to be able to show and hide fields and genres of your choice and have more “end-user” control how long the exerpt is.

You could also implement a shortcode to only show a “category(genre)-list” with “category(genre)-images”.

The implementation of custom fields would also be nice (maybe for “pro-version”), for example, there are many more ways to order books online depending on different countrys the plugin is used in.
And, if a writers shortstory is part of an anthology it would be nice to have the anthologists name or something like that right underneath the title.

It would also be wise, considering shortcodes, to output the field-id right where the field can be edited, also if you create a custom field.

Also one major asset would be to have a “publisher” field. My client doesn’t like to advertise towards Amazon, because she rather wants her buyers to go to her publisher in the first hand.

One major issue I have towards series is, that you don’t have control over the “quadratic picture” output underneath the description of a book in a series. It would be much better to have a much smaller list with the original proportions of the uploaded images.

Also a plus would be a WooCommerce compatibility, or something equal.

I really don’t know, how easy or hard it is in PHP or JAVA to do things like that, so please don’t judge me considering my lack of knowledge. I’m more like a “visual” guy (3D and 2D Design) where you only need rudimentary skills in programming (mostly with MEL/Python in Maya)! =)

That’s it for my “input”, for now.

Cheers, Sunny

Sunny,

Great feedback.

We had not thought about an Anthology taxonomy. I could see short story writers finding that very helpful.

The Pro Add-on has a universal buy button which we added with the expectation of authors using it to link to the publisher. This can act as a poor man’s custom field in the short term.

I agree about the “‘quadratic picture’ output underneath the description of a book in a series”. The way we feature series new is a bit janky and will get better over time. The series feature is only used by a small percentage of authors (most of our users write stand alone books) so this is not as much on our fast track as some of your other ideas.

We have MyBookTable running along side WooCommerce on AuthorMedia.com so that should not be far off for the main plugin. Are you having any specific trouble with WooCommerce compatibility currently?

Sunny,

We have added some shortcodes to the new 1.1.1 version of the plugin. Let me know what you think.

Hey,

first of all, nice to see the plugin progressing…

I had some work to do, because I’m starting my own business right now, so there’s little time to do some QA on your plugin. =)

I’ve installed the plugin on a local server for testing purposes because I had to go into the code on the “live server” to translate it into german … so no update functionality there so far. But, as you said, localization is planned for the future.

Ok, lets get started…

The first thing I checked out were, of course, the shortcodes. One litte advice … you give examples how to implement shortcodes but, none of the examples, like [mybooktable series=”lordoftherings“], [mybooktable genre=”fantasy“] and [mybooktable author=”jrrtolkien“] are set up when you do a fresh install of the plugin. So now I have to create the series, the genre and the author by myself to test the new shortcodes. Would be better if they, or similar ones, are created on startup.
Ok, tested em and they work as expected.

Maybe one little thing could be to have the “list-title” displayed on top of a “shortcoded” page, so when I use [mybooktable genre=”Fantasy“] it shows “Fantasy” as the title. The option to show and not not to show such a title would be a plus. Could be implemented as followed [mybooktable genre=”Fantasy” showtitle”yes/no”].
Thats it, so far, for the new shortcodes. Keep it up!

Other things I noted:

– It would be nice to have the “Book Order” also in the “Quick-Edit” window in the “Books” list

– One major thing, I am able to add a “Barnes and Noble”, “Barnes and Noble Nook” and “Audible” Button in the “free-version”. I don’t know if this is intended.

– The book price currency is currently only availble in $ (Dollar). In the pre-localization stage you could (I think) easily implement at least ￡ (Pound) and AUD (Australian Dollar).

– One graphic design issue is, that, if you look at the “default-books”, they “look” outside of the site (like my userpic here). It’s better, advertising wise, to have them “look” inside of the page (like your userpic here) so they connect better with the text on their right side.

– When it comes to localization you really should be aware of the positioning of the social-media buttons because right now the “Facebook-Like” button is cut off, but this is because of the automated german translation into “Gef?llt mir”.

Thats it so far for QA.

Keep up the good work!

Cheers, Sunny

Thanks Sunny,

Could you post a link to your site that runs MBT? I would love to see how you have it running in German. It will be a good benchmark for us when we start adding internationalization.

https://www.elladanz.de

I have to say, that I disabled many things, since the siteowner is not so much into social networking.
I could send you my “edited” version of MBT. The only things I didn’t translate are some help and setup texts. Admin and frontend are nearly complete.

Cheers, Sunny

I would be happy to see the edited version. Could you send it to tumstattd a t gmail dot com?

Could someone tell me why [mybooktable] delivers a 500 error on the three different pages I’ve tried it on please?

my site shahwharton.com

This is the last page I tried it on https://shahwharton.com/buy-stuff/my-fiction-buddies-books/

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, [email protected] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Apache Server at shahwharton.com Port 80

Don’t get this on any other page on my blog except the ones with this shortcode.

Shah,

Who is your host?

Could you try this fix and tell me if it works?

1. Deactivate ALL plugins (including MyBookTable).
2. Reactivate MyBookTable.
3. Try the page and try to reproduce the problem. If the problem persists let us know.
4. If the problem goes away reactivate your plugins one at a time till the problem reappears. Let us know which plugin is the conflicting plugin.