At the end of 2024, I mentioned big plans for Mooberry Book Manager. I’ve been working hard the last 6 months, re-building Mooberry Book Manager from the ground up by re-writing 90% of the code. 😳
Ironically, you won’t immediately see a drastic difference in version 5, and that’s because most of the work has been “under the hood”, affecting more of the back-end pieces that make Mooberry Book Manager work. I’ll spare you the technical details, because I’m sure you want to know is What’s In It For Me?In this blog post, I’ll be telling you about some of the improvements you’ll see.
Here’s the first one:Speed
Mooberry Book Manager now includes caching, even if you aren’t using a separate caching plugin. In short, the first time a book grid is displayed, all the books are saved. This means Mooberry Book Manager doesn’t have to figure out which books to include and how to group and order them every time.
But fear not, book grids are still dynamic and always up to date! Mooberry Book Manager is smart enough re-generate the list of books if anything changes that would require a book to be added or removed from the grid, or a different ordering or grouping.
Book Grid Updates
- Book covers of all shapes, including square and landscape orientation, now display properly in grids without any custom coding necessary.
- The book grid can now be centered on the page.
- Long book titles no longer require custom coding to display properly. The grid will dynamically determine the amount of spacing needed to display the whole title.
- Similarly, for those with the Advanced Grids extension, the additional fields displayed on the grid no longer require you to enter a height value to accommodate them. Mooberry Book Manager handles it automatically for you.
- When book grids are grouped, one group is all the books that don’t fit into any of the groups. For example, if you group by Genre, there will be a group of books that don’t have a Genre assigned. Starting with Version 5, you can now specify whether those books appear at the top of the grid or the bottom.
- No more “MBM Tax Grid Page” nonsense!
I’ve been trying to solve as many of the common support requests as I can. Another one that comes up often is customizing the heading in a grouped book grid. In version 5.0, you will now be able to customize the heading for custom taxonomies created with the Custom Fields extension. The ability to customize headings for the other grouping options is coming soon, just not in time for version 5.0. Perhaps 5.1.
Fixed: Books in Multiple Series
Finally, a fix to an issue that has plagued since version 1!
Books can now be included in multiple series AND have a different series order for each series. In fact, ordering books in a series is now a simple drag and drop:
A New Look
It’s not a huge change, but all the admin screens used in Mooberry Book Manager have been given a bit of an update. For the most part, it all works the same; it just looks nicer.
Some of the improvements include:
- Laying out fields in multiple columns to more effectively use the space
- With Multi-Author, you can now search for the author(s) to add to the book in addition to looking through the list
- With Custom Fields, the options for drop downs, radio buttons, and checkboxes can now be set at the same time you create the field
- You can now choose to just list the formats your books are available in, without having to deal with all those other fields
