The Ultimate Book Blogger Plugin has been updated to version 1.3! Here’s a detailed list of all the changes:
Social Media Followers
I have three functions for fetching social media followers: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The rest have to be updated manually. Previously, I was using get_file_contents to fetch the number of followers, but this isn’t supported by all hosts, and would sometimes result in an error. I switched to using cURL, which is more widely supported. I also provided more fallback options in case cURL isn’t supported.
I also set up caching for the follower counters. They will now be updated every 30 minutes instead of with each page load. This should speed up your page loading time!
Review Index by Title
A blogger kindly pointed out that the review index by book title wasn’t properly alphabetizing. Posts were being sorted under their correct letter, but the posts within each letter weren’t always sorted correctly. For example, you might have seen something like:
L
Love Unscripted by Tina Reber
Lost Code, The by Kevin Emerson
They’re both under “L” like they should be, but “Lost” should come before “Love”. This has now been fixed and posts under each letter are properly alphabetized!
Review Index by Series
This is something I didn’t even think about, so thanks to a blogger for pointing it out! Each post under a series is sorted according to post date. Normally this is logical, but it becomes a problem with reading books in a series out of order. For example, if you read book #1 in a series and then read the novella (#0.5), then it would show up in the index like this:
Under the Never Sky
Under the Never Sky (Under the Never Sky #1)
Roar and Liv (Under the Never Sky #0.5)
Through the Ever Night (Under the Never Sky #2)
That’s the order you read them in, but it’s not really logical to look at. This has been changed so that books are now sorted according to their number in the series, like so:
Under the Never Sky
Roar and Liv (Under the Never Sky #0.5)
Under the Never Sky (Under the Never Sky #1)
Through the Ever Night (Under the Never Sky #2)
This method depends on you using proper naming conventions, as explained in the instructions. Next to the “Book Series” box it says: “Include the number in the series. For example: “His Dark Materials #2″.” As long as you follow that instruction, it will work just fine!
To-Do List
Right now the only big thing on my to-do list is the ability to use the [book-info] shortcode to call any post’s book data. Now, you can stick [book-info] into a post and fetch the current post’s information. But hopefully in the future I will enable something like [book-info postid=”235″] where you can pull the book information from any other post ID other than the own (in this case, the post with ID #235).
However, this will take quite a bit of re-working so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get it done!