Bookshelf preview
Making great progress on the Bookshelf merge. Redesigned the post meta boxes and created a new admin screen for you to change the most important parts about your Bookshelf. Things like the permalink, page title/description, and even some bonus features will make its way in. I’m confident about the usefulness of these settings based on how people have been using the Bookshelf for the past 2 years, so I know what’s been missing. To spoil you further, I’m adding a couple of bonus features too!
New layouts
The Bookshelf will now also come with 2 listing views: The Grid, and Excerpt view. Here’s what the Grid layout (with sidebar enabled) looks like.
Excerpt view
…and here’s what the Excerpt view will look like. This is a totally new feature that will be introduced in MD4.8.5.
Custom sidebars
You can even add a sidebar, or custom sidebar to the Bookshelf listing page! Once enabled from the Bookshelf Settings screen, you can then go to the Widgets screen and use the simple Custom Sidebars feature. Talk about deep integration!
Almost done...
Truth be told, Ive just about completed the merge into MD4.8.5 and have totally refactored the code to not only support new features, but integrate into the MD core. The last critical feature that will be added is Categories support, then I’ll be off to work on a few other items for the final MD4.8.5 release.
MD4.8.5
Here’s everything that’s included in MD4.8.5 so far. I may choose to hold off on merging the Videos dropin in this release so we can adapt to one big change at a time.
Books categories
You can now sort your books by categories – this is useful if you have a lot of books and want to give your readers a more digestible way to browse them. The titles and description update based on category, so you can optimize these pages by writing your own page headers.
