[Plugin: bookTuner] Has potential, doesn't work.

Hey,

Sorry it’s not working for you – as you might have guessed I’m very new to this. On my own site, I have the code in sidebar.php and that works ok. I take it when you say it isn’t working nothing is displaying at all, right? Are you getting anything in your admin page?

D’oh on the FAQ, I thought I had corrected all of those but clearly not. As for the widget and shortcode, to be honest I haven’t done it because I don’t know enough about how to code those yet. Perhaps let’s see if we can get it working with the php code first?

Hi

It doesn’t work for me either. I created a custom template and put your function call in as specified but nothing shows up on the page.

It’d be useful if you would post the php code of the page template you use. Thanks

Certainly. In sidebar.php I have the following:

<?php if(function_exists('booktuner')) { booktuner(); } ?>

Hi

Thanks for the quick reply. Sorry, I meant the whole php file, I know what the individual command looks like. Have you tried it in a page template?!

That’s basically it, it’s in sidebar.php and wrapped in a bit of HTML for styling.

<li id="booktuner">
		<h2>Reading</h2>
		<div class="booktuner-books">
            <ul>
                <?php if(function_exists('booktuner')) { booktuner(); } ?>
            </ul>
		</div>
        <a class="booktuner" href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1874313"><span>Goodreads</span></a>
    </li>

Where do you want to put it?

Well, I made a custom page template like so:

<?php
/*
Template Name: BookTuner Page
*/
?>

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
 <div class="p-head">
  <h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
 </div>
<div class="p-con">

Blah blah blah

<?php if(function_exists('booktuner')) { booktuner(); } ?>

</div>

<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>

</div>

<?php if ( comments_open() ) comments_template(); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '<p class="edit">', '</p>'); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Nothing appears below the blah blah except for the comments etc when the page is rendered.

Any ideas? Would you give it a go and see if you can get you plugin to work in a page as opposed to the sidebar?

Thanks

I put it in a couple different places in a template and was able to get code to display – make sure you’re putting the code outside The Loop.

I’m assuming you’ve already set it up to pull books from your account and you’ve got some on the shelf it’s using. You can test that this is working by viewing the Goodreads RSS feed for that shelf.

OK, I just tried something and it worked and I’m feeling pretty stupid…

I’d put my used name in instead of my user ID number D’OH. In my defence the field is title user name, it only says user ID number in the description after the field. Perhaps you could update the code so that the field is titled with user ID number so that others don’t have a brain fade moment like myself lol

Actually, now that it’s working, have you any plans of adding “user rating” (and others) to the custom tags possible? And if you also allowed us to sort the shelf by one of the tags then your plugin would definitely be the best goodreads plugin by far :o)

Excellent, glad to hear it’s working! Good catch on the user field, I definitely need to make that more clear. I’ve love to see a link to it in action if you don’t mind.

I don’t think it would be too difficult to add more fields. Sorting is slightly more involved, but I’ve been hoping to change the plugin to use the API instead of the RSS feed anyway. If I get that working you’d be able to choose how to sort the books retrieved from a given shelf (I’m also hoping it will solve a different problem I’ve been having).

It will likely take a bit for me to get to it though – it’s certainly made the project list. I just do this as a hobby and this has been a real learning experience for me, so I appreciate your kindness and patience!

Thanks you for actually checking this forum and replying to our comments. Here’s the webpage of your plugin “in the wild”:

https://talkinsense.com/db/brain-food/

I realise you’re just doing this for a hobby on the side so don’t have much time to devote, but adding some extra custom tags would make the plugin so much more usable over the competition right now. Sorting can wait ??

Thanks again.

Actually, I was going to say that sorting would be far more useful for me than other tags, but to each their own.

This is, as it is, far superior to the native Goodreads widgets (which are HARDCODED as to the books to display, fergoshsakes).

That said, sorting would be nice (ahem).

There’s the bookshelf plugin, which has sorting and more tags BUT it doesn’t let you choose how many words to limit the review to.

A mix of both plugins would be best ??

Agreed. Though, given that, I’m playing with the WP Bookshelf plugin until I hear otherwise. It’s got BETA stamped all over it, but seems to do the job.

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll see what I find time to do in the next few months. Stay tuned!

Just an update for folks here – I’ve added sorting and a tag for user rating in the latest version. It just inserts a number, which you can format however you wish (or use to fill out something like “X out of 5 stars”).

I’ve also tried to make it more clear that you need to use the Goodreads user ID number instead of the username, and changed how the plugin uses the API to hopefully get better results on the back end.

Please let me know how it works out and if you have more suggestions. Hopefully this makes it more usable for you!