Suggestions?

Hey Kev,
Woo! Thanks so much for your kind words about the plugin. I’m thrilled it’s working for you. We so love seeing this plugin making writers’ lives a little easier.

Regarding your question, I’m going to help you as best I can, while my genius plugin co-author Ben is away with family.

He’s the code expert, while my focus in on user interface, logic flow, and design, but I can comment based on what I think you’re saying, and we can go from there. Sound good?

Okay, so based on what you’ve written, it sounds like you want the book description text to wrap around the image, rather than the whole left side under the image being blank. I totally hear that, and it makes sense, especially in light of your theme dimensions.

We created the system to be as clean as possible, and integrate with as many theme layouts as possible. Thus the divs and white space.

But the great thing about the system is that you can also easily customize the output, using the templating functionality we’ve built-in. You can even disable the CSS output of the plugin altogether, if you’d prefer to use your own.

Instructions for templating the plugin layout can be found here

Let me know if this gets you the info you need, or if you need additional assistance.

Cheering you on,
Kelli

I’m afraid I’ve been a bit of a naught boy. ??

I went ahead and played with the CSS and PHP to coerce the interface to do what I wanted. I went ahead and used the advanced techniques. I’m not sure how to handle the CSS and one of the lib files (which I tinkered with to add the Author and Genre headlines to the top of the page (you can see here: https://www.kevinprovance.com/books/prisoner-of-the-game))

The instructions said to make sure the directory hierarchy in my themes folder should be the same as in the plugin. But since the assets and lib folders are outside of the /template/loop structure, I wasn’t quite sure of those dirs should also be recreated, or if I should simply toss the CSS file and the template_tags.php in the custom dir for altered template files. If I’m not able to substitute those files (and so updates don’t reverse everything), I can always rename the plugin and append it with ‘KP edition’ ??

As for the fuller content area and the image, it was merely a matter of moving the image dic inside the content div and eliminating the .book_content CSS that was forcing the content size. I also found a way to align the image with the title and taxs, again, by moving the image div code. These things could *easily* be made options. Ditto for the added tax items under the title. Very simple stuff.

Maybe at some point I could chat it up with Ben, as I see some opportunities for code optimization, but…I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.

This one’s a keeper. Thanks for letting me share. ??

– Kev

I was testing my hacks out on various browsers (including IE8, sorry to say, long story). The book image doesn’t render properly on IE8 (and presumably lower, since they all sucked). It’s a known issue, based on several posts in the WP forums. I found a fix. Please forward to the resident code monkey. ??

In the totally-booked.css, under the .book_cover img block add the following lines:

max-width:100%;
max-height:100%;
width:auto;
height:auto;

Images will then properly render on those older browsers. I’d be including to say ‘eh, screw it’ as far as IE8 goes, but some of us are stuck with XP because we don’t want to upgrade our hardware which various companies won’t issue W7 driver updates for. IE8 is the last supported version of IE for XP (and if my site stats are any indication, it’s still being used). I like to at least try and make everyone happy. ??

– Kev

Thanks Kev,

Ill add those CSS tweaks to the next update.

The CSS can be told not to output to the frontend in the admin options and the template tags in template_tags.php have a function_exists check so they can also be overwritten in a plugin of functions.php file.

What could we have done better so you didn’t feel the need to modify the plugin files ( which we for obvious reasons cannot support. )

CHeers
Ben

Basically, I moved all those links at the bottom, referring to other works in genre, etc and moved them to the top as label hyperlinks, and added inputs for price and sale price. I also redid the series tax stuff to pull the data from the series taxonomy and added an input for book number. I also added inputs for for Amazon kindle, B&N Nook (to differentiate them from hardcover links) and um…redid all the buttons.

I understand you can’t support all the changes I made. I’d be happy to share them with you, if you want (although, I use braces in PHP) ??

You can see it here: https://www.kevinprovance.com/books/prisoner-of-the-game (the new buttons are on my xampp install and not live. My bad)

Cheers, and congrats on the addition t your family. ??

– Kev