Useful for a publisher’s website?

Hi @sheriziya,

Most of the things you’re looking for here are supported by the plugin:

– You can create Coming Soon/New releases/More Books/Award Winners/Best Sellers segments by using Book Tags, and using the MyBookTable shortcodes to display the groups on a page together if you’d like. The MyBookTable shortcodes don’t currently support the slideshow view that is shown on the Penguin Random House page that you linked to though.

– You can create custom Author pages by using regular WordPress pages and using the MyBookTable shortcodes to insert links and summaries of the MyBookTable Book pages.

– Genres and series are fully support taxonomies in MyBookTable that have all of the appropriate pages.

– The custom Search Form functionality that allows users to sort books by specific attributes is not supported, though it would be very possible to extend MyBookTable to implement with custom plugin development if that is something you wanted to do. MyBookTable does support sorting all your books by given criteria such as alphabetically or by publication date, but this is a single static sort that applies globally; All your users would see whichever sorting you choose, and would not be able to change it based on what they’re looking for.

Thanks for the help!

Good to know that most things are very doable with your plugin. I was having problems with another plugin that was pretty much messing up the site.

I’ll see about the custom development. At the moment the publisher doesn’t have that many books published yet, so it’s not a real problem yet ?? I just like to be prepared. I’ll talk with the owner about it.

Thanks again for your response and advice!

Okay, I was playing a bit more with the plugin on my own website relating to your advice:

– You can create custom Author pages by using regular WordPress pages and using the MyBookTable shortcodes to insert links and summaries of the MyBookTable Book pages.

I noticed both the Book page and the Book Overview page already have a link to an author page, which is made with MyBookTable. This only has the bio of the author. How do I make it happen that the author’s name is linked to a full author page (with links to the books, event overview, etc, like you can see here) instead while the book page has the short author bio?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Sheriziya.

Unfortunately it’s not possible to change the author links that are automatically displayed in the book details to links to your own pages without custom development. You can add your own link to the book overview, but the one that shows up in the book details is generated by the Authors taxonomy. If you are able to have some custom development done however, it wouldn’t be too difficult to change this by overriding the ‘mbt_get_book_authors_list’ filter.

~Tim

Hmmm…. I was just thinking.. Is it possible to expand the author part in the database instead of overriding the ‘mbt_get_book_authors_list’ filter?
Currently you have it made that an author page has a bio of the author with the overview of the books.
On a book page the bio of the author is loaded.

What if the backend (MyBookTable>Authors) had two sections for the author:
– Bio (what currently basically the current description is which shows up on the book description page.)
– The rest (that will only appear on an author’s page)

In “The Rest” other things could be included that will only show up on the author’s page and not on the bookpage. Things like:
– Events and author is going to (will be done with a shortcode)
– Related social media account links
– Related websites
– Related articles about that author (if there are any)
– Newsletter sign-up form
– etc.

Would that be easier to do? I’m not a plugin developer myself, though I do know a bit about coding. I’d prefer to change as little as possible in someone else’s plugin ??

I was thinking about this, since your author page already also shows the book overview, the bio and a photo of the author, which is something I want on the author pages as well.

Thanks again for the help!

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Sheriziya.

Hi @sheriziya,

That sounds like another viable way of doing what you want to do, it’s hard to say if it would be easier than the other alternatives though. You could add this extra content to the MyBookTable Author pages via the “mbt_get_book_archive_description” hook, but figuring out all the different actions you need to attach to this hook to get all the content you want, as well as adding the content editor interfaces to the WordPress backend is not an easy task, you would need to study the appropriate reference documentation such as the WordPress Codex for more information. Unfortunately I am limited in how much I would be able to advise you on this process, if you have specific questions on how to interface with the MyBookTable plugin that you are not able to answer with the information in our Developer Wiki, I will do my best to provide that information, but unfortunately we simply don’t have the resources to provide more general help with customizations you may need for your website.

~Tim