Coming Soon: More Sidebar Widgets for Mooberry Book Manager 1


In the next few weeks, I’ll be releasing some extensions for Mooberry Book Manager. Extensions are plugins that extend the functionality of Mooberry Book Manager. You’ll need to have Mooberry Book Manager version 3.0 installed to use these add-on plugins.

One of these extensions is call MBM Advanced Widgets. This plugin will add two additional sidebar widgets for Mooberry Book Manager, as well as add additional functionality to the existing Book Widget included with Mooberry Book Manager.

screen shot of 2 new widgets

Most Popular Book Widget

The first sidebar widget included in MBM Advanced Widgets is called the MBM Most Popular Book widget.

screen shot of Most Popular Book widget options

This widget will allow you to feature the book that has received the most views over a given time period:

  • Year to Date
  • Month to Date
  • Week to Date
  • All time

 

Because you as the author may view certain a book’s page several times while creating or updating it, this widget includes an option to ignore views from certain users or roles of your website.

screenshot of excluding users

The number of views for each book can be reset back to 0, and there’s also an option to reset the views of all books back to 0.

On the individual book page:

screen shot of reseting number of views

On the Book Page Settings page in the Mooberry Book Manager Settings Menu:

screen shot of reseting number of views

The MBM Advanced Widgets plugin must be activated in order for book views to be counted. Any views that happened before installing the plugin will not be counted.

 

Related Books Widget

The next sidebar widget is the MBM Related Book widget.

screen shot of related book widget options

This widget appears only when viewing blog posts. If one of the tags of the blog post matches a tag of one of the books, that book will be displayed in the widget. If multiple books match tags with the blog post, one will be chosen by random. If no books match tags with the blog post, the widget will not be displayed at all.

 

Related Books on the Book Page

Although not a widget, the functionality was so close to the MBM Related Book widget, this feature is being included in the MBM Advanced Widgets plugin.

This is an optional feature that can be turned on/off either in the Mooberry Book Manager settings for all books, or on an individual book’s page.

Default settings on the Book Page Settings page of the Mooberry Book Manager Settings menu:

screen shot of related books settings

On the individual book page:

screen shot of related books settings

When turned on, this feature will add a section to the bottom of a book’s page that displays books that have matching tags.  You can choose to display 1-5 books.

screen shot of related books output on book page

Additional Features on Existing Book Widget

The MBM Advanced Widget plugin adds some additional features to the existing Mooberry Book Manager Book widget included in the base Mooberry Book Manager plugin.

screen shot of filter options on Book widget

When you choose Newest Book, Random Book, or Future Book, you’ll now have the option to filter the results by the following options:

  • Genre
  • Series
  • Tag
  • Editor
  • Illustrator
  • Cover Artist
  • Publisher
  • User

For example, if you choose to display the Newest Book filtered by Series, the widget will display the book from the selected series with the most recent publication date. If you choose to display a Random Book filtered by User, the widget will select a random book from the list of books added by a specific user.

An additional option has also been added to the “Which book to show?” list: Random Book by Random User.

screen shot of book widget options

This option will be useful if you have multiple users adding books to your website and you want to fairly choose a random book to display. This option will first choose a user at random, and then choose a random book added by that user. If the chosen user has not added any books, another user will be chosen at random. The reason this differs from simply choosing Random Book is because if one user has added more books than other users, a book added by that user will be statistically more likely to be chosen. This option levels the playing field by choosing the user first, then the book.

Additional Features on All Book Widgets

This plugin also adds additional customization features to all of the book widgets: Mooberry Book Manager Book, MBM Most Popular Book, and MBM Related Book.

screen shot of new book widget options

The customization options added include:

  • Alignment of book title: left, right, or center
  • Alignment of book cover: left, right, or center
  • Display of additional information
  • Alignment of additional information: left, right, or center

The plugin adds a field to the book page where you can enter the additional information to be displayed on the widget.

screen shot of additional book information settings

screen shot of book widget example

 

The reason the widgets don’t simply pull from an existing field, such as summary, is to not only allow for more flexibility, but to keep the widgets from displaying too much information.

Just the Beginning

This blog post has described the features of MBM Advanced Widgets Version 1.0. Have a need for another kind of widget? Let me know!  I intend to update this plugin with new widgets based on your input.

 


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