Of History and Taxonomies

The last couple of weeks got me pretty busy handling some side projects, back to real business now. Lets start with good news: we’re coming close to the release of version 3.0-alpha-1 now, expect it by the end of the week! I’ll make a proper announcement later, meanwhile here are a couple of things I had fun implementing lately: History and Taxonomies.

History is kind of a gadget at the first sight, a simple list of what occurred since you opened the movie editor: searches and results, autosaving notices, etc. I think it’s a pretty cool feature to let you see what’s actually being done in a more literal way than showing loading wheels and dumping errors and notices to the JavaScript console.

Taxonomies are far more important and I took some time to make sure collections, genres and actors are correctly updated; each time you modify the casting and genres list in the metabox, taxonomies are updated accordingly. Reversely, each taxonomy metabox now has an autocomplete button to automatically use the metadata as reference and create and set the corresponding terms of need be.

From the last point you may have guessed that the API has been implemented; although a limited part is supported at the moment, vital parts, movie and images import, are working. It should be noted that even though the plugin will not yet provide usage of actors and tv shows like explained in a previous entry, the API has been built to make it easy to implement later; take this as a proof of will to fulfil those requests at some point!

By the way, I’m not sure if I did mention this before or not, so forgive me if I did: the movie editor includes a setting panel to handle searches on an single basis. That setting panel allows you to set specific search settings for the current movie without having to edit the general plugin settings. That being said, you can also chose to save these ‘single settings’ and make them general if you want to.

Now what needs to be done before we release the first alpha is to clean up the code a bit, and add some security with nonces and permissions checks. Like I said: getting close!

Prologue: what’s coming next

The first alpha will be the occasion to let testers play with the rewritten interface and notice bugs, errors and missing things; the next step will be the implementation of the public parts: shortcodes, headboxes, search, grid… Then we’ll start on the last and most interesting part: the multiple movies importer. Now that’s some fun coming our way. Can’t wait!