On the road to v2.0: icons and metaboxes
It came to us that a little development blog could be a nice idea to let you know what we’re doing and what we’ve been up to. Here’s a first blog post on the road to WPMovieLibrary 2.0!
Since the decision was made to drop v1.x and start working directly on v2, we’ve been putting a lot of work on the main features, which are the new metadata format and settings panel, but we’ve also taken a little detour to the vector world and are quite happy to announce that v2 will include its own icon font.
That’s actually something I’ve had in mind for quite some time, both for visual and technical reasons. Truth be told, a good half of the plugin’s icon pack are original icons from the dashicons font; this brings the legitimate question, why bother? Obviously because as awesome as it is the dashicons font isn’t exhaustive and can’t be extended. This means every single glyph we want to add has to be an image file, in addition to the images we still have to provide for WordPress < 3.8. Quite a lot of trouble for a minor visual issue. It's much easier for us to have a dedicated icon font that we can extend at will and use in all WordPress versions, and we're quite pleased with result.
Another detour we've been taking is a redesign of the Movie Editor metaboxes. The current design is a lame mess of inputs and textareas that goes back to the first drafts of the plugin and truly needed some refreshment. I've always liked the way WooCommerce handles the product details metabox, and you'll see the new metabox is actually an adaptation of the WooCommerce one to WPMovieLibrary data. It doesn't change a lot internally, the old v1.x remaining at work, but it definitely enhance the user experience.
We'll keep working to release a first beta soon, our focus right now is on making sure the transition from 1.x to 2.0 will go as smooth as possible. More updates coming in before beta.1! And to conclude this nicely, here's how the new mete editor will look like in v2!
I absolutely LOVE your plugin! It’s a movie collector’s wet dream, but it’s only missing 2 things in my opinion…
1. The MPAA Rating — TMDb provides the MPAA Rating for several countries. Could that be imported if one is available and have a taxonomy just for the rating? — I share a lot of my movies with family and friends and the one thing most of them ask is, is it kid/family friendly. I either have to go off of memory or look up the rating in my catalog software
2. A link to the trailer — I went to the TMDb site and see they link to trailers. Could that link be imported if one is available?
If you could find a way to include those 2 items, I’d have no need for the software on my computer. I could use your plugin exclusively — I swear it’s better than sliced bread! I can’t wait to see what you have in store for the next version!
Hi Becky,
1. We’ve been asked for this a couple times, I think we’ll make a plugin of it once version 2.0 is released 🙂
2. There’s an extension for this already, though it is still in development and may cause some issues; see http://wpmovielibrary.com/extensions/wpmovielibrary-trailers/
As for the rest, thanks! We working hard to release version 2.0 by the end of the month 😉
Hi Charlie. I have many troble with the trailer plugin. How do i get a view of the trailer on my wordpress site and not only in the dashboad,
I can understand that i have to put some code inside, ehm somewhere. But how? and do i have to do it for every movie i add?
Again thx for a very good plugin,
Hi Jens,
Yes, you have to use a shortcode to include the trailer in your movies pages, you can find help about this shortcode in the documentation 🙂 And yes, you need to do it manually for each movie.
It could be nice to have the trailer automatically inserted in movies pages, though, that’s something I’ll bre considering when updating the trailer plugin to support WPMovieLibrary 2 🙂