On the road to v2.2: interactions and beauty

Well, it’s been a while. And truth is, it’s been a hard time. Lets be honest and put words on what happened in the last months of 2014: we messed up. And lost a lot of time.

There are a couple of awesome things we want to build on WPMovieLibrary, and these things take time to build; currently the development is being done on two parallel versions, 2.1.4 which contains minor features and bug fixes, and version 2.2 which will bring bigger improvements; to be effective we needed to split up the development, and by we I mean I, since I’m now as before the only one left in the project. I trusted someone to work on version 2.1.4 so I can concentrate on version 2.2, and now after a couple month, I’m back to working on version 2.1.4 myself as the previous dev left the project without a word. So here we are: lot of work for a single person.

But hey! I’m still up. I just wanted to let you know than whatever feature/tweaks were scheduled, they will be done. Maybe not just as soon as expected. Anyway, here’s a glimpse of what I’m currently building.

Version 2.1.4

As a minor version it will mostly contain bug fixes, but it will feature a nice thing: two different Headbox styles, Allociné and IMDb:

These styles replace the default Headbox style if you chose so in the settings panel. They’re not customizable for now, but will probably be a future release if there’s demand − and I suspect there will!

Version 2.2

That’s the most important, really. The first, major, big feature of this version if actually a major development change as I started a complete rewrite of the JavaScript part of the plugin, which means basically anything that makes you interact with the plugin: the metadata editor, images/posters importer, movies mass-import tool, etc. The plugin will now use Backbone.js, which is a great tool already used in WordPress − that’s the one used to build the WordPress Media Library, for instance. This takes time, especially because I’m actually learning Backbone as I rebuild the plugin with it, but the result is, quite frankly, pure awesomeness. For now only the metadata/posters/images editor is (almost) done, but see the list of improvements done or planned:

• Search movie by title, TMDb ID or IMDb ID
• Metadata autosaving, even when editing a single item
• Images/Posters automatic import
• Images/Posters multiple import
• Filter Posters by language

In the long term, we can imagine amazing things using this tool. Rewriting the imported means you will be able to import movie by title or ID indifferently, with the possibility to set specific import settings for each movie or group of movies, to edit some data before importing movies… Possibilities are infinite. It’ll just take time to make them a reality. Here what the new Posters tab and modal look like:

Furthermore, version 2.2 will serve as a major base for additional plugins; I’ve started working on two requested extensions, an advanced/user rating plugin and a people support to manage actors/technicians pages linked to the movies. Both these plugins will rely on features and development brought by version 2.2.

Hum, that was a bit disorganized, but at least you know what’s going on now. Short version to remember: I’m now working alone on this plugin and therefore will need more time than expected to build all that is planned, but I intend to build it, and it should be very, very, nice to use.

I was about to say that I’ll try to make this blog more alive by publishing more “in-dev” stuff, but I already that 4 months ago and haven’t said much thing here since them, so… To be continued!

Charlie