Manga+Press 4.0…and 5.0?!?

That was finished — almost — quickly. I’m pleased to announce that Manga+Press 4.0 will be out next month.

New features coming in Manga+Press 4.0:

  • Comic bookmarking
  • Lightbox
  • Random comic link
  • Social media integration

Manga+Press 5.0 will follow by the end of the year. I’ve made a command decision to focus heavily on redesigning the way the Series taxonomy works. As it currently is, the Series taxonomy causes some confusion in how navigation is supposed to work. What I’m looking at doing is splitting Series into three different taxonomies: Series, Issues, and Chapters, with possibly adding a Series or Issue cover option — where you can designate a comic post as a “cover” page. These changes could have some rather profound effects on the way the Archive and Latest Comic pages behave as well. I have an issue on Github detailing what’s going to happen with Series. You’ll note that the issue itself dates back to 2014, so this has been on my mind for a while now.

What happens to Manga+Press NEXT then? That project is officially dead. The other point of Manga+Press 5.0 is to integrate the changes from NEXT into Manga+Press core itself — namely the refactored navigation and unit testing. I unintentionally refactored quite a bit of Manga+Press core in 4.0, and that effectively killed NEXT. Chances are, the NEXT-to-5.0 integration will happen first, then the changes to the UI.

Till next time!