I haven’t had a chance to test Manga+Press (either the current version or the beta) with 5.0, so I have no idea of how it will work with the new changes in WordPress 5.0. My working assumption is that Manga+Press 3.0 will/should work because I’m not doing any with the editor—although, I can’t rule out potential changes to the_content filter that 3.0 is currently using.

That being said, I don’t have plans to release 4.0 until after New Years, while I will need to perform tests with WordPress 5.0 and Manga+Press 3.0 to assure users that it still works. Which, with the Thanksgiving holiday next week, I likely won’t have time to do those tests until after WordPress 5.0’s projected release date, which has been pushed to the 27th.

What comes after?

That’s a good question. Assuming everything works in 3.0 as it should, 4.0 will be tested and refactored against WP 5.0’s changes. After that, and after some soul-searching, I’m going to make the decision that I won’t be continuing active development on Manga+Press beyond bug-fixes and WP core updates. I still want to implement the features I had planned for the original 4.0 release, but it occurred to me that trying to cram more features into what should be a simple comic browsing/management plugin would be pointless, and doesn’t go with my original goals for the plugin.

Basically, it’s a “we’ll see” scenario.

Well, not really. You can still access the docs at docs.manga-press.com, but I may be moving them back to GitHub Pages in the near future. GitBook changed some things recently, and I’m not particularly happy with the changes. The end-result is that I merged the developer docs and the guides into one repo, and the new GitBook experience is rather lacking.

In the meantime, what started as a simple fix for the issues with the Latest Comic and Comic Archive pages has turned into a full-on refactoring of the plugin. Which means, guess what? The original 4.0 roadmap is postponed. The refactor will become the new 4.0, which will have breaking changes. I realized that I was doing the archives wrong, for one. The Comic CPT was configured wrong, and considering my years of professional experience using WordPress, I should have caught that. You can have archives for CPTs in WordPress, and you can even customize the slug used. So that bit of WordPress Core functionality has been added—should have been added years ago, and should lead to a better experience all around. The Latest Comic page has been changed to a custom endpoint—branching from an idea that I had in my last post. So the next release will feature templates for both pages, but still maintain the original Comic Archive sub-templates for the three supported styles.

So, no release date yet. I’m hoping it’ll be soon, though.

So what’s happened? I’m back working again—finally. So that leaves me little time to work on personal projects, including Manga+Press. Which is probably a good thing because that leaves me a little time—even though I barely have any time haha—to plan. The version 4 and 5 road-map is postponed. I realized that there are some things I’m going to have to change about Manga+Press, primarily the way that the Latest Comic and Archive page is handled. I’m getting error reports about those two pages, and I think it’s all due to the use of the_content filter to modify the output of the content of those two pages. Tl’dr—my approach needs to be re-architected. Heh, ironically, I think I realized that around 4 years but forgot after the upheavals in my personal life these last few years. Basically, the ideas I have are:

1. Remove the pages, and just use custom end-points with their own templates (this was my original idea but never got around to implementing it). This one comes with its own headaches. The WordPress Rewrite API was a bear to deal with—at least that’s what I remember from dealing with it when I worked on Arctic Cat’s website.

2. Make the Latest/Archive page into their own post-type. It opens up a can of worms, though—there can be only two, for instance. However, it also opens up a realm of other feature possibilities, like refactoring the Series taxonomy. It brings us back to that can of worms, though. If I do that, I end up changing the entire architecture of the plugin in a way that it won’t be backwards compatible.

3. I do (actually, should have done) what WordPress is doing with its static front-page functionality. One page is set as a static front-page (Latest Comic)—except the difference is that it pulls in the most recent comic, and then the other page is a post listing page (in this case, Comic Archives). If I remember correctly, WordPress overrides the admin for these two pages, letting the user know that they can’t be edited.

So, we’ll see. Rest assured, I’m aware of the issue. It’s just going to take time for me to find a workable solution.