A quick update, and to keep a long story short, I needed a break from Manga+Press to work on other projects. I also needed a break to see what I wanted more clearly. To put it bluntly, I am not giving the project up for adoption, nor am I going to abandon it. I do need help with bug-hunting, providing support on the WordPress plugin forums, and I especially need help with documentation.

I also know that there have been a few WordPress updates to Manga+Press since the last update. I’ll need to check and make sure that those updates haven’t caused any breaking changes in Manga+Press.

And yes, the road-map for versions 4 and 5 is back on but I likely won’t get started until later in the spring.

Stay tuned!

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!

Took the summer off from Manga+Press. It was good idea, since I’m now back with some fresh ideas on how to proceed with the next updates.

I’m branching Manga+Press. Manga+Press 3.0 will become Manga+Press NEXT, which will contain some of the feature updates that would have gone into 3.0 AND eliminating the embedded themes while old Manga+Press 2.9.3 will continue on its own. I’m also re-writing Manga+Press NEXT from the ground up, the reason being that there’s a lot of crap that’s still leftover from the old days plus I want it to be more flexible than it already is. Manga+Press 2.9.x will receive bug-updates as needed, but I’m not going to add new features to it, while any new features in the future will go to Manga+Press NEXT.

Release date for Manga+Press NEXT? That’s still in the air, as I’ve only just started development on it.