Putting the brakes on Manga+Press 2.9 development for the moment. Things are busy with my life, and I’ve noticed some issues with the structure of the plugin that will likely take a while to work out. In the mean-time, I’m going to take some of the things that were fixed in the 2.9 branch and merge those fixes into 2.8. I’m also planning on creating a new site and a new support system that should handle bugs and enhancement requests. I’ve realized that routing support requests to GitHub and WordPress was probably not the most ideal thing to do but it solved issues with support requests over Twitter and personal email.

Last question first: I’ll make sure (as always) to ensure that Manga+Press is compatible with the latest version of WordPress, even though I’m in the middle of development for the next version of Manga+Press.

Which leads us into the second question. The next release is going to be 2.9. I’m not going to jump to 3.0. I’m saving that for a feature release. 2.9 is turning out to be another refactoring version, namely focusing on template handling plus bringing Manga+Press more inline with the way WordPress does things. Which means deprecating some functions that handles Manga+Press’ navigation due to some bug fixes in WP core that allows Manga+Press to use core functionality for navigation. Sadly, that means that the “Group By Parent Category” feature will go away. However, I do have a solution for that issue, which is mentioned in this blog post. The main issue I’m finding as I continue the code refactor will likely be performance-related and could make template development (namely for comic archives) more complex.

Finally, I’m shooting to have a new version of Manga+Press.com out before the end of the year. The site layout has stayed pretty static since it was launched six years ago and could definitely benefit from a refresh.