Some updates. I’ve finally started some tentative work on Manga+Press 3.0. I’m realizing that all of the updates that I wanted to make might not be feasible during this update cycle, namely because of the big change that involves pulling out the themes that come with the plugin. I have a feeling that one change is going to upset a lot of people, specifically people who don’t bother to read what the update is going to involve. Oh well. I’ll have the themes available for download on my Github page for the people who do happen to lose their theme-data. I can’t do anything for people who simply modify the themes outright instead of creating child-themes but I can try to warn people to make sure to backup their files before upgrading. Essentially meaning that I won’t provide help if someone should lose their theme as a result of an update 😉

With that, so what I have decided to pull back? Well, the Gallery feature isn’t going to make it into this release BUT the bookmarking feature will, or at least that’s my current plan. In 2.9.2, I added support for Facebook and Twitter posting via the Jetpack Publicize plugin so that’s out of the way. Other than that, I’ve pushed off some things until 3.1.

Finally, since I do have the project hosted on Github (here), I am looking for people to help out and contribute to the project. At this point, I don’t have enough time to maintain Manga+Press by myself and would like a few people to at least pick up some of the tickets that I have out there. If you’re interested, go ahead and leave a comment below with your Github link included.

The first idea behind Manga+Press 3.0: remove the bundled themes.

Yes, that is revolutionary. My plan is to make the bundled themes available for download on Github. One reason is WordPress Multi-site support. With the themes bundled inside the plugin, they’re not available to all of the sites on a given network. To change that, you need to move the themes from the plugin folder into the WordPress themes folder. Another reason for removing them from the plugin is separation of concerns — it’s messy having the themes be a part of the plugin. Yes, this will probably make it difficult for anyone updating — hence the reason I’m announcing this now and will keep harping on it during the development period and especially during pre-release.

A few other ideas floating around are:

Improving the UI of the Series Taxonomy

Yes, I’ve been looking at a means of improving the interface of the Series Taxonomy from the default WP to something that’s better suited to a comic workflow. The problem with that is what would represent a good workflow? What I would think of as a decent workflow might not suit the community.

Manga+Press: Gallery Edition

This feature was a suggestion from a Manga+Press user. While it’s a good idea, it might be difficult to implement. The only thing I can think to do is wrap it into a separate plugin that works with Manga+Press. Then then next question would be: how would this work with the proposed changes to the taxonomy? Should this, in fact, be controlled by the taxonomy?

Push Notifications for Facebook and Twitter

This idea might go away — or it might not. The Jetpack plugin has social media integration that would cover this feature. The main goal here would be to test Manga+Press extensively against Jetpack and see if it meets the needs that this feature would require.

Other Suggestions

Comments on Comic Posts

This was a feature request I received through the feedback form. Manga+Press supports comments on comic posts out of the box, using the bundled themes. I suspect that in this case, there may have been issues with a third-party theme that didn’t support comments on custom post-types. Comments might be missing from the Latest Comic Page, which is something that I can look into.

Finally, as for a development start (and a release date). I’m looking to start development this fall with a release date of next spring. Yes, I’m standing by my idea of taking the summer off. I’m going to explore the idea of doing things that don’t involve sitting in front of a computer this summer 🙂

Other Updates (Website)

Having moved my personal blog to Github, I’m considering doing the same thing with the Manga+Press blog and documentation. The documentation is currently in transition to be moved to Github.

Reasons behind this? I <3 Github and I really <3 Markdown!