Book Review Library

The Book Review Library plugin allows you to create a library of books, with reviews, that include sortable meta information like author, illustrator, genre, subjects as well as ratings. This enables you to list all the books of a particular type (e.g. all books written by a particular author or with a specific rating). With very little effort, the book review system will be up and running on your site right away, with built in filters to add this extra information to the page without any custom theming.

A configurable shortcode is also built in, to display a book list. [book-reviews] will display all books, while [book-reviews count=3] will only display 3 books and [book-reviews count=3 covers=true] will display those reviews with their covers, if they exist.

Two sidebar widgets have also been included. A Recent Reviews widget will display the most recent book reviews that have been added, and a Related Books widget will display a list of similar books when you are looking at a single book or book list by common genre tags.

Theme developers haven’t been forgotten either. If you want to customize the way the reviews display, create and edit these template files:

• taxonomy.php
• archive-book-review.php
• single-book-review.php

Additionally, there are a number of template tags that can be used in your theme, which are found in inc/func.php.

This plugin uses the Genericons icon font in both the dashboard and the front end to display the book icons and star ratings.

Translators!

New translations site is up at https://chrisreynolds.io/glotpress/projects/book-review-library/
Please email me at hello at chrisreynolds dot io if you want to be added as a translator.

• Italian translation by tristano-ajmone
• Hungarian translation by Ignácz József
• French translation by claire idrac
• Russian translation by Diana Kononova
• Arabic translation by Salim Solomon
• Spanish translation by Tierras del Rincon
• Persian (Farsi) translation by Masoud Allameh
• Polish translation by Rafał Szampera
• Catalan translation by Jordi Ramirez
• Turkish translation by Yardımcı Destek Teknolojileri
• Dutch translation by robin ketelaars

About this plugin

I sat down with a librarian and a volunteer at the Open Classroom charter school library and asked them what they wanted from the website. The result is this plugin. It was built with a real use-case in mind based on specific feedback I received about things they wanted to share with the school and wider community. If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Note

This plugin hasn’t been in active development for a while. However a major revision/rewrite has been planned for some time. The plugin is stable and works with all versions of WordPress and I’m happy to review/merge pull requests on the GitHub repo or respond to support queries you may have but no new features are planned until after the rewrite is complete.

Shortcodes & Shortcode Parameters

Book Review Library currently supports one shortcode. This page will list the shortcode variations and parameters supported and describe what each available option and parameter does.

Read the full description on the official page →