Update: This plugin is very out of date and many of the examples no longer exist, I recommend using my custom post type instead.
I write a fair number of book reviews and I was planning on adding books to a few of my other sites, but there’s no real easy way to do book reviews easily in WordPress. I could have used the excellent structured blogging plugin, but that doesn’t separate the data, it stores it all in the post and excerpt fields using custom XML-like tags. The problem is I wanted to split up the information and be able to enter it separately so I could access it individually, rather than just make it part of the main text of an article.
I’d worked something out for my blog so that I could add book posts and they would automatically be grouped by author and links provided to the right places. It was a simple enough method using the custom meta data fields that WordPress supplies. The problem was that with up to five fields to add if became time consuming to add them all one at a time. There are no real easy ways to pull the info back up using that code either, so I couldn’t offer it to you guys.
So, I sat down and built a better plugin, with some more functionality, a custom admin screen and made it a whole lot easier to use, and here it is. The plugin allows you to create book entries with a title, author, recommendation, review, book link and image link and then provides some functions for pulling that information out as individual entities, or all of your books as a group of posts, and it also includes the function I use for displaying my books on my reading page.
The principle reason for the effort of the overhaul was because I wanted to use it on my film blog, and this probably provides the best example currently. You can also use it in ordinary post listings or for individual entries. Let me know what you think.
