I haven’t gotten to public implementation of the alphabetical listing/sorting toggle yet, but I did do a bunch of little updates that should make adding books to My Collection easier.

1. Non-Logged In users will now see a slightly faded version of the Add To Collection icon in place of the normal one. It doubles as a link to take you to the login page. I also added title text to the conditional links to make everything a bit more user friendly.

2. The icon now shows in the header of individual book posts and next to the add to collection link under the book cover image (if there).

3. Fixed the spacing a bit on the single book headers – the cover, text, and add to collection icon should look a little less crowded.

4. Made the review link conditional – if there is no review in the database, the blank link will not show. I tried to do the same for the amazon and cbdb link, but the php call for the title of the entry keeps it from working. That’s ok though, they’ll all have amazon and cbdb links long before they all have reviews.

5. Made “You Must Be Logged In To Manage Your Collection.” on the My Collection page bigger and conditional.

6. Added a note about possible uses to the collection page.

7. Put all the collection feature info into an expanding div – it takes up a bunch of room at the top of your collection page, and you probably want to get the the list asap, when you’re visiting it.

Comment!

As has been requested, I’ve moved the Search to the top right of the page. I also added a login reminder that should only be visible to users who are not logged in.

Finally, I added the “Comics” list to the filtering on the sidebar, so you can now create filtered lists that pull from ALL comics, not just the subcategories. If you’ve only been using the search and haven’t tried the filtering yet, I HIGHLY recommend it. It will list a bunch of books at once, instead of bringing you to the individual page, etc. It takes some getting used to, but play around with it and you can get really cool results by searching for included issue names and so on.

These little updates should come in handy for working on your collections! :D

Edit: Also just fixed a weird bug where the forum content was showing underneath the title header. Very strange! Added in a float tag for it and it seemed to fix the problem. A lot has changed in the last couple days, so let me know if you see anything else that’s wonky!

Comment!

A quick update to let you know that the “Add To My Collection” button is now on the left. I’ve also added it to the filtered search results, so you might be able to find books that way pretty quickly. Remember, you must be logged in to see it at this time.

Comment!

So I added in some little icons on the reading order listings and now you can collect from any reading order page. I wish it was Ajax, since the loading is a pain in the butt. I’ll have to learn how to get that working myself.

Let me know if you think it would look better with the collection icon on the right of all the book information or just to the left of the thumbnail.

Showcase Presents: Jonah Hex Vol. 2

Info Amazon

Weird Western Tales 34-38; Jonah Hex 1-22

May 1976 – March 1979

Or

Viking Glory: The Viking Prince

Info Review Amazon CBDB

Original Graphic Novel

August 1991

I also added “My Collection” in under the User Control Panel. Remember, at this time you have to register and log in to use and see these features.

3 Comments

I can’t believe this is actually working.

If you are registered and logged in, you can add books to a page that will list all the the volumes in your collection. The link is right in the center of the individual book pages (above the amazon and review links.)

Feel free to play around with it, though it won’t do much besides listing the books in the order you added them, for now.

Things I gotta do:

1) Making it so the link shows up on the reading order view as well, because it’s a pain to always have to go to the full data page.

2) Formatting and Sorting your Collection List so it’s in order. I’m not sure if I’m gonna make it look like a full reading order page with all the data, but I at least want it to list the books in order. This is the trade off: Less data and custom fields and I can list more books on the page, so you can see a lot more of your collection. More data, it might take really long to load and/or break down with large collections. I’m not sure!

3) Right now this only works for you when you are logged in to view your own collection. That’s ok for now (I’m ecstatic about it!) but in the future it would be cool if each user’s collection got a permalink that they could share with other users and the rest of the internet.

Anyway, for now, we should celebrate. This is a major step towards awesome!

Edit: Temporarily Disabled While I Play With Some Code

Edit 2: Enabled again! I’m actually using a totally different set of code now, which means the ajax adding doesn’t work but it DOES sort by reading order! So go ahead and sort your collection!

Edit 3: Collection lists are now numbered, which I thought would help in organizing and keeping track of your books.

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11 Comments