Manga+Press

Ahem, seriously. I had to take a break from development on Manga+Press namely because I’ve been keeping busy with my current job — which has taught me a lot about PHP in general, and WordPress in particular. I’ve recently taken the time to go back and look at the current Manga+Press 3.0 beta code-base — frankly, it sucks. I’m glad it has never managed to make it into public beta.

Anyway, I remember that I’d been thinking about branching Manga+Press. I know think that it would be a very bad idea to do so. Simply put, it would put twice the amount of work on me — the sole developer of this project. It would make far more sense to just continue the current Manga+Press from 2.6.2 to 3.0. The other goal I’ve had for Manga+Press is to make it theme-independent. The best idea so far is to make use of certain hooks in WordPress pertaining to theme templates.

Finally, I hate to do this but because I’m so busy with my current job, I have no choice. Please note that I will NOT handle support issues. I just don’t have the time, at the moment, to do so. This is one reason why I would eventually like to have a dev team, but finding the time to put one together…*sigh* Life, ’nuff said.

Folks are probably wondering what happened to Manga+Press 3.0. It’s still out there, just haven’t had the chance to really work on it. In fact, I’ve learned so much at my current job that I’m thinking about tearing down the current M+P 3.0 code-base and starting over. In the meantime, I do want to bring in some of the features that I’d been working on for Manga+Press 3.0 into the 2.x branch. With that in mind, I’d also mentioned something about naming my branches: Read more →

The next release of Manga+Press is currently in the works, I’m happy to say. However, I do have some bad news to report. Because of the implementation of custom post types & taxonomies in the next version, I’m finding it very hard to retain backwards compatibility. The only option I can think of is to branch Manga+Press. MP 2.6.x will continue as it’s own branch and Manga+Press 3.0 will be a different branch entirely. Heh, maybe I should start coming up with names for these different branches

Anyway, branching them will allow me to provide support for both versions. I can also transfer over features that don’t require custom post-types or custom taxonomies. One feature that I can definitely transfer over takes advantage of post thumbnails, and another feature I have in mind is grouping comics by series or chapters.

So, that’s just about it for news on the future of Manga+Press. I’ll have an update when I know how I’m going to handle the branching.

Well, after some quick testing I am happy to say that Manga+Press 2.6.2 does work with WordPress 3.0.

Now, here is the other news that I’m sure some people are anxious to hear about: the next version of Manga+Press,which is 2.7. First off, I’m done with school so that means more time to work on the plugin. Second off, I’m going to completely rework the code from scratch—make it more modular, more flexible than the current version. The other part to that is I have to maintain backwards compatibility. Finally, because of the amount of changes, I’m going to advance the version number to 3.0. Hey, might as well The ETA I have for releasing Manga+Press 2.7 3.0 will be sometime in August, possibly middle of August.

And no, I haven’t forgot about CharacterWiki. I just can’t offer an ETA on it yet.