“Now Reading” – tweaks

Today I was fiddling with yet another plugin: Now Reading by Rob Miller. Install it, add a line of code to your sidebar and add a few books and it will show you the books you’ve read, are reading or want to read in the sidebar. I had two issues with the plugin, both of which I fixed by adding or deleting php code (I’m getting rather good at this, tweaking a blog is fun!).

The first was with displaying pictures of the bookcovers in the sidebar, which Now Reading only does for current books. I don’t want to overcrowd my sidebar, so I wanted to get rid of the pictures. There’s no option for that in the admin menu, so I decided to hack the php file. In the file sidebar.php I replaced the lines

<p><a href="<?php book_permalink() ?>"><img src="<?php book_image() ?/>" alt="< ?php book_title() ?>" /></a></p>
<p><strong>< ?php book_title() ?></strong> by < ?php book_author() ?></p>

with the line

<li><a href="<?php book_permalink() ?>">< ?php book_title() ?></a> by < ?php book_author() ?></li>

This got the right result: the bookcover will only be shown when you click on the title and see the entry for it.

The other thing I found irritating was that I really had no idea how many entries the sidebar would finally show. As I just said, I don’t like my sidebar too cluttered, so I wanted only two entries per category shown. In the same file, therefore, I added a few arguments to the lines that call the entries, in which I indicate I want two books per category, and for read books I want them in descending order, whereas for current and planned books I want them random:

For planned books: <?php if( have_books('status=unread&orderby=random&num=2') ) : ?>
For current books: <?php if( have_books('status=reading&orderby=random&num=2') ) : ?>
For read books: <?php if( have_books('status=read&orderby=finished&order=desc&num=2') ) : ?>

There should be options for these things (even though I feel proud for fixing it this way), so I’ll request these features. Maybe Rob Miller will want to implement them :)