Montecchiani Book Catalog

A WordPress plugin to display a book catalog with a custom post type, shortcodes, hover effects and ISBN autofill from external book databases.

The canonical, user-facing documentation is readme.txt, which is also what the WordPress.org plugin directory renders. This file is the developer README.

Author

Mirko Montecchiani

Features

• Custom Post Type: Dedicated "Book" post type with custom fields
• ISBN Autofill: Enter an ISBN and fetch title, author, publisher, year, pages, description and cover automatically from Google Books and Open Library (results are merged and cached)
• Cover Import: One click imports the fetched cover into the Media Library and sets it as the featured image
• Book Fields:
  • Title
  • Author
  • Description (WordPress standard editor + excerpt)
  • Cover image (Featured image)
  • Publisher
  • Publication year
  • Number of pages
  • Language
  • ISBN
  • Shop link
• Genres Taxonomy: Organize books by genre and filter the shortcode by genre
• Shortcode Support: Display books anywhere with [mbcat_books]
• Responsive Grid: 1-5 columns with automatic responsive adjustments
• Hover Effect: Overlay with book details on hover (tap-friendly on touch devices, keyboard accessible)
• AJAX Loading: "Show All" button loads remaining books without a page reload
• SEO: Automatic Schema.org Book structured data (JSON-LD) for rich results in search engines
• Admin Columns: Cover, author, year and ISBN columns in the book list, sortable by author and year
• Settings Page: Configure default author, columns, ISBN data source and uninstall cleanup
• i18n Ready: Fully translatable; French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese translations are maintained on translate.wordpress.org

Requirements

• WordPress 5.8 or later
• PHP 7.2 or later

Installation

1. Download or clone this repository
2. Copy the plugin files into a folder named montecchiani-book-catalog inside /wp-content/plugins/ (the folder name must match the text domain)
3. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress

Usage

ISBN Autofill

1. Create a new Book (Book Catalog > Add New Book)
2. Enter the ISBN (10 or 13 digits, with or without dashes) in the ISBN field
3. Click Autofill from ISBN: empty fields (author, publisher, year, pages, language), the title and the description are filled automatically
4. If a cover is found, click Use as cover to import it as the featured image

Data sources can be configured in Book Catalog > Settings (Google Books, Open Library, or both merged). An optional Google Books API key can be set to raise the request quota. Lookups are cached for 12 hours.

Shortcodes

Display all books:

[mbcat_books]

Display limited books with a "Show All" button:

[mbcat_books hitem="3"]

Available attributes:

• hitem - Number of books to display (shows the "Show All" button when more exist)
• columns - Override default columns (1-5)
• orderby - Order by: date, title, year, author, rand, menu_order, modified (default: date)
• order - Order direction: ASC, DESC (default: DESC)
• genre - Filter by genre slug(s), comma separated

Example with all attributes:

[mbcat_books hitem="6" columns="3" orderby="title" order="ASC" genre="fantasy,thriller"]

At most 500 books are rendered per request; raise it with the mbcat_max_books_per_request filter.

Settings

Go to Book Catalog > Settings in the WordPress admin to configure:

1. Default Author: shown as a placeholder in the book editor and used at render time for every book that has no author of its own
2. Author Gender: controls the Author/Authoress label on the frontend
3. Number of Columns: choose 1-5 columns for the grid layout (responsive)
4. ISBN Data Source: Google Books, Open Library, or both merged (recommended)
5. Google Books API Key (optional): raises the API request quota
6. Delete Data on Uninstall: permanently remove books, genres and settings when the plugin is deleted

Filters

Privacy

The ISBN autofill feature sends the ISBN you type — and, if you configured one, your Google Books API key — from your server to the Google Books API (googleapis.com) and/or the Open Library API (openlibrary.org). Each request carries a User-Agent header naming the plugin and its version; your site URL is not sent. When a cover is found, the server downloads its small thumbnail from the address returned by the API (books.google.com or books.googleusercontent.com, covers.openlibrary.org or its archive.org redirect) and embeds it in the editor as a preview; importing the cover downloads the full image file from the same address and stores it in your Media Library. The browser itself never loads anything from these hosts. Nothing is requested from the public frontend, and no personal data about you or your visitors is transmitted. See the "External services" section of readme.txt for the full disclosure and the providers' terms.

Development

# Regenerate the translation template and merge it into every catalogue
wp i18n make-pot . languages/montecchiani-book-catalog.pot --slug=montecchiani-book-catalog
for loc in fr_FR es_ES it_IT ja; do
  msgmerge --update --backup=none translations/montecchiani-book-catalog-$loc.po languages/montecchiani-book-catalog.pot
  msgfmt -o translations/montecchiani-book-catalog-$loc.mo translations/montecchiani-book-catalog-$loc.po
done

# Coding standards
phpcs --standard=WordPress-Extra --extensions=php .

# Build a release archive with the folder name WordPress.org expects
git archive --format=zip --prefix=montecchiani-book-catalog/ -o montecchiani-book-catalog.zip HEAD

License

GPLv2 or later. See LICENSE.