Texon Flipbook

A WordPress plugin that turns any PDF catalog into an interactive page-turn flipbook with clickable hotspots — a self-hosted alternative to FlipSnack / Issuu.

Built for Texon Towel, but works with any PDF.

Features

• Realistic page-turn viewer powered by StPageFlip — smooth page curl, touch/swipe, keyboard arrows
• PDF → JPG pre-rendering via Ghostscript (preferred) or Imagick, so page loads are instant
• Clickable hotspots — draw rectangles over any page and point them at product URLs, categories, external sites; opens in a new tab
• Two embed modes — inline on a page, or a button that opens the flipbook in a full-screen modal
• Per-catalog hotspot editor — click-and-drag to draw, drag to move, drag corner to resize, right-click to delete, autosaves via AJAX
• URL → filesystem path auto-conversion — paste any PDF URL (media library URL, site-relative path, etc.) and the plugin resolves it to the correct server path

Requirements

• WordPress 5.5+
• PHP 7.4+
• Either Ghostscript (/usr/bin/gs) OR the Imagick PHP extension (for PDF rendering)

Installation

1. Download/clone into wp-content/plugins/texon-flipbook/
2. Activate Texon Flipbook in the WordPress admin
3. Go to Flipbooks in the admin sidebar → Add New

Usage

Create a flipbook

1. Flipbooks → Add New
2. Title it (e.g., "2026 Product Guide")
3. Paste the PDF URL or filesystem path into the PDF Path field, or click Choose from Media Library
4. Save — the plugin renders all pages to JPGs (~1–2 seconds per page)

Add hotspots

1. Click Edit Hotspots → from the edit screen
2. Select a page from the dropdown
3. Click and drag on the page to draw a hotspot
4. Enter the destination URL when prompted
5. Click a hotspot to edit its URL, drag to move, drag the handle to resize, right-click to delete
6. Changes autosave

Embed on a page

Use one of these shortcodes:

[texon_flipbook id="123"]
[texon_flipbook id="123" height="800"]
[texon_flipbook id="123" trigger="button" label="Browse Our 2026 Catalog"]

• id — the flipbook ID (shown on the Flipbooks list screen)
• trigger — inline (default) or button (opens in a modal)
• label — button text when trigger="button"
• height — inline embed height in px (default: 700)

Architecture

• texon-flipbook.php — main plugin bootstrap
• includes/class-post-type.php — texon_flipbook custom post type for storing flipbooks
• includes/class-renderer.php — PDF → JPG rendering (Ghostscript or Imagick)
• includes/class-admin.php — admin screens, AJAX save, URL/path normalization
• includes/class-shortcode.php — [texon_flipbook] shortcode
• assets/flipbook.js / .css — front-end viewer
• assets/admin.js / .css — admin hotspot editor
• vendor/page-flip.browser.js — StPageFlip v2.0.7 (MIT)

Hotspots are stored as percentages (0–1) of page dimensions, so they stay accurate at any viewer size.

License

MIT