Now Reading Redux 6.7 Released

Just released a new version of Now Reading Redux, version 6.7 with a number of fixes and improvements.

Highlights include fixes to Amazon searching, templates, CSS styles and a new nrr_shelf shortcode to generate book lists in posts like the Library page does. I’ve addressed a number of user-submitted bugs, so hopefully some complaints are answered.

Please don’t be shy to give feedback, make suggestions or ask question on the project’s home, on GitHub or WordPress.

Here is the changelog:

6.7.0.0

• WordPress 3.4 support.
• Fixed: The wp-config.php file may be either in its default folder or a folder above it. See Hardening WordPress. (Thanks to Alex for this request.)
• Fixed: Replaced file_get_contents() with url_get_contents() which is based on cURL/Snoopy and doesn’t suffer PHP settings. file_get_contents() required enabling allow_url_fopen in php.ini which some servers disallowed. (Thanks to Tom Saunders, TechnoMom, unsicherheitsserver, inktails and others for reporting).
• Improved the robustness of Amazon searches, debugging and error-reporting. Also, untitled books are now show with the title “Untitled” (previously they were skipped).
• Fixed: Removed hard-coding of styles from shelf and using CSS class nr_booktitle and nr_bookauthor for the title and author respectively. Also, new classes include nr_viewlibrary, nr_wishlist, nr_nobooks. Apply default CSS styles in NRR options page to get new default styles.
• Fixed: Redesigned templates to use correct and up-to-date styles and better WordPress integration.
• New options: Library Title and Wishlist Title options added.
• New option: “Use Theme templatates” to control whether or not to load theme-specific templates or defaults. Themes can have ‘now-reading’ or ‘now-reading-redux’ folders added to the TEMPLATEPATH and by enabling this option the templates will be loaded from there. Suffusion makes use of this approach as it has heavily customized templates and the defaults don’t render so well (although latest templates are much better in this regard.) For Suffusion you’re advised to copy the templates from NRR’s suffusion subfolder into Suffusion’s now-reading subfolder and enable “Use Theme templates”. Don’t forget to repeat this every time you update Suffusion!
• Added: NRR shortcode nrr_shelf added. Supports all rendering styles and filtering options supported in the Library page. See FAQ for doc and sample.
• Improved book statistics and average reading rate calculation. Statistics may be calculated by books being read per-month as well as books finished per-month (no external option, just internal function implementation).
• Improved nrr-generated page-titles shown in the browser caption-bar.