Since there are now two reviews in the database, Review links are now active!
I added a custom field for the review link to the backend, so any title that has a review will now have the link displayed between the “Info” link and the “Amazon” link.
You can see it in action on this filtered list for titles containing “Man Of Steel” – the Lex Luthor one has a review, the others, unfortunately, do not yet.
I think that I will eventually remove the “Info” link, as it’s redundant. Clicking the title of the book sends you to the same page for the database entry. I only ever included it so something would show in that field and to make it easier for new visitors. I think that people will be able to figure it out without the info link, though, and if they click review they can always find the database entry from that page as well.
Then I created a new category under the blog category, for the reviews.
That allowed me to put up a category specific recent posts widget on the top right there – now you’ll have the most recent reviews up! I changed some of that widgit coding to fix formatting and make it so the thumbnails and other info displayed properly.
Then I had to create a new custom field for the book title, because I didn’t want it to redundantly say “review” next to the link for each book – so the text for the link is made by the information put in that field, not the actual post title. That was a bit of genius, I think, if I’m allowing myself to pat my own back a little.
I think it looks great! It’s kind of constant battle with what information I want to show in the sidebars, but I don’t think these two new widgets (review, and comments) are too much. This way I can keep doing updates about the reading order and site issues without worrying about pushing the reviews off the front page (as they’re arguably a lot more fun to read!)
Also, I did one minor tweak to the layout, removing an absolute height measurement on the booklist headers – now they should conform properly to the header content and look a little nicer. Let me know if you find any that are broken!
