I’ve been using Rob Miller’s Now Reading plugin to show a list of books I’m currently reading in my blog’s sidebar, as you can see. The plugin allows you to show sublists of books you’re reading, books you’ve read, and books you’re planning to read. However, I wanted more, so I’ve done some hacking. What I’ve added is:

• a new category, ‘Favorite books’;
• an option to display only the category/categories you want;
• a text field for each book to store and later display your own review.

Ideally, the categories would be completely adjustable by the user. However, this proved too much work for one evening, so I’ve only added the one category that I missed the most: favorite books. I wanted those favorite books on a fixed page, without the other books mixed in. So I also changed the nr_get_book() function to allow for an optional parameter. You can pass a string containing the categories you want displayed, separated by a space character. So you could say:

< ?php nr_get_book('unread reading read'); ?>

to get the former three categories. This is also the default if you don’t pass any string at all (so you’re existing call to nr_get_book doesn’t have to change).

If you only want one category, like I wanted only the favorite books, you write:

< ?php nr_get_book('favorites'); ?>

I wanted the favorite books on a separate fixed page. However, WordPress does not allow you to add PHP code to a page (without plugins). So I created a page template, favorite_books.php, which only contains a call to nr_get_book to fetch the favorite books. My favorite books page is based on this template.

Finally I added a review field to each book. This field can be entered in the Manage/Now reading admin page. To display it, add it to the format string in the Options/Now reading admin page.

You can download my hack here. And Rob, if you want, you’re welcome to copy my changes into your official plugin.