suggestions for shortcode options

Thanks for your feedback. It’s great to see users doing unique things with MyBookTable.

Unfortunately your particular use case differs enough from our core functionality that it’s not something that we would actively support out of the box in the plugin. As you say, you don’t need a “full-fledged bookstore”, but our primary goal is making a good full-fledged bookstore. Unfortunately we don’t have unlimited development time so we have to prioritize things that directly serve our primary goals.

That said, I might be able to give you some tips to get you where you want to go.

Unfortunately there is no way around needing to use PHP to get the image URL from the WordPress image ID. That’s just how WordPress works; It wants you to reference your image by ID, and then transform it into an actual image URL when you are ready to display it, which allows you to display different image sizes (which will have different urls) in different places (such as a small thumbnail on the archive page and a full sized image on the post itself) and to support responsive image sizing.

However, you could cache a specific image URL for use with your Views template, which looks like it can only pull from preset post meta fields. You can do this by adding a hook to your theme that detects whenever a MyBookTable book is updated and caches the image URL into a new meta field. You would want to add something like the following snippet to your theme’s functions.php file:

add_action('save_post', 'mytheme_cache_mbt_image', 20);
function mytheme_cache_mbt_image($post_id) {
    if((defined('DOING_AUTOSAVE') && DOING_AUTOSAVE) or get_post_type($post_id) != "mbt_book") { return; }
    $image_url = '';
    // get the image id from the book's post meta
    $image_id = get_post_meta($post_id, 'mbt_book_image_id', true);
    // wp_get_attachment_image_src returns an array of image url, width, and height, if the image id exists
    $image_data = wp_get_attachment_image_src($image_id, 'mbt_book_image');
    // extract the image url from the data array, if the data was found
    if($image_data) { $image_url = $image_data[0]; }
    // create our custom post meta that contains the cached url
    update_post_meta($post_id, 'mytheme_cached_mbt_image', $image_url);
}

In order to get this work initially you will need to go in and re-save your MBT books in order to get this hook to run for each of them.

~Tim