not that i can think of off the top of my head. if it’s either a largish list of books (say >100) or you want to have many book data fields (ISBN, format, genre, publisher, etc) then you are best off (IMO) making yourself a special non-WP book table, writing custom PHP to display it in your WP pages, and finding some way to admin and update the table.
If it was a smaller book list with less complex metadata per book you could go down the route of having a post per book in category “book_data” and using custom fields.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/170677?replies=17 is a recent topic covering how to list posts by custom fields.
I would like to suggest a look at this plugin called ‘Fresh Post’:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fresh-page/
Although I haven’t used it myself, I did use the precursor plugin that this ‘new’ one is based on (Custom Write Panel) and found it extremely convenient. Sadly that is no longer developed, but thankfully FreshCreative are now continuing development.
What this does is to literally create custom write panels for utilising custom fields. I used it (CWP) at the time for creating a club website, where fixtures were updated using CWP by club members who were not as web-savvy.
However, one thing I never did get round to doing properly was to find a way of displaying the custom fields just as I wanted them to be (it worked sometimes), but now that this plugin takes care of the backend, I guess the energy can be spent on the front end! 🙂
Hope this is of some help!
I need something like that also, but nobody has ever replied.
Maybe you can use custom fields.
I’m too much of a noob to make something as complicated as that.
I recommend the “more fields” plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/more-fields/
good luck
More Fields looks pretty good, gabesands! 🙂 Thank you for the suggestion!
p/s: More Fields is essentially custom fields, but in a more organised manner.
How about using nextgen gallery? There you would have organised categories. Thumbnails of the books would be displayed together with the book title (as image title) and if a customer clicks on it you can add a description with more detailed information on the book. Just an idea though … 🙂
The only problem is how to search nextgen gallery via search function. There is a plugin “search unleashed”
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-unleashed/
which has the option to search nextgen gallery but it is a bit annoying that you cannot restrict it to search for full words only.
If a customer would search for the book “To kill a mockingbird” the search results would include any post with words containing the letter a which means actually every post. The lack of a reliable search function could probably be a problem for a business ..
Hope you’ll be sharing your site with us at some point, Flightless! 😉
