Featured Community Plugin: Hardcover - Reading Buddy

This post is part of a series, featuring the incredible work of plugin authors who grow the TRMNL plugin ecosystem with every contribution. The TRMNL team has individually selected these plugins and authors to be featured.

Hardcover - Reading Buddy Plugin

Community member Sumalyo Datta (Discord: sumalyo) created the Hardcover - Reading Buddy plugin; here are their words on how it was created.

Why did you want this plugin to exist?

I thought that I would be quite cool to see my (and other people's) reading progress on the TRMNL. Also it would give me the perfect dose of motivation to finish my book.

How did you balance look vs functionality?

I tried to keep it minimalistic. The idea of mashups looked quite interesting and I leveraged the idea of making my views appropriate for various sizes. As Book Club members would most likely combine various iterations of this plugin to track their buddies, I worked on a design that gave it a clean yet gamified look. I also worked on implementing a progress bar that would look clean.

What was your process for creating the plugin?

I used the service Hardcover.app that provided a nice clean API to retrieve user progress information.

What, if any, challenges did you face while creating it?

The design of the single page view which had to adjust based on the number of books the user was currently reading was quite challenging to design.

If I were to make this from scratch today, what would I have changed?

I made this plugin a long while ago when FrameworkV2 was not quite mature. Today I look a the cool features that the team have added for developers and I think I could incorporate some of that in this.

What is your favorite plugin that someone else created and why?

Movie Title Screens - Just so so cool!!