Browsing Genres

[HansUwe52]

When browsing the genres, Pinakes only shows me 4 records within each Genre. Would it be possible to show more records. Maybe it could be done the same way as the overview of the newest/latest books, where you have to additional buttons: "Load More" and "View Entirce Catalog".

The carousel-function connected to this browsing the genres, makes sense on a smartphone, where you see 1 record a time. On a desktop, which eg. shows 4 records, this function has no real meaning, when only showing 4 records.

[fabiodalez-dev]

Hi Uwe,

Thanks for the feedback — you're absolutely right. The entire genres area is honestly one of the least polished parts of the app. Being a solo developer, it was more of a "draft feature" that never got the attention it deserved. Your reviews and testing are really helping shape Pinakes into solid software. I hope to reach version 1.0 soon and finally mark it as "Stable" — thank you for your continued support!

What's been done

Both changes are already implemented on the current development branch:

1. Books per genre increased from 4 → 12 — the carousel now has enough content to be meaningful on desktop
2. "View all" link added next to each genre title — links directly to the genre archive page with full pagination

These will be included in the next release.

[HansUwe52]

The important thing will be, that the carousel-function is not getting to "heavy" for the webbrowse. Dealing with photo galleries in WordPress learned me, that a carousel really can slow down the generation of the page.

[fabiodalez-dev]

Good point about performance! The carousel here is lightweight — it's pure CSS/JS with no heavy libraries, and images are lazy-loaded. With 12 books per genre (small cover thumbnails), it should stay fast even on modest hardware. But I'll keep an eye on it, especially on your QNAP setup.

Speaking of which — since you mentioned dealing with photo galleries in WordPress, you might be interested in another project I'm working on in parallel: Cimaise, a lightweight, modern, self-hosted web app for photographers. It's designed to be clean and fast, without the bloat of WordPress.

If you ever feel like giving it a try and sharing some feedback, I'd really appreciate it! Your attention to detail has been invaluable for Pinakes. 😊

[HansUwe52]

I have been looking at Cimaise and installed the system on my desktop. When I tried to use MariaDB as the database the installation broke. Even though I tried to make the database switch by "hand", I did not succed.
Before I had been using the french system Piwigo, which has a bit outdated user interface and problems dealing with my photo-collection.
My WordPress site runs fine on my Qnap Nas, even though I have 1,748 posts, 886 pages and 925 galleries. Among other things I use the WordPress site to document my walking hikes (about 600) with maps, photos and documents.
Furthermore I have integrated TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding) into my WordPress site. The Genealogy collection counts at the moment 2,286 people and 875 families. Our family is spread over several countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, USA, Australia, Poland, Brasil). The brasilian part of the family roots back to Mantova in Italy. TNG has a very well working function in changing between different languages, which makes it a lot easier to share information.

Hans Uwe

[fabiodalez-dev]

Hi Uwe,

Thanks for trying Cimaise! Sorry about the MariaDB issue — the app is still in early testing phase and the MySQL/MariaDB driver hasn't been fully stabilized yet. The SQLite version should work if you'd like to give it another try.

That said, Pinakes is absorbing most of my development energy right now, so Cimaise updates may come a bit slowly. Your WordPress setup sounds impressive — 1,748 posts, 925 galleries, plus TNG genealogy integration across multiple countries! The Italian-Brazilian connection via Mantova is a nice detail. 😄

I'll take a closer look at the MariaDB issue when I get a chance, but for now SQLite is the safer option for testing.