About this plugin
Goblin Shelf shows a bookcase with book spines on any page. Hover over a book to see its cover, its author and its average rating; click it to open its card with all the reviews.
- Anyone can review: a visitor adds a book with a rating from 1 to 5 stars, “the best thing” and “the worst thing”. Reviews are published straight away, with no moderation.
- A bookcase with three shelves: the modern bookcase has room for 33 books on each shelf, 99 in total. When the shelves are full no more books can be added (the books on the shelves can still be reviewed). The limit is also a safeguard: if you turn on Open Library or Google Books, it caps the number of cover requests a visit can make to those services (never more than 99), so they are not overloaded and do not block your website.
- Search and sort: by title, author, most recent reviews or best rated.
- Covers: whoever adds a book can upload a photo of its cover from the form (optional), and the administrator can also choose one from the Media Library on the book screen. Without a cover the shelf shows only the spine. Optionally you can also turn on Open Library and/or Google Books (both off by default ) in Goblin Shelf → Settings → Book search, so the form suggests books and covers while the person types. Covers from these services are not copied to your website: they are shown from the service’s own server.
- Translation ready: Goblin Shelf follows the language of your website. It is fully internationalized, so translations are provided by the community at translate.wordpress.org.
- Privacy: deleting the plugin deletes all its data. No name, email or account is asked for, and nothing about the visitor is stored except a temporary, scrambled (hashed) abuse counter that expires within one hour. By default no external service is contacted; the two optional book search services (Open Library and Google Books) are off until you turn them on. Goblin Shelf adds a suggested text for your privacy policy in Settings → Privacy → Policy Guide.
How to use it
Goblin Shelf works with a shortcode: a short word between square brackets that you type in a page, and that WordPress replaces with the bookshelf. The shortcode is:
[goblin_shelf]
- Go to Pages → Add New Page and give the page a title.
- Click the + button, search for the Shortcode block and add it.
- Type [goblin_shelf] inside the block (with the square brackets, nothing else).
- Click Publish and then View Page.
The same instructions, with a copy button for the shortcode, are in Goblin Shelf → Settings → Help.
Goblin Shelf Pro
Goblin Shelf Pro is a separate, paid plugin by the same developer. It adds: the Classic and Youthful styles, country and school years, reviews sent by email to the teacher, teachers’ recommendations, moderation, CSV import and export, control over your data on uninstall, a library mode with recommended ages, filtering the shelf by school year or age, approving reviews from the email with a private link, an approval log, a reviews screen with filters and a button to delete all data.
None of these features is included in this free plugin. They are described in Goblin Shelf → Settings → Pro, which has a link to the developer’s website. com/goblin_shelf.
The same link appears as “Pro” next to the author in the list of plugins.
External services
By default Goblin Shelf does not contact any external service. Two optional services can be turned on in Goblin Shelf → Settings → Book search. Both are off by default:
- Open Library (https://openlibrary.org, Internet Archive). Only if you turn on “Search for books and covers on Open Library”. When someone types the title of a book in the review form, that text is sent to Open Library from the browser of that person (and, as in any web request, the IP address of the visitor). The form tells the visitor about it. When a visitor chooses a book, only the identifier of its cover is saved. The cover is not downloaded: it is loaded from covers.openlibrary.org by the browser of each visitor, in the background shortly after the shelf is shown (so it is ready when the pointer reaches the book), as the Open Library cover guidelines ask, and that request also sends the visitor’s IP address to Open Library. The plugin asks the browser not to send the address of your page with that request. A link back to Open Library is shown below the shelf. Covers API guidelines · Terms and privacy
- Google Books (https://books.google.com). Only if you turn on “Search for books and covers on Google Books”. The same search text and the IP address of the visitor are sent to Google. The cover found is not downloaded or stored either: it is shown from books.google.com, which means that the visitors who load the shelf also send their IP address to Google. Google’s terms do not allow keeping permanent copies of the content of its API, which is why the images are never saved on your website. The plugin includes the required attribution. Terms of service · Google APIs terms · Google Privacy
Covers remain the property of their rights holders. Covers uploaded by visitors or chosen by the administrator are normal Media Library images and are stored on your website.
If you turn them on, mention these services in the privacy policy of your website (especially if your visitors are minors). Goblin Shelf adds a suggested text, adapted to the services you have turned on, in Settings → Privacy → Policy Guide. If you need to block external covers on the whole site (for example, while you wait for consent), use the filter goblinshelf_external_covers (return false ).
To load covers only when the pointer reaches a book instead of in the background, use goblinshelf_preload_covers (return false ).
The only other link to another website is the “Pro” link next to the author in the list of plugins and the optional “Get Goblin Shelf Pro” button in Goblin Shelf → Settings → Pro, which open the website of the developer when you click them.
Credits
The images of the bookcase and the spines (folder assets/img/ ) were generated with ChatGPT (OpenAI) and are distributed under the same license as the plugin (GPL v2 or later).