Happy New Year! A new year and a new set of plans for the year. I wanted to get this first release out quickly so I can share my plans as I'm bursting with excitement. The release is pretty small and mainly focused on bugs I found during my holiday. With that out of the way, let's talk about Kavita this year.
Process Change
First off, I will be changing how feature requests are handled. Going forward, Kavita will solely use Github Discussions for feature requests. Normal support will be done still via Issues and Discord and bugs of course via Issues. I tried many different things over the last 3 years. Given the scope of the application, I need something a bit more robust. The current feature site, while is nice, doesn't send alerts to users, leaving me without a means to communicate when I'm actually ready to start a feature. Discord is just too chaotic and we lack visibility. All feature requests over 10 votes have been migrated over to Discussions already. Please go visit and engage so we can drive some of these home.
Next, let's talk about shaping features. Once a feature is on discussions and I agree, I will be taking this feature to my Kavita+ discord users to help shape the feature into the final solution. I usually rely on a few users for advice, but going forward, Kavita+ users (which many would consider power users) will have a strong say in shaping features going forward. Feedback is always welcome from non-Kavita+ users, but I want to utilize power users to drive features going forward. You can go to Kavita+ tab to link your Discord User Id with your Kavita+ license, which will grant you access to the hidden channels.
Lastly, the subreddit will be shutdown this year. I no longer use Reddit and unfortunately have to keep it as the subreddit needs questions answered. I hope you all can respect my decision and can migrate to discord for future discussions/support.
Website/Wiki
The website is drastically out of date and quite bad. Originally I copied it from Lidarr, which I was one of the original developers, and meant to update it to a new look and feel, but never got around to it. This is finally the year to take action. A new design and stack has already been chosen and @therobbiedavis is taking lead on driving the effort.
In addition to the new website, I will be creating a blog. I need a centralized place to post updates that may not be tied to a release (like this post). The new website will host the blog and I will post releases there as well.
The wiki is also in need of some love. It's quite difficult keeping it up to date myself. @DieselTech and @ThePromidius have helped a ton in that regard to updating, but we are in need of a deep redesign of the information and a new technology to allow better searching. We are investigating new software and are planning a complete revamp over this year. If anyone is knowledgeable about Kavita and wants to contribute, please reach out in discord.
The Features
Kavita+
I have a few key features for Kavita+ that I want to test and if successful, deliver to you all. The first up is Metadata. Komf is a great tool that already exists, but some users want something a bit simpler and that is where Kavita+ comes in. When I first started Kavita, I always had the goal of metadata integration but soon I learned how disjointed everything is and it seemed like adding it would become a full time job instead of letting me build out Kavita. As Kavita+ already has metadata from AniList, I see an opportunity to trial metadata integration.
At the end of 2023, Robbie mentioned to me Hardcover, a potential integration point for Kavita+ that has similar features as AniList -- reviews, ratings, scrobblings, and metadata for books (and some limited comics). After speaking with their development team, this seems feasible to build out. I will be doing a deep dive later this year to bring these features into Kavita+. This also means if metadata support is built out, it will benefit from Hardcover.
Lastly, as mentioned above, Kavita+ users will become critical to shaping and expanding on community ideas once accepted. Link your discord user id via Kavita and you will be granted access into the hidden channels to participate in defining the scope of an idea and provide feedback post implementation before it ships to stable users.
PDF as many of you know has always been Kavita's weakest point. PDFs have no tools existing for metadata, have the worst and most inconsistent naming patterns out there and overall have just not been a good fit within Kavita. I want to change that this year. First off I want to polish the reader. I've been using a reader that doesn't have many hooks nor does it have the ability to save the reading preferences. I had originally opened an issue for information on how people use Kavita, but the comments were underwhelming. I will be looking to my Kavita+ users to help shape this feature and deliver a good experience.
Many users also collect magazines and I think it's high time a separate library type with different parsing is built out. Like I did with the image library last year, I will be adding a new library type explicitly for Magazines with a limited set of metadata and some UI differences. PDF parsing overall will be updated to be more robust and work better overall.
Comics
Comics are quite complicated and work differently than I had thought when users asked me many years to add comic support. This year I will be trialing a new library type that mimics ComicVine's format, which is the standard for Mylar and comics in general. As is the theme, my Kavita+ users, including @DieselTech will be helping me drive the end solution.
Kobo Sync
The last major feature is Kobo sync. I bought a Kobo and am excited to reverse engineer the protocol to allow native sync with Kavita, much like calibre-web has. Originally this was planned as a Kavita+ feature, but after looking more into it, Kavita can service it without problem.
There are more items on my list as well, but let's leave a bit to surprise. I'm sure everyone can tell these are huge items with that will take tons of time. I'm really excited for this year and what I can achieve.
Remember to use the new Docker Central Repo!
Added
- Added: (Kavita+) Added the ability to view the provider of a recommendation on the card itself and in the preview drawer.
- Added: (Kavita+) Added the ability to reset your Kavita+ license key without having to reach out to me.
- Added: (Kavita+) Added the ability to add your Discord UserId during Kavita+ license registration which will grant access to hidden channels for feature curtailing.
Changed
- Changed: When opening up an external series review, show the source of the review.
- Changed: Streamlined the design slightly for a user's personal review
- Changed: There is now inline form validation on the User Review Modal
- Changed: Removed the tagline from user/external reviews.
- Changed: (Scanner) When a series has a single special and a total count of 1 or less, assume it's completed
- Changed: Lots of love around the messaging when interacting with users that do not use real emails.
- Changed: Enhanced the messaging around users without valid emails interacting with change email flow.
- Changed: Validation messaging added on change username flow, including showing the valid characters.
- Changed: Don't log apikey in logs
- Changed: Updated the donate link to point to a wiki explaining the donation options and that Kavita+ is the only way to remove the donate button.
Fixed
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where user reviews wouldn't be rendered on the UI if they didn't have a tagline, even though it's optional.
- Fixed: Ensure my own review orders in front of other local user reviews
- Fixed: When a user resets the API key, tell connected clients to refresh their account details
- Fixed: Moved bulk operations bar back to the top of the page where it belongs on series detail
- Fixed: When using back on side nav after having a filter applied, clear the filter.
- Fixed: Cleaned up the error handling around Kavita+ registering of a license.
- Fixed: Fix the issue of an extra space appearing after the end of the series detail page. (Thanks @charles7668 )
- Fixed: Fixed a bug with email link generation when using a base url, where too many characters could be trimmed (Thanks @charles7668 )
- Fixed: Change username wouldn't update the correct field which was used in login flow
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where when filtering was disabled (reading list page), the jumpbar also got disabled.
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where library watching was trying to be turned on before we had saved the new value from server settings.
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where the check email button success message was missing a space before the version number.
- Fixed: Fixed a delay in the UI after a bookmark is created/deleted (Thanks @charles7668 )
- Fixed: Fixed webtoon mode not allowing bookmarking (Thanks @charles7668 )
- Fixed: Fixed a config issue where not all of Weblate's language codes would show up
Removed
- Removed: (Kavita+) Removed the ability to scrobble reviews as the conditions are strict and doesn't make much sense to do it from Kavita.