v0.9.1 - Kavita+ Overhaul and 100K Installs! #4888
majora2007
announced in
Announcements
Replies: 0 comments
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
v0.9.1 is here and it's a massive overhaul of Kavita+. I started Kavita+ 3 years ago with a split goal of bringing some of my initial vision of Kavita to fruition (metadata downloading) and setup a way for me to work full time on Kavita. While unfortunately I'm not there yet monetarily, over those last 3 years I have listened to the community and found a few ideas that could take the integration to the next level. That day has finally come and the Kavita+ in this release is a day and night difference to what we've known before.
Before we get into the Kavita+ features, I'd like to call out a few big items for all users.
Epub Variable Font Support
This was a user submitted feature that expanded Kavita's epub custom fonts to apply the bold/italic variants from the font family. While I was testing the code from the user, I also cleaned up the UX.
Cover Chooser UX
I finally got around to building the new Cover Chooser with @therobbiedavis's design made last year. The new experience separates the different entity covers into tabs, renders out titles for each, and makes the understanding of a locked cover front and center. For Kavita+ users, you can now use the Kavita+ tab to download and apply series/volume covers from Mangabaka and Hardcover. The covers will be grabbed against the Edition and Language if applicable.
Security
With AI on the rise, the amount of AI scanning and reporting issues against repositories is also on the rise. This round, we ended up fixing 10 security issues. All of these issues have a very low rate of exploit, but I would still urge you to keep up to date. All CVEs will be requested 1 week after this update.
Series Rename functionality 🎉
I don't use emoji's often, but I feel it's warranted here. I removed the ability to rename series in the UI a few years ago when I reworked the scanner. The code has been able to support it and user's have been asking for it, with the Kavita+ work, I finally got around to tackling it. If you're using Kavita+, it's even nicer as Kavita can update it for you with language fallbacks (customizable).
Kavita+ Overhaul
There is quite a bit of new stuff, with some documented below. One of the biggest improvements is the media support. Prior, books were left out, but now with Hardcover, we have full book support.
Kavita+ Features added:
License Management
This is the core of the Kavita+ experience. You need to understand when your subscription is renewing, have the ability to change details like your email, cancel and renew the sub, and overall understand the value you're getting from the platform. I designed this new screen to reduce how often you need to reach out to me and provided functionalities for just about everything I've had to manually do over these last 3 years.
From this new dashboard, you can not only see your sub at a glance, but cancel/renew/change email/change billing (Stripe), see how much usage you've gotten from your Kavita+ sub, and health status of providers as well (since AniList API going down is almost a fact now). In addition, I did a TON of work on the Kavita+ layer to hammer out a lot of bugs, and ensure we send renewal email reminders for yearly plans.
Accountability
Another big pain point of the system was, Kavita has all these controls and matching flows, but it's hard to know WHAT is actually changing on the system and why. So we built a Audit log with dedicated screens for both Admins (All Activity) and regular users (My Activity). These provide rich insights into what Kavita/Kavita+ are doing, what fields are updated, etc. You can also view this from an individual series detail page.
Controls
Kavita has controls for both local metadata and Kavita+ metadata to allow remapping genres -> tags and vice versa or have genre/tags drive Age ratings. With this release, we've updated them with some of the new features, like overriding an provider's age rating (ie Mangabaka says Safe (G), you want safe as Everyone) or telling Kavita what languages to write to Series Name and Localized Name and what fallback to use per-field.
Rich Metadata
In this update of Kavita, we added the ability to write Series Name, Chapter/Volume covers and metadata. With the addition of Mangabaka and Hardcover, Kavita now has individual metadata available for Volumes as well as Series and thus can drastically improve metadata, whereas Volume level metadata for Manga was otherwise not possible. Comics already supported Issue-level metadata and just adds Cover updates into the mix. All cover operations use a system to detect if the incoming image is "better" before writing and respect the language on the series/library when applicable.
More Progress Scrobbling
Lastly, we've added way more scrobbling providers along with switching from token-based auth to OAuth, meaning Kavita can refresh your auth with these providers for you. As of v0.9.1, you can now scrobble your progress, ratings, and reviews to AniList, MAL, Mangabaka, and Hardcover.
In addition, we've added settings per-provider (with some library bindings) so that you can configure what you want to sync up, how you want reviews shared (private, friends, public), how you want series to be treated if you stop reading them for some time, etc. This should cover you in most scenarios (my personal favorite is the new drop rule).
What's next?
All in all, this has been a monumental release. Not only have we completely reworked Kavita+, we've also seen an uptick in contributions with a few that didn't make the cut, that will likely come next release (a lot of new stuff for the readers). Kavita also hit 100K active installs!, one of my goals for the year. Amelia and I are looking forward to continuing our work on Kavita.
As mentioned in the first release of the year, we have one more promised release which is v0.9.2 - Native Kobo Sync Support. After this, we will likely start working on the foundations for the official mobile app.
Added
Changed
Fixed
API
Theme
This discussion was created from the release v0.9.1 - Kavita+ Overhaul and 100K Installs!.
All reactions